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The Buccaneer's Apprentice: V. Briceland

Seventeen-year-old indentured servant Nic is cursed: all of his masters have met early, violent deaths (and deserved them, too). Nic hopes his luck is changing when he winds up with shrewd but jovial Armand Arturo, owner of the Theatre of Marvels—until their ship is attacked by pirates and Nic washes up on a deserted island. His quest for revenge becomes a quest to save the land of Cassaforte from invasion, aided by an unusual crew and an enchanted ship. Briceland’s spirited companion to The Glass Maker’s Daughter (2009) blends charismatic characters, magic, piracy, theater, and romance into a fantastical sea adventure.

Influences: Dickens

It’s largely because of Charles Dickens that I dropped out of my Ph.D. program, twenty years ago. Bleak House, specifically. No, I know what you’re thinking. Generations of grad school students in British literature approached Bleak House with a similar enthusiasm they might muster to an appointment for a root canal.

I wasn’t one of those students. I’d read Great Expectations in high school, and had been assigned Hard Times for a history class. I was of course familiar with A Christmas Carol, or at least the multiple adaptations of it for film and television. But Bleak House was revelatory. The moment I picked it up, I was gripped by the story with all its twists and turns, and was overwhelmed—in a good way—by the overabundance of characters and dialogue. I felt as if I’d been sat at a giant buffet table covered with all manner of exotic foods, all of them fragrant in their own special ways, and informed that I had all the leisure in the world to enjoy it.

Well, I was a doctoral student on a fellowship. I did have all the leisure in the world to enjoy it, and for long days and nights I plopped myself down on the sofa with my stereo on and a bowl of snacks at my side, while I raced through the pages. There were times I knew I should take a break at the end of a chapter, but I kept turning the pages, because I had to know what happened next. It was really just that good.

In class, the first night we discussed the novel, I listened attentively to the professor’s lecture about the British legal system, and took notes when he discussed the book’s unreliable narrator. I didn’t at all disagree with any of the cool, analytical comments that the other students made about the book’s twin narrative structures, or flinch much when the students who wanted to show off their familiarity with Derrida and Foucault invoked the names of their dark masters.

Something was missing from the conversation, though. I couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was. Not until we’d had an hour and a half of dispassionate conversation about the book’s structure and technique, of tossing back and forth the names of famous theoreticians, and of discourse that was interesting yet dry as dust, did I ask a question at the end of class. “Didn’t anyone else think the book was exciting?” I asked around the table. “I mean, didn’t anyone else enjoy it?” I mean, come one! Bleak House has character die from spontaneous combustion, for crying out loud!

The rest of the students and the faculty member looked at me as if I were a lunatic. It was at that moment I realized that at a certain level, including graduate school, one isn’t supposed to admit to sensations such as enjoyment. To admit to being excited by a book’s plot is, well, juvenile. There’s an implication that if one’s relishing a story, it’s impossible to have one’s critical sensors engaged. Having fun is for kids. Serious professionals don’t enjoy what they do. It was then that I had the first inkling that perhaps I really didn’t belong in the academic world. Many more were to come.

Dickens has been one of my very favorite authors ever since. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I riffed on bits Great Expectations in my first novel for adults, Calendar Girl. My upcoming The Buccaneer’s Apprentice is an unabashed homage to what I consider one of my favorite parts of Nicholas Nickleby, namely the too-brief section in which Nicholas and Smike travel the countryside with the Crummles’ theatrical troupe. It might strike some people as odd, though, that I haven’t read all of Dickens’ works. I pick one up every three or four years and dive in, making it last for a month or more, relishing every well-turned minor role and sentimental scene and scowling at every villain. Dickens’ heroes and heroines are inevitably always a little bit of wet dishrags to me, but they’re surrounded by such a vivid swirl of action and colorful characters that it’s hard to dislike them.

I haven’t read them all because I’ve enjoyed knowing, for a couple of decades now, that I have a few more to go. I like knowing that sometime in the future, I’ll succumb and enjoy the familiar thrill of immersing myself into one of Dickens’ worlds and swimming in it for weeks. Right now, I’m fascinated with Little Dorrit, the riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags tale of intertwined families and a French murderer. It’s kept me awake late at nights. I’ve had to restrain myself from watching any further in the 2008 BBC television adaptation than I’ve reached in the book. It’s difficult, because the cast (which seems to have been assembled from the casts of Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Clatterford) is terrific, and because my actor boyfriend Russell Tovey breaks my heart in every scene in which he appears.

When I’m reading Charles Dickens, it is the best of times. It is the worst of times. It is . . . no, wait. I haven’t read that one yet.

Caprica

I was much too late to jump onto the Battlestar Galactica spacewagon when the show started airing on the Sci-Fi channel several years ago. By the time I really became aware of the series as a geek cultural phenomenon, it was already half-over.

Now, I like science fiction as a genre. Most of the new fiction I read tends to be SF. I’d seen the original Battlestar Galactica when I was a kid and had dismissed it as a Star Wars ripoff. I’d never been fond of Star Wars, even though my childhood occurred in the epicenter of its cultural impact. I’d never been a fan of Star Trek either, for that matter. My fondness for Doctor Who and Firefly notwithstanding, I think it’s fairly safe to make the generalization that I’m not a fan of the space opera, with its captains standing steadfastly in their bridges against the enemies to the human race, its babble about hyperspace jumping, and the shooting of big lasers between spaceships.

So when it came to the remake of BSG, I contented myself with following my friends’ excited LiveJournal posts about the series. By the time the show finished its run I had a general idea of its arc, and judged it safe finally to dip my toe in the waters, and watch the miniseries that started the whole reboot. And wow, was I impressed with it. I found the miniseries exciting. I loved its premise of a global holocaust caused by the human-looking, but totally mechanical, race of Cylons, and I really liked the notion of the only survivors being an unlikely assortment of officials aboard a decommissioned military spaceship turned into a museum and educational center. I was hooked.

Hooked for the duration of the miniseries, anyway. Almost immediately the series went off the rails for me. Fans of the show have tried to rationalize it away for me, but I see Battlestar Galactica as suffering from a contradiction in its premise set out by the miniseries—that the only scraps of humanity left to battle the Cylons are a disorganized, random group overlooked in the attack against their home planet of Caprica, who become the least likely heroes ever to defend a race against genocide—and the premise pursued in the rest of the series, which is that those aboard the Galactica are unique and special snowflakes who have been heavily infiltrated by Cylons years in advance in order to achieve some mystical goal. The series tries to have it both ways with both the notion of the humans as accidental spontaneous heroes, and the premise of this has all been planned, and the two never really gel for me. Plus, there are all the sequences in which spaceships shoot lasers at each other, which is usually the point in the program I pick up my phone and begin playing Puzzle Quest.

I’m only about two-thirds of the way through the DVDs of Battlestar Galactica, which is about the level of my enthusiasm for the show as well, so it was with a little bit of reluctance that I began watching its prequel/spinoff show on the renamed SyFy, Caprica. I’m happy to say, however, that not only am I totally hooked on Caprica, but that it’s probably the show I look forward to most these days.

It’s the simplicity of Caprica’s premise that keeps me coming back. In the highly technological world of Caprica that’s blown up sixty years later in Battlestar Galactica, an inventor and tech whiz played by Eric Stoltz has devised the first of the mechanical Cylons. His daughter, the bratty and brilliant Zoe, has managed to create an enduring version of herself in (for lack of a better term) cyberspace. When Zoe’s accidentally killed in an act of terrorism, Stoltz’s character retrieves her online avatar and infuses it into the mechanical Cylon. He believes the experiment is unsuccessful, but what he’s done is to give the mechanical being Zoe’s sentience, with chilling results for the human race.

The show plays with the notion of the teenaged girl in the oversized robot’s body with both humor and suspense as it cuts between shots of the gleaming silvery hulk and Zoe’s diminutive form. Like so many adolescents, Zoe’s both a monster and a little girl at the same time. When she’s not blowing up multiple targets with her machine gun hands, she’s sneaking away and talking to her best friend on the phone. Cylon Zoe is as sullen and silent as a sulking teen girl (and it’s rather humorous to think of the Cylon war that’s to come as the apex of an adolescent brat’s temper tantrum), but when her father asks her to strut about his company’s boardroom, the robot does so with obvious relish, proud of her dad’s accomplishments. When he orders her to rip off her arm mere moments later, to prove her absolute obedience to him, it’s blood-curdling to watch. He has no idea what his daughter has become, and she has no intentions of telling him—the standoff of the generations, only in cybernetic form. A teen's cry of you don't understand meeeeee! only rings louder when the teen in question is two tons of metal and electronics.

The show’s rife with subplots involving the Adama family, with its roots in organized crime (and their equally-deceased teen daughter, whose linger cyberspace identity becomes the biggest gangster of all), and with a sect of religious fanatics whose terrorism provides the sparks of violence that pinpoint what’s otherwise been an intellectually-driven plot. Every week I keep coming back for more, and so far I haven’t been disappointed.

It seems to me, though, that there are two kinds of science fiction fans. There are those like me who tend to like their stories earthbound, or at least planet-bound, and then there are those who like the big spaceships with the big lasers. For fans who only like the space shoot-em-ups, however, I’m afraid Caprica might be a little bit of a disappointment. However, Caprica is the kind of science fiction I most enjoy: an interplay of ideas and science with a story that sucks me in on both cerebral and emotional levels.

Bagels, Einstein

The Mont was in Cincinnati for the better part of last week, so while he was gone I thought I’d try my hand at some baking. It’s easier to do such things with a little privacy, so I can avoid questions like, ‘What’re you making?’ or ‘What’s that smell?’ or ‘Why is the kitchen covered with flour?’

My experiment for the week was bagels. I’m not sure why, but I’d always assumed that bagels were tough to make—but they’re not. I already had three pounds of whole wheat dough I’d made sitting in the freezer, ready to go. I took a pound of it, flattened it out and sprinkled it with a cinnamon-sugar mix and some raisins, rolled it up like a jelly roll, then squeezed off portions that I formed into the traditional bagel shape. I let them rise a bit, dunked them in a bath of boiling water doctored with baking soda, then baked them on a hot stone.

I couldn’t believe how intense the smell when I pulled the half-dozen bagels from the oven; it was as if heaven itself had opened a bakery in my neighborhood. Even the cats lifted their heads to sniff at the spicy fragrances filling the house. When the bagels were cool enough to touch, I bit into one. The crust was hard and crunchy to the bite, and the middle moist and sweet and full of plump raisins. In a word, they were amazing.

A couple of days later I was inspired enough to try another variation with more of the whole-wheat dough. This time I filled the dough with a mixture of brown sugar, dried cherries, and crushed chocolate chips. The water bath turned out to be a lot messier, since the chocolate near the surface had a tendency to melt quickly. The result was a lot like boiling wads of dough in a vat of Swiss Miss—aromatic, certainly, but not exactly easy to clean up. The bagels themselves turned out to be just as delicious.

So in my sudden enthusiasm for bagels, I’ve been trying to think of other variations to attempt. I’ve always liked the cheese bagels, certainly. And I think a bagel with dried apple, brown sugar, and cinnamon (perhaps with a streusel topping) could be really tasty as well.

When the Mont came home yesterday, I pulled out the bags of bagels from the freezer to display. “Huh!” he said, peering at them closely. “Interesting. They look like turds.”

Martha Stewart never had to deal with these things.

White-people music

Over the weekend we seemed to be in the car an awful lot. While we were traveling from place to place, we listened to the radio. If I get control of the radio, it’s pretty much a given that we’ll be listening either to old-school R&B, or else to BBC-One. (If the satellite radio had an All Swedish Pop station, I’d be listening to that stuff twenty-four/seven.) If the Mont is in control, one can be pretty certain that it’s going to be tuned into the stations playing the songs of his long-distant youth.

The Mont was in control over the weekend. It was only a moment or two out of the house that he began singing along with some goopy song I’d never heard of before, allegedly a chart-topper in 1982. “If you must take your love away,” he sang, “take it gradj-oo-leeeeeee.”

“You know this song?” I asked with an eyebrow raised.

“Everyone knows this song!” he protested, and kept on singing.

I let him warble through the multiple melodies of “Hooked on Classics” without comment, before he started bobbing his head along to some Styx number. “What song is this?” I mumbled.

He stared at me. “Oh my god,” he finally said, and let it pass. I sighed, and thought to myself that if we’d been having a pop quiz on the lesser-known singles of Shalamar that the situation might be reversed.

It was after a number of similar exchanges that we had a showdown outside of a supermarket. “You know this song,” the Mont was goading me, jabbing his finger savagely at the radio.

“I do not,” I said stiffly.

“Come on!” he said, as if yelling at me more loudly would jog my memory. “You know it!”

“No I don’t.”

“You do!”

“Who is it, then?” I asked. The radio’s screen had abbreviated the singers’ names so thoroughly that it was impossible to tell.

“It’s England Dan and John Ford Coley singing ‘I’d Really Love to See You Tonight.’ So there,” he said. “Now tell me you don’t know it.”

“I don’t know it!” I freely admitted, taking a sample of the song on my phone and checking to see if he was correct. He was. “What the hell kind of name is England Dan, anyway?

“I can’t believe you don’t know that song,” he said. “What rock were you under?”

“I didn’t listen to white-people music in the seventies!” I protested, as he pulled the car to a stop. We unbuckled our seat restraints and got out of the car.

“White-people music?” he asked with incredulity. “You are white people.”

“I went to a city public school. I was the only white person in my high school graduating class!” I reminded him. “My senior class theme song was ‘One Nation Under a Groove,’ for crying out loud. I don’t know that white-people music from the seventies!”

And it’s true. There’s a huge cultural lacuna in my musical background, a vast gap in which the collected songs of Linda Ronstadt and Olivia Newton-John and Kiss have no resonance. To the Commodores and George Clinton or just about any funk ensemble of the era, I can respond with instant recognition, if not an eerie ability to recall all the lyrics. If it’s not from one of the very few groups that did gain a foothold of popularity in my high school—and that would be limited to Blondie, Queen, and my own secret indulgence of ABBA—or if the hook wasn’t played constantly on the K-Tel eight-track television ads back then, the chances that I’ve heard it are pretty doubtful. Yes, I’m talking about you, AC/DC.

“White-people music,” the Mont said again as we walked into the store. He shook his head, as if I were the whitest person he knows.

The bread of friendship

A few weeks ago one of our friends stopped by our house with a gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled with a thin white fluid that looked like—well, like baby sick in a plastic baggie. Charming, right? “Here you go,” he said to us. “Friendship bread. Take care of it.” Then he was off and away, no doubt cackling at the top of his little lungs once he was out of earshot.

I’d never heard of Friendship Bread before, but apparently it’s widespread enough that it has its own Wikipedia entry. Basically it’s the pastry form of a chain letter. You receive a yeast starter (like a sourdough) that allegedly originated from the Amish, from a friend. For nine days you follow the instructions on the sheet that comes with it—instructions that largely consist of squeeze the bag, so that it gives the illusion of simplicity. Halfway through the process, you have to give the starter a little snack of flour, milk, and sugar. Over time, the starter changes from a gruel-like white to toenail-fungus yellow, and begins to bubble, foam, and produce massive amounts of gas. I was burping the Ziploc bag several times a day and recoiling from the yeasty, fermented aroma.

Finally comes the big tenth day. After dumping the ever-growing Audrey II mix into a bowl and adding more milk, sugar, and flour, it’s your turn to scoop out cupfuls of the reeking stuff and put it into three one-gallon plastic bags (just like the Amish have done with Ziploc bags handed down through the generations) to hand out to your friends, along with a clean copy of the instructions for care. I stress the word clean, because by the time I reached day ten, my copy was covered with grunge and starter. Then you bake the bread.

I hadn’t really studied the recipe before I started preparing it. All I knew is that it was supposed to create two loaves of a lightly sweet bread. Lightly sweet, my flat ass. My eyes began to bulge out as I mixed the thing, and continued to bulge as I added ingredient after ingredient, because it seemed to read like this:

Add four cups of flour to the bowl.
Add one cup of sugar.
Add 1/2 tsp. of baking powder.
Add two cups of sugar.
Add 1 tsp. of baking soda.
Add one cup of sugar.

It was when the recipe exhorted me to add “One large box of vanilla pudding (low-fat or sugar-free is fine)” that I decided that whoever wrote the recipe had a fairly mean sense of irony. Especially as the next step was to “Coat baking pans with non-stick baking spray and dust with one-half cup of sugar.”

How was the bread? It was fine. It was a fairly dense, far-from-lightly sweet concoction that tasted like coffee cake more than anything. It was so much like a quick bread I’m not really convinced it needed a starter, to be honest. But spread with butter and roasted under the broiler, it was delicious.

Oh, what happened to my starters, you ask? I foisted one on Ford Girl, who left hers out overnight to freeze and die. The other went to our friend Jeffrey, who let it sit on his kitchen counter for two weeks before he admitted that he’d forgotten about it. He then apologized and said that he really could only have taken care of the friendship bread if the recipe had asked for cocktail pickles and cajun spices to be added to the starter, because that’s all he had in his pantry. Which he might have mentioned when we gave it to him.

The last packet went to our friend Clark. Ten days after I gave Clark the packet, I got a flurry of text messages from him. Why does it use so much sugar?! he asked. I’m running out of sugar! said the next.

Ah, friendship and diabetes. They walk together hand in hand.

The Brick Wall

I doubt I’m the only music lover alone in experiencing a total and utter burnout over a particular musician. I’m referring specifically to the phenomenon I think of as the Brick Wall Album—a band or artist’s release that completely impedes a fan from following them any further.

I’m not talking about the artist you dislike from the get-go. I’m not talking about the artist who has a promising release or two and then peters out gradually, so that one day there’s a realization that you haven’t listened to her in, well, years, and don’t really care (hi, Sinead O’Connor!), or the artist you might have on the cusp of liking, who then releases something that you listen to with bafflement a few times before deciding she was never really your cup of tea after all. (Why yes, I’m talking about Boys for Pele. How did you know?)

No, I mean the artist whom you love unreservedly for years and years, and whom you purchase automatically on the day that he or she drops a new album. The artist you assume you’ll be listening to until the day you die. The artist who, one day without warning or betrays you by foisting upon your poor ears an album that’s such an offense and an aural assault that after one play, you’re finished with the musician. Forever. Not only do you refuse to listen to that particular album ever again, but it poisons your view of everything else from that artist that you’ve enjoyed in the past. You’re done. Out. Kaput. No more, ever again. Boom! Brick wall.

Does it sound familiar?

My example? Talking Heads. I loved the band during my college years, when they were a favorite on the student radio station. Remain in Light was one of my first-ever LP purchases, quickly followed by my purchase of their first three albums. I wore out my cassette tape of Speaking in Tongues. I saw the movie of Stop Making Sense a half-dozen times when it was released, and caught every concert of the group I could during the nineteen-eighties. I could sing Little Creatures backwards while walking a police line. I loved, loved, loved True Stories.

And then Naked came out. I gave it one spin. My reaction was, bluntly, something along the lines of, “The hell.” And then I never listened to Talking Heads again. If one of their songs came up on random play on my iTunes list, I’d rush to skip it.

For the life of me, I’m not really sure what it was about that album that so turned me off. I don’t have a particular animus against the one single I remember, “Nothing But Flowers.” Kirsty MacColl sings backup on a couple of songs, which you’d think would be a huge plus, since I was a fan of hers. (It’s not.) I’m not even sure I could give the thing another listen, considering the revulsion I have for it—that and the fact that I think it’s the only CD I’ve ever bought that I tossed in the garbage can. After one listen of Naked, though, I basically refused to tolerate the group ever again. Until a couple of weeks ago, anyway, when I imported all my old CDs into iTunes and started remembering why I enjoyed them. But it took twenty-two years!

Okay, so maybe Talking Heads wasn’t the best example, because Naked was really their last release. I’ll throw out another from someone with a longer career.

Prince. You know. The purple wonder. Mr. Doves Cry. Yeah, I loved that little midget for a very, very long time, starting with his very first release. By the time he came out with the 1999 album, I was convinced he was the musical messiah; I was basically walking around my college campus knocking on strange doors with a copy of 1999 in hand, asking people if they’d heard of how their eternal souls could be saved by the gracious good power of Minneapolis funk.

My enthusiasm peaked all during the years Prince played with the Revolution. For dances at school I would dress in tight pants, shirts with lace cravats, and sparkly homemade blindfolds with one eye cut out, so that I looked like a refugee from a Purple Rain-era video. I camped out overnight once for tickets to see Prince, the Time, and Vanity 6. I ran through two copies of Parade on my Walkman. Any spin-off act Prince produced, I bought. The Time? Owned every album. Vanity and Apollonia 6? Girrrrrl, I can still rap the entire “If A Girl Answers (Don’t Hang Up)” at the drop of a hat. (It’s a pity it’s not available for karaoke.) The Family? Still think it’s the most underrated album of the nineteen-eighties. Ditto for Jill Jones.

I was still in awe of the little devil all through Around the World in a Day and Sign o’ the Times, and even after he broke away from the Revolution and started getting a little weird. I confess that LoveSexy ticked me off a little—not because of the music, which I really liked, but because I bought the original CD that had no track markers in it, which forced me to listen to the entire CD or nothing. I didn’t really get the Batman release, for example, but I dug the “Batdance” single and was willing to groove along with the rest.

Then came the Brick Wall Album: Graffiti Bridge. I popped it into my CD player, endured it with the same expression I might have if I’d found an unexpected turd on the bottom of my shoe, and never listened to Prince again. I have almost my entire music library ripped onto my computer—1600 CDs. Batman is not one of them. So yes, I missed a ton of music from the little guy that people would swear up and down I should best believe I would l-o-v-e love, but eh. I didn’t really care. I did like the single of “Chelsea Rodgers” two years ago, and went so far as to buy it, but it didn’t make me a fan again. It wasn’t really until January, when I started spontaneously wailing “The Beautiful Ones” in the shower (“Do u want him? Or do u want me? Cause I want u!”) that I realized even after a twenty-year moratorium, Prince’s music was still firmly wedged in my psyche, no doubt taking up space that could be put to more practical use for remembering dental appointments and or to get postage stamps.

I’ve experienced the Brick Wall in literature, too, though I’m a little softer and more lenient with my favorite authors. When Anne McCaffrey resolved a late-in-life novel by having a meteorite fall from the sky and kill a villain, hooray, problem resolved, end of book!, I kind of gently struck her from my to-buy-borrow-or-library-loan list and set her aside for many years. I might consider reading through some of my old favorites of hers, though. Connie Willis’ Passage was so freaking scary and upsetting that I refused to re-read anything of hers for years after its release, but I bought and am enjoying Blackout right now. But musical artists, once they slam me into the wall, seem never to win me back.

Who else has hit a brick wall with an artist?