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box_cameraSaturday I only had to go to the grocery store and got home fairly early in the afternoon. Mom and I split a chicken ceasar wrap I got at the Rouses deli, then I vacuumed downstairs, prepped my planner for July, and took Penny for a walk. It was shockingly nice, after a couple of days of heavy rain. Which we needed, so I'm not complaining. The weekend was sunny and dry, with warm sun but a cool breeze. Nice spring weather is usually just a fond memory in south Louisiana by the first week of May.
We had leftovers for supper, then I watched a couple more episodes of The Expanse and did some collaging.
Sunday I made pumpkin doughnuts for breakfast, put clean sheets on the bed, and read for a while before getting in the shower. I finished London Falling, which felt kind of... inconclusive? I'm not really sure what point Radden Keefe was trying to make with it. Was it about zoomers and materialism? Was it about organized crime? Was it about how foreign oligarchs and their money have ruined London? I mean I guess it was about all of those things, but it never really felt like it cohered for me.
Which isn't to say I hated it or anything, it was an interesting story and he's a good writer. It just felt unsatisfying to me.
In the afternoon I made a baked lime pudding and did some dinner prep, in between drinking wine and reading the next Dave Robicheaux book, Heaven's Prisoners. There was a terrible movie adaptation of this one back in the '90s, which I mostly remember because Teri Hatcher, of all people, pulled off one of the very few decent Cajun accents I've ever heard in film. Most actors don't even try because of how weird it sounds, they just opt for a bog standard southern drawl.
Burke can be problematic for me to read, and if he didn't write with such beauty about the place I live in I might not bother. I've mentioned this before, and he got better about it later on, but the women in his early books seem to just exist to further the plot or to make Robicheaux feel a certain way. This is the book where he pulls a little Salvadoran girl out of a plane wreck and he and his wife just like, keep her? I don't mean they go through the system of fostering/adoption, I mean they just take her home like, "finders keepers". That seems weird!
Her mother has died in the plane wreck, then Robicheaux's wife gets murdered, then like a week later he brings home an old flame, then she leaves, and like, we never get a single word about how the little girl feels about any of this. Robicheaux never even finds out her real name--and she's a toddler, not an infant, she could have told them!--and just starts calling her his mother's name, Alafair. (In his defense, that's a great name.)
There's also a fair amount of playing to the cheap seats. I mean, it's 1987, and people are still using the word "negro" in this book. And I don't mean it was published in 1987, at some point a character in the book literally says "it's 1987". I remember hearing people still use that word here when I was very young, in the late '70s and very early '80s. And they weren't always white people; it wasn't meant to insult, it's just that the south is also little-c conservative, as in slow to change. But by 1987, you would only use that word if you were racist and for some reason didn't feel like you could use the other n-word.
There's a certain amount of pandering to Yankee stereotypes about the south in a lot of media; my favorite example is how Matthew McConaughey and Ashley Judd constantly look like they've been lightly sprayed with baby oil in A Time To Kill. Air conditioning existed in late 20th century Mississippi, Hollywood. It will always bug me, especially when the writer is southern and knows he's peddling bullshit.
Anyway, I made tonkatsu for supper, mostly because Rouses started carrying "pork panko", which is basically just pulverized pork rinds and I really wanted to try them. Verdict: okay, but not worth the money (about double as regular panko), and also didn't get as crispy. I'll stick to the real thing.
Collages completed in the past week:
I should start using more people in my collages. People make them feel more dynamic, and it's also more fun to play with size/perspective.
We had leftovers for supper, then I watched a couple more episodes of The Expanse and did some collaging.
Sunday I made pumpkin doughnuts for breakfast, put clean sheets on the bed, and read for a while before getting in the shower. I finished London Falling, which felt kind of... inconclusive? I'm not really sure what point Radden Keefe was trying to make with it. Was it about zoomers and materialism? Was it about organized crime? Was it about how foreign oligarchs and their money have ruined London? I mean I guess it was about all of those things, but it never really felt like it cohered for me.
Which isn't to say I hated it or anything, it was an interesting story and he's a good writer. It just felt unsatisfying to me.
In the afternoon I made a baked lime pudding and did some dinner prep, in between drinking wine and reading the next Dave Robicheaux book, Heaven's Prisoners. There was a terrible movie adaptation of this one back in the '90s, which I mostly remember because Teri Hatcher, of all people, pulled off one of the very few decent Cajun accents I've ever heard in film. Most actors don't even try because of how weird it sounds, they just opt for a bog standard southern drawl.
Burke can be problematic for me to read, and if he didn't write with such beauty about the place I live in I might not bother. I've mentioned this before, and he got better about it later on, but the women in his early books seem to just exist to further the plot or to make Robicheaux feel a certain way. This is the book where he pulls a little Salvadoran girl out of a plane wreck and he and his wife just like, keep her? I don't mean they go through the system of fostering/adoption, I mean they just take her home like, "finders keepers". That seems weird!
Her mother has died in the plane wreck, then Robicheaux's wife gets murdered, then like a week later he brings home an old flame, then she leaves, and like, we never get a single word about how the little girl feels about any of this. Robicheaux never even finds out her real name--and she's a toddler, not an infant, she could have told them!--and just starts calling her his mother's name, Alafair. (In his defense, that's a great name.)
There's also a fair amount of playing to the cheap seats. I mean, it's 1987, and people are still using the word "negro" in this book. And I don't mean it was published in 1987, at some point a character in the book literally says "it's 1987". I remember hearing people still use that word here when I was very young, in the late '70s and very early '80s. And they weren't always white people; it wasn't meant to insult, it's just that the south is also little-c conservative, as in slow to change. But by 1987, you would only use that word if you were racist and for some reason didn't feel like you could use the other n-word.
There's a certain amount of pandering to Yankee stereotypes about the south in a lot of media; my favorite example is how Matthew McConaughey and Ashley Judd constantly look like they've been lightly sprayed with baby oil in A Time To Kill. Air conditioning existed in late 20th century Mississippi, Hollywood. It will always bug me, especially when the writer is southern and knows he's peddling bullshit.
Anyway, I made tonkatsu for supper, mostly because Rouses started carrying "pork panko", which is basically just pulverized pork rinds and I really wanted to try them. Verdict: okay, but not worth the money (about double as regular panko), and also didn't get as crispy. I'll stick to the real thing.
Collages completed in the past week:
I should start using more people in my collages. People make them feel more dynamic, and it's also more fun to play with size/perspective.
