west of the moon

hitting the ground running. or not.

There's something singularly irritating about coming in to campus on a rainy Saturday, hoping to get some work done, only to discover that you no longer have after-hours key-card access to your building.  We've sorted it out, finally--it looks like my building access was accidentally listed as expiring at the end of fall semester, even though my teaching appointment runs through spring semester--but it was frustrating at the time. 

Frustrating, but somehow not surprising.  I've had a very rough time with the start of my semester.  For a quick timeline: Matt and I went on a short vacation, the week before classes started.  We got back in town on Thursday night, and then my parents were visiting Friday and Saturday.  Both the vacation and the visit were great, except that by mid-day on Saturday it was clear that I was coming down with some kind of sick.  From Saturday evening until Wednesday morning, I was almost completely incapacitated by what I'm pretty sure was the flu.  Either the flu or just the worst cold of my entire life--it was miserable either way, with violent coughing fits and severe exhaustion and general all-around ick.  I'm extremely fortunate that I had the option of basically spending four whole days in bed, sleeping whenever I wasn't coughing, and even so it was miserable.  (The pettiest complaint of the whole illness?  How -boring- it all was.  I couldn't even -read-, because my head was so foggy that I couldn't follow anything, even when I could focus my eyes on it.  And all the while, the ever-present frustrating knowledge that I was falling further and further behind on work that needed doing.)

Wednesday was the first day of classes for spring semester, and I managed to drag myself out of the house and up to campus.  In retrospect, I'm not sure this was the best idea--as much as it seemed pathetic to have to cancel the very first class of the semester, it was probably equally pathetic to start class with an instructor who's barely managing to stand up, much less think clearly and answer questions. 

That was a week and a half ago, and I'm pretty much over the flu/cold, so that's good.  I can't shake the feeling that there's still a lingering effect on my teaching.  The first week was so off-balance that I'm only just now starting to feel really comfortable with the material.  Clearly this isn't how it's supposed to work.

It's a shame, too.  This semester, I'm teaching "Science in the United States", and it's a course with a lot of potential.  I'm trying to focus the course around the relationship between science and society in the US, starting back in the colonial period and stretching more-or-less to the present day.  Major highlights along the way include the debates about evolution in the schools, the history of American eugenics programs and scientific racism, the development of conservation movements (and, later, environmentalist movements), the growth of the research university, the development of the military-industrial complex, the Army Alpha tests and the birth of intelligence testing, the Manhattan Project, Sputnik and the space race, and a lot of other things.  It's great, because there are a lot of complex issues at stake, and never really any clear answers.  On the first day of class, we had a little bit of discussion in class about the role that the government plays in funding science, and how it's affected scientific work (both in positive and negative ways).  I have great students, great historical material to work with, and a lot of enthusiasm for this topic.  And yet I still don't feel like I'm on track.

It's kind of like--this is an awkward analogy, but bear with me.  It's kind of like when you start to tell a story, or maybe a long joke, but right when you're starting you get distracted by something, and you start the story all wrong.  Maybe you forget to mention something important, or you get off on some boring tangent, or something.  When you have a bad start, it's hard to get the narrative back on track.   It's an awkward analogy because a teaching semester-long lecture course is, of course, not exactly like telling a story.  A good course will have a rhythm to it, though, and a couple of thematic through-lines, nested story arcs.  Because I had the flu, or maybe just a bad cold, my semester got off to a rough start, and I haven't quite found that rhythm yet. 

so, about those books.

So, as promised, what I thought about some of the books on the big 2007 list.  I want to start with a little disclaimer, though--these aren't really book reviews proper.  I think a good book review should probably have some critical infrastructure, and should certainly have more thought put into it.  This book list was the leisure-reading list.  I didn't include the books I read for course prep, or for academic use.  When I read something for academic purposes, I think about it differently, with a whole critical infrastructure; I don't generally bring all that mental machinery to bear on books that I'm reading just for pleasure.  So I'm thinking of this more as my reader reactions to the books, not as actual reviews.  (If that distinction even makes sense outside of my head.)

• David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.  I loved everything about this book, and it's one of the rare books in my life that I wish I could read again for the first time.  It was beautiful, and weird, and surprising, and I didn't want it to ever end.
• Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai.  I also loved everything about this one--it's one of the best books I've ever read, although I felt constantly off-balance while I was reading it.  It only took me a page or two to figure out that it has nothing at all to do with that Tom Cruise movie of the same name, thankfully.  It took me much longer to figure out what it -was- about, but that was okay. 
• David Mitchell, Black Swan Green.  So, Jenn said in the comments on the earlier post that she has trouble sorting out her reaction to The Last Samurai from her reaction to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, because she read them at around the same time.  I read The Curious Incident a couple of years ago, right after I read The Speed of Dark; it was an unplanned sequence, and an unfortunate one, because both books feature autistic narrators, and The Speed of Dark was so goddamned brilliant that The Curious Incident couldn't help but look sad and gimmicky in comparison.  And then when Black Swan Green came out, I saw people comparing it to The Curious Incident, and as a result I had no interest at all in reading it.  But everyone kept saying how good it was, and I had loved Cloud Atlas so much, so I finally gave it a try, and I liked it quite a bit.  It didn't have that light shimmery kind of brilliance that Cloud Atlas had, but it was really good, entertaining and weird and smart.
  
• Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild.  I confess, I only read this because I saw the movie.  I like Jon Krakauer quite a bit--Under the Banner of Heaven is a fabulous book, and one that I couldn't stop talking about for weeks after I read it--but the book just didn't sound that interesting.  I only saw the movie because I was in the mood for a movie and it was playing at a convenient time, and I liked the movie, I think.  I think.  I feel a little bit like the movie I saw was not the same one Sean Penn thought he was making, like I was seeing something in it that wasn't quite there, or wasn't intended to be there.  Mostly, though, I came out of the movie desperately curious to know how Jon Krakauer had put the story together, and I was hoping that the book would give me that story.  It didn't, but it was a good read anyway. 
• Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels and What's Bred in the Bone.  These were fabulous.  I have no idea how to talk about them--they're so different from most of the things I read.  For that matter, they're so different from each other!  But such good books.  (I'm not thrilled with the change in Maria from the first to the second book, but I'm hoping that when I finally get a copy of the third in the trilogy, she'll make more sense.  She's only a cameo in the second book, after all.)  But so strange.  Davies has this talent for weaving together a string of weird coincidences that, when they finally come together, look less like gimmicky coincidence and more like the pieces of some larger puzzle falling naturally into place.
• Allegra Goodman, Intuition.  This was completely a comedy of manners in the academic world--no, wait, when I write that sentence it sounds like Jane Smiley's Moo or something, and this book is nothing like that one.  And I actually had a little trouble while reading it, because my brain kept trying to map it more directly onto the David Baltimore / Thereza Imanishi-Kari incident.  (It maps pretty directly on its own, there's no need to force an even closer correspondence.  But somehow I kept trying.)  But the characters all made sense, and all seemed like people I know--not that anyone in the book reminded me of anyone particular, just that each one of them felt a little familiar.  Slightly melodramatic, but in an entertaining and fairly realistic way.
• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.  True story: when I graduated from college, I had two weeks before I had to start at my new job, and I told myself that I would use part of that time to read some huge epic classic that I'd previously neglected.  I settled on Anna Karenina, checked it out of the library, and over a period of a few days I read nearly a third of the book and just adored it. But then I put it down for a few days, and when I went back, I couldn't remember who anyone was or how they were related to each other, and I was too demoralized to start over.  I finally got around to trying again, and I still adored it.  The big secret about this book is that it's a soap opera dressed up as high art.
• James Halperin, The First Immortal.  This book was absolutely horrible--it's practically a caricature of itself, and just kept getting stupider and more awful.  I don't think I finished it, actually--I gave up somewhere around the time when Our Hero, having attained immortality, adopts the eight-year-old clone of his dead wife, who he raises expecting that she'll be his new wife once she's, y'know, past puberty.  One hopes. 

More later, but that's a start.

constructive criticism.

I've had a string of days full of tiny irritations--each little thing is insignificant on its own, but as they accumulate I start to feel like I'm being nibbled to death by cats.  I've locked myself out of my campus office five times in two days, locked myself out of the house once, and even managed to lock myself out of my locker at the gym.  A lot of the campus-office lockouts happened because I had to move offices--it's much easier to forget your keys when your hands are full of books, papers, and miscellaneous office accoutrement like tea canisters and little plastic airplanes.  Moving offices is itself slightly irritating, because it's a very physical reminder of my impermanence in this department, and on top of that, the new office is much further from the water cooler and the copy room.  (Do you see what I meant when I said these were tiny insignificant irritations?)  One of the books on order for my spring semester class hasn't come in yet, which means I can't check page numbers for assigning reading on my syllabus, and the library's only copy has gone missing, which means that I -still- can't check page numbers -and- we probably won't have a copy of the book on course reserve for students who can't afford to buy their own copy. 

Tiny, minor, absolutely petty things.   For me, the best way to wipe out this state of mounting irrational irritation (somewhere inbetween the mood Jed calls "the mullygrubs" and Holly Golightly called "the mean reds") is to get thoroughly involved in some kind of work, so I've thrown myself head-first into next semester's course prep, even though we're almost two weeks away from the first day of class.  I have a course reader, I have a syllabus (although still tragically lacking specific assignments from the missing book), I have the first lecture done and good outlines for the next few. 

Part of my preparation for the new semester involves reading course evaluations.  At the end of each course, our students are asked to fill out evaluation forms for the instructors.  The forms are anonymous, and instructors aren't allowed to look at them until after final grades have been submitted.  It's never been clear to me whether course evals actually mean anything.  People applying for jobs will use selected quotes from the evals as "demonstrations of teaching excellence", and I hear rumors that they may be involved in tenure review, but I don't know if they're used for anything else.  From what I can tell, a lot of faculty members never even look at their course evals.  I like to check mine over, though, to see if there are any general trends in my teaching I need to pay attention to. 

As I'm writing this, it's occurring to me that the best advice for reading course evaluations is the same as the best advice for dealing with manuscript critiques from a writing workshop.  You'll get some completely contradictory responses to the exact same material, and you can't take any one response too seriously or try to change everything that people suggest changing.  That said, if almost everyone says that you need to change one particular thing, you should think about changing it.  You may not end up making the change, but you should at least think about it.

With all of the caveats in mind, I do take my course evaluations very seriously.  After my first semester teaching, a lot of people said that they found the material interesting but didn't always see what the point was.  The next semester, I did more signposting ("here is the thing I am about to say, here is why it is important") and made more frequent (and more explicit) connections between the specific topics and the overall course themes or concepts.  At times it started to feel ridiculous, like I was telling them the same things over and over again, but the feedback the next time around was extremely positive, and many students said that all that signposting and connection-drawing had really helped them understand the material better.  All of my students say that I talk too fast, and I'm actively working on that, but apparently with only minimal success.   I've even taken some of those sharp stinging critcisms to heart--one of last fall's evaluations said "she keeps saying that things are 'interesting' when they aren't really."  Since then, I try to not refer to things as "interesting", because that's subjective.  As the authority in the classroom, I can say that something is "relevant" or "significant" or "meaningful" or "important", but "interesting" varies from person to person.  (To be briefly immodest: every semester, I get a few evaluations that say things like "I took this class because I needed to fill a requirement, and I've never liked history classes before, but Professor Groppi made it really interesting!"  I hope those students realize how incredibly valuable that kind of thing is to a teacher, not because it's useful per se, but because that's the kind of comment that gets you through the bad days.) 

The one thing that consistently jumps out at me from my course evaluations, though, is how visual these students are, at least in terms of their expectations.  I use PowerPoint presentations in my lectures, but fairly minimally.  Whenever I mention a specific person, I try to have a picture of that person.  Whenever I talk about geography, I try to have a map.  I use diagrams to illustrate some key concepts (important in teaching the early history of science), I use pictures of scientific apparatus, and (I'll confess) sometimes I just use pictures for visual distraction or amusement value.  My presentations are mostly images, though, not "key concepts" or bullet points or outlines.  Every semester, the student feedback about the visuals hits the same two points:  they want more pictures, and they want bullet-points and outlines.  (This semester, someone even suggested that I use embedded video clips, to liven things up a little.) 

This is one area where I feel like I'm swimming against a current.  I understand that the bullet-point PowerPoint is practically an industry standard at this point, but I don't like it.  As a visual display, I don't think it's a good way to communicate information, but more importantly, I think it's bad pedagogy.  It short-circuits some of the information processing that the students need to be doing on their own.  I don't want them going down some list of key ideas and ticking them off as I recite them--I want them to be fitting the pieces of the puzzle together, seeing the categories and connections and contexts.  The bullet-point teaching style always looks to me like a slide backwards towards rote learning and recitation, and that's not what we should be doing, certainly not at the college level, and certainly not at a school like Berkeley, where I can reasonably assume that my students have an educational background that's prepared them to do this kind of work.

You know, I'm too young to be a cranky old woman. The good news for my students is that this semester's class ("History of Science in the United States") covers a modern-enough time period that I'll have a lot more pictures available to me than I have in past semesters.  (Y'all have no -idea- how hard it is to find good illustrations of people, places, and equipment when you're dealing with, like, ancient Mesopotamia or the Kingdom of Kush.  Even in slightly more modern times, all of my portraits of Indian and Islamic mathematicians and astronomers last semester came off of postage stamps.) 

Ishi Courtyard.

Ishi Courtyard.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi

Trees in the rain.

Trees in the rain.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi

bibliophile.

I have just been informed that the Bay Area is either having or about to have a Massive Winter Rainstorm of Epic Proportions.  (I can hear it raining outside, so we may already be in the midst of it, but it doesn't sound like it's raining all that hard yet?  I don't know.)  I don't mean to diminish the importance of the Massive Winter Rainstorm, if only because I live in a part of the country where people build their houses on the sides of steep hills, and bad rainstorms can wash those houses right off.  In my life, though, the rain mostly only means that the mail in my mailbox gets wet and I have to juggle my umbrella and my coffee when I walk to my campus office. 

I know that we're a few days into 2008, but I have one last 2007 wrap-up to do, and that's a book list.  2007 was, among other things, the year that I started reading again.  I've always been a compulsive reader, but I got so worn down at the end of the dissertation process that I wasn't able to process anything more complicated than trashy romance novels and well-worn half-memorized favorites.  I stopped reading new books entirely, it seemed like, and that felt wrong.  About a year and a half ago, I emailed a lot of my friends and asked them for reading suggestions, old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, genre, literary, whatever.  Tell me the names of some books you like, and I'll try to read them, I said. 

And that's what I've been doing.  I've been reading a lot of books that I hadn't read before, and it's such a good thing for me.  I haven't liked all of them, but I've liked most of them, and I've loved a few.  I tried to reconstruct the list of books I've read in the last year or so, and it's hard, because I don't really keep lists or records.  The list that follows is a reconstruction based on a few sketchy documentary sources and a quick scan of the bookshelves.  (I've gotten most of these from either BookMooch or the library, so it's been a pretty cost-effective reading surge.)  Almost every book on this list I've meant to blog about, even just a brief reaction, and kept not getting around to.  I may still try and do that, at least brief reactions, but for now I'm just going to list them.  If anyone's particularly curious about what I thought of any of these, though, let me know, and I'll try to get to those first.

• Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai.
• Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books. (I may not have read all of them, but I think I got most of them.)
• David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.
• David Mitchell, Black Swan Green.
• Robertson Davies, Rebel Angels and What's Bred in the Bone.  (still trying to track down a copy of The Lyre of Orpheus, the third book in the trilogy.)
• John McPhee, Annals of the Former World.  I don't think I've actually finished this yet, though.  It's just so hard to carry around.
• John McPhee Coming Into the Country. 
• Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild.  Particularly interesting read as a set with Coming Into the Country.
• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
• Julie Phillips's Tiptree biography.
• Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep.
• Kate Chopin, "Pale Horse Pale Rider" and "The Awakening"
• Mary McCarthy, The Group.
• Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave and a few of the sequels
• Joan Vinge, Snow Queen (and World's End, and Summer Queen, which I haven't finished yet)
• Naomi Novik's Temeraire books.
• All of Kate Wilhelm's Barbara Holloway books (except I think the most recent one, which I haven't found a copy of yet)
• Michael Chabon, Summerland.
• Walter Mosely, Devil in a Blue Dress
• Bill Buford, Heat
• Janet Kagan, Uhura's Song
• Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon
• Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors and Dry, A Memoir
• James Halperin, The First Immortal
• Stephen Carter, The Emperor of Ocean Park
• Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
• David Halberstam, The Teammates
• Ben Mezrich, Bringing Down the House
• Leon Lederman, The God Particle
• Allegra Goodman, Intuition
• Jane Smiley, Duplicate Keys
• Alexandra Ripley, On Leaving Charleston
• Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance
• Willo Davis Roberts, The Girl with the Silver Eyes
• Caleb Carr, The Alienist
• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
• Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
• Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy
• Kate Wilhelm, Juniper Time
• Charles Stross, The Clan Corporate
• David Halberstam, The Summer of '49
• J.D.Robb, Innocent in Death
• Tess Gerristen, Bloodstream
• Nora Roberts, Angel's Fall
• John Scalzi, Old Man's War
• John Scalzi, The Ghost Brigades
• Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy

I may have forgotten a couple, but I did resist the urge to not list the books that I think will make me look less smart.  There's no shame in reading mass-market thrillers and romance novels.  Also, some of these are books I've read  before, but long enough ago that I didn't really remember them that well.

And that's 2007 in books.

new year's flower.

pink flower.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi

good fences.

When I was growing up, I knew all of our neighbors, and we all knew each others' business.  I don't want this to sound all halcyon-days rural-utopia; I grew up deep in the heart of suburbia, and I think that the local culture on our street was an exception rather than the rule, even for my hometown.  But we did know all the neighbors.  (My mother still does, and still keeps that network active.  When I finished my doctorate, I got congratulations cards from families up and down the block back home, including at least a few people who I don't think I've talked to since my last trick-or-treating run in eighth grade.  My mother has a real gift for keeping people in touch with each other--it's one of the things I admire most about her.)

That connectedness of the old neighborhood hasn't really carried through anywhere else I've lived, though.  In the last seven or eight years, in particular, it seems that I only get to know anything about my neighbors when some kind of calamity strikes our neighborhood.  Back in my old apartment in a slightly dodgy part of Oakland, the little garage unit behind my building caught on fire, and that brought out the whole block.  One of the women from the building next door came running over, banging on our doors and windows, and people up and down the street were standing on the sidewalk, calling the fire department from cordless or cell phones.  Three strangers helped us evacuate the collection of parrots from the upstairs apartment, and everyone had suggestions for how to get the smoke smell out when we were finally allowed back into the building.  (The fire never spread from the garage to the main building, thankfully.  The people in the upstairs apartment had been using the garage to store their SCA equipment, and they lost several thousand dollars' worth of costuming and pavillion tents, but there were no injuries, either human or parrot.) 

A year or two after the fire, not long before I left that apartment, one of the women who lived in my building was held up at gunpoint on our front steps.  Three in the morning, I was woken up by someone screaming, the loud thumping of a door being pushed shut, some shouting.  It was over before I was fully awake, but when the police came, they asked me to wait a while and give them a statement.  I sat out on the stoop for over an hour, talking with another neighbor who'd heard a similar jumble of noise and was also waiting to give a statement.  By the end of that hour, I knew more about his life than I knew about most of my friends from graduate school--something about the quiet middle of the night running up against the jangled nerve-ends made it easy to talk.  That was nearly five years ago, and I'm not sure I'd recognize him if I saw him on the street tomorrow, but I remember that night, bare feet on the concrete steps and the smoke from the cigarettes he lit with slightly shaking hands. 

There's nothing that profound that happened today, just the run-of-the-mill hassle of my car being broken into.  Again.  The passenger-side window was smashed to bits, small crackled rafts of safety-glass all over the seats.  We didn't notice until late afternoon, when Matt was on his way out to work, but god, it feels like I should have the auto body shop on speed-dial by now.  (And it's a holiday weekend--I won't even be able to get in touch with them until Monday, which is New Year's Eve, so who knows when I'll be able to get a new window?)  Nothing was stolen--there was nothing in the car but books, honestly, and the thieves/vandals apparently weren't interested in Thomas Pynchon and David Liss--but Matt can't take it to work like this, leaving it window-less in the parking lot at his store, and how can I go buy groceries tomorrow when everything is covered in glass and open to the rain? 

By the time I was done collecting case numbers and badge numbers and claim numbers, I was too irritated to do anything else, but later in the evening I finally wandered out to see about rescuing the books from the wreckage and taping some plastic to the window.  While I was out there, one of the neighbors from my building came out to talk.  It's the guy in the parking space next to ours, and our interactions so far have been limited to waving and smiling when we cross paths while parking.  Tonight we had a nice little chat about the cars and the neighborhood and the crime--he's been hit much worse than us, and much more often.  He does construction work of some kind, and has a locked tool-case in the back of his pickup truck.  A few months ago, he says, someone came in the middle of the night and sawed through the titanium lock.  That's not some crazy drugged-up teenager, that's premeditation, that requires something like a battery-operated sawzall.  They took five, six hundred dollars' worth of tools, including a crowbar that they used to pry open a storage unit in the parking area and steal some more stuff.  He had suggestions for us, and some ideas about why this keeps happening, but mostly it was just a shared venting of frustration, which was nice. 

I'd still much rather that the stupid car hadn't been attacked again, of course.  But if I have to look for a bright side, it was nice to get a chance to talk to my neighbor.

Regrouping, miscellaneous.

There's something deeply satisfying about taking a day or two at year's end to regroup, reorganize, reflect.  In high school and college, I used to set aside time at New Year's to re-read all of my old journals and diaries; that tradition stopped when I stopped keeping a diary, but I still like the idea.  Now I just reorganize my file cabinets. 

I did forget, though, to post links to the Strange Horizons Christmas stories of years past and present.  (I meant to do this Christmas Day, but ended up not even opening my computer that day.  Which is all for the best.)  We don't seek out Christmas stories or hold a publication slot for them, but we've had quite a few nonetheless.

2000:  "War of the Lights" by Madeleine Rose Reardon Diamond. 
2001: "Carol for Mixed Voices" by Madeleine Rose Reardon Diamond, part 1 and part 2.
2002: "Christmas Season" by Jay Lake.  (actually published in June, but who's counting?)
2002: "Emergency Claus" by Ken Brady.  (published in October!  What were we up to in 2002, I wonder?)
2003: "In the Late December" by Greg van Eekhout.
2007: "R3" by Dennis Danvers, part 1 and part 2.

They're all very different types of stories--both of Madeleine's are kind of madcap comedies, and "Carol for Mixed Voices" in particular reminds me of the best of Connie Willis's Christmas novellas.  Greg's (Nebula-nominated, and rebroadcast this week on Escape Pod) story lures you in with science-fiction children and sneaks up on you with the Christmas spirit.  Jay's and Dennis's are just weird, in a very very good way. 

Unrelated to Christmas, but maybe worth drawing your attention to, is this gallery of beautiful libraries.   

Feast of the Two Fishes

You know how some family traditions don't even really look like family traditions until you get some distance from them?  If it's just what everyone does, you don't even notice.  I've said before that I never really felt Italian until I left New Jersey; after leaving the East Coast entirely, I've felt more Italian than ever before.  One effect of this is that family traditions (some of which aren't even that strictly observed in the family proper) start to feel more important.  One of those traditions led me right into tonight's adventure: the feast of the twelve fishes.  Or seven fishes.  Most of which aren't fishes, technically, but other seafood. This is a problem with these immigrant-culture traditions that have been filtered through several generations of cultural assimilation and reclamation--we often don't know quite what we're doing.  (It puts me in mind of something Peter wrote on the old Secret Kings webjournal, about a traditional Korean holiday, where one executed a long series of ceremonial activities "for, uh, luck?  And more luck?") 

Somewhere back in the cultural DNA of one branch of my family, there was a tradition of eating a set number of seafood dishes for Christmas Eve.  The number may have been seven (for the Sacraments), or twelve (for the Apostles), or something else, but the point is, on Christmas Eve, you gather your friends and family and you feed them fish.  The last few times I spent Christmas Eve with my parents, we did the fishes up right: shrimp cocktail, shrimp scampi, clams oreganata, steamed king crab legs, and lobster.  It's hugely extravagant, but I think that's part of the point, holidays as feast days.  Matt and I haven't quite been keeping this up--we've had people over for Christmas Eve the last few years, but we serve them non-fishy food, grilled flank steak or peanut noodles or lasagna.  This year, it's just the two of us tonight, and we're having our own little Feast of the Two Fishes, starting with baked stuffed clams.

I've never made stuffed clams before.  My parents have a few different recipes for these, all of them good, but this is a whole new cooking experience for me.  Mark Bittman makes it sound so -straightforward-, so -easy-.  Get some fresh clams, pry them open, scoop out the meat, mince it, mix it with garlic and breadcrumbs and spices, stuff it back in the shells, bake.  Easy-peasy.

I'd like to draw your attention back to that "pry them open" part.  Everyone (Mark Bittman, the guy at the fish counter, my parents) said to steam them first, just a little bit, just until they open.  I, naive, didn't realize that even after steaming them open, I'd still have to wedge a knife in there and sever the little muscles holding the clamshell shut.  It was a surprisingly brutal process, and I learned a whole lot about clam anatomy.  I was on the phone with my parents for part of it, leading to the following exchange:

Me: Oh!  Damn it.
Dad:  What?
Me:  The clam.  I steamed them a little, so that they'd open, and I swear this guy was open, but he just shut again.  I can't get the knife in there at all.
Dad: Oh, they do that.  They'll open and close on you.  Just reminding you that they're still alive in there.
Me: I don't want to think about that too closely.
Mom: Oh, just put him back in the steam, he'll open up.  But get in there quick next time, don't give him a chance to get closed again. 

In the end, I triumphed over my little bivalve nemesis, and our Feast of the Two Fishes seems on track.  The second fish, a spicy shrimp dish out of the Williams Sonoma New Orleans cookbook, is entirely drama-free, as long as one buys shrimp that are already peeled and de-veined.  (In this I deviate from the cookbook, but life is short, and I don't want to spend it de-veining shrimp.)   Melt a lot of butter, pour in some olive oil, use it to sautee a whole lot of onion and rosemary, add garlic and cayenne pepper, spoon the sauce onto some shrimp in a casserole dish, bake for twenty minutes.  Simple and tasty.