Mere Being - 032 - June - summer sports, Brandon Sanderson, tagines
Hello again, from Hotness! Yes, it does get warm in Minnesota— yesterday the high was 95 degrees. The cantaloupe I'm trying to grow likes it, at least?
(This is a little bit late because family stuff— everything's good, but I had to travel for a few days and decided to leave the laptop at home. It's going to take me a day or two to get caught up on various newsletters.)
Other Writing
A bunch of new essays up on the site in June. Most of you are also on the weekly newsletter but just in case you missed any:
Want to be happier at work? Try joining a church
Also, there are now 18 issues up of Walking in Oakland, a pop-up newsletter of photographs and short essays I wrote in 2021 that I'm re-releasing as a benefit for paid subscriptions. (And you can read more about the membership program here.)
Here's the kind of thing you can expect from those short essays:
As the crowds thinned out on my little walk, as I got away from street lights and crosswalks, I got uneasy. Passing cars started to feel slinky and predatory. The road became an obstacle. I started thinking about Gene Roddenberry, alien planets, and man's essential urge to explore. And– you know– I'm still in Berkeley. The chittering in the trees isn't a Yautja. The heavy wetness in the air is the standard 73% coastal humidity. The giant spiders are inflatable.
The membership program launch has gone... well? Somewhere between "emotionally wrenching" and "extremely energizing." The "offer" needs some more iteration, I think. However: My Ghost hosting costs are now fully covered by members. (Thank you!)
The Giants Season Upgraded to "Fiasco"
I really, really want to like the San Francisco Giants. I've been auditioning baseball as my "offseason" sport, when gridiron football is not available and I go into Large Man Hitting Things withdrawal. Baseball itself is barely football methadone, but being at an actual ballpark is great.
I want to be a Giants fan in particular because it's a way to stay connected to what has kind of come to be my "home town." San Francisco is a surprisingly big baseball city, and most of my friends who are willing to talk about baseball live there. Besides, what are my other options? The Twins? The Nationals?
But the friends I've gotten into it with are all LGBT. And the Giants have been making national headlines that they do not deserve (their performance this season could be described at best as "deeply mediocre") because of both what happened at Giants Pride Night and how the team has handled the aftermath.
The short version: The Giants held a Pride Night, where they had the players where the Pride version of their hat and uniform. (They're one of two teams allowed by the league to do so.) One player instead wore the regular version of the hat, and three more wrote a Bible verse referring to the Christian meaning of the rainbow, on the hat. This made a lot of people upset. The league sent those players a warning, because you're not allowed to write on the hats. This made a lot of other people upset.
Am I upset about that hat thing? Not exactly. Sports guys are, by and large, more socially conservative than I am— that's fine. I don't think they fully thought through the exact, actual message they were sending with the hats, but that's fine, too.
But I keep thinking about it, and especially the way the team has handled it. Here's a statement from Buster Posey, their President of Baseball Operations, in a press conference that he called shortly after the incident for... some reason.
I’d like to recognize that the organization has shared its response to Pride Night, and I understand that there’s strong feelings on this topic. There’s differing perspectives, and out of respect to everybody involved, it’s not something that I’m going to revisit. I understand that some fans are upset and frustrated, and I can promise you this is something that we’ve talked about a lot internally and will continue to do so.
He then responded to all follow up questions on the topic with, "I'll answer baseball questions." Like, to a robotic degree. It was weird.
I just, like, look, man. Support gay rights or don't. Hold Pride Night or don't. But being gay in public isn't free, and you shouldn't expect Pride Night to be, either. Trust me— there are a lot of people out there who get very upset if you don't act the way they think your gender is supposed to. Pride is supposed to be break from all that.
If you're going to hold Pride Night, actually, you know, hold Pride Night. Don't give your terrible bullpen a platform to tell people that God doesn't want them to be gay and then hold up your hands and say, "There's a lot of different opinions!"
So, that's killed a lot of my enthusiasm for Giants baseball. But fandom is a mysterious thing. I've been trying to get into other sports— the WNBA seems fun, and very queer friendly?— and other teams. When I get the notification from my phone that the Giants have started playing, I can't bring myself to turn it on. But I walked past a guy on a plane wearing a Giants cap the other day and felt that warm rush of yes, the right team!
Brando Sando
It happened to me. I started reading Brandon Sanderson. First, The Way of Kings, followed by the next two Stormlight books, then circled back around to hit Mistborn at the recommendation of a friend.
They're pretty good! I pretty much slammed through them— I read Mistborn in under two days. After spending so long with Tale of Genji (which I am still only 82% of the way through) it was nice to get to read something where the sentence-to-sentence level of the writing was clear and comfortable.
I don't know what to do with this impulse to hedge. I was vaguely aware of Brandon Sanderson for a long time before I picked them up and had that very common mild disdain for them. I'm not one of those readers. I enjoyed the books. I think if you're reading them you should probably at least pick them up. But I keep finding myself writing things like, "well, they're pretty good."
They're good! But they have a little bit of the leggy feeling of a plant given too much nitrogen. There's a lot there, but there are even more words. You can tell, I think, that Sanderson writes to outlines with these books— I should read one his earlier books, one of the books he says were written without outlines, to compare— in both good and bad. The books really do come together at the end, but there are also a lot of scenes that don't quite justify their own existence. They're there because of the demands of the structure, not because they insisted on their own existence.
I fear at this point that I sound like I didn't like these books. I very much did! I'm looking forward especially to picking up the next of the Stormlight Archive, and I expect at this point I'll read the later Mistborn books.
Spoilers for the first Mistborn trilogy
Out of all the Brandon Sanderson books I've read so far, Mistborn itself is absolutely the best single novel. It's entirely self-contained. It and the rest of the trilogy make a sort of Russian nesting doll together: The trilogy is a complete story, that pays off moments set up in the first book, but the first book within it is also a complete story.
It struck me as sort of a cross between Dragonriders of Pern and The Lies of Locke Lamora. From the first: A YA romance, a slow-moving apocalypse, a very technical, almost scientific magic system. From the second: The heist structure, and a beautiful plot that hinges on a secret you don't even realize you've learned in the first chapter. If you like Mistborn I suspect you'll like at least one of those books, and probably both.
About a chapter in I text the friend who had recommended it, "I'm not prepared for how seriously Sanderson is about to make me take a guy named 'Kelsier.'" And indeed, the book did make me take him seriously: He was by far my favorite character in the series, challenged pretty much only by TenSoon. But is apparently pronounced Kel-see-er, and, which I can't read without thinking of this:
Tycho
Anyway! My favorite part of the trilogy was probably the society of the kandra, shape-shifting mist creatures. I think Sanderson is probably at his best when he is dealing with creatures and society that are weird.
I also find the background cosmology and the way the shards work really interesting. Now that I've seen Ruin (and the related entity in the Stormlight Archive) and the basic dynamic where it gets its claws into people (kind of literally?) and then uses them to get those claws into even more people I've been seeing it everywhere. It makes me wonder if there isn't a shard that's really obsessed with vibe coding.
The one thing I was really disappointed by was the romance between Elend and Vin. They just... fall in love? And we know this because they say so? Kind of a lot? Sanderson improves in his ability to write romance a lot by the time he's writing the Stormlight Archive, so reading them out of chronological order probably set me up a bit.
Eggs! Eggs!
Our neighbors keep chickens and they largely regard the eggs as an unfortunate side effect of chicken keeping, so now that it's summer and the eggs are in full laying mode we are doing our best to keep up— and prepare for later this year, when three more chickens will be coming online.
Simultaneously: I am trying to eat more vegetables. I am always trying to eat more vegetables. My personal happiness is pretty much linear function of how many vegetables I have eaten in the last 48 hours and even knowing that I'm not great at eating enough. In particular: Kale, spinach, etc. The whole brassica situation. All the micronutrients I don't quite get enough of are in there.
Luckily, a discovery: You can cook kale and then just scramble some eggs into it. This is a very reasonable lunch.
Rhubarb Tagine
The other notable thing I cooked this month is this recipe from the New York Times, a chicken tagine that uses poached rhubarb in place of the usual preserved lemons. I share this news regretfully, since rhubarb season is now largely over, but put it on the list for next spring, maybe?
In the meantime, I'm keeping an eye out for eggplant. As soon as I can get some good ones I'm going to make khoresh bademjan, an eggplant and tomato stew that completely changed my feelings about eggplant.
More soon —
Nat