Strangerland

Together

Eric Gregory — Sat, 29 Oct 2016 00:00:00 UTC

We end up together.

Work in Progress

Eric Gregory — Sun, 10 Apr 2016 00:00:00 UTC

The last two summers, Julia and I planted in a community garden organized by generous and supportive folks who knew a lot more than I ever will about what makes a garden work. This year, we’re building our own beds:

Our last frost date is supposed to be April 15. For now, we’re welcoming worms to the soil.

Hello from the Other Side

Eric Gregory — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 UTC

Something that’s been on my mind a lot lately: How should we behave toward people on the other side of political divides? Was Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Antonin Scalia’s friendship praiseworthy? Or is such a relationship morally compromising when you understand your friend’s ideology to do some damage to the vulnerable? I’d break the larger questions here into three parts. Is it always, sometimes, or never…

Obligatory to be friends with the other side?
Praiseworthy to be friends with the other side?
Permissible to be friends with the other side?

Both of the major camps frame many of their positions as a defense of the vulnerable: if you’re for women’s choice, you understand yourself to defend the health and rights of women. If you’re anti-abortion, you understand yourself to defend nascent lives. The premises of each position tend to drive their adherents into self-rendered bubbles, if we can’t speak in friendship with folks from the other side.

Some social clustering of like-minded people is natural and inevitable. I’m not going to share a relaxed meal with Trump or Cruz, and I think it’s probably morally fraught to do so–it would tacitly condone the cultivators of ideologies so toxic that they pose a real danger to health, safety, and our system of social organization. But if everyone actively selects away from anyone who believes contrarily on issues of consequence, then we get a kind of interpersonal isolationism that precludes or at least discourages good-faith dialogue closer to the middle spaces, in the ideological demilitarized zone. And good-faith dialogue is hard enough as it is.

Everything above suggests that it’s sometimes permissible and sometimes praiseworthy to be friends with the other side. Is it ever obligatory? It’s hard for me to imagine what an obligatory friendship looks like. Friendship seems inherently elective, so the idea is probably nonsense.

The previous questions seem easy enough in the abstract, but I’m speaking from a position of significant privilege. If I’m questioning whether I should be friends with someone who holds a marginalizing position, I might be pained by the position, but I’m rarely if ever its object. It would seem like a hardhearted and patronizing thing to tell someone who suffers that it would be best for them to welcome friendships with those who make them suffer.

Still, it would be unfair to dismiss Ginsberg and Scalia’s relationship as something only possible between privileged elites. Ginsberg contended directly with her friend’s marginalizing work:

Had Scalia been a justice when Ginsburg was arguing women’s rights cases before the court throughout the 1970s, he certainly would have have voted against her. He wrote the solo dissent to her majority in U.S. v. Virginia, the opinion that ended women’s exclusion from the Virginia Military Institute, and formed the capstone of her lifelong fight for gender equality. “This is not the interpretation of a Constitution,” Scalia complained, “but the creation of one.” Scalia bitterly opposed the Supreme Court’s gradual recognition of rights for gays and lesbians; Ginsburg was the first justice to preside over a same-sex marriage. Scalia referred to the Voting Rights Act, the law protecting ballot access for the historically disenfranchised, as one of several “racial entitlements” that Congress would be hard-pressed to end; Ginsburg ferociously dissented when the court gutted it.

How do we know when it’s permissible or praiseworthy to pursue friendships? I doubt there’s a reliable formula, but I wonder if it might be useful to use John Rawls’ original position exercise on a smaller scale.

Imagine seven diverse socioeconomic and political identities. Posit that these seven lives may intersect consistently. You and six others will have to live out existence as one of these seven folks, but you don’t know which one. If you had to determine in what way the seven identities should interact before assuming that identity, before living that life, I think you’d err toward friendship. I only have a shallow understanding of Rawls’ actual formulation, which is supposed to form the basis of a fairness-centered conception of justice, but it may basically rely on individuals’ capacities for friendly disagreement. Coexistence between folks with different fundamental ethical premises – coexistence in a plural society – depends on humility. It requires that we act in good faith with our beliefs, but that we do so with an understanding that there is some provisionality to our knowledge.

Maybe the line is where someone’s behavior and beliefs make reasonable disagreement and empathetic exchange genuinely impossible. In the Rawlsian experiment, I think I’d always prefer relationships based on empathy. If someone conducts or fosters violence, if someone actually, actively precludes the mutuality of empathy in relationships, maybe it’s not a good idea to hang out with them.

But friendship isn’t schematic, and while we hope for a reciprocity of empathy in our relationships, we don’t treat empathy as a currency that demands equivalence in exchange. There are people we shouldn’t condone through friendship, but those cases of impermissible friendship are probably rare. We can relate to people with grace and curiosity because they make us laugh or have interesting thoughts or share our loves. We can relate to the sum of a person who isn’t reducible to their positions, and all of that is a good.

In the Meantime

Eric Gregory — Sun, 14 Feb 2016 00:00:00 UTC

Since last June:

Returned to teaching
Started and published the first issue of a small press magazine
Moved into and made significant renovations on a house
Got engaged to Julia

Busy eight months or so. At the moment:

Second semester
Readying the second issue of Middle Planet
Planning a wedding
Fiction?

We’re a month past resolution season, so maybe I can take myself a bit more seriously when I say that I want to write here (and in general) more often. In the meantime, here’s what I read last year:

How about you?

Love wins

Eric Gregory — Fri, 26 Jun 2015 00:00:00 UTC

Rainbow flags fly above Carrboro:

The realization of something that once felt impossibly far away. I’m overjoyed for everyone touched by this day.

The March Wind

Eric Gregory — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 UTC

I’ve got a new story, “The March Wind,” coming out in LCRW 33. Take a gander at this lovely cover by Kevin Huizenga:

Both the story and the magazine mean a lot to me – LCRW published my very first piece of fiction exactly ten (!) years ago. And I’m excited to share pages with these folks:

fiction
Carmen Maria Machado, “I Bury Myself”
Alena McNamara, “Starling Road”
Giselle Leeb, “Ape Songs”
Michelle Vider, “For Me, Seek the Sun”
Deborah Walker, “Medea”
D. K. McCutchen, “Jellyfish Dreaming”
Sofia Samatar, “Request for an Extension on the Clarity”
M. E. Garber, “Putting Down Roots”
Eric Gregory, “The March Wind”

nonfiction
Christopher Brown, “Winter in the Feral City”
Nicole Kimberling, “Cook Like a Hobo”

poetry
Leslie Wightman, “The Sanctity of Nature”
Ingrid Steblea, “Another Afternoon in the Garden”
Kelda Crich, “Child Without Summe”
Peter Jay Shippy, “Singing Beach”

art
Kevin Huizenga
Dmitry Borshch
Steve Logan

Looks like I’ll be part of a reading at Readercon in a few weeks, for anyone who will be there. Stay tuned for more details.

Found fantasy

Eric Gregory — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 00:00:00 UTC

Near Logan Square in Chicago:

Last year's reads

Eric Gregory — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 00:00:00 UTC

Not an exhaustive reading list or a “Best of 2014,” but something in the middle: a handful of books and stories, mostly published last year, that have stuck with me.

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
Hypnotic, understated ecological science fiction. The entire Southern Reach trilogy is fantastic, but the first book’s complex narrator and perfectly pitched voice make it a masterpiece, and the novel tells a satisfyingly complete story on its own.

Syllabus by Lynda Barry
Lynda Barry’s work is suffused with this sly wisdom and warmth that makes you feel more grounded and understanding for having read it. (I heard her speak in DC about a year ago, and she’s the same way in person). Her latest book collects and expands on her beautifully illustrated syllabi for her art/writing classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Worthwhile for anyone, but there’s a ton to learn here if you’re a teacher, artist, or writer.

How to Get Back to the Forest by Sofia Samatar
Horror stories and sleepaway camp go hand-in-hand, but this – incisive and gorgeously-written science fiction rather than outright horror – is the only one I’ve read that has rendered the whole concept of camp genuinely unsettling. The story sneaks up on you and then hits hard.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Though nothing fundamentally speculative happens, this is science fiction in the truest sense: a novel about empathy and family-as-experiment and what it means for the people involved. Also beautiful and broad-hearted and easy to recommend to just about anyone.

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
Feels like David Mitchell doing Stephen King, which is not a bad thing. A little sloppy in its fantasy worldbuilding, sometimes, but compulsively readable and moving in its depiction of a life in mosaic. And there’s an elegaic realism to the dystopian coda that feels urgent even if you’re a little tired of post-apocalypse: this just reads like a clear-eyed picture of how a world winds down.

How to Be Happy by Eleanor Davis
A beautiful collection of comics about melancholy and contentment and family, including an incredible near-future short story, all gorgeously drawn.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
I feel like I halfway avoided the apocalypse in my reading last year, but it kept coming up in the books I really loved. Unexpected human connections and performing Shakespeare after the fall of the modern world. Thoughtful, hopeful, and humane.

The Peripheral by William Gibson
The William Gibson novel I’ve been waiting for. You can’t talk much about the premise without spoiling it, but: the voice is terse and quietly funny, the protagonist balances badass cool and complexity, and the setting is (partly) a tangible near-future Appalachia.

Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They are Terrifying by Alice Sola Kim
A raw, creepy, funny, moving short story that feels like a novel, with an amazing voice and immediate characters and high school dark magic rooted in loneliness. Included in Monstrous Affections, an anthology with a just ridiculously great list of contributors.

2014

Eric Gregory — Mon, 29 Dec 2014 00:00:00 UTC

A year of corrections. Big and little, public and private. The last few days and weeks, especially, it has felt like a year of old faces and places. Folks I hadn’t seen in too long, all around me and all at once, by purpose and by accident.

In the weeks and months prior, a steady rhythm of changes, many of the sort that are quiet but feel momentous. I came home to Carrboro. Saw old friends more often. Published a new story. Started a new garden and settled into familiar patterns. Every year feels like a milestone, in retrospect, but this one felt like progress.

In the new year, I hope: more old faces, and more new ones. More stories and more gardens. More corrections, more mistakes. Friends, good books, warmths. And the same for you.

Garden postseason

Eric Gregory — Sun, 26 Oct 2014 00:00:00 UTC

Colds and travel kept us from the garden for a couple of weeks, and we were surprised to find it still going strong.

By the mid- and late season pictures, you’d think we only ever grew peppers. But we had a lot of luck with cherry tomatoes, too. The cucumbers were wiped out by these jerks, and we only ever got a few watermelons (a bad choice, we found, for a small plot: they sprawl).

The dragon cayenne peppers seemed to love the Triangle climate, producing as quickly as we could pick them. Very spicy with a smoky flavor, delicious (and a little painful) straight from the plant. I’m still pretty green in the garden, but it was a good learning season.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki

Eric Gregory — Sat, 20 Sep 2014 00:00:00 UTC

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
by Haruki Murakami

A quick, elegantly structured, and sometimes frustrating novel about lost friendships. Nostalgia is Murakami’s thing, and there’s plenty of it realized very effectively here, but two of the three women at the heart of the story are basically just plot devices. That’s a problem from the start, and it only compounds given some of the turns in the latter half of the book.

Tsukuru Tazaki is a thirty-something rail station engineer who, as a college student, was mysteriously rejected by his four closest high school friends. His present-day girlfriend Sara, a literal and figurative travel agent, exists primarily to Gandalf him through the plot, first spurring him to solve his longstanding personal mystery and then guiding him from one investigative reunion to the next.

This basic structure – moving from reunion to reunion – has a beautiful sort of simplicity, and there’s real power in seeing how a sequence of people have changed over the course of a decade and a half. But we never get more than a cursory sense of who these people were in the past: this guy a jock, that guy a nerd, this girl the arty one. That shallowness gets even more frustrating as the story begins to deal with serious trauma in one of the characters’ history, which the book treats sympathetically but thinly, and perhaps more as a plot machination than a lived experience.

There’s some surprisingly rough prose here, too. I’ve seen some reviews point out this line, which gets at both the infelicity of the language and the often shallow rendering of women:

“Just as he appreciated Sara’s appearance, he also enjoyed the way she dressed.”

Hard to know whether that’s a question of the original language or subtleties that aren’t coming across in the translation. I could imagine that “appearance” and “way-she-dressed” might have more specific and distinct meanings in Japanese. Either way, there’s more jarringly awkward writing here than I’ve noticed in other Murakami books.

Still, the novel includes some really compelling and true-feeling scenes between old friends who haven’t seen one another in over a decade. And tucked in the middle of the novel is a better short story that traces the arc of a sudden college friendship. There’s a lot of emotionally exacting characterization in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki – but very little for the women at its center, and that leaves the book feeling unfinished.

Inaugural peppers

Eric Gregory — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:00:00 UTC

The first peppers of the season:

More Harrowing

Eric Gregory — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 00:00:00 UTC

Some exciting reprint news: “The Harrowers” is set to appear in Paula Guran’s Zombies: More Recent Undead from Prime Books. The anthology brings together zombie stories from folks like Maureen McHugh, Roxane Gay, Neil Gaiman, Genevieve Valentine, Mike Carey, Joe Lansdale, and many others:

“Trail of Dead” by Joanne Anderton
“Rigormarole” (poem) by Michael Arnzen
“What Still Abides by Marie Brennan
“Iphigenia in Aulis” by Mike Carey
“Those Beneath the Bog” by Jacques L. Condor (Mak a Tai Meh)
“The Day the Saucers Came” (poem) by Neil Gaiman
“There is No ‘E’ in Zombi Which Means There Can Be No You Or We” by Roxane Gay
“I Waltzed with a Zombie” by Ron Goulart
“The Harrowers” by Eric Gregory
“The Death and Life of Bob” by William Jablonsky
“Til Death Do Us Part” by Shaun Jeffrey
“The Afflicted” by Matthew Johnson
“Rocket Man” by Stephen Graham Jones
“Aftermath” by Joy Kennedy-O’Neill
“In The Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection” by Caitlín R. Kiernan
“Present” by Nicole Kornher-Stace
“The Hunt: Before and The Aftermath” by Joe R. Lansdale
“Becca at the End of the World” by Shira Lipkin
“What Maisie Knew” by David Liss
“Jack & Jill” by Jonathan Maberry
“Selected Sources for the Babylonian Plague of the Dead (572-571 BCE)” by Alex Dally MacFarlane
“The Naturalist” by Maureen McHugh
“Resurgam” by Lisa Mannetti
“The Day the Music Died” by Joe McKinney
“Chew” by Tamsyn Muir
“Delice” by Holly Newstein
“Love, Resurrected” by Cat Rambo
“What We Once Feared” by Carrie Ryan
“The Children’s Hour” (poem) by Marge Simon
“A Shepherd of the Valley” by Maggie Slater
“Stemming the Tide” by Simon Strantzas
“Bit Rot” by Charles Stross
“The Gravedigger of Konstan Spring” by Genevieve Valentine
“Kitty’s Zombie New Year” by Carrie Vaughn
“Pollution” by Don Webb
“Dead Song” by Jay Wilburn

It’s out in September. I’m thrilled that my bootleggers and preachers get to keep company with some of my favorite writers – the McHugh and Gay stories are both amazing, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest.

Rules of the road

Eric Gregory — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 00:00:00 UTC

Fell into a Wikipedia spiral of descriptivism and prescriptivism in linguistics, recently, and found this great post:

Prescriptivism and descriptivism are contrasting approaches to grammar and usage, particularly to how they are taught. Both are concerned with the state of a language — descriptivism with how it’s used, prescriptivism with how it should be used. Descriptivists describe, systematically recording and analysing the endlessly changing ways people speak and write. Descriptive advice is, as Jesse Sheidlower put it, almost an oxymoron. Prescriptivists prescribe and sometimes proscribe, emphasising rules and guidelines based on the conservation of customs (and sometimes a mythical ideal of correctness), and on judging what is or isn’t acceptable — which poses, among other questions: acceptable to whom, when, and why?

Maybe a “descriptivist approach to creative writing” sounds a little oxymoronic, but it gets at how I’ve tried to teach fiction courses in the past, and I think it describes how we learn to write outside a classroom. You read widely, internalize the many ways others are writing, and then synthesize what you read as you find your own voice (or voices). When you sit down to write, you do it contextually, mindful of your own aims and audiences. Supposedly universal doctrines (avoid adverbs, avoid second person, tend toward the minimalistic) are sometimes useful, but usually just the loose consensus of a particular discourse community.

That doesn’t mean you ignore rules altogether. But it means advice like “You have to learn the rules to break them” is maybe a little wrongheaded. A better take might be, “Knowing local customs is useful for a traveler.”

Home again

Eric Gregory — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 00:00:00 UTC

Back in the Triangle:

Prompt

Eric Gregory — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:00:00 UTC

Jonathan Lethem on the impetus for his new short story:

What would it be to think you’ve gone about halfway, or not even halfway, down some irreversible ethical path, then got stuck there?

Posting JSON via curl

Eric Gregory — Sun, 16 Mar 2014 00:00:00 UTC

Authenticate (by digest) and POST JSON from the command line using curl:

curl -i -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"name": "The Wind Rises", "year": "2013", "rating": "5"}' --user username:password --digest http://localhost:3000/api

Digital Witness

Eric Gregory — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 00:00:00 UTC

The new St. Vincent album is out at the end of the month, and I’m loving what she’s released so far. This one’s been on repeat in my head for a couple days now.

Responsive YouTube

Eric Gregory — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 00:00:00 UTC

YouTube embeds don’t always play super-well with responsive layouts. This StackExchange thread has a nice solution. In the stylesheet:

.videowrapper {
	float: none;
	clear: both;
	width: 100%;
	position: relative;
	padding-bottom: 56.25%;
	padding-top: 25px;
	height: 0;
}

.videowrapper iframe {
	position: absolute;
	top: 0;
	left: 0;
	width: 100%;
	height: 100%;
}

And within a responsive element on the page:

<div class="videowrapper">
  <iframe src="funvideo"></iframe>
</div>

And now you can spend five minutes resizing your window over and over, if you’re anything like me.

A festival of links

Eric Gregory — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:00:00 UTC

NC Literary Festival 2014 Lineup
The author lineup for April’s North Carolina Literary Festival is fantastic. Karen Joy Fowler, Junot Diaz, Peter Straub, and many, many more. I’ll be going if at all possible; anyone near the Triangle should give it a look.

Hello Ruby by Linda Liukas
A Kickstarter for a lovely-looking children’s book that teaches the basics of Ruby programming, from a co-founder of Rails Girls. Seems warm and playful and genuinely kid-oriented, which is really cool to see.

Horrifying Business Cliches We’re All Tired and Terrified of Hearing

“Let’s make sure that our bases will touch. I will touch your base to my base.”

“Together, we will all circle back. The circle will be mandatory, and it will never end.”

“You are the Thought Leader; you must lead our thoughts.”

Now you must bear the key takeaway. We have taken the key away and entrusted it to you. We only hope we will not Regret Our Investment.

Still

Eric Gregory — Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:00:00 UTC

The old reading tree at Weaver:

I finally got a chance to visit a bunch of my Triangle people and places last weekend, and didn’t quite realize how relieved I would be to find everything where I left it. New produce section at Weaver, PTA Thrift Store finished, but the folks in the bookstores still knew me to say hi.

Some places don’t take long to feel like they’ve moved on without you. But the Triangle is still home, and still feels like it.

Garlic-headed buffalo chili

Eric Gregory — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 UTC

I’ve made this for years but never gotten around to measuring or writing down the ingredients. UNTIL NOW. Here’s what I used last time – it came out pretty well and made enough for two.

1lb ground buffalo
2 strips thick-cut bacon
2 heads of garlic
1/4 large sweet onion
14.5 oz crushed tomato
?? tomato paste (lost track)
7 oz black beans
2 teaspoons chili garlic sauce
Salt, pepper, paprika, chili powder, cayenne pepper to taste

I roasted the garlic (like this) and cooked both buffalo and bacon for a minute or two on stovetop. Put it all in the pot, mixed with diced onions and tomatoes and beans and a little tomato paste, let it simmer on low for an hour and a half or so. Then added seasoning and a little more tomato paste, let it go for another hourish. Usually I let it sit for longer; in the past, it’s come out best when I’ve used a crockpot.

This isn’t quite a final draft, and I’ll probably come back and fiddle with it when I make the chili again. But in the meantime: buffalo and bacon and weapons-grade concentrations of garlic.

Christmas

Eric Gregory — Wed, 25 Dec 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Hope you have a happy one.

Circles

Eric Gregory — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 00:00:00 UTC

From Mike Doughty’s new album of reworked Soul Coughing songs, also (sort of) called Circles.

Discovery

Eric Gregory — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Earlier this year at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum.

Proceed to Memory

Eric Gregory — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 00:00:00 UTC

From Pinback’s Information Retrieved.

Blockbuster

Eric Gregory — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 UTC

From Teju Cole’s Open City:

On the other side of the grocery store was a Blockbuster; though I had never rented anything from there, I was startled to see a sign announcing it, too, was going out of business. If Blockbuster couldn’t make it in an area full of students and families, it meant that the business model had been fatally damaged, that the desperate efforts they had made recently, and which I now recalled, of lowering rental prices, launching an advertising blitz, and abolishing late fines, had all come too late. I thought of Tower Records – a connection I couldn’t help making, given that both companies had for a long time dominated their respective industries. It wasn’t that I felt sorry for these faceless national corporations; far from it. They had made their profits and their names by destroying smaller, earlier local businesses. But I was touched not only at the swiftness and dispassion with which the market swallowed even the most resilient enterprises. Businesses that had seemed unshakable a few years previously disappeared in the span, seemingly, of a few weeks. Whatever role they played passed on to other hands, hands that would feel briefly invincible and would, in their turn, be defeated by unforeseen changes. These survivors would also come to be forgotten.

I identify with this

Eric Gregory — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 00:00:00 UTC

District of Columbia

Eric Gregory — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Almost settled.

Git: Some basics

Eric Gregory — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Running reminders on some super-basic Git commands. (Also: GitHub and Code School have a fun fifteen-minute primer.)

git init: builds .git directory containing metadata and history
git add: stages a file for commit; can stage folders, filetype wildcards (ex. *.txt)</span>

git add .
git commit -m "Stages all indexed additions or modifications"
git push

git add . -A
git commit -m "Stages all indexed changes, including file deletions"
git push

git checkout: move to branch
git branch -a: list branches
git pull: pull changes from remote

Mystery science

Eric Gregory — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Stuart Feinstein on science and uncertainty:

Questions…go places, take you down new avenues, generate curiosity and inspiration. They are the critical ingredients to new experiments. Of course, answers are important, but too often they are treated as an end. Think about the word “conclusion.” It is an answer drawn from data, but it can denote the end of the process, of the story, of the adventure. It is at once a determination and a termination. We may hear about the conclusive results in this or that study, or the conclusions to be drawn from this work, but the last thing a scientist wants is a conclusion in the sense of, “there ain’t no more to do.” For all the talk about drawing conclusions in scientific studies, there is relatively little in science that is conclusive.

You don’t expect an answer to everything, or you probably shouldn’t. Instead, you’ve got a workable way to live with provisionality. Science and science fiction both have at their hearts something sad and hopeful and warm and wry: stories about people running up against the edges of their answers and trying to live with endless questions.

Cyrus and Tara

Eric Gregory — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Cyrus and Tara got married the weekend before last, in a ridiculously beautiful ceremony on a ridiculously beautiful day.

Weirdly good roasted chicken

Eric Gregory — Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Nothing fancy here, but I’m forgetful. More a checklist than a recipe, but it’s also my only meal in regular rotation that feels pretty fail-safe:

Get a ~4lb whole chicken
Put a lot of pepper and garlic powder on it, also some salt and lemon zest
Cook on stovetop briefly, just until color starts to change
Set the chicken on a cooking sheet, put a head of garlic inside, surround with maybe brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes, chopped onions, and more garlic
Cook at 375 for 1hr and 15mins

Still brusselsing

Eric Gregory — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Not dead yet!

Python: pip and virtualenv

Eric Gregory — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 UTC

pip is a package manager for Python modules; virtualenv turns a given directory tree into an isolated Python environment so you can use different module versions for different projects on the same machine. They really go hand-in-hand, and I realized pretty quickly that they’re more or less mandatory if you’re working on multiple projects in Python. This guide explains both modules and the setup process super well – below is a quick-and-dirty reference for feeling out your Python environment and then getting up and running.

While not strictly necessary, I’d like to see which modules I have installed by default. So in terminal:

pydoc modules

Okay, no pip (which is itself just a Python module). To install it, we can use the older, creakier, and not-particularly-recommended package manager, easy_install. This is fine for grabbing pip, but you don’t really want to use it for anything else. (This may require sudo.)

[sudo] easy_install pip

We could use this installation of pip to install modules globally (which may require sudo too)

[sudo] pip install [module]

but we’re probably not looking to do that too often. Instead, just as we used the not-quite-recommended easy_install to grab a better tool, we’re going to use this global pip to grab virtualenv:

sudo pip install virtualenv

Now we can head to the directory where we want to work on our first project. I made a directory called pyground for fooling around, so I cd to that and enter

virtualenv env

This creates a new Python virtual environment inside the current directory, storing everything at your_directory_name/env/. Now (automatically packed in with your virtual environment!) you have a version of pip local to this environment, and this is what you’ll want to use to install a module to your working directory. To use this version of pip:

env/bin/pip install [module]

Note that you won’t have to use sudo here, because you’re not installing globally. You can check to see which modules you’ve installed via pip in this environment with

env/bin/pip freeze

And to run virtualenv’s local version of Python, you’ll use

env/bin/python

And that’s it. You can repeat this process for as many environments as you like. The walkthrough linked above offers a way to cut down on typing and temporarily make your shell recognize a given environment’s pips and pythons as the default, but I kind of prefer to type out the env/bins.

Bias towards the easy

Eric Gregory — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 UTC

From Ezra Klein:

People talk a lot about media bias. Some say there’s a bias towards liberals or conservatives. Others say it’s towards ostentatious even-handedness, or sensationalism. But one of the most dangerous media biases is simply the bias towards events, sources and narratives that are easy for those of us in the media to cover.

Brussels accountability

Eric Gregory — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 UTC

First new plants of the season:

Don’t let me obliderate them.

Chilaquiles

Eric Gregory — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 UTC

This is definitely a work-in-progress (and based on an Old El Paso recipe), so probably don’t expect too much, but it balances laziness and tastiness well enough that it’s becoming a pretty regular staple for me.

~1.25 lbs chicken breast
16 oz salsa verde
1/2 cup sour cream (plus an extra spoonful)
a bunch of chips or taco shells (can be stale)
some cheese, mozzarella or pepper jack

Set oven to 350F. In a bowl, mix one and a half cups of the salsa verde with a half cup of sour cream, then set aside. Cut up and pan fry the chicken breast with salt, pepper, hot sauce, lemon zest, whatever else. Use cooking spray on cake pan or casserole dish, then cover bottom with crunched chips/taco shells. Scatter the chicken over the chips, then pour the salsa/sour cream mixture on top. Put some cheese on there.

Now cover all of that with another layer of chips. Now take the remaining salsa verde, mix in bowl with just a spoonful of sour cream, and pour this over the second layer of chips. Add more cheese. Drizzle some tomato-based salsa on top if you’d like. Bake for thirty minutes.

Carrboro Open Streets

Eric Gregory — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Parade at Carrboro’s Open Streets day.

Bash: Basics and miscellany

Eric Gregory — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Running notes and reminders on basic bash (and some other useful commands, in no particular order, that wouldn’t really make sense in another post).

cd: change directory
ls: list contents of directory
pwd: print working directory
hostname: what’s this computer’s name?
mkdir: make directory
rmdir: remove directory
touch: make empty file
cp: copy file (-r for dir)
mv: move or rename file
less: view file (q to escape)
cat: view file without stopping or paging
ctrl-c: stop program
sudo !!: run last command as root

pbcopy <: copy file contents to clipboard
open -a [application.app] [filename]: open file with a given application on OSX
chsh -s /bin/bash: change shell (in this case, to bash)
sips -Z 600 *.jpg: batch resize, retaining aspect ratio, longest side will be 600px
dig +short txt [searchterm].wp.dg.cx: ask Wikipedia for a text record and short URL via DNS

Soundsuit

Eric Gregory — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 UTC

A soundsuit by Nick Cave at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Ruby: Installing RVM on Lion

Eric Gregory — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:00:00 UTC

RVM is a version manager for the Ruby programming language, letting you install, run, and default to different versions of the language on the same computer. Ruby 1.8.7 is built-in on OSX Lion and I’m running a few programs that depend on it, but 1.8.7 is several years old and about to be deprecated – if I want to learn some Ruby, I should probably use a more recent version like 2.0.0.

So that’s where RVM comes in. Since I’m a slightly doofus-y beginner and installations can differ according to terminal shell configurations, setting it up took some muddling through. These are breadcrumbs for me rather than instructions for anyone else; if you’re trying to get started with RVM, you should use the official installation guide. But if you’re on Lion and getting the error rvm: command not found after install, you might try step two below.

In terminal, install the latest stable release:

\curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

You may or may not have a .bash_profile in your root directory. Since the filename starts with a dot, it’s invisible by default; you can view hidden files in a given directory with

ls -a

If you have a .bash_profile, you’ll need to update it so your shell can find RVM:

echo "source $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" >> ~/.bash_profile

In theory, you’ve got RVM powers now. I started to install Ruby 2.0.0

rvm install 2.0.0

but got an error – RVM needed lots of missing packages to complete the install. I had to enable autolib so RVM could take care of those:

rvm autolibs enable

Ran the install prompt again and that did it. Hurrah!

Unearthly bodies

Eric Gregory — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Last week’s setup and reception for Julia’s MFA thesis show, “Unearthly Bodies.” (The pieces got to ride in the back of a truck and watch TV – we had to do a little more heavy lifting.) This was many many months in the making: I’m in total awe of her.

Another hello world

Eric Gregory — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Welcome to the new site! (Or if you’ve never seen the old one: Whew. Hello!)

I’ve been meaning to renovate for a while now, and wondering exactly what I want a frontpage to do for a lot longer. I’m still not completely sure. But I know I’m not really satisfied with the way I’ve used this space in the past (the very occasional photo or link or ramble), and I have some experiments in mind.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what I keep in notebooks and txt files. Mostly

stories theoretically in progress, and
notes on whatever I’m trying to learn at the moment.

Right now, the “whatever” in number two means some recipes, outdoor/garden-y things, and programming stuff. And that’s what I think I want this space to be: less a half-assed journal or editorial column, more a notebook and public workshop for figuring out how to do things I want to know how to do.

The old site is archived on GitHub, and this one is still in progress. I’m planning on expanding the story page soon, and in the short term I expect to make notes mostly about recipes and building websites. We’ll see how it goes.