I’m not great at planning or following instructions, which might be why my relationship to cookbooks is complicated. So sometimes I’ll get hip-deep in a recipe and then see that there’s a step I didn’t notice. In this case, it was for allowing the filling to cool overnight. At first, I thought that was about locking in the flavor, which I didn’t think was a big deal, but then I could see that it was about making it easier to fill a bun without some of the filling gushing out. But that makes buns a two day prep and that just seemed too much, so I went ahead and had it gush, making the buns a bit messy looking. I also thought the filling wasn’t quite as glossy and sticky as in some of the best steamed buns with char siu pork that I’ve had. (I have to admit that the deep red from the food coloring is also so striking that I was almost wishing I had used it.)
Yin-Fei Lo’s bun dough came out well but it was a lot of work—it absolutely had to be kneaded by hand for the requisite 12-15 minutes in order to serve its function. It steamed well—I used my standard rig-up of a bamboo steamer inside a pot or wok with my huge stock pot on top to catch the steam.
I didn’t see something in the book that suited as a vegetable side, so I roasted some shiitakes with miso, butter and sake and then steamed the bok choy and put some sweet bell pepper and chili crisp on top of that.
Speaking of woks, I went ahead back in February and ordered a carbon-steel wok from The Wok Shop as recommended by Wirecutter and several readers. It not only hasn’t arrived, but the store doesn’t answer emails or pick up their phone, so I have a bad feeling that there are serious problems there—don’t order from them. (I’m now seeing some Reddit threads and other discussions that back this up.)
I keep thinking about my spring 2020 course on the creative adaptation of the past. The pandemic killed it really hard, but we were already struggling a bit because there were several students in the class who were absolutely adamantly committed to the position that no one should ever creatively adapt history if they are not an absolute 100% perfect match in identity to the individuals and society being adapted. Which means in some rigorous sense, no one should creatively adapt any history, because no one in the present is part of any past society—but I almost think the students taking the dissenting position might have agreed with that thought. It was one of the few times in a class where I felt genuinely frustrated with this kind of position, in that it made it very hard for other students who wanted to explore creatively to do so. It also makes me wary about trying to teach it a second time.
That said, I did quite a lot of reading in adaptation theory in preparing for that course and it’s an interesting body of scholarship. I was especially interested in the thought that many theorists have developed that the dullest or least useful way to do critical analysis of adaptations is to ask about “fidelity”, about how faithful an adaptation is to the original. And yet that’s what most popular discourse about adaptation comes down to, so you have to reckon with that position in a way that doesn’t just dismiss it.
Over the weekend, my film studies major child and I were talking about adaptations and together we sort of brainstormed up a really great class. I don’t think I’m qualified to teach it—it’s really something more for a film historian or film studies scholar. Maybe she’ll teach it someday. But it’s worth sharing the sketch version of the syllabus.
Essentially, as a course focused on adaptations, you’d do about a half of the class on frequently adapted books, about a third on twice adapted books, and then finish up with notoriously difficult-to-adapt books like Naked Lunch. (Ending on the comedy Cock and Bull Story about the impossibility of adapting Tristram Shandy feels like a great move.)
You’d get a lot of collateral benefits out of this course—it’s a great window on to film history generally (seeing multiple adaptations from different periods) and onto the study of production and aesthetics. But it would also be a great way to study adaptation theory where the question of fidelity could be bracketed somewhat (e.g., once you have multiple adaptations, you begin perhaps to have a richer critical vocabulary than just measuring their relative fidelity to an original text. To encourage that, maybe you wouldn’t actually read the original text and instead have the students almost have to imagine or infer the original from viewing multiple adaptations.
I think you’d have to rule the Bible and Shakespeare out of bounds—too many adaptations. You’d also have to think about what to do with work derived from the cultural property but not an adaptation per se. (E.g., do you do Young Frankenstein or Monster Mash in the Frankenstein week? I’d say no: that becomes a class about genre, trope and cultural diffusion, not adaptation.) It’s so hard to keep this even to 15 weeks, but this would have to be pared down somewhat. One thing I’d want more of is some international remakes like Shanti Nilayam, the Tamil-language version of Jane Eyre.
It’s probably cheating to mix television adaptations in (The Shining) but that’s such a classic case of the “fidelity” critique slamming headlong into “but this is an interesting work in its own right”.
It would be fun to finish up by reading an ostensibly unadaptable book, but all the best candidates I can think of would not be the kinds of novels you’d assign in a single week of a course, especially not at the end when everybody’s tired.
Week 1: Theories of Adaptation (Basic framing week, getting familiar with the concepts, reading about the resistance to ‘fidelity’ as a critical linchpin)
Week 2: The Three Musketeers (1921, 1974, 1993)
Week 3: Peter Pan (1953, 1991 [Hook], 2003
Week 4: Frankenstein (1931, 1957 [Hammer], 1973 [BBC])
Week 5: Jane Eyre (1943, 1969 [Shanti Nilayam], 2011)
Week 6: Little Women (1933, 1994, 2019)
Week 7: Tarzan (1932, 1984 [Greystoke])
Week 8: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1971, 2005)
Week 9: The Shining (1980, 1997 [television miniseries])
Week 10: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978)
Week 11: Scarface (1932, 1983)
Week 12: Dune (1984, 2021, plus Jodorowsky’s Dune 2013)
Week 13: Under the Volcano (1984)
Week 14: Naked Lunch (1991)
Week 15: A Cock and Bull Story (2005)
David Ibanda has recently adapted my PhD dissertation into a video. I think it could be thought of as an adaptation. Maybe I should get extra points if this is so, more points if it’s unique. But, more seriously, a new Shaka series is about to appear (Angus Gibson this time). But maybe we have to see and study it before we affirm it fits the category of adaptation.