Geek Luddite

The goal is the action, not the result

2009-11-12T20:31:16Z

I figured I ought to take the stress level from 28 job applications and do something useful with it. So I submitted a piece of poetry to a magazine. And then I realized, with something like horror, that it had been almost 10 years since I had submitted a short piece of writing. 10.

I used to manage at least once a year from middle school through my junior year of college. I thought nothing of sending a short story to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction when I was 15, or sending a poem to the blinkin' New Yorker when I was 12. I didn't expect to have them taken, it just didn't bother me to send them in. And around when I hit 20, I just stopped. (I'm not counting the novel here, I guess. Novels are in a different category than poetry or short fiction.)

So since my goal in life this year is to focus on my actions, not the results (which are, after all, often controlled by others) I guess that this is a good action. Still trying to wrap my head around that 10 year gap, though.

Book: A is for Alien

2009-11-03T14:47:56Z

A is for Alien is a science fiction short story anthology from Subterranean by Caitlin R. Kiernan. I'm pretty sure that I read one of her horror novels sometime between 2003-2006, and I've had a sort of similar reaction to the short stories - beautifully done, and not the kind of horror that I enjoy.

The writing makes me feel tense and depressed and nervous, which I think is something certain kinds of excellent horror writing aim to do. I just can't handle the feeling for very long, and even one of these short stories is enough to make me feel that way for a few hours. I checked it out of the library because I want to encourage them to buy short stories in sf/f, and because I'm psyched that stuff from Subterranean is showing up in so many libraries and want to encourage that as much as possible. Bar those two factors I don't think I'd have checked it out; once I'd checked it out I felt like a cheater if I didn't read it.

One insight I have come up with is that I find horror in sf much harder to deal with than horror in fantasy. I had to go and reread some of Wilhelmina Baird's Psykosis last night because I wanted to be reminded that having alien symbiotes infest your body could, in some hands, be a terrifying/exciting/world-changing/life-affirming thing, as opposed to an invitation to pus and decay and nightmares.

I dunno - I admire the dense specificity of the language and the world-building, I'm just not that much interested in the psychological theme of alienation, no matter how beautiful the construction of the androids, cyborgs, and parasites that manifest that alienation. I think I come from a starting point of alienation and am more excited and terrified by the immense leap that's involved in asserting connection. I think an interesting essay could probably be written tearing apart a few of these stories and comparing them a few Tiptree stories though - I get a sense that a similar problem is being treated from very different emotional outlooks or along very different vectors.

Ranty rant rant - This empathy is not free

2009-10-28T15:47:10Z

I haven't figured out a way to extract this ranty-rant from its trailing illogical side tendrils, but I'll do my best. Since it's a) long, and b) of undoubtedly limited interest, it's all behind the cut. Format is almost purely philosophical - I'm all about the abstraction, so whatever real-world moments may have inspired this, I think I've kept them from intruding too much into the analysis.

I think our cultural expectations about empathy are deeply out of whack. I think this shows up in how we write about people suffering adverse circumstances. I think it shows up in how we write about people whose past includes serious trauma. And I think our unexamined assumptions about how empathetic relations between people work tend to poison a lot of conversations. I think that there is also a lot of unexamined and undeveloped thought about empathy in positive interactions, but I'm going to be focusing in this ranty-rant on empathy in or for negative situations.

My best definition for empathy: the ability to recognize and acknowledge the emotions that another person is experiencing.
And I don't think it's a free skill. I think it costs a lot to develop, and a lot to use. Many people have enough empathetic ability to recognize emotions, and enough empathetic capacity to acknowledge those emotions, to get through the average day to day experiences of their life. And so they take empathy for granted until they encounter a situation that tests their empathy, or a sequence of situations that exhausts their ability to use that empathy.

On the development side: It's much easier to empathize with someone who is undergoing an experience similar to one you've already undergone. But undergoing negative experiences does not in itself tend to make someone empathetic towards others. Some people respond to traumatic experiences by becoming very guarded of their emotions and unwilling to offer empathy to others. So articulating what experiences and thought processes can help someone develop empathy can be difficult.
Personally, I would think that in talking about empathy, we're talking about a skill that is similar to language - the potential for language acquisition is inborn in the human brain, but that doesn't guarantee language acquisition. If you are never spoken to as an infant or child, your chances of language acquisition as an older child or adult become much smaller (I haven't read the case studies closely enough to know if it is totally foreclosed or just really hard). Similarly, I think there's been psychological research on neglected infants (those in state care that aren't held or touched) and many of them develop deep and ongoing psychological problems that could be described as a lack of empathy - they don't recognize or respond to emotional connections very well. I don't have the science chops to know quite how this does or doesn't connect to the idea of mirroring neurons, but I vaguely understand that there are actual structures in our brain that help us when observing or imagining an action to feel its effect a little bit as if we were doing the action ourselves. So I would think for empathy that there are both nurture (exposure to emotional experiences as an infant/child) and nature (proper development of neurological and chemical systems) factors that would affect how easy it is for a person, as an adult, to experience or develop empathy.

On the use side: A lot of really negative experiences cause the person who is experiencing them to repress the experience, or to actively deny it on the surface even if they're aware of it underneath. Offering empathy to someone else undergoing that experience requires that you acknowledge your own experience to a certain degree. This act of acknowledgement can be very traumatic. So one factor limiting use of empathy is the emotional trauma that the person may experience in acknowledging this situation in another person. In a scenario of this type, offering empathy incurs an emotional cost in the form of remembering or acknowledging a painful event or feeling.
I think that another factor limiting use of empathy is similar to the exhaustion caused by decision making. Recently I've read a few articles about decision-making (as: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=tough-choices-how-making) that suggest the capacity to make decisions is exhaustible in the same way a muscle is exhaustible - after a certain amount of effort is extended decision making conks out and needs a while to recharge. I am personally quite convinced (though I haven't read articles to this effect) that the capacity for empathy with others is similarly exhaustible, and after a certain amount of use (an amount that may be quite different from person to person and moment to moment) that capacity is exhausted and needs to recharge. I would assume that, like physical muscles, these capacities are expandable through repetitive effort.

So, quick summation: I see the capacity for empathy as a) requiring certain inputs for ideal development, b) requiring certain physical/inborn hardware for ideal development, c) incurring certain transaction costs per use, that may vary based on type of use, and d) having a finite quantity available for use in each person at any given time.

If you look at our conversations related to empathy, I think it's quite obvious that none of these factors are routinely considered in any conversation that assesses empathy. Rather than looking at inputs, variables, outputs, etc., the conversation about empathy focuses on words like "should" and "can't". That is "you should be able to understand how I feel about this" "you should know where I'm coming from", "If you were a ____, you would know how this feels" "I can't understand why you don't ___" "If you cared about me, you'd feel ____", or "If you felt the way I felt, you couldn't/wouldn't ___". In part, this is quite natural. These conversations don't tend to be intellectual or analytical conversations. They are emotional conversations that happen with a lot of heat and anxiety. Chemical responses in our brain heighten certain mental and behavioral likelihoods and decrease others.

But it does amaze me how differently we treat mental, emotional, and physical capacities. If a young person does not have the physical strength to lift a large object, that doesn't make them a bad person. If they want to lift large objects, they'll need to do some weight training. They may have been born with a physical difference to do with muscle or bone functioning that will prevent them from ever lifting large heavy objects without assistive technology. All of these factors, perhaps because they're somewhat visible, are known and discussed publicly. But the same surely applies to emotional factors. If we want to be caring and compassionate in our dealings with others, we must first have a large supply of empathy. If we do not have a well-developed capacity for empathy from childhood, we will need to lift a lot of emotional weight in order to develop our capacity. We may have inherent neurological differences that limit this capacity, in which case we may make use of social assistive technologies (which I'd argue, is what "polite rules" and "social norms" can consist of, at their best) in order to help us deal with our limitation.

People who would never want to speak judgementally about someone with a physical limitation on their capacity often are the same people who can be highly judgemental about the emotional capacity of others. In issues relating both to the physical and the emotional, I think it makes more sense to ask what social and cultural changes we can all contribute to that increase opportunities to develop capacity. Many of the factors that most affect someone's default adult potential are out of their control, due to early influences from their environment. That adult may recognize the deficit and make constant, concerted efforts to correct it without ever acheiving the level of, for example, empathetic functioning that someone else has enjoyed their entire life due to a fortuitous combination of inborn and environmental factors.

I think that this issue is much on my mind because I am absolutely one of those whose environment greatly affected my ability to feel or acknowledge empathetic connections. I have focused for over a decade on attempting to redevelop those connections, and for most of two decades on trying to learn and practice those social assistive technologies that allow me to best deal with this limitation. Yet I know that I routinely fail in ways that cause distress to my friends. And the effort that I continue to expend in this development is not free. It takes up a significant amount of time that I cannot then use to pursue other activities, both hobbies and career advancement related. It takes up significant emotional energy and exhausts me intellectually.

I am also sure that the use of empathy is not free for other people, whatever their relative supply of empathetic capacity. I know that I see many friends who seem to have very strong/large empathetic capacities who are motivated by that empathy to give up their free time to helping others, who spend late nights listening to friends in trouble - who, motivated by empathy, give a great deal to others. I think their behavior is generally a positive both for them and for those they interact with. And I know that they receive benefits from these interactions. But I also know that these interactions are not free - that these friends have acknowledged an emotional cost that these interactions incur, along with occasional physical costs, since emotional stresses can affect physical health.

Positive benefits of empathy include a sense of connection and a lessened sense of isolation. Social connections built on empathetic moments can provide long term material benefits in the form of increased trust and sharing for both parties. Empathy eases other forms of communication, including intellectual ones, providing increased opportunities to learn from each other. Empathetic connections also help create a social safety network - they contribute to the forms of emotional mutual insurance in groups where those with some contribute to those in need out of a shared feeling and a shared expectation of support in return. I keep using the word "share" - I think it is fair to say that without empathy, we don't share.

So I recognize the positive benefits of empathy, and the reasons why it is worthwhile to develop both my supply and my use-capacity of empathy. But I surely do resent the people who act and speak as if empathy is both free and infinite. In my experience, it is neither.

Self-indulgent kvetching

2009-10-21T14:08:11Z

I am procrastinating my job hunt this morning and made the mistake of reading my latest yalsa-bk listserv email. For the last year I've mostly been deleting these emails unread.
It astonishes me to think back to library school and recall that I praised yalsa-bk and criticized pubyac because of how much philosophical conversation there was on yalsa-bk and how restricted to the practical as opposed to the ideological pubyac was.
Now, after working in public libraries for three years, I have actually gained benefit for myself and patrons through the pubyac community more often than the yalsa-bk one, though I suspect that yalsa-bk has more value to non-librarian book people.
But reading yalsa-bk always depresses me, and was one of the factors that began to convince me I could not have a future as a young adult librarian. The most vocal, frequent posters on that email list have ideological values vastly different than mine. The reification of "young adult" as a concept and category is disturbing to me. The many posters who feel that teens should only read books published specifically for teens dismay me. The spirit of Margaret Edwards, who saw service to young adults as a way to support them in their transition from restricted children's reading to unrestricted adult reading, seems to me to be honored in the breach more than in the observance.
Young adult library work seems to be in many ways a lightning rod for both external and self-created censorship. Luminaries in the field often seem to note that such and such a work is inappropriate for children, teens, or young adults, while others constantly want to extend the boundaries of young adult service upward - to people in their mid 20s! Pfah, pfeh, ptui.

Books: The Dirt on Clean

2009-10-20T16:51:42Z

The Dirt on Clean: an Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg. Well, this is one of those delightful single-topic books of social history that have been trendy for several years now. I love 'em, and I'm not tired of 'em at all. This was a particularly well written, nicely paced sample of the genre. It moved along at a good clip, the transitions between sections didn't feel too jarring to me, and the layout really added something (a lot of little inset quotes from various sources, and some interestingly placed illustrations that broke up the text here and there). I think this would be a good book for fantasy writers to pick up (at least, those writing fantasy set in countries similar to Europe/post-colonial North America), particularly for its lovely list of works cited. Some are quite standard and others seem (to me at least) reasonably obscure and academic.

I shouldn't have been surprised that so much of the discussion about cleaning our bodies ends up being a discussion about sex, but I was. Not in a bad way. I felt that, in that regard, this book would be a nice lighter follow-up to Hanne Blank's Virgin: the Untouched History. I'd learned a bit about the bathhouses in Germany when reading the Burgermeister's Daughter, but I liked hearing more about them here. (Side note: how awesome is it that typing "history book woman germany lawsuit medieval" into a search engine actually pulled me up the forgotten title of this book? I love the modern era!).

Particularly pleasing notes:

The section on modern bathing habits includes mention of recent research on asthma, allergies, and the possible negative effects of living in a sterile environment; male vs. female bathing habits within one country and time period are often compared; issues of class are mentioned in regards both access to and opinions about cleanliness.

We get at least a bit on particularly Jewish and Muslim bathing habits as they interface with developing European and Christian culture. But I found this quote both fascinating and unspeakably sad:
"Because the Moor was clean, the Spanish decided that Christians should be dirty. Many of the Moorish baths were destroyed by orders of Ferdinand and Isabella after the conquest of Granada in 1492, but enough remained that Philip II definitively banned them in 1576. Moors who converted to Christianity were not allowed to take baths, and a damning piece of evidence at the Inquisition, levelled against both Moors and Jews, was that the accused "was known to bathe." "

[Side note: I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the way all history texts talk about Muslim people in al-Andalus and Spain during the middle ages. Why oh why is it always "Moorish Spain"? It's as if 700 years of a country's history don't count at all. And then there's the whole thing where not all the Muslims in the peninsula were Moors, but that's another irritation I suppose - I know it comes from quoting the source material that was written in a certain way, but isn't there some kind of new consensus on this we could come to?]

Books: The Water Mirror

2009-10-13T16:48:51Z

This is translated from the German. Original text by Kai Meyer. I'm not sure if the translation affected the flow or POV - there were a lot of things that felt like tiny hiccups in POV to me, but I'm not sure if they were translation artifacts or elements of a different style in German fantasy? I think that I've read some other works translated from German before and that they struck me as intermittently odd in tone.

The world-building is outstanding in this fantasy. It's set in a not-medieval Venice that's under siege from an Egyptian army of mummies made from the dead of conquered territories. There are mirrors made of water and stone lions who fly and thieves and magic underwear. Both the magic and the world are fascinating.

The characters, unfortunately, don't rise much above stock. There's very little humor in the dialog or storytelling, and I think the shimmering decay of the setting would be nicely highlighted by some humor. We've got orphans, a boy thief, lords of Hell, mermaids with toothy mouths. That reminds me that the mermaid-on-land character is definitely the character development high point. Her story really moved me. I think that I was wanting this to be more Lloyd Alexander-ish than it is. That said, the setting and magic and conflict (Venetian chancellors vs. lords of Hell vs. Pharaohs + fueding magic craftsmen + orphans traded to the control of dubious magic powers) are more than engaging enough that I'll plan to pick up at least book 2 of the trilogy.

The cover, while a good representation of the novel's world and the characters, is done in a very very quiet palette. I didn't pick it up on the first three times I looked at this book, until I saw the much brighter covers for the sequels. I've got mixed reactions to it - it's accurate to the story's world and tone, but I just don't have a strong response to it when it's on a shelf - and the sad faces of the girls make me not like them as characters. I should add that it's a middle grade fantasy and that I don't seem to be an ideal reader of middle grade fantasy, so that might be part of the problem. I'm not sure. Maybe having established the world in book one the author will let the characters get a bit livelier in book two. I did like the self-awareness of the Flowing Queen - her style of argument could be a lot of fun.

Books: We Never Talk About My Brother

2009-10-06T15:28:37Z

Well, reading anything by Peter S. Beagle usually leaves me in a state of deep calm, which is something I need quite a bit of at the moment.

Several of the stories in this volume are just heartbreaking, and oddly these are often the same stories that are very light and funny. I suppose it isn't odd, exactly, more a feature of the storywriter. Spook, for instance, was very funny and yet there was something deeply uncomfortable in the story, something about the relationship with the large unpleasant man whose assistance they request. I don't know, but it's like a burr underneath the humor. Not in a bad way. I can't remember if Ben is the man who lived with the goddess in Folk of the Air, but I think maybe? It's been forever since I read Folk of the Air.

I hadn't read the title story before, and thinking about it, it reminded me a bit of several classic 50s-70s sf stories, and yet not, because there's not such a sense of the world being put right at the end of the story, instead it's one of many iterating changes. A lot of the stories with similar plots set their darker character up as the first/unique aberration, and the battle against that character as a moral battle. Where this story fits better into human history as I understand it by suggesting many people with the ability to remake the world, along many lines.

I guess the best I can summarize it is that for me, a lot of these stories took place in a story-space where being human and ugly and flawed didn't mean you weren't human. A lot of times stories that examine deep points sort of dissolve focus at the end, and I'm left with this tragic sense that the characters were like a filter, and the philosophical point is meant to be a truth. Reading the stories in this collection gave me a deeply different sense - that whatever philosophical filters might get applied, we're still people. And that human lives can't be resolved into (I erased intellectual explanations and am stuck here with no good replacement) systems.

Music - Richard Thompson

2009-09-24T10:11:17Z

Well, I'm going to see Richard Thompson again :)
Or should I say "we"? J. and I are going for our anniversary. He's playing with Loudon Wainwright III at the Flynn Center in Burlington on October 3rd.

In usual me fashion, I put off buying tickets for WAAAAY too long, and then had a nightmare that they'd all sold out and woke up to rush to the computer at way-too-early in the morning.

So we're going to be a couple rows back in the side balcony. There was no chunk of 2 seats together in the main floor top-price area.
And now I'm going back to bed for a while.

Today is a poetry day

2009-09-16T13:51:01Z

There are some moods that are conducive to despair and raging when they meet the practical. It's particularly odd, because the same mood on a day when the only task is to walk along the ocean front, sip tea, write in a journal, can be almost a pleasant thing, almost a particular sharp-edged gift. I only know that this mood is not a gift because of one thing: it detests company, it detests engagement in the world of men.

So today I'm comforting myself with Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's a sharp kind of comfort, but oftentimes effective... somewhere between
"Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee" and "Ah, as the heart grows older / It will come to such sights colder / By and by, nor spare a sigh / Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie."

On the pleasantly engaged side, you see, there's always remembering that I only ever heard of Gerard Manley Hopkins through the offices of some realistic fiction Dorothy Canfield Fisher award nominee as a kid and David Telfair's novel Cherton.

Moving, books

2009-09-12T20:44:40Z

Vermont showed us a delightful face for the first week of our arrival, treating us to warm breezy days with clear skies, cool but not cold nights, and plenty of sunlight on beaches and the lake. We had friends in from out of town, relatives who helped us move, and got to eat tasty food. September is a season of markets, fairs, and street festivals as best as I can tell, and our favorite musician of all time (Richard Thompson) will be playing Burlington in just three weeks or so.

Books-wise, I'm still in a phase of re-reading comforting and /or familiar things or types-of-things. I brought home the first volume of Roger Zelazny's collected short stories (yay!), tore through a re-read of some more Georgette Heyer (A Lady of Quality, I think).

Then I surprised myself a bit and picked up a book by Muriel Spark. It had no book jacket and sat flat and black on the "staff recommends" table. The title was "Loitering with Intent" which was too good a title to pass by. So far I love it. It reminded me that I do read literary fiction. (I'm always announcing, in just the pompous tone used by readers of literary fiction reviewed in the New Yorker, that I "only read genre", but it isn't actually true.)

So I thought about it and here are some literary fiction authors I've read and valued, since I'm always claiming to read only f/sf, horror, mystery, romance, etc.
Doris Lessing - the Golden Notebook and Love, Again both blew my mind. Her other work has been consistently intriguing to me.
Jeanette Winterson - I read Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and a few others.
Margaret Atwood - I really liked the Edible Woman, appreciated the Handmaid's Tale though I really don't enjoy stories set after the disaster, and liked the Robber Bride quite a lot. I think I've read others but those three I remember clearly.
Richard Meltzer - The Night (Alone) - I'm not sure if this qualifies as lit fic as it's more experimental. I loved it to pieces and then foolishly gave it away.
Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers is one of my favorite books ever.
Richard Brautigan - I've read maybe four or five of his novels, a bunch of poetry. My favorite is Sombrero Fallout.
Stefan Heym - The King David Report was the book that propelled me into my adolescent bible reading phase. I really enjoyed it, and then I quite enjoyed reading all the related books in the Old Testament.
does it count if it's for school? My junior year of high school we read Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt and I loved it. I think of it as being like a detective noir novel since he falls through the underbelly of his own constructed world. And though I can't stand Of Mice and Men, I loved Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath unreasoningly - not for the Joads so much as for all the other bits.

Moving, tra-la, tra-la

2009-08-29T05:44:39Z

I am moving to Vermont this weekend. We are ludicrously underpacked and undercleaned, but such is life.
I won't have phone or internet hookup for a week after we move due to cabling delays, so I'll be spottily accessible from the 29th of August to the 9th of September.
Hope you all have a nice week.

Books and or cleaning

2009-08-18T07:29:02Z

Bookland has been quiet as I still am mostly rereading. I read the Queen of Attolia and the King of Attolia for the 3rd or 4th time this weekend (The King of Attolia is one of the all time perfect novels, in my opinion, but only if you've read The Thief and The Queen of Attolia - which are, respectively, good and very good, but not perfect. Hence my difficulty in describing The King of Attolia's perfection - conditionally perfect?)

And I'm still reading Nana, because my desire for shojo manga apparently continues unabated.

I'm poking at The Lady in Red, a newish nonfiction book about a marriage and court cases and adultery in the late 1700s, but I'm not sure I'm up for another historical adultery book. That would make three this year.

Cleaning: my apartment looks oddly naked without the 400+ lbs of books that I have mailed to my mother's basement. I found our wedding invites (designed and silk screened by the awesome Hope Larson) while packing up stuff and the framed matted one is on my desk next to another print of hers. I found the shoebox o'journals and had to resist the temptation to read vast swathes of them. And now it is extremely late so I should most likely sleep.
But first I am going to have some organic whole wheat sourdough toast and read a few more pages of the Lives of Christopher Chant, because re-reading is the order of the day (and night and morning).

Signs you are too tired and/or need glasses

2009-08-09T02:46:08Z

I was skimming through the Penguin Young Readers "Coming Soon" section and somehow, horribly, I misread the information on
"Sunshine and Showers: A Flower Fairies Handbook" as being by Clive Barker, and not Cicely Mary Barker.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to imagine just exactly what kind of book Clive Barker would ever write, in this or any parallel world, that would end up titled "Sunshine and Showers: A Flower Fairies Handbook."
The mind definitely boggles. At least, mine did.

Happy stupid thing.

2009-07-30T03:49:27Z

I swear I won't go on about this all the time, but I'm very happy. I ran 5 miles for the first time today.
Technically, I walked .8 miles or so at an increasing speed, ran for 3 miles or so, jogged for half a mile at a decreasing speed, and then walked for half a mile or so, but whatever. I did it for 5 miles total.

This is a first for me and I'm happy about it. I've been working up to it sorta-casually over 2 years and pretty focusedly over 6 months.

That is all.

Moving... so I'm thinking about books. It's called avoidance, right?

2009-07-25T03:40:33Z

Moving is stressing me out. I will be delighted to be back in Vermont this fall, but at the same time I feel that it's much harder to be your adult self in the same environment you grew up in - different vectors act against you in social groups that knew you when.

So my brain is a bit busy and all I want to do is sit around re-reading The King of Attolia and the Miles Vorkosigan books. Things I've read before that are well written and emotionally twisty enough to keep me engaged again and again, but which have no chance of ever making me go "no, what, horrible, can't be, makes no sense, grr" and throwing them against the wall.

In this kind of mood, only books by authors who are absolutely safe, known quantities have any appeal. Preferably books I've read before. I think I've read The Pinhoe Egg three times this summer. I'd have read Conrad's Fate as many times, but it got packed up and shipped to my mother's basement a few weeks ago, so its total stands at two for the summer. I re-read all of the Dalemark Quartet a few months back in one long go.

Nonfiction books quickly try my patience, though I did have the immense and unexpected pleasure of actually being able to recommend Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples to someone last week as a genuine Readers' Advisory recommendation. I was so happy I did a little dance. The cultural history of impotence I'm reading is pretty amusing but the book on tricksters struck me as bad and pretentious and got quickly returned to the library.

Also I felt full of joy when I saw a picture book called "Flying!" by Kevin Luthardt at the library because it is a) a brightly colored and happy and about a little boy who thinks about flying and there are birds and a loving daddy, plus, b) the little boy and his dad are not-white.

There is a severe and tragic shortage of picture books where the main characters are not-white AND the book itself is bright and cheerful. I like The Moon Ring by DuBurke for this too. Because about 94% (by unscientific make-up-a-numberness) of the non-white-kid picture books in my library are all full of dark saturated blah blah colors, even if they are not sad stories. Hellooooooo, small children of all skin tones do like brightly colored stories, I believe. Even this book I'm praising is honestly a bit flattened in color tone for my taste. I don't get it. How about not just bright colors, but shiny happy saturated colors? Something as bright as a Jan Thomas book like Rhyming Dust Bunnies. (I looooove Jan Thomas books. They make me laugh so hard.)

Summer Reading Program is eating my brain

2009-07-17T14:43:12Z

Hrm. I think that I am naturally very very introverted, so perhaps my choice of career (Librarian) which involves tons and tons of programming and outreach, has a negative effect on my social life.

After 8 hours of going up to every passerby to be like "hi, what can I find you/tell me about what you love in stories/do you have a summer reading program sign up/ would you like to read to a dog this Saturday/yes I can find you every vampire book with a love story in our out of this building (no, really, I swear I can, I just can't give you one now because they are ALL checked out because I do this 8 times a week and the list repeats)" I come home and I just want to stare at TrueBlood on the screen or go running.

I am really good at outreach. I've built volunteering, program offerings, program attendance by percentages that have multiple hundreds in them. But sometimes I just get a bit tired.

Books: The Language of the Night

2009-07-04T16:07:06Z

I picked up this early book of Ursula Le Guin essays used, and will be returning it to the used bookstore largely unread. I love many of Ms. Le Guin's novels unreservedly, but my gosh, her style of criticism doesn't mesh with my values as a reader, so the criticism is just not useful to me.

I am, in fact, getting pretty frustrated by my encounters with literary criticism, formal or informal, of things that I like. It tends to make me irritated when I do it, irritated when other people do it, irritated when I read it. It's like the opposite of Wheaties for my brain.

This is odd, since I love talking about elements in a story, how they're put together. And I've got an essay brewing in the back of my brain about plot, intellectual theme, and emotional theme and how the three interrelate in terms of criticism. And that essay is irritating me too. So I think I should lie down until the urge passes.

Not about a book, really

2009-07-01T14:07:53Z

I just finished Pat Murphy's Wild Girls.
Reading books with that kind of plot is always odd for me - I was one of those bright kids, did go to summer camps for writing and things like that, and so am reading the book comparing it the whole time to my experience.
This one was very well written because it did get me to stop doing that and stay immersed in the story's point of view.
The ending broke the fourth wall a bit too hard for me because the first person wrap-up butted up against the narrative form and that's not really my thing, but otherwise very engrossing. And the story bits were all believably good and intertwined.

Afterwards I was thinking of fights my parents used to have (which is why this isn't about a book, really) and thinking: one of the great sad truths about life is that the muscles of our hearts and the muscles of our heads don't develop in tandem.

Being a bright kid doesn't change the fact that you're a kid. The muscles of your head may have developed, but the muscles of your heart are still all raw and tender and growing. Of course now I want to talk about it as if it's bones (can't keep a metaphor straight) - how when you're in a growth spurt weightlifting can do funny things to your bones and joints if you over do it - not breaks exactly (on the macro level, anyway - probably breaks on the micro level), but deformations or compactions?

Your heart is soft when it is growing and can get compacted, distorted.
Then, times when you get older, maybe your heart is doing its thing and your brain goes through a growth spurt, new thoughts put pressure on the heart, new blood flow not quite what it's used to. Damage to all those aortas and stuff from the flow of ideas, thoughts, pushing your feelings into new shapes.

The two do work together, heart and head. But it's an uneasy thing, an unsettled thing.

Books: The Enchantment Emporium

2009-06-24T22:14:36Z

Tanya Huff is always fun. Reading this particular book reminded me of those days you occasionally get when the weather cooperates with your plans and everyone in your group wants to do the same thing and all the restaurants you go to have really good food and friendly wait staff and then there's ice cream.

Partly this is because she writes delicious relationship fantasias - sexy people, with few hangups about their bodies, sharing love and space and snuggles and mad hijinks. (They often have hangups about their emotions, because how else to have the angst, but usually not about their bodies or their sexuality.)

And also I really like the way her plots flow as they build up, though I never love the endings - I think this is partly because I love her books most for letting me be in their worlds, and thus no ending could satisfy as ending puts you out of the world.

The dragons are deliciously horrible. (Dragon mentionings can't be spoilers when they're on the cover, right?)

Apologies

2009-06-20T05:24:03Z

*sigh* I think, looking back over my conversational skills today, that I must not have been very happy. Because proving my point that I'm a lot more fun to be around when I'm feeling happy and less fun when I'm feeling less happy, I get the sense that I moved distinctly towards less fun this evening.
My apologies to my dinner companions, who were all that is charming and rational and thoughtful.

Conventions - 4th Street

2009-06-19T15:45:47Z

I'm going to 4th Street today. I'll be there this evening, tomorrow morning and night but not afternoon/evening (scheduled a teen event that day, ha, go me!) and then Sunday.

Hope all is well with all. Some of you I hope to see there. Probably won't post con reports/analysis, as my analytical headspace is rarely if ever something you'd want strangers reading on the internet for all time.

Since it starts in a few hours I should probably go check how many buses I need to take to get there.

Website that looks cool: in re laws and stuff

2009-06-14T02:59:15Z

This Yale online document thingie looks totally awesome. It's called the Avalon Project and it's a bunch of online texts of old laws and treaties and stuff, arranged into collections.

I was poking around looking for text of treaties between the U.S. Government and Native American tribes and this came up. It has stuff that could be handy for people doing all kinds of worldbuilding, I suspect.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/

Random blither: Damage vs. Trauma

2009-06-04T13:29:06Z

I've been thinking lately about damage and trauma.
To clarify my terms at the outset, I'm here using "damage" to mean - "things that happen that suck", and "trauma" to mean - "things that happen and suck and then haunt you for a long time".

And what occurs to me is that a lot of the difference between whether something is damage or trauma, using my definitions above, could have to do with how difficult other factors make talking about the damage.

F'r'instance, if you break your arm as a kid while you're out playing, and it's an accident, and you have parents you can tell about it, and they take you to the hospital and don't blame you for it and you get a cool cast and then you have friends who sign the cast, then assuming no long term health effects from the break, you've probably got damage there.
You broke your arm, sure, but you can tell people about it. It's no secret why or how. When someone says, "gee, what happened to you" you can comfortably answer, "I fell off the slide" or whatever.

On the other hand, if you broke your arm because your parent tossed you off the slide, or if your parents refused you medical attention because you should tough out the broken arm, or if you broke your arm while out playing with some kids and they ditched you to fend for yourself instead of getting help - trauma. Because then the event has gone into this hard to talk about, isolating place.

So under this theory, one of the reasons that so many things to do with the emotional side of family life and the sexual side of relationship life are so traumatizing would be that our culture makes them very very difficult to talk about. The weird side of family life, outside of novels, is treated sort of like those ads for visiting Las Vegas - what happens in the family stays in the family. And the weird side of dating and sexual relationships is treated similarly, except with bonus added shame.

And, by inference, if this theory panned out we as a culture could work to reduce trauma by finding ways to reduce the secrecy/guilt/shame load that we put onto talking about certain damaging situations.

Wiscon - Panel Thoughts #1-Porn Crushes Patriarchy

2009-05-26T15:57:49Z

This was a panel that had some generational aspects. The panelists had what struck me as maybe a 20-30+ year age spread, which was probably matched/exceeded by the age spread of audience members - teens through 70s is what I'd guess.

And those age differences made a huge difference to the topic, because I think the people of different ages were often having different discussions. Because they'd grown up in potentially very different worlds as regards their sexuality and the influences on it.

My adolescent experience was mediated by queer newspapers, Dykes to Watch Out For cartoon strips and Dyke Strippers collections, feminist and lesbian owned/run sex toy stores, pornography and erotica written by and from a feminist, female, and/or queer perspective, etc. I'm intellectually aware that pornography written and created from a straight male viewpoint exists, but I've never seen it, or been interested in seeking it out. I've never been into a traditionally staffed/run sex toy store or pornography store. Why would I do that when I've grown up surrounded by stores like Toys in Babeland (which seems to be just Babeland now) and the Smitten Kitten? Sex World just doesn't seem very attractive in comparison - I've grown up surrounded by boutique stores with nice lighting and clean unsticky floors where friendly women with piercings will explain how to use anything you've ever been vaguely curious about. Factual information about sex wasn't easily available in my schools, but my grandmother gave my little sister a copy of the umpteenth edition of "Our Bodies, Our Selves", which by that point was an immense telephone sized book with info on EVERYTHING and then some, and included links to online websites for followup. Plus there was the sex education web ring, with instructional sites on masturbation (one for guys, one for girls), and later there was Scarleteen and Nerve.com and Clean Sheets and a whole host of other awesome sites. My mom took me to Planned Parenthood so I'd get to find out about all the different kinds of birth control.

Which is to say that my experience of porn didn't really involve the patriarchy at all. The closest I'd ever come was reading Playboy, which I did for the Cynthia Heimel articles and the Shel Silverstein poetry, not the strange Barbie-looking airbrushed naked ladies.

So my first reaction after the panel was: wow, those women live in a very different world than I do.
And the next day, my reaction was: wow, thank you to previous feminist generations. Thank you for ensuring that I get to grow up in a world where it's possible not to have those experiences of being so lonely and having so little information and feeling so isolated. Thanks for creating the resources that talk about bodies and sexuality without blame or shame. Thanks for creating organizations that make it possible for women to protect their sexual health without dealing with an often still-judgemental traditional health system. Because none of those things existed even 10 years before I was born. And they made my life much much much better than it could have otherwise been.

Wiscon

2009-05-22T13:00:05Z

I am going to Wiscon this morning. I'll be there sometime this afternoon, through I think (though I'm not sure) sometime Monday AM.
Perhaps I'll see some people there.