Ambling Along the Aqueduct

Rachel Swirsky's Novelette Recommendations from 2011

2012-02-01T11:14:00.000-08:00

Repeating the notes from my previous post: this year, I read about 260 short stories and novelettes. I compiled my list using a combination of reading magazines and anthologies, querying authors about their yearly work, asking for recommendations from critics and editors, and referencing the year’s best anthologies. As always, I enjoyed more novelettes. than I’m listing here.

Some of the pieces listed as novelettes may actually be short stories. I double-checked the ones I’m voting on, but for the rest of my reading, where it wasn’t immediately obvious what category the work belonged to, I guessed.

MY HARD PICKS:

I haven't entirely decided on my ballot yet, but I'm absolutely sure these two will be on it.

"The Way Station" by Nathan Ballingsrud (Naked City) - A man, haunted by the city of New Orleans, navigates the world in which he is part streets and levies and the wreckage from floods. Haunting imagery and setting details build an eerie, well-fleshed character and tone. This is the kind of story that shows the power of surrealism in illuminating emotional truths. It exposes the heart of grief.

"What We Found" by Geoff Ryman (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) - The protagonist of this story has discovered that stress levels affect subsequent generations through the male line, meaning that the tragedies of the past are literally passed down into the bodies of the present and future. Now considering his own marriage and the prospect of passing on the stresses his line has endured, the narrator relates his experience of growing up. It's intense, often sad, but also brilliant in the way that it delineates character and setting detail. This story does what I've noticed I seem to want from fiction--it brings both literary tools and genre tools to bear in a way that sharpens both.

SOFT PICKS

3 of these 6 will be on my ballot, but I'm not yet sure which three. I wish I could nominate all of them.

"Six Months, Three Days" by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com) - Two precognitives meet and fall in love. Their relationship is fraught by the fact that one of the precognitives is a determinist (seeing the future as a single stream) and the other believes in free will (and sees possibilities branching from most moments). The philosophical contrast and science fictional premise provide an intriguing philosophical flavor to the human romance; the two work exquisitely in synchrony.

"Gap Year" by Christopher Barzak (Teeth) - Like Kelly Link at her best, this story of a girl who discovers herself to be an emotional vampire not only deploys surreal, disconcerting imagery in service of emotional truth--but also does so in a satisfying, story-shaped structure.

"The Summer People" by Kelly Link (Steampunk!) - Kelly Link has a genius for characters and beautiful, strange imagery. Both are here. The character is strange and immediately compelling, her situation likewise. Strange events unfold in a way that's both disorienting and completely intuitive; she has an amazing talent for calling for the suspense of disbelief, for welcoming the reader into strageness. Unfortunately, I sometimes feel that Link's stories are structurally weak, although this makes the ones that aren't ("The Constable of Abal," "Magic for Beginners," etc.) even more striking. This one manages a compelling plot through to the abbreviated end. It's still striking and wonderful, but I'm left with an unresolved hollowness that disconnects me emotionally from the rest of the story. (Endings are of course controversial, and I'm a big fan of endings that leave you at the perfect moment, even if that moment is an unresolved chord--Tim Pratt's "Cup and Table" oh my God--but this one missed for me.)

"Slice of Life" by Lucius Shepherd (Teeth) - Another story that reminded me of Kelly Link. (I don't know what to say. I love her writing. Maybe Kelly Link is one of the paradigms in my brain against which All Others Will Be Judged.) The vampire in this story is unusual and compelling, but the most striking thing about this story is the non-magical protagonist, whose self-resolve--and sometimes bitterness--rise off the page to make her a fully fleshed, compelling figure.

"The Migratory Patterns of Dancers" by Katie Sparrow (Giganotosaurus) - In a future without birds, men ride through the country, wearing wings and dancing, doing the dangerous work of sustaining memory. Near-future science fiction with an unusual premise and absolutely gorgeous imagery and voice.

"Work, with Occasional Molemen" by Jeremiah Tolbert (Giganotosaurus) - Although there's a joke at the center of the piece that I'm not fond of; ignoring that, this is a visceral, emotionally intense piece with scarily good characterization and setting. It's dark, almost hopeless, but not in a sci-fi dystopia-way, but in an emotionally unflinching way like Dorothy Allison. It's a very unusual combination of voice and genre; it's distinctly itself in a striking way. I'm not sure I've ever read anything else like it.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:

"The Silver Wind" by Nina Allan (Interzone) - So, I read this novelette in the context of a linked short story collection, in which it was story #2 or #3, so I have trouble separating it entirely from the rest of the collection in my mind. Allan is a strikingly talented writer with a facility for taking complex ideas (time travel, alienation, exploration) and using extremely detailed characterization to reveal their emotional truths. The characters and premises in the collection are interesting and the read is often surprising and gratifying, but as a whole, I thought it was overwritten. Pruning back some of the contemplations and repetitions would have given the emotional moments and character revelations more of a chance to stand out. The novelette itself is the most highly structured piece of the collection and it's odd and compelling while also providing intellectual fodder.

"The House of Aunts" by Zen Cho (Giganotosaurus) - The story of a girl who is a variety of vampire from a non-western mythology and her first experiences with love. The relationships between the main character and her titular aunts manage to be tender, compelling, and creepy all at once. The main character, likewise, is easy to invest in, and yet has an edge of the gruesome. The story as a whole maintains this balance well, mixing the familiar and the revolting, in a way that I think most vampire stories fail to. Perhaps it's because the main characters aren't vampires in the traditional sense that allows their methods of killing and eating to feel freshly frightening in a way that blood-sucking doesn't. This story was very good, but I felt like it flinched away from the ending rather than facing the emotional complexity it had set up.

"Anticopernicus" by Adam Roberts (Amazon e-book at .99) - I didn't get very emotionally involved with this story, although I liked the cynical main character. However, the ideas and the action were pretty cool. It's somewhere between near- and far-future SF, and takes place at the time of first contact with aliens.

"The Skinny Girl" by Lucius Shepherd (Naked City) - Although i didn't think this piece held together very well structurally (particularly at the end; endings are so slippery), the strangeness and eeriness of it were very compelling. A photographer, obsessed with death, meets death's avatar. Their spine-shivering of their interaction--particularly when it's erotic--is skillfully crafted.

"Flying" by Delia Sherman (Teeth) - An aerialist who has been forbidden to practice her trade since she began dying of leukemia runs off to join a strange, timeless circus. There's an eeriness to circuses, of course, which gives all writing about them a boost when it comes to evoking the odd, but I especially liked the descriptions of this circus and its acts. I was compelled by the main character's hardened resolve. Sherman's voice is, as ever, exceptionally sharp.

RECOMMENDED:

"Slow as a Bullet" by Andy Duncan (Eclipse 4) - Nothing too deep, but a really entertaining tall tale in a characteristically entertaining Andy Duncan voice.

"Afterbirth" by Kameron Hurley (Amazon e-book at .99) - A tie-in with Hurley's GOD'S WAR.

OF NOTE:

"A Small Price to pay for Birdsong" by K.J. Parker (Subterranean Magazine) - Amadeus v. Salieri, fantasy style.

"Sauerkraut Station" by Ferret Steinmetz (Giganotosaurus) - While the voice of the protagonist--a young girl--rings false in places, this is fun, traditional space opera.

I'm Running for SFWA Vice President

2012-02-01T09:43:00.001-08:00

My statement of candidacy is on the SFWA forums, but I thought I'd post a couple of notes around the internet for people who don't often hop over there.

My novelette recommendations coming asap!

Rachel Swirsky's Short Story Recommendations from 2011

2012-01-31T11:19:00.001-08:00

This year, I read about 260 short stories and novelettes. I compiled my list using a combination of reading magazines and anthologies, querying authors about their yearly work, asking for recommendations from critics and editors, and referencing the year's best anthologies. As always, I enjoyed more stories than I'm listing here.

Some of the pieces listed as short stories may actually be novelettes. I double-checked the ones I'm voting on, but for the rest of my reading, where it wasn't immediately obvious what category the work belonged to, I guessed.

MY BALLOT:

"Her Husband's Hands" by Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed) - A war widow receives bad news from the front--that her husband is dead--however, they've managed to save his hands and only his hands. This is pretty much the height of metaphor-as-story. In that, it's not dissimilar from last year's "Arvies" in which Troy-Castro created a physicalized metaphor about abortion, but in my opinion, this piece does a much better job of pulling it off. It's dark, intensely written, and intimately and compassionately characterized. I was seriously awed.

"Old Habits" by Nalo Hopkinson (Eclipse 4) - Ghosts relive their deaths in a mall. The concept of ghosts reliving their deaths isn't unusual, of course, but Hopkinson brings unusual storytelling to the ensemble cast. Her characters are generously and sensitively portrayed, their stories interesting, and the plot pitch-perfect in terms of pulling the reader forward without sacrificing characterization or tone.

"Hero-Mother" by Vylar Kaftan (Giganotosaurus) - Kaftan's story of the alien physiology of sex is reminiscent of Tiptree's "Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death," in the way it confronts the viscerally physical. Unlike Tiptree's story, however, "Hero-Mother" is also a story about love, sacrifice and limitation.

"Simulacrum" by Ken Liu (Lightspeed) - A father and daughter, unable to relate to each other in the real world, find their relationship (voluntarily and involuntarily) mitigated by computerized simulacra. This story is told in sharp, sweet flashes that are vivid in detail and characterization. The science fictional concept in the story provides an excellent means for Liu to explore lost connections and alienation between parent and child.

"The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld) - Sometimes people manage to pull off surrealism and whimsy in a way that feels like they've discarded narrative conventions and, damn it, are just going to wander wherever they feel like it. It doesn't usually work, but sometimes it does. Cartographer fucking wasps and anarchist fucking bees.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:

"Three Damnations: A Fugue" by James Alan Gardner (Fantasy Magazine) - Three characters are stuck in a loop, dancing around each other, making each other miserable. Each of the characters and stories is interesting, and there's an admirable flesh on the story, giving it more depth than the (clever) idea alone. There are also some striking, unusual images.

"The Axiom of Choice" by David Goldman (New Haven Review) - This is the best reinterpretation of choose your own adventure stories I've seen so far. The story brings up philosophical and mathematical issues that provide intellectual interest, but also creates an emotionally compelling story.

"Story Kit" by Kij Johnson (Eclipse 4) - As Always, Kij Johnson has an amazing ability to tell stories, not only with an author's usual tools, but using the structure of the story itself to fascinate and move her audience. This meta-fictional story about love and loss is, in many ways, brilliant, and certainly noteable for its energy and ideas. However, I think the story doesn't quite come together--at one point, the narrator wonders whether what she's talking about is so personal that she can't even endure talking about it at one remove. It seems as if the whole story is a remove away from its subject matter, as if it's being held at arm's length. Each of the metaphorical threads in the story has its brilliance, but I didn't feel they all came together to make the story what it could have been.

"The Bricks of Gelecek" by Matt Kressel (Naked City) - One of the spirits of destruction falls in love with a human girl. Kressel creates absolutely stunning imagery in this story. It has the scope and breadth of an epic story in a way that really worked for me. Descriptions of ancient, fallen cities are gorgeous. Kressel has a talent, I think, in depicting the weight of history, even in short form. The ending faltered for me, but in some ways, the events and characters weren't my primary concern to begin with; this story is a delight in setting and cinematography.

"Valley of the Girls" by Kelly Link (Subterranean Online) - Kelly Link does her usual thing, weaving together several disparate but striking concepts. They come together here in a far-future story with unusual ideas and striking imagery. I didn't find this piece particularly emotionally involving, but it was beautiful and interesting to read.

"The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) - This story does a really interesting job of relaying the second-generation immigrant experience, creating discomfort and alienation through specific, suburban details. It reaches its pinnacle when the main character reads a letter left by his deceased mother. Unfortunately, the denouement doesn't sustain the emotional climax; the main character's emotions read as assumed, rather than fully realized on the page. This prevents the story from being outstanding rather than very good.

"Defenders" by Will McIntosh (Lightspeed) - McIntosh's story poses an ambiguous relationship between humans and aliens in a post-apocalyptic world. The way that the text deals with the ambiguities around power, alliances, violence, redemption, sacrifice, and yearning for connection remind me very much of the way Octavia Butler handled these themes, particularly in one of her later published stories, "Amnesty."

RECCOMMENDED:

"Smoke City" by Christopher Barzak (Asimov's) - Beautiful, surrealist imagery, in a story that doesn't fit easily in genre categories.

"In the Gardens of the Night" by Siobhan Carroll (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) - Immersive fantasy with an interesting character and tone and genuinely well-created tension.

"Selling Home" by Tina Connolly (Bull Spec) - An emotionally evocative story in a far-future dystopia.

"Staying Behind" by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld) - An upload story from the perspective of those who stay behind that includes some striking, unusual images, such as kids bicycling in their evening dresses through the post-apocalyptic world to prom.

"Houses" by Mark Pantoja (Lightspeed) - A clever, well-structured far-future story.

"Long Enough and Just So Long" by Cat Rambo (Lightspeed) - A wistful far-future.

"Tethered" by Mercurio D. Rivera (Interzone--eligible only for the Hugo) - In a far-future story with aliens, Rivera explores the boundaries of love and physiology.

"The World Is Cruel, My Daughter" by Cory Skerry (Fantasy Magazine) - A surprisngly emotionally evocative retelling of Rapunzel.

"The Future When All's Well" by Cat Valente (Teeth) - A clever way of talking about the experience of growing up in the '8os (with Just say no! and after school specials), using vampires as a metaphor, that pulls off character and emotion as well.

"The Sandal-Bride" by Genevieve Valentine (Fantasy Magazine) - A fantasy that feels much longer than it actually is, with evocative setting details and an interesting plot.

Of Note:

"Lessons from a Clockwork Queen" by Megan Arkenberg (Fantasy Magazine)
"Needles" by Elizabeth Bear (Blood and Other Cravings)
"Sunbleached" by Nathan Ballingsrud (Teeth)
"Join" by Liz Coleman (Lightspeed)
"The Double of My Double Is Not My Double" by Jeffrey Ford (Eclipse 4)
"Younger Women" by Karen Joy Fowler (Subterranean Magazine)
"Steam Girl" by Dylan Horrocks (Steampunk!)
"History" by Ellen Kushner (Teeth)
"And Neither Have I Wings to Fly" by Carrie Laben (Bewere the Night)
"This Strange Way of Dying" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Giganotosaurus)
"How Maartje and Uppinder Terraformed Mars (Marsmen Trad.)" by Lisa Nohealani Morton (Lightspeed)
"The House That Made the Sixteen Loops of Time" by Tamsyn Muir (Fantasy Magazine)
"All That Touches the Air" by An Owomoyela (Lightspeed)
"The Fish of Lijiang" by Chen Qiufan (Clarkesworld; may or may not be eligible as it's a translation)
"Whose Face This Is I Do Not Know" by Cat Rambo (Clarkesworld)
"Woman Leaves Room" by Robert Reed (Lightspeed)
"The Landholders No Longer Carry Swords" by Patricia Russo (Giganotosaurus)
"The Panda Coin" by Jo Walton (Eclipse 4)
"All You Can Do Is Breathe" by Kaaron Warren (Blood and Other Cravings)

A word with such a sulfurous reputation

2012-01-29T16:31:00.000-08:00

This morning I read a poignant essay on Anna Banti's Artemisia by Susan Sontag. (It is reprinted in At the Same Time, a posthumous collection edited by Sontag's son.) I suspect at least partly because Banti repeatedly addresses the protagonist of her historical novel, bringing in a few carefully circumscribed details about her own life, Sontag's essay ventures into the area of Banti's life as a scholar and writer and her vehement disavowal of feminism. While speaking specifically about Banti, Sontag takes up the phenomenon of intellectual and creative women expressing hostility to feminism more generally. This has always been an interesting issue for me, one strewn with pitfalls for the feminist faced with an apparent contradiction, and so I read this passage with great interest:

To refuse, vehemently (even scorfully) refuse, a reputation as a feminist was, of course, a common move for the most brilliant and independent women of her generation-- Woolf being the glorious exception. Think of Hannah Arendt. Or of Colette, who once declared that women who were so stupid as to want the vote deserved "the whip and the harem." (La Vagabonde, her novel-manifesto about a woman choosing her career and a single life over the love of a worthy man and emotional dependence, was translated into Italian by Banti.) Feminism has meant many things; many unnecessary things. It can be defined as a position-- about justice and dignity and liberty-- to which almost all independent women would adhere if they did not fear the retaliation that accompanies a word with such a sulfurous reputation. Or it can be defined as a position easier to disavow or quarrel with, as it was by Banti (and Arendt and Colette). That version of feminism suggests that there is a war against men, which was anathema to such women; that feminism suggests an avowal of strength-- and a denial of the difficulty and the cost for women in being strong (above all, the cost in masculine support and affection); more, it proclaims pride in being a woman, it even affirms the superiority of women-- all attitudes that felt alien to the many independent women who were proud of their accomplishments and who knew the sacrifices and the compromises they entailed.

Artemesia is full of affirmations of the pathos of female identity: women's weakness, women's dependence, women's solitariness (should they want to be anything but daughters, wives, and mothers), women's sorrows, women's grief. To be a woman is to be incarcerated, and to struggole against incarceration, and to long for it. "'If only I were not a woman,' that futile lament," Banti's Artemisia reflects. "Far better to ally herself with the sacrificed and imprisoned, participate in their veiled, momentous fate, share their feelings, their plans, their truths; secrets from which the privileged, men, were barred." But of course, Artemisia's achievement-- her genius-- banishes her from this home. (53)

Interestingly, Sontag then observes the simliarities between historical and "fantastic fiction":

Artemisia is a tragic reflection on the condition of being a woman and of defying the norms of one's sex--as opposed to the comic, triumphalist, tender fable that is Orlando. As an account of exemplary tribulations that follow from being independent, an artist, and a woman, Banti's novel is also exemplary in its depair and its defiance: the merit of Artemisia's choice is never in doubt.

Read only as a feminist novel, which Artemisia certainly is, it confirms what we know (or think we know; or want others to know). But its power as literature is also that of an encounter with what we don't know or fully understand. The feeling of strangeness is a particular effect of that branch of literature tamed by the label "historical fiction." To write well about the past is to write something like fantastic fiction. It is the strangeness of the past, rendered with piercing concreteness, that gives the effect of realism.(54-55)

Sontag writes more about the book as a historical novel, all of which I found deeply interesting. She concludes by remarking "Anna Banti did not want to lose her manuscript in the battle for Florence in early August 1944. No writer could welcome such a destiny. But there can be no doubt that what makes Artemisia a great book--and unique in Banti's work-- is this double destiny, a book lost and re-created. A book that by being posthumous, rewritten, resurrected, gained incalculably in emotional reach and moral authority."(55-56)

I have often, in the past, reminded myself of this-- to remember that first versions, however complete they might seem, are not necessarily the only or best versions of the story one wants to tell: and more particularly, of the kind of book that resulted from Banti's having lost the first completed version of her novel and, in re-creating it, had found it necessary to haunt her re-telling of Artemisia's story with the pain of that loss. Her insertion of that loss into the novel, rather than being self-indulgent, is painfully spare, resonating with the others sorts of painful losses that Banti perceived in the brilliant Artemisia Gentilleschi's life.

I've written about Anna Banti's work before on this blog, here.

The 2012 Galactic Suburbia Award

2012-01-27T17:11:00.000-08:00

Have you heard? The f/sf field now has a feminist award! It's called The Galactic Suburbia Award for activism and/or communication that advances the feminist conversation in the field of speculative fiction in 2011. The women of Galactic Suburbia, Tansy, Alex, and Alisa, have just announced the first year's winner and Honours List.

Honours List"

Carrie Goldman ad her daughter Katie, for sharing their story about how Katie was bullied at school for liking Star Wars, and opening up a massive worldwide conversation about gender binaries and gender-related bullying among very young children http://www.chicagonow.com/portrait-of-an-adoption/2010/11/anti-bullying-starts-in-first-grade/

Cheryl Morgan for "Female Invisibility Bingo" ( http://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=10805 ), associated blogging and podcasting, and basically fighting the good fight

Helen Merrick, for the "Feminism" article on the SF Encyclopedia: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/feminism (i think its a rewrite not new)

Jim C Hines for “Jane C Hines” and associated blogging, raising awareness of feminist issues in the SF/Fantasy publishing field. - http://www.jimchines.com/2011/09/jane-c-hines/

Julia Rios, Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond for episode 11 of the Outer Alliance podcast (The Writer and the Critic special episode)

http://blog.outeralliance.org/archives/875

L. Timmel Duchamp - for continuing to raise issues of importance on the Ambling Down the Aqueduct blog [I'm sure they mean Ambling Along the Aqueduct--td] and various Aqueduct Press projects
http://aqueductpress.blogspot.com/

Michelle Lee for the blog post “A 7-year-old girl responds to DC Comics’ sexed-up reboot of Starfire” http://io9.com/5844355/a-7+year+old-girl-responds-to-dc-comics-sexed+up-reboot-of-starfire

Winner

Nicola Griffith - for the Russ Pledge, and associated blogging http://asknicola.blogspot.com/2011/06/taking-russ-pledge.html

The winner will receive a Deepings Doll (www.deepingsdolls.com) hand-painted figurine of a suffragette with a Galactic Suburbia placard.

Congratulations, Nicola!

If you have ideas for the Honours list for 2012, please email Tansy, Alex, and Alisa at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com or tweet @galacticsuburbs

Middle-aged protagonists and ducks that aren't dead

2012-01-25T17:02:00.000-08:00

I didn't go out yesterday but sat tight, waiting out yet another storm. I'd never seen Admiralty Inlet so white with chop before. Today, though, has been calm. And when I walked down to the beach a little after one, there was actually beach to walk on. Best of all, the waterfowl busy in the water were many and varied. I saw my first marbled murrelet, black scoters, and Pacific loons, in addition to the more usual ducks-- buffleheads, common golden-eyes, and hooded mergansers. I spent about ten minutes standing in one place, binoculars lifted to my eyes, watching a duck off by himself-- probably the same one I saw last week, also solitary-- which I eventually identified as a juvenile common golden-eye. Why did I watch him for so long? Because he was dabbling, with his head underwater, for such a long time that I began to wonder if he were dead. (I wasn't sure at that point if it was the juvenile golden-eye because all I could see was his body and some spiky black feathers sticking up.) And then, finally, as I began to think about moving on, he lifted his head out of the water. It made me happy to see he wasn't a dead duck after all. And then I found myself wondering why I've never see a dead duck in the water or on shore yet. Where do they go when they die? Do they wash up on the shore? Do their carcasses get scavegened? Or do they go someplace sheltered when they know they're dying?

It was warm enough that when I reached Point Wilson I was able to sit down on a log, take my gloves off, and jot a few thoughts in a notebook. (Until, of course, my fingers got too stiff to continue writing.) Here's what I jotted:

I've been watching the gray green waves roll in so near to the Point, right where the land curves sharply. No matter one's viewpoint, the waves seem inevitably to come in crooked even if they don't always collide at an angle with the ones rolling in a little further south. It occurs to me that so, too, my character's limits are by this point in the novel all too clearly established. The land, unlike the wind, tide, and currents, is a given. Some days the waves comming in at an angle to the the straight line of the beach and waves south of them do collide, with great turbulence--the wind, tide, and currents create a variety of possibilities. Today, though, the difference that the curve of the beach just there makes in the waves seems a thing in itself, without relation to the waves coming in along the straight line of the beach-- perhaps because the latter are barely perceptible as surf. Under these conditions, the collision between the waves coming in at different angles is below the threshold of my perception.

M. is middle-aged. And my ms is at 85,000 words. It is easy to see that her younger self would have scorned her for having gotten into the situation she's in. It's not a matter, in this story, of her being comfortable and not wanting to give up her comfort-- no one would judge her exactly "comfortable" (except by the most moralistic standards). Though certainly one could argue that she's looking for a way to make her life more comfortable. It's more a matter of her having made, for most of her life, one compromise after another, as each new crisis befell her. She began making these compromises by thinking she was being practical and doing what was sensible. But having done so time and again has put her into a state in which compromise is the preferred-- learned-- response to every demand for a decision.

This is the problem with writing middle-aged protagonists who haven't lived their lives in a constant state of self-actualization. Oh sure, a middle-aged character can undergo a conversion experience and be swept out of her inertia. And then, of course, there's the cliche of the midlife crisis. But midlife crises usually result in an attempt to turn back the clock, to shed social and personal responsibility. As someone holding on by her fingernails, that's just not an option for my character. The challenge here, for me, is to find a path that avoids her defeat but is nevertheless true to her character and is not a magical resolution. I have a very clear sense of her limits. But what I need to have now is a better sense of the possiblities within those limits. (She did, after all, start life with some solid resources. Utilizing those resources-- arguably dormant-- must suggest a horizon for the possible.) I hate it when writers suddenly gift their characters with possiblities that ignore their limits, as though when it comes to individuals in fiction, it is an act of good faith to believe in miracles. I know a lot of people insist on this as a sort of moral good. But when I read such stories, I'm left with an unpleasant taste in my mouth, as though I'd been eating saccharine.I damned sure don't want to find myself feeling that way about this novel.

The cry of an eagle is not exactly what I expected it would be

2012-01-23T16:24:00.000-08:00

All weekend it stormed-- first rain and later powerful winds battering the cabin almost without pause. I got out on Saturday for a walk, during a pause in the rain, but not yesterday. And then this morning, when I woke, I saw the sun rise as a bright line on the horizon, behind an amazingly calm sea. And then sun flooded my cabin, annoying, actually, since for most of the morning I couldn't seem to get it out of my eyes and my back-lit screens were tough to read. As I prepared, after lunch, to go out for my walk, I laughed at the sight of the REI-style gadgets Tom brought me, which are to hiking boots what chains are to tires. I'm feeling fairly confident I'm safe from ice and snow for this week, at least. Unlike some people, I'm not eager to try out those kinds of toys.

Wow. As I typed those last words, sitting in the work room in my cabin facing an eastern window, a bald eagle flying past caught my gaze. Now I'm watching it pass and pass again, flying just above the trees. I saw it earlier, as I set out for my walk. And then I saw it again, when I walked up from the beach and was only yards from my cabin. In both cases, I pointed my camera at the sky and pushed the button, doubtful the eagle would show up (particularly since with the sun slanting sidelong into my eyes I couldn't see a thing in my viewfinder). But it did, in all four takes. What delighted me most, though, was that the eagle was producing its very strange call-- not a trumpet shriek, but a sort of bassoon-like gulping sound. A comical sound that I doubted could be coming from the eagle (until I went inside and opened a nifty app called Chirp USA and discovered that yes, indeed, that is what eagles are supposed to sound like). My surprise reminded me of the first time I heard the call of a Great Blue Heron-- an ugly hoking sound that seems crazily mismatched with the grace of its form. Its flight, I should add, is nowhere near as graceful as an eagle's-- their liftoff looks impossible, and their flight ungainly. It always seems a miracle they can stay aloft.

The daylight tides this week are too high for extensive beach walking. I'm thinking that maybe one or two days this week I might walk up into the woods behind the cabin. Likely to be pretty muddy. But also likely to have a different set of birds.

I finished reading the Ranciere, which contained an afterward by Slavov Zizek asserting that politics and economics are mutually exclusive focuses for understanding our world. Most of my time, now, is going straight to the novel. The idea of writing epigraphs with fictious sources is concentrating my mind wonderfully. I'm wondering if assigning the writing such epigraphs for one's fiction should be added to my pedagogical toolbox. They could be discarded, afterwards, the way alternative endings can be when I ask students to write at least three different endings for their stories.

Epigraphs with Fictitious Sources

2012-01-20T16:10:00.000-08:00

All day the snow has been melting. I've been watching it from the windows of my cabin, sliding off the steeply-pitched cabin roofs neighboring my own, exposing patches of grass, creating icy slush on the park's streets. The temperature's risen, and a wind from the south is whipping the trees into a dance mostly stately, sometimes frenzied. I'm keeping my fingers crossed --again-- that the power doesn't go out. Oh, and it's also lightly raining. Again, sadly, I've forgone my walk on the beach. It's so slushy and slippery out that I'm worried about getting down the slope to the beach without mishap.

Working on the novel, which includes, of course, thinking its thinkier thoughts, continues more or less steadily. This morning it came to me that this novel wants epigraphs from fictional sources. I think I've provided such epigraphs in only one of my (unpublished) novels (The Asymptoptic Woman, which I consider a "private" novel not intended for publication). If done well (as in Andrea Hairston's Mindscape), such epigraphs can add another dimension to the novel's world and its stories. I'm sure readers of this blog will be able to think of half a dozen or a dozen examples of it done well just off the top of their heads. It's one of the devices in writers' technical toolboxes that are especially sf's own. Why this thought came to me isn't fully clear yet. But I hope that once I've got the epigraphs in place, I'll understand why it now seems so necessary.

Ranciere continues to provoke me to thought. This morning I encountered this gem: "The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought." I'm tempted to take that as an epigraph for the novel as a whole. (With all the fictious-sourced epigraphs reserved for chapters.)

Tomorrow, weather permitting, Tom will visit-- and bring the box of books and office supplies we forgot to load into the car last Sunday and take me shopping to the local food co-op (which I like very much). We will walk on the beach. And then I'll return to my low-speech state.

The magic of writing longhand

2012-01-19T14:41:00.000-08:00

So much for my regimen. Though I made it to the wifi building, I am probably not going to get down to the beach today. Yesterday I didn't go out at all. Partially because I decided to refrain from posting in support of the strike calling attention to the perniciousness of SOPA and PIPA, and partially because I didn't feel up to facing the slipperiness on slopes and hills, notwithstanding my walking sticks. (Now if they had spikes on the ends...) Not many people are stirring in Fort Worden, today. Some workers were out putting sand on the steepest street through the park. But mostly the snow is marked by deer tracks.

Suffice it to say that I've been drafting new material for insertion into the earliest chapters. Although I do most of my fresh writing at the keyboard, when I'm writing material to be inserted I usually write it longhand first and then type it into the file. That is what I've been doing here. I have an idea that I feel a need to write such passages longhand because it allows me to slip past a psychological barrier created (for me, at least) by the seeming solidity of hundreds of pages of printed text. Somehow, it is one thing to tweak drafted text with elaborate line-edits, but quite another to insert new (however little) stories into it. It's as if I'm playing god with an already existing world (even if it's a world I've created-- a world in which I am, in a sense, god).

And now I'm reminded of how, before we had personal computers and before we had personal computers we had "word processors," every new iteration-- whether an edit or a major revision-- of a story required substantial retyping, whether from the beginning of the ms or the beginning of a chapter. Back then, whenever I wasn't sure where the story was going, I would retype the entirety of the scene I was working on, to give me a sort of running start. It never failed. I didn't feel I could do that when I switched to a word processor. So then I'd write out some of it longhand, and continue from there.

Writing longhand has thus come to seem a sort of magic. Some writing still work that way. (Tanith Lee, for one.) All writers, pre-typewriters, worked that way (perforce)-- unless, of course, they dictated it aloud to a secretary. Which makes me wonder if writing longhand is magical only for those of us who habitually write at the keyboard.

Speaking of technology: I hope, should a forecast of freezing rain come to pass for Port Townsend, that the power in my cabin doesn't fail. I brought three candles with me (two of them votive size) and a flashlight. I have lots of tablets and pens. And I'm keeping the batteries of all my battery-powered tech charged up. None of that stuff will keep me warm, though, should an ice- or snow-laden branch of a tree takes the wrong powerline down. I once survived a winter power outage at Kath's house for three days: but then she has a woodstove (and lots and lots of oil lamps). Now that was kind of romantic. (In retrospect, anyway.)

2 Novelettes and a Short Story by Rachel Swirsky

2012-01-19T03:51:00.000-08:00

I've been busy reading books for the Norton Award so I didn't put aside the time to do as all the other writerettes do and post a few pieces of mine that were published in the previous year.

Fields of Gold
A novelette, originally published in Johnathan Strahan's ECLIPSE 4
Out from Nightshade Press

When Dennis died, he found himself in another place. Dead people came at him with party hats and presents. Noise makers bleated. Confetti fell. It felt like the most natural thing in the world.

His family was there. Celebrities were there. People Dennis had never seen before in his life were there. Dennis danced under a disco ball with Cleopatra and great-grandma Flora and some dark-haired chick and cousin Joe and Alexander the Great. When he went to the buffet table for a tiny cocktail wiener in pink sauce, Dennis saw Napoleon trying to grope his Aunt Phyllis. She smacked him in the tri-corner hat with her clutch bag.

Napoleon and Shakespeare and Cleopatra looked just like Dennis had expected them to. Henry VIII and Socrates and Jesus, too. Cleopatra wore a long linen dress with a jeweled collar, a live asp coiled around her wrist like a bracelet. Socrates sipped from a glass of hemlock. Jesus bobbed his head up and down like a windshield ornament as he ladled out the punch. Read more.

The Taste of Promises
A novelette, originally published in Jonathan Strahan's LIFE ON MARS
Out from Viking

They approached the settlement at dusk. Tiro switched the skipper to silent mode, grateful he wouldn’t have to spend another night strapped in, using just enough fuel to stay warm and breathing.

A message from Tiro’s little brother, Eo, scrolled across his visor. Are we there yet?

Tiro rolled his eyes at Eo’s impatience. Just about, he sub-vocalized, watching his suit’s internal processor translate the words into text.

Is it someplace good? asked Eo.

I think so. Be quiet and let me check it out.

It was a big settlement. Three vast domes rose above the landscape like glass hills. Semi-permanent structures clustered around them, warehouses and vehicle storage buildings constructed from frozen dirt. Light illuminated the footpaths, creating a faintly glowing labyrinth between buildings. Read more.

Diving after the Moon
Short story, originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine

When Norbu was a child, his mother Jamyang told him an old Tibetan story about an industrious but foolish troop of monkeys that lived in a forest near a well. One dusty night, a monkey elder woke thirsty. He crept away from his sleeping mate and went to the well for a drink. Inside, he saw a reflection of the moon.

“The moon has fallen into our well!” he hollered.

His ruckus woke the other monkeys. They all agreed that it would be a terrible thing to live in a moonless world. They joined hands and formed a chain to climb into the well and rescue the moon.

As the monkeys dove in, the moon’s reflection broke, leaving blank dark waters. The shamed monkeys climbed out again: shivering, wet, and empty-handed. The real moon chuckled above them, safe in the sky. Read more.

Some of my other fiction that came out in 2011 includes:

"Death and the All-Night Donut Shop" in Unstuck Magazine

"A Practical Guide to Loving the Dead" in the New Haven Review

"Extremes" in Nature Magazine

Snow, sun, and killdeer on the beach

2012-01-17T17:35:00.000-08:00

Thinking about Day 2 of my artist's residency, I'm finding it difficult to integrate all that has so fare happened into the scope of a single day. This morning now feels like... yesterday? (Only not the yesterday that actually happened.) When I woke this morning, the quality of the silence made me suspect it might have snowed. When I went to the window and pushed back the curtains, I beheld a muffled gray and white world of snow, as monochromatic as a black and white film. While I made coffee, I spent a few minutes on the Internet via my iPad. Then I took my coffee back to my nice warm bed and settled in to read Ranciere's "The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics." This gave me much to think about vis-a-vis the interests I mentioned in my post yesterday. But then I asked myself what it might have to tell me about the world and technologies of my novel. Asking this brought me a dazzling insight, one that made me realize that I want/need to insert a new element into the story from its beginning. What a challenge! I've never done that before-- tried to introduce new material and all the perturbations that might follow from it at a such an advanced point of the story. I'm daunted, but also excited. Excited about what this new element can add to the story, excited at facing a new technical challenge. (Understand, I'm not the kind of writer that works from an outline. I generally undergo my conceptual brainstorms as I go.)

Because of the first brainstrom, I was late taking my shower. While I was in it, loving all that deliciously hot water pounding my shoulders and back, I had a second breakthrough anent the novel, again thanks to Ranciere's essay. I was so excited by this point that I decided to have an early lunch of hot, hearty soup and do my walk early. Not only did I want to spend some time outdoors doing something physical, but I figured it would help me begin mulling over these new ideas the easy way-- i.e., in the back of my mind, while the rest of me busied its attention with the world around me. (It's the form of thinking I love best: it's virtually effortless!)

As if to applaud my decision, while I was down on the beach, the snow stopped falling and the sun came out, drenching the landscape (and me) with light. The wind was bitter. But the beauty of the scene ravished me. Six killdeer were hanging out at the south end of the north beach, and one of them enacted a sort of dance with me-- flying past me to settle onto beach a little ahead of me, and then flee with hysterical cries every time I caught up with it, flying in the opposite direction, only to circle around and fly ahead of me on the other side, to settle on the beach a little ahead of me, only to again, yes, circle around behind me and fly again ahead of me... and so on. Also saw a few ducks fairly close to the beach, including a solitary golden-eye (a juvenile male, I think, judging by the size and shape of his white collar) who was doing a lot of diving.

While I was walking on the beach, I found myself thinking about Joan Slonczewski's The Highest Frontier, which I read last week, vis-a-vis Ranciere's essay. I realized that I really liked the inclusion of snippets from main character Jenny's Politics class discussing Aristotle's Politics-- but that I wished that discussion had been a bit sharper and its resonance in the novel's events consequently a bit more powerful. I know full well that though I amplified those resonances in the way that I frequently filled in things that went unspoken by the characters, things that for a reader like me have a ghostly presence (however weak) in such novels, readers who haven't already spent some time engaged in thinking critically about such things would not even have noticed them.

But then so much culture is like that now-- providing the basis for an audience inferring meanings they are always looking for while also providing a comfortable read/viewing for those who miss them entirely because they live in one of this world's many alternate realities where the basis for making such meanings does not exist.

By the time I got home, my cabin was lit up, the kitchen and front room positively peachy. But it's clouded over now, which probably means more snow. Worse, the snowmelt has re-frozen into icy patches, making walking on pavement treacherous. Have I said how glad I am to have my walking sticks with me?

Reviewing SF&F for Young People Part I: Akata Witch, All Men of Genius, Anna Dressed in Blood, Anya’s Ghost, Between Sea and Sky

2012-01-17T09:25:00.001-08:00

This year, I’m binge reading science fiction and fantasy books that are accessible to young adult and middle grade audiences. I’ve picked about thirty to review (1). They’re books that I felt I had something to say about, not necessarily the books I loved most. They’re all good enough to be worth reading, though, or I wouldn’t bother to review (2).

AKATA WITCH by Nnedi Okorafor (highly recommended)

Teenage protagonist, Sunny, discovers that she has the ability to learn magic. She makes friends with other teens who have the same abilities. They take lessons together, explore the magical world, and eventually form a coven to fight off a serial killer who is butchering children in order to fuel his own spells.

Sunny and her friends are memorable and interesting characters, each well-drawn through their traits and actions, but especially through their exceptionally written dialogue. Despite the ensemble cast, it’s never difficult to remember, crisply, who everyone is and what they want. Even the secondary characters are extremely well-rendered.

Reading about a setting that’s still unusual in American fantasy was nice, especially since Okorafor’s Nigeria seems sharply observed and non-sentimentalized. (She clearly wasn’t following the rules on how to write about Africa.) The strong imagery helps create a magic rich system that seems much more complex than what’s on the page. The world-building feels seamless and deep in a way I feel Okorafor often manages, creating a real sense that the settings exist both before and after the characters wander through. Other characters seem to be having their own adventures; we just happen to be watching this one.

The novel suffers from a rushed ending. The plot is foreshadowed for a long time, then suddenly turns up, and all of a sudden everyone’s rushing to finish things, and then the book is over in a way that feels unsatisfying. There’s no time for the danger to build, no time for complexities and reversals. The bulk of the book is about the journey of learning magic, and it’s rich and wonderful. The adventure feels tacked on. It’s not that it couldn’t have been an interesting adventure; the premises were interesting; but the structural issues caused it to pale in comparison with the beginning of the book.

ALL MEN OF GENIUS by Lev Ac Rosen

Violet Adams wants to attend college so that she can create mechanical and magical wonders, but the best colleges only accept men. Assuming her brother’s identity so that she can apply, Violet sneaks into a men’s-only school, knowing that if her deception is discovered, she’ll be sent to prison.

As an educated reader would guess, a book featuring a cis-woman living as a man is going to be full of mistaken identities, farcical situations, and puzzled lovers. All Men of Genius includes all that stuff, and it’s fine. It’s often fun.

But the real joy here is the description of the mechanical and magical wonders being made at the university. They. Are. So. Cool. I enjoyed the plot and the characters, but I probably would have still read the book if it had been nothing but a list of awesome experiments the characters were doing.

Don’t get me wrong—the book is good on other stuff, too. Fun historical details. Characters you can get behind, including the main character and her brother, but most especially an unexpectedly rich secondary character, Miriam.

There are some pacing problems—it’s clear about midway that all the characters are going to get along famously once the secrets are revealed, but the adventure plotline hasn’t really begun by that point, so there’s a large chunk of text that doesn’t have much drive behind it. When the adventure clicks into high gear, it doesn’t have much time to develop, so it doesn’t feel as realistic as it might; the villain’s motivations come across as thin. And the last attempts to wring suspense from “will they or won’t they?” read like the paper tiger’s pacing the cage; not only is it clear to the reader what’s going to happen, but it feels like it must be clear to the characters, too.

Anyway, all that’s true, but the major point here is: AWESOME SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS.

Also, a really funny sequence with a bunny.

ANNA DRESSED IN BLOOD by Kendare Blake (recommended)

Ghost-hunter Cas travels the country chasing ghost stories. When he finds the ghosts, he exorcises them with his magic knife. He’s never had a problem until he encounters Anna (dressed in blood), a powerful and violent ghost whose strangeness draws Cas to investigate before he kills.

I don’t know if this is the year of awesome ghosts or if ghosts are always awesome or what, but this book featured some awesome ghosts. The awesomest of all is Anna (dressed in blood) who steals the book and runs away with it. The imagery describing her is amazing, from her physical presence to the chilling murders she commits, her character is compelling, and the best part of the book is the resolution of her plotline. Cas himself is a somewhat generic protagonist, a not-so-interesting guy in an interesting situation, but some of the other characters also stand out, such as Cas’s awkward, spell-casting friend. The tightly wound plot unspools suspensefully… until the very end when some things resolve too quickly and fail to meet the “inevitable” part of “inevitable and surprising.”

One thing that I’ve discovered in this reading ‘bout is that almost all adventure novels veer off at the end this way; it seems like it’s hard to toss all those balls in the air, keep them flying, and then successfully catch them all without letting one slip.

ANYA’S GHOST by Vera Brosgol (recommended)

This graphic novel depicts the story of Anya, an unpopular and resentful high school student, who’s out walking one day when she falls into a hole—and not just any hole, but one inhabited by a skeleton, which in turn is inhabited by the ghost of a sad girl with a puff of hair like a dandelion. The ghost sneaks a piece of her skeleton into Anya’s bag so that when Anya is rescued, the ghost can follow.

The art here is fun, sometimes funny, and intuitive to follow, even for people who don’t spend much time reading graphic novels. Anya’s grumpy, awkward, angsty adolescence is easy to identify with; she’s not always likeable, but she’s hard-headed and determined and interesting. The central mystery kept me turning pages, but unfortunately, the book didn’t quite manage to execute its leap into horror, leaving the ending a bit pallid and expected.

BETWEEN THE SEA AND SKY by Jacqueline Dolamore

Mermaids can turn into humans, but only if they’re willing to endure the shooting pain of each step. After her sister is kidnapped, Esmerine braves the pain and enters the harbor city in search of her. She understands little of the human culture around her, but luckily she runs into a childhood friend: a young, bookish man with bat wings, native to the sky as she is to the sea.

The plot of this novel was a little weird for me in places. For instance, some of the conceits about sirens vs mermaids seemed unnecessarily complicated. The book also draws from what I assume is the mythology about selkies, saying that if a mermaid in human form gives up her magic belt (equivalent to a seal skin?) to a man, she’s freed from the pain of walking, but loses her ability to transform back into a mermaid. The abhorrence of giving up the ability to return to one’s natural form is central to the way the plot unfolds, but it doesn’t entirely make sense—the man seems to be able to return the belt, which would seem to mean that the mermaids can zip back into the ocean, then return to the land whenever they want. Or rather, whenever they can get the men to cooperate. I can see how that would be a problem—many mermaids are kidnapped, and even if they’re not, is it really a good idea to trust the fundamentals of one’s freedom to someone else?—but it doesn’t seem like it’s an *impossible* arrangement, the way the book seems to treat it.

For me, the pleasure in this book came in its quieter moments, when the characters had time to sit and talk. There’s a long sequence in a bookstore which doesn’t entirely fit into the quest plot line (or, at any rate, seems to take a lot of the page count when it’s technically not moving the plot forward much), but it was one of my favorite parts of the novel, a kind of tactile pleasure, establishing the world the characters inhabit. Once Esmerine finds her sister, Dolamore does a delicate job of describing the awkward intimacy of their reunion as they find out they didn’t know each other nearly as well as they thought they did. I wasn’t up for the adventure on this one, but where the book is at its best, it evokes an interesting, quiet tone that feels almost like it comes from a historical novel.

--

(1) I’m doing my reviews in alphabetical order, but I haven’t finished reading absolutely everything I’m planning to. I may tack some on at the end, out of order.

(2) Consequently, please interpret “recommended” as “especially recommended.”

--

My philosophy on reviewing: I love books and I love talking about them. My goal is to support both readers and writers. It’s my hope that reviewing books and creating conversation about them is ultimately beneficial to both.

With few exceptions (and none here), I prefer to talk about books I’ve enjoyed. Please assume that if I talk about a book here, I enjoyed reading it, even if I’m criticizing the hell out of it. I’m the kind of person who could nitpick through the apocalypse and still have complaints left for the howling void.

Horned Puffins yes! Snow, no!

2012-01-16T19:11:00.000-08:00

Today is Day One of my artist's residency at Centrum. It's been a little more than a year since I was here last. But I resumed the regimen I follow when I'm here as though I'd never stopped. Last year, heavy snowfall and accumulation of snow marked my first day, and howling winds my second night. But this first day was marked by the absence of snow-- remarkably, since Seattle, which is south of Port Townsend, had snow when I left yesterday morning and was snowbound when Tom returned last night. But though snow has been and is forecast, I've seen nothing of it here. The sun at its low winter angle (does it rise as high as 20 degrees in the sky now?) lit up my cabin on and off all day and encouraged me to wear sunglasses when I went out for my daily walk on the beach. As for that walk-- there will probably not be as low a tide again during my stay here as we enjoyed today. I could have walked along the south beach all the way to town, if I'd wanted to. (Thought I'd better not press my luck with the tendon in my heel, even though my boots and walking sticks minimized the stress both standing and walking puts on it.) I wondered, as I caught my first glimpse of the water, whether I'd still be able to find ducks out there, since they almost never swim near the beach. Sure enough, sensing their presence came back to me (like riding a bicycle?), and I knew when to check out something I thought might be there but couldn't really distinguish from the sea at the distance, with the binoculars. What is it that my eyes pick up on? It's not a color, or a blob, but perhaps some subliminal thing that cues me that the waves are in some inarticulable way perturbed.

My heart leaped when I saw that again, this year, horned puffins were hanging out in Admiralty Bay. What is it with me about puffins? I took a lot of pleasure in watching eighteen beautiful graceful swans swimming in Lake Washington last month. But seeing puffins-- not beautiful at all, maybe even a bit comically grotesque-- gives me more of a charge. As they did last year, they swam in formation, back and forth, back and forth, giving an impression of avian discipline.

The rest of my day is less interesting to tell. I did some thought-provoking reading for part of the morning and then began reading/line-editing the ms of the novel I intend to finish before leaving here. I was a bit wary when I turned to page one of the ms. I always am, when I pick up something I haven't worked on for a long time. Often such work will read to me as though it had been written by a stranger, though this is more likely to be the case if it's been published (as though my unconscious mind never lets go until a piece of writing is beyond my power to revise). This morning I found that although I had a certain distance from the words on the page (leading me to line-edit them as though they had been written by an Aqueduct author), my mind nevertheless clicked into a certain kind of memory I'm certain all writers must have of the many layers of moments that go into any given sentence or paragraph of a text. It's almost like a body memory. That's perhaps not so off-the-wall, given that what happens as we write is a highly complicated physical process that includes but is not limited to the organ of the brain. It involves not just what our hand or hands are doing during the process, but pulse, blood pressure, breath, hormonal surges, even, perhaps, our very metabolism.

As for my "thought-provoking" reading-- at 8:30 this morning I opened one of the books I'd brought with me-- Jacques Ranciere's The Politics of Aesthetics-- and began with the translator's Preface, subtitled "The Reconfiguration of Meaning." (Yeah, I always read front and backmatter: you never know what gems you might find in the proper margins of the main text.) In his Preface, translator Gabriel Rockhill discusses a subject Ranciere has been working away at for some time. I talked about one aspect of the subject, the aspect I call the problem of intelligibility, in my WisCon 32 GoH speech. I'm also intensely interested in another aspect of the subject (which I wrote about in my essay "Old Pictures: the Discursive Instability of Feminist SF"), discursive instability. Rockhill introduces the subject by way of talking about translation in general as well as his translation of Ranciere's text in particular.

"Translation," he writes, "is not simply a form of mediation between two distinct languages. It is a relational reconfiguration of meaning via a logic of signification that is rendered possible by a socio-historical situaiton. This process can, in fact, take place within a single language, which does not however mean that understanding itself is an act of translation or that we are condemned to endlessly paraphrasing our original ideas. An alternate logic of signification can actually use the same words to mean something entirely different because it determines the very structure of meaning, the horizon of what is qualified as language, the modus operandi of words and sentences, the entire network that defines the process of signification."

It was in "Old Pictures" that I talked about how meanings and connotation of certain words and phrases can shift significantly over a period of decades. Lately I've been thinking a lot about just how radical a shift I can see in my own "logic of signification," as Rockhill (and Ranciere) puts it, from, say, the 1970s through today. It's the "horizon" Rockhill gestures to in that passage that is what each of us who write are perhaps most concerned with. Most of the time we aren't as acutely conscious of our "logic of signification" as we are of that horizon.

Over the last year I've had occasion to read numerous letters (I wrote many and many) and journals from the 1980s, and have been increasingly becoming conscious of feeling as though I need, in a sense, to translate them to the self that I am today-- and of suspecting that much that they are saying is now, crazy as this may sound, unintelligible to me. Would it be possible for me, with effort, to reacquire meanings that now elude me? More interesting for me, perhaps, is another question that's occurred to me because of this shocking gap (that person who wrote all those words, after all, was in a sense-- certainly in legal terms-- me): can any historian read documents produced even a generation or two before and ever fully, richly, understand them as they would have been understood at the time of production?

It's probably not surprising that I'm already finding some of these concerns running through my novel in progress.

Now it's time to go back to my cabin make a vegeatble soup with lots of garlic, ginger, and red pepper. I'm ravenous, and the building I'm visiting to use its wifi is frigid. (My fingers and nose are frozen!)

Recognizing Gabe

2012-01-16T18:52:00.000-08:00

Alberto Yanez, who was my student at Clarion West last summer, has just been published by Strange Horizons. Recognizing Gabe: un cuento de hadas is a Trans coming of age story with enormous heart. Alberto wrote it for my week at Clarion, and I just loved it and urged him to send it out as soon as possible. Strange Horizons was at the top of the list I gave him for likely venues. I'm tickled pink to see that it was, in fact, a perfect fit.

I recommend the story highly.

Reflections on ASA 2011

2012-01-15T12:50:00.000-08:00

The tenth of a series on the 2011 convention of the American Studies Association. Here's Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine.

The 2011 convention of the American Studies Association, as I experienced it, was full of tantalizingly interrelated work on such topics as oppression, disability, race, and resistance. The issue of black female agency, for example, that would be celebrated most overtly by Jean-Charles was first raised in Ahad’s Tan Confessions piece, as was the question — faced by Johnson in founding and publishing Tan Confessions — of how you can repress a thing when you have to name, read about, and discuss what you’re trying to repress (much in the mode of Delany’s Aunt Laura).* Indeed, that dialectical dilemma is part of what informs Baldwin’s concern that you’ll let your fight with the oppressor define you — that you’ll be constrained by your enmities. Such a problem appears in the binary thinking that Thomas finds in depictions of the sissy. It’s that context that highlights the significance of how, in John Charles’s words, “black authors showed that they could say other things.”**

Stringer’s remarks on the “pulp clichés that are central to Wright’s work” and how the liberal critics of the Fifties ignored those features of U.S. culture put me in mind of Baldwin’s rather intense disavowal of not only protest fiction and Popular Front literature but hard-boiled fiction. And how ironic that disavowal is, in the light of such statements as Baldwin’s

In the truly awesome attempt of the American to at once preserve his innocence and arrive at a man’s estate, that monster, the tough guy, has been created and perfected; whose masculinity is found in the most infantile and elementary externals and whose attitude toward women is the wedding of the most abysmal romanticism and the most implacable distrust

, which actually articulates the very critique of masculinity that noir fiction frequently engaged in. Moreover, Jernigan credits Another Country with using low-affect hard-boiled prose, manifesting unease with the disciplinary and judgmental, and lauding “the eternal heterogeneity of the self” — all features of Fifties noir fiction, many at odds with the uses to which the Fifties U.S. and some of its literary novelists put existentialist thought. There’s also something very noir in Tuhkanen’s account of the role fascination with the grotesque other plays in Baldwin — such fascination, as Kristeva describes it in the opening pages of Powers of Horror, is central, for example, to Highsmith’s fiction.

I asked Thomas after his panel about the history of the black sissy, particularly in black art rather than in black characters created by the likes of Kushner, and he acknowledged that it was too complicated a thing even to start discussing. Then I learned from Godfrey about the use to which Wright put the sissy and, more disappointingly, the importance in Baldwin of masculinity (and the silencing of Ida in the course of Vivaldo’s awakening) as well as more general suppression of female and feminine voices, which makes the agenda of black feminist criticism all the more urgent.

I got a lot out of the citations on the Affect panel, particularly Tongson’s, and of the documentation of activism and analysis of domination that McRuer always excels at: I think McRuer is one of those social commentators who brings a thorough understanding of history and resistance to his critique of how the powerful abuse and vitiate the ideal of “diversity.” I wasn’t sure how to take some of the more grandiose claims I heard from some of the other panelists to the effect that the Affective Turn was creating a powerful ethics and challenging the presumption of the subject and undoing human mastery – they resonated a little too much with the ASA trope of “With these radical analyses of Dickinson, we can begin to form a new intersubjectivity that resists the neoliberal imperatives of our age and, hopefully, go on to smash the state.” So it was generally refreshing to hear concrete discussion on the Black Feminist Criticism panel that located agency, offered genealogies and biographical content for scholars’ affective investments, and spelled out models of praxis such as Koritha Mitchell’s. duCille’s worry about atomization/isolation and her concern that we’d come a lot farther on paper than we have in the outside world were both necessary as a matter of keeping it real and useful inasmuch as some of the other panelists helped mitigate those anxieties. The panel managed to address representation without treating bad representations as the foundational injustice of society – in the process, like Harry Thomas, it sought to recover disenfranchised populations from the lies that circulate about them – “to correct the narrative on behalf of the most vulnerable.”

DeLoughrey, Franklin, and Martini on the Environment panel addressed a different set of midcentury erasures than the denial of black female agency. Franklin and DeLoughrey in particular raised issues of great relevance to medical and disability issues, not only in discussing the teratogenic war machine but in addressing how the scientific establishment is basically brought up to find criticisms of its hegemony unintelligible, much as the medical and bioethics establishments are selected and trained to resist the perspectives of the vulnerable and the disabled. Hence Nelson and Bliss on the Race, Health, and Justice panel were in a sense recounting the sequels to these midcentury horrors — Bliss with her disconcerting account of how the establishment refunctions liberatory language to fit its agenda of benignant imperialism, and Nelson with her indispensable history of one organization’s resistance to biological victimization. Greene’s story of neoliberal incursion into formerly public facilities also included an account of the self-reinforcing and victim-blaming nature of racist rhetoric, an issue that McRuer and Abdur-Rahman had raised. I think Nelson’s distinguishing the BPP agenda from the disability movement’s goals could be the start of a fruitful discussion: recall that she said the Party framed its goals in terms of protection rather than access. Now, we know from Katherine Henry’s Liberalism and the Culture of Security that there are pitfalls to the rhetoric of protection (heck, we know that from Sojourner Truth); but we know just as well, thanks to work in the queer and disability fields, that “access” is susceptible to the same kind of co-optation as “diversity”: Melanie Yergeau remarked on Margaret Price’s brilliant Access Panel at MLA 2012,

the aim of access, much like the whole of behavioral therapy, is to make disabled people “indistinguishable from their peers” (Alyric, 2008). We live in a world that conflates disability with undesirability. It is more convenient that we cease being disabled than it is for the world to become more inclusive of disabled people.

Reconfiguring interviewing practices, or dismantling ableist approaches to classroom management, or reinventing workplace events—these are not undertakings that happen in the name of access. Rather, what’s happening in the name of access is this: reconfiguring disabled people, dismantling their ways of being and knowing, and reinventing them, as best we can, into normate clones.

So I wondered, what about Nancy Hirschmann’s suggestion that we frame disability issues, for example, with the rhetoric of “freedom”?

The disability panel, and my conversation after the panel with the Smithsonian’s historian of medicine, Katherine Ott, engaged with issues that had appeared in the talks of Franklin, DeLoughrey, Bliss, duCille, and Jernigan. Burch’s central question of how we apply this knowledge we’ve accumulated, and the whole panel’s concern with disseminating knowledge and spreading a liberatory perspective in hard times, echoed the worries of duCille and the interests of others on the Black Feminist Criticism panel. The attention that Burch and that one auditor gave to acquired disability resonated, of course, with the whole Environment panel as well as with the work on war and disability that scholars have done in the wake of Henri-Jacques Stiker – the issue of refugees and the topic of global disability were also themes that McRuer works hard at addressing. The complementary questions from the audience of “Where do I see people like me represented?” and “Are we too invested in the identity of the scholar and in self-disclosure?” recalled to me the whole question of what to do with the self in one’s liberatory agenda, an issue raised by Tukhanen (who invoked Bersani’s denunciation of the self) and Jernigan (in his celebration of Baldwin). My conversation with Ott, which was somewhat inspired by Nelson’s work, addressed the issue of how and whether these innovations could show up in medical education. At present, the history of medicine is generally taught in universities as a series of forgivable mistakes leading up to our glorious present day; and medical students are socialized into a mindset that can be inimical to, say, disability movement values.*** Innovations such as “Narrative Medicine” get co-opted in the sort of way Bliss and McRuer describe liberatory rhetoric being abused. But a number of scholars believe in working to change that situation, no matter how slim the odds seem to be.

Breu’s talk on the Thanatopolitics panel shared Sean Greene’s interest in Shock Doctrine politics coming home to roost. The “material turn” that Breu’s interested in did not seem to be about rocks or relations with the inanimate – indeed, I thought it might overlap with disability theory issues such as Anne Finger’s resistance to metaphor or Tobin Siebers’s New Realism of the Body. I recommended (as I often do to literary scholars interested in critiques of neoliberalism) that Breu take a look at McRuer. It also related to the abjected peoples whom DeLoughrey talks about. In general, the members and auditors of the Thanatopolitics panel did a good job of combining history, theory, literature, and an account of social justice without claiming the ability to transcend the subject (on the one hand) or reinscribing exclusionary discourses (on the other). Now, one exclusionary discourse that I’ve learned something about is what counts as legitimate for literary study: given time, I think I could have offered Kevin Floyd some suggestions as to why Delany’s novella has received so little attention in quarters where it deserves notice.

I am grateful to everyone named above for what I learned at ASA 2001.
__________
* This dilemma is related to the point I addressed in my review of Larbalestier's Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction: "science fiction foregrounds its engagement with 'the discourses of knowledge' to a greater extent than other kinds of fiction. Science fiction stories, and discussions thereof, spell out their claims about the nature of the universe and its inhabitants: therein, principles of ethics, science, ontology, and history are presented and contested, not tacitly assumed. Hence even the most reactionary affirmation of traditional gender roles in the genre's earliest years acknowledged the idea of nontraditional gender relations, by virtue of naming what it sought to exclude: 'these texts offer the possibility . . . of being something other than a proper man or woman, and thus they problematize the notion of a true sex' (13). Misogynistic science fiction stories, and those of feminists manqués, participate energetically in their own deconstruction."
** In the classroom, I have occasionally faced the task of persuading a white reader that one could interpret a black author to be doing something other than expressing resentment over racial oppression.
*** One scholar frustratedly says, "These people arrive on campus in their Lexuses and raise their hands with Rolex watches on them and say their practices can't afford to pay for sign language interpreters when deaf patients need them" — that is, they're taught very early never to relinquish their anxiety about money.

FOGCON: Literary, Feminist-Friendly Science Fiction Convention in San Francisco, March 30-April 1

2012-01-14T15:54:00.000-08:00

Here's the official lowdown:

Friends of the Genre (FOGcon) is a literary-themed San Francisco Bay Area SF/F con in the tradition of Wiscon and Readercon. This year our theme is "The Body", and we've two wonderful Honored Guests, writer Nalo Hopkinson and writer and artist Shelley Jackson. We will be building community, exchanging ideas, and sharing our love for the literature of imagination. FOGcon takes place from March 30-April 1, 2012. Visit fogcon.org for more information.

I enjoyed this con when I went last year. It fulfilled my number one convention prerequisite--lots of cool people to hang out with, which consequently leads to lots of fun conversations. The concom also did a great job with their programming track--not just interesting ideas, but also really intelligently assembled panels, which again, meant fun conversations.

Plus, Nalo Hopkinson. NALO HOPKINSON.*

Check out their website.

----

*(If you haven't read her, go read her!)

There's still time to submit programming ideas for WisCon 36

2012-01-13T14:40:00.000-08:00

The WisCon blog notes:

Have you been brainstorming ideas with friends, or trying to come up with the perfect panel description? You have 20 more days before the WisCon programming idea submission page closes on January 28, 2012!

Have you read something inspiring recently? Are you excited to discuss a new topic at WisCon that we've overlooked in the past? We love to receive programming ideas of all kinds! Your ideas don't need to be complete or fully formed; the programming team can work with whatever you submit. Just go to http://wiscon.piglet.org/idea and tell us what kind of programming you'd like to see at WisCon 36.

The Third Issue of the Cascadia Subduction Zone now available for free download

2012-01-09T15:13:00.000-08:00

Caught up in the madness of our 2011 Pleasures series, I forgot to post this earlier: the third issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone is now available for free download, here.

Here's the issue's table of contents:

Vol. 1 No. 3 — July 2011

Feature Essay: Can Science Fiction Change the World? by Kristin King
Poems: Where Are You? by Mary Merriam; Three Lessons by Shweta Narayan
Grandmother Magma: Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison An Appreciation by Gwyneth Jones

Reviews: Fairy Tales in Electri-City by Francesca Lia Block reviewed by Maria I. Velazquez; Isles of the Forsaken by Carolyn Ives Gilman reviewed by Nic Clarke; This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan reviewed by Deb Taber; Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston reviewed by Maria I. Velazquez; Up Against It by M.J. Locke reviewed by Karen Burnham; Paradise Tales by Geoff Ryman reviewed by Victoria Garcia; Blackberries and Redbones edited by Regina Spellers and Kimberly Moffitt reviewed by Tanya C. DePass; Thief of Lives by Lucy Sussex reviewed by Cynthia Ward
Featured Artist: Mr Mead

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 22: Liz Henry

2011-12-31T14:32:00.000-08:00

This year I was very happy at the mind-expanding, complicated, beautiful books that came my way. All my reading, viewing, and listening was enhanced greatly by looking things up in Wikipedia (and sometimes editing Wikipedia to correct information or add articles on people not listed.)

Speculative Fiction
===================

Redwood & Wildfire by Andrea Hairston. Gorgeous and complicated story. I loved the way the Chicago World's Fair (and time travel) was woven into the story, and everything about Redwood's perception of the world, her path from the rural South to Chicago, her friendship with Wildfire, and the way she lived her life in general. The novel also kind of pieced together some of my other readings in African American history and autobiography so I felt that stories only implied in other books got told (and told beautifully). I love Hairston's writing especially for revealing complicated imaginary things that feel like true things.

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor. A story of a young woman named Onyesonwu and her friends, in a far-future post-apocalpytic (and magical) Saharan Africa. It's hard to write about my responses to this book but I highly recommend it. It was an amazing exploration of what a feminist hero-tale can be.

The Highest Frontier by Joan Slonczewski. Hilarious and fun bio-punk science fiction, set on a space station at an elite university. Ubiquitous Internet in your head, 3D printers everywhere, complicated futuristic disabilities, and very interesting politics!

Cold Magic and Cold Fire by Kate Elliott. Fabulous fantasy in an alternate history that feels sort of early-industrial-revolution steampunk, with a blend of West African and Celtic cultures dominating Europe, and the Taino and some lawyerly feathered dinosaurs in North and Central America. I loved how the story started as a girls-in-school novel and then twisted and exploded several times to shatter all my expectations.

This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan. I keep saying that this sf novel is like Woman on the Edge of Time but in reverse. It's in a timeline that is just a little bit "better" than ours and there are some very interesting women hopping timelines, going crazy, figuring out their own family histories and coming to grips with utopianism in general.

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic. Past Tiptree winner, and well worth a read!

Among Others by Jo Walton. Do I even need to say anything? This book was awesome! Especially if you grew up loving books and SF.

Eon and Eona by Alison Goodman. Another book about dragons! Complicated gender politics! Trashy and fun.

The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman. A pre-teen girl goes back in time and experiences slavery first hand. This book reminded me strongly of another excellent time-travel book, A Girl Called Boy by Belinda Hurmence. I recommend them both!

The Warriors series by Erin Hunter. I read a lot of this mega-series about tribal tabby cats who live in a forest, because my son was reading them. The writing made me cringe but I came to appreciate the dramatastic story lines and angsty, meowing characters. It is notable for having decent gender politics for a fantasy series. Female and male cats can be in all the available societal roles, but the female cats do worry about pregnancy and motherhood affecting their careers.

Moxyland and Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. Two candy-like sf novels set in futuristic South Africa. They're sort of cyber-punky.

For the Win and Makers by Cory Doctorow. Very cool and political explorations of Internet gaming and 3D printing technology.

History, biography, nonfiction
==============================

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle L. McGuire. This book is so crucial! I felt very grateful to McGuire for bringing all this history together around a coherent theme of black women's political activism in the U.S. over the entire 20th century -- centered around anti-rape activism.

The Revolution Will be Digitised by Heather Brooke. Brooke goes through her personal stories of encounters with Wikileaks folks, outlines the history of Wikileaks in general, and then winds up with a final chapter, best part of the book, that is a fierce political rant about freedom of information, the Internet, political resistance, and revolution.

Hands on the Freedom Plough: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. Fifty-two different women involved with the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. tell their stories of political activism.

A Pattern Language. This enormous doorstop of a book put together dozens of architectural and city planning concepts in a hypertext-like structure which became an inspiration to software engineers in their creations of patterns and anti-patterns. It's very lovely!

4D Timelock by Buckminster Fuller. A very strange manifesto from 1928 about modular houses, blimps, city planning, and The Future! published by Fuller as a mimeographed zine. My edition is reprinted with many letters from and to Fuller. Bizarre and fascinating!

Army Life in a Black Regiment and Black Rebellion: Five Slave Revolts by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Higginson was a white Union officer who led the first black regiment in the Civil War. He was an abolitionist, can be deeply racist in his writing, but is interesting and chronicled some things I hadn't read about elsewhere. These books are free for Kindle on Amazon and you can also get them from Project Gutenberg.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird. Another free book. I read several of Bird's travel books and enjoyed them all, especially this one and the one where she goes to Hawaii.

Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart. Stewart tells the story of going west from Denver to stake out a homestead. She gets married but does all the work on her own claim, separately. It is especially awesome how she hops on a horse with her 6 year old kid and camps out on the mountain with a shotgun, in the snow. She has skills!

White on Black by Ruben Gallego. Fiery and angry memoir of vignettes from Gallego, who grew up in an institution for disabled kids in Russia. He survived, unlike nearly everyone else in the book. I highly recommend this book to people with disabilities and others who want a bit of consciousness raising. It is beautifully and poetically written.

A Great Place for a Seizure by Terry Tracy. Oddly this biographical fiction goes well with This Shared Dream and Among Others. It has a haunting feel of being speculative fiction, though it isn't. It's the story of a young woman's life and how she organizes the narrative of her life internally around the experiences of her seizures. I really loved the end...

Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness, and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier by Suelette Dreyfus. An excellent book about hackers and hacking, much better than most.

Poetry

I Made My Boy Out of Poetry by Aberjhani. My friend Nordette, a poet and political blogger from Whose Shoes Are These, Anyway introduced me to Aberjhani's work and it's all well worth reading. In this book I best loved "Portrait of my Heart that is a Nation".

Bug Death by F.A. Nettelbeck. Brilliant, weird poetry by my friend Fred, who died this year.

Amelia Earhart by Maureen Owen. Not new to me, but still one of my favorites for its controlled flight through imaginary and historical space.

Games

I played a lot of Oolite (a ported and expanded version of Elite) this spring and really enjoyed its simple (retro) beauty, especially the meditative quality of flight and then the gorgeous and tense docking maneuvers.

I also showed Zork to my 11 year old son who enjoyed trying to map the world and the weird feeling of being in a place mediated by only text. The inconsistencies of the mapping frustrated him a bit so I'm thinking of starting him again on Zork II or the Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure.

I continue playing a simple game on my phone called Drop7, which is Tetris-like but with numbers and interesting strategy. It's very soothing! You can get it on Android and iPhones.

On the iPad, I played all the way through Peggle, which is just strategic enough to be fun without requiring much mental effort. When you win a level, Ode to Joy starts playing with fireworks and rainbows and sparkles, one of the funniest expressions of or commentary on the minor rewards of video games I've ever seen.

Music

Here, have a fantastic music blog with easy downloads of rare West African records from the 50s, 60s, and 70s! http://orogod.blogspot.com/

I also enjoyed Ana Tijoux, Tullycraft, listening to all of Poly Styrene and the X-Ray Spex, and all of Betty Davis's albums of awesome funk. They Say I'm Different is one of the best albums ever!

Watching things

I watched Frozen Planet, some of Life on Mars, some of Portlandia, and a hell of short clips on YouTube.

* Have some Best of Maru compilations! Maru is the cutest cat ever!

* Pumped Up Kids|Dubstep by RemoteKontrol is an extremely beautiful dance video to the point where you may wonder if you're hallucinating, as the dancer goes through movements recalling fast-forward, slow motion, digital animation, and breakdancing/hip hop moves.

* The little sith girl video in which an 8 year old girl instead of following the obvious script to reject Darth Vader, accepts his offer to join the Dark Side and bows at his feet on stage. Interview at Meet the Little Sith Girl: Sariah Gallego! in which Sariah explains she is tougher than Vader and has a plan to learn all his secrets and then kill him so she can become the most powerful person in the Universe.

* I really enjoyed comedian krissychula's Banana Song which basically blows Dana Carvey's "Choppin' Broccoli" out of the water by going through 4 minutes of stereotypes of African American women's musical performance styles.

* New Moon Wolf Pack Auditions made fun of film casting, the Twilight franchise, and Hollywood stereotypes of Native Americans.

* PonPonPon is a very odd mindblowing music video.

* A teenage rapper in L.A. performs her song Vagina Ain't Handicapped. (NSFW and contains much offensive language)

* If you are wondering what's up with the bronies, this My Little Pony Physics Presentation might shed some light.

* And finally, Martin Solveig featuring Dragonette made me laugh very hard in this 80s-tastic music video, Boys & Girls.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 21: Cat Rambo

2011-12-29T23:14:00.000-08:00

Best of 2011
by Cat Rambo

2011 was a rich year for speculative fiction for me. Like most of my friends, I was eagerly awaiting both the HBO version of Game of Thrones and the latest installment in George R.R. Martin’s series, Dance With Dragons. I enjoyed them both (and discovered a subplot in GoT that I’d apparently missed in the book), but wish DwD had had more to it. There are characters I’m dying to see again who are tucked away in what’s still to be written, apparently. Speaking of other big fat fantasy books, Pat Rothfuss’s The Wise Man’s Fear, sequel to The Name of the Wind, finally appeared and was close to the quality of the first one, though I’m not sure about that section in another dimension. I also loved Sam Sykes' Tome of the Undergates and Black Halo, which were everything modern day sword and sorcery should be and never hit a sour note.

I love spec fic that thinks about gender roles, and was lucky enough to get an advance read of Kelly Jenning’s Broken Slate from Crossed Genres Press this year, a far future story of a male slave which explores power and class dynamics. 2011 was a great year to find GLBT characters and two joined my list of all-time favorites. One, a transgendered courtesan, appears in Amanda Downum’s The Drowning City and The Bone Palace. Downum’s writing reminds me of what I like about authors like Martha Wells and P.C. Hodgell - vivid and interesting, beautifully drawn worlds, including cities that feel drawn with the obsessive eye of a DM, down to the last street. The other character, Chess Pargeter, comes from Gemma Files’ Hexslinger series, so far consisting of A Book of Tongues and A Rope of Thorns, which is a wow of a fantasy western world.

I also got an advance read of Elwin Cotman’s The Jack Daniel Sessions EP. I loved these stories, both Cotman’s more contemporary pieces as well as the ones that go back and take looks at more traditional pieces, both celebrating and making new things of them. In blurbing the book, I said, “In The Jack Daniels Sessions, folktales and modern landscapes collide, exploding and reforming in the form of an intriguing and intelligent collection. Cotman seizes the stories of tired tradition and galvanizes them, setting them to dance for us in wonderful, new interpretations.”

More traditional fare appeared in the form of Galen Beckett’s The Magicians and Mrs Quent and its sequel The House on Durrow Street. While the books have a definite Jane Eyre vibe, they’ve also got a world of odd time cycles and magical possibilities that is intriguingly, sparsely explained. Of the various steampunk books, I particularly enjoyed Lavie Tidhar’s The Bookman, The Doomsday Vault by Steven Harper and Cassandra Clare’s YA Clockwork Angel. I read a lot of urban fantasy, and found books that I liked this year included a fine romp titled Under Attack by Hannah Jayne, everything I found by Kate Griffin (The Midnight Mayor, A Madness of Angels, and The Neon Court), and the latest in Kim Harrison’s Hollows series as well as Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim series. I was delighted to find that Tim Pratt has released a number of Marla Mason pieces on his own in e-book form, since she’s one of my favorite modern-day magic wielders.

This summer, Minister Faust read from The Alchemists of Kush and I was lucky enough to have him read the section I’d just finished. The book’s terrific, and Faust is an amazing reader. Clarion West brought him along with a slew of other instructors, and my other favorite was Margo Lanagan, who apparently I’d managed to miss until that point. Holy moly was she a good reader! Plus such a lovely voice. I bought Tender Morsels immediately.

I read a LOT of stories in 2011 and should have tracked them better. Several that stood out were: Charlie Jane Anders’ Six Months, Three Days (http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/06/six-months-three-days); Nancy Fulda’s “Movement”, Genevieve Valentine’s “Demons, Your Body, and You”
http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/summer-2011/fiction-demons-your-body-and-you-by-genevieve-valentine/ (which appeared in the terrific Subterranean Press Summer 2011 issue edited by Gwenda Bond - http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/summer-2011/introduction-by-gwenda-bond/); Lily Yu’s “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” (http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/yu_04_11/)

I was sorry to see spec fic magazine Crossed Genres go, but I’ve been enjoying the success of Daily Science Fiction, which is really publishing some strong stuff. Beneath Ceaseless Skies also continues to knock it out of the ball park on occasion. 2011 also saw Realms of Fantasy go under for the third and final time, as well as the announcement of Fantasy Magazine and Lightspeed’s new owner John Joseph Adams and his plans to merge the magazines, which looks like it will continue to publish some great stuff (disclaimer: every magazine mentioned has published my work, so I am biased.)

2011 started with a strong movie, The King’s Speech, and also held several superhero movies that were big and silly and full of spectacle: Thor, Green Lantern, and X-Men: First Class. But my favorite of the year was Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which had some problematic aspects, but crafted the lead up to the final battle so well that you rooted so solidly and satisfactorily for the apes that I’d go see it again, anytime. TV was the usual crap (and I happily watch that as much as anyone, but I refuse to celebrate it) but I did really, really enjoy the BBC modern Holmes series, Sherlock, which celebrates and updates the traditions of the series in a loving, meticulous way and which any Holmes fan will adore.

Game-wise, there was nothing more outstanding than Skyrim, which looks to carry me into 2012 as well. I’d been very hopeful about the new Civ release, but in looking at it, I felt like they’d taken away the parts I liked the best and dumbed down the rest. World of Warcraft certainly took its share of time, but it’s grown less appealing somehow, perhaps because the gender stuff in Skyrim is a little less...I dunno, full of ass-slapping succubi. Go figure.

Cat Rambo writes and teaches in the Pacific Northwest in the wilds of Redmond. Her collection Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight was a 2010 Endeavour Award finalist, and her work has appeared such places as Asimov's, Tor.com, and Weird Tales. Her website can be found at http://www.kittywumpus.net

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 20: Kate Schaefer

2011-12-29T13:06:00.000-08:00

Books and Television I Enjoyed in 2011
by Kate Schaefer

Books I particularly enjoyed in 2011:

Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing - re-read in grief after Joanna’s death, in fierce joy at her words. I’m grateful to get mad all over again as she reminds me of all the ingenious ways in which women’s writing is suppressed, minimized, and forgotten. I’ll always remember her writing, as long as always lasts for me.

Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels - read for the first time just before Margo taught at Clarion West, shared with a granddaughter who wants happy endings for everyone, even for the bad guys. Sometimes especially for the bad guys; she feels sorry for them and wants them to be redeemed. I know more things happened to those people after the book ended, she said.

Ysabeau Wilce, Flora Segunda and Flora’s Dare - re-read, and again shared with that granddaughter, who was indignant that the third volume isn’t out yet.

Paul Park, Soldiers of Paradise, Sugar Rain, The Cult of Loving Kindness, A Princess of Roumania, The Tourmaline, The White Tyger, The Hidden World - much of this Park orgy was re-reading, but I hadn’t ever finished the Roumania quadratic equation before this summer. Damn, that man writes good.

Cat Rambo, Eyes Like Smoke and Coal and Moonlight- collected short stories; I’ve been a sucker for Cat’s stories since the first time I read “The Dead Girl’s Wedding March.” I’m a sucker for her titles, too.

Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, Writing the Other - another re-read. I’m not writing the other, myself, but I’m constantly reading the other. This little book has much useful info packed into it.

Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tides, Vacuum Flowers, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, The Dragons of Babel - all re-reading except The Dragons of Babel, which I’d been saving until the ink didn’t smell so new. The two older books made me so happy that I wrote Michael a fan letter thanking him for writing them. We should all thank authors we like from time to time; it encourages them even more than buying their books.

N. K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - the newest book I read all year; I look forward to reading lots more of Nora’s work.

Television I enjoyed in 2011:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Joanna Russ used to say, If you don’t watch television, you’re out of touch with popular culture, and you don’t understand the society you live in. She was shocked and appalled that I didn’t have a television; she scorned my intellectual snobbery toward TV. In later years, I was taken aback that she was a rabid fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now that I have a television and am watching old shows via DVDs borrowed from the library, I know what she was on about. Buffy is brilliantly written and well worth watching, though I’m still only partway through the first season. All of you people who are in better touch with popular culture, you can scorn me now.

Xam’d: Lost Memories – one of the best anime series I’ve ever watched; well-written, beautifully drawn and animated. The opening sequence alone is a lovely set of meanings conveyed through characters’ glances and gestures, an abbreviated ballet.

Princess Tutu – anime for small children, about a girl who is really a duck and also has a secret identity as a magical ballerina who fights evil and saves a handsome prince. It’s astonishingly good. Uses lots of classic ballet music and breaks the fourth wall to great effect. Ballet fight sequences refer to the swordfighting sequences in Revolutionary Girl Utena; those references should have gone over the heads of the intended original audience, but undoubtedly kept the show’s creators entertained.

Revolutionary Girl Utena – weirdest damn anime I’ve ever watched, and definitely not for small children. I’ve watched this series three times now, and I’m still not sure what happens in it. It’s about religion, power, manipulation, cliques, sex, abuse of all sorts, student councils, incest, cows, and the power to bring about world revolution. It has the most powerful use of repetitive, static animation I’ve ever seen, with bonus Indonesian shadow puppet characters acting as a chorus in every episode.

Kate Schaefer previously worked in a lumberyard, wrote budgets for a no-longer-extant bank, researched quotations for one of Ronald Reagan's speechwriters, wrote code that ran on mainframe computers, won awards for Latin oratory, served on the Clarion West board of directors, chaired the
Tiptree jury in 1998. Now she makes cocktail hats, lifts weights, raises money for writers, votes Democratic, remembers very little Latin and hardly any JCL.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 19: Cynthia Ward

2011-12-27T18:10:00.000-08:00

2011 in Review: Stories in the Key of E
by Cynthia Ward

In our household, 2011 is the year of the e'reader, since I received a Nook Color and my partner gained a Kindle late last year. I hadn't thought reading on an electronic device would be an easy adaptation, but our reading quickly became almost exclusively e'reading. Now I find myself wondering if I'm spending my reading time downloading free e'books and e'samples instead of, you know. Reading.

Gods and Atheists (Music, Television, and Film)

In music, the year got off to a bad start with the death of Kate McGarrigle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_McGarrigle), untimely torn from the world by cancer. I suppose she's better known nowadays as the mother of singers Martha Wainwright and Rufus Wainwright, but I first made her musical acquaintance in the early '80s, when I heard the second album (Dancer With Bruised Knees, 1977, http://www.amazon.com/Dancer-Bruised-Knees-Kate-Mcgarrigle/dp/B00000063O/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1323818655&sr=1-1) by the eclectic French-Canadian folk-rock sister duo of Kate and Anna McGarrigle. I hesitated to type "the eclectic French-Canadian folk-rock sister duo," because, if you haven't heard them, the phrase reduces them to a misleading image or soundbyte in your head, and gives no idea at all of their glory. But a trip to YouTube will fix that problem (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kate+and+anna+mcgarrigle&oq=kate+and+anna&aq=0&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=33l2163l0l4601l13l12l0l3l3l0l243l1183l5.2.2l9l0).

With television I remain 99% unacquainted. Still, I've seen the first season of the highly regarded apocalyptic series, The Walking Dead (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1v0uFms68U&ob=av3e). Meh. I wouldn't say the show operates on the low level of the idiot plot, but too many characters who ought to know better (like, oh, the trained law enforcement officers) do a lousy job of grasping the seriousness of their situation (it's the zombiepocalypse, people! look alive!). Another annoyance is that the show, initially diverse, has whittled away most of the minority characters, with the lone black woman killed off in an especially troubling manner. I can't help wondering if a big part of the show's appeal lies in finding a way to justify brutal violence ('cas surely no one's going to object if you blow the brains out of a mindless, insatiably hungry ambulatory corpse, or beat the blood out of a wife-beater).

I've probably seen most episodes of the new sitcom, 2 Broke Girls (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr3FXTioTIo), which joins the proud tradition of what a friend calls depression-era comedy (cf. Blondie and The Honeymooners, though technically the latter wouldn't qualify). I hadn't realized TV sitcoms had gotten so comfortable with vibrator references and lesbian overtones ("I never thought waking up in bed with another girl and frosting on my boobs would be this depressing"). These het girls almost manage more shared sack time than the characters of The L Word, but no doubt this teasing will lead nowhere. The show's treatment of minority characters will probably infuriate, but, like South Park, 2 Broke Girls seems to scorn everyone else, as well. Now, I suspect an actual old-money Wharton grad would not find herself in this situation, even with a Bernie Madoff clone as her dad. But the main characters have great chemistry, and there are many good lines. I don't think I'd want to find myself on the cutting edge of Max's wit.

In film, the year must have been a high-water mark for good superhero movies, judging by Captain America, Thor, and X-Men: First Class (I didn't see Green Lantern or the Green Hornet remake, however). Putting a swinging-'60s spy-fi spin on the popular Marvel Comics franchise, X-Men: First Class gains points for a gay subtext that strains so vigorously against the text, it nearly bursts the zipper (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-N2qNhAbHv14/TfBCURoe2FI/AAAAAAAAABg/_wJ6IAwW3ZI/s1600/X-Men%2BFirst%2BClass.jpg); but it loses points for racefail. Set mostly during World War II, Captain America is good, clean, dieselpunk'd fantasy fun. Meanwhile, Thor is a little less well written, but still strong. Chris Hemsworth wrung every ounce of nuance he could from a part offering little opportunity for it. And, though the Nordic type isn't usually my thing, his uber-buff portrayal of Marvel's reboot of the Scandinavian myth had this atheist thinking, "Maybe there is a god (http://www.celebuzz.com/2011-05-03/shirtless-chris-hemsworth-all-the-reason-you-need-to-see-thor-photos/)."

So we come 'round to Bill Maher's purportedly atheist movie, Religulous (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5yJ2qUyxCk), released in 2008 but not seen by our household until this week. Actually, Religulous is better described as anti-religious, which, of course, is a position the agnostic and the person of faith can also take. In his satirical approach, Maher generally picks only the low-hanging fruit. Religulous reminds me of nothing so much as those newspaper articles about science fiction conventions, in which the reporter interviews an 800-lb. fan with visible B.O. and a Spock costume (complete to surgically altered ears), then implies that everyone at a con is like this. Had Maher done more than just punch a straw man, the movie would have been a lot more interesting. And valid.

We also enjoyed Breaking Dawn: Part 1, which is the latest of the Twilight Saga movie adaptations, and the best since the first. I admit the series should make my feminist head explode, but it's such a fascinating exploration of a severely fucked-up relationship...which I would not be surprised to learn Stephenie Meyer knows, seeing as her characters are familiar with Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights. And is it just me, or does a disturbing percentage of the criticism of the Twilight Saga boil down to "She wrote it but she shouldn't have. She wrote it but look at what she wrote about. She wrote it but she isn't really an artist, and it isn't really art"?

Other movies I saw this year include: Astroboy (much better than I expected -and how did they get the movie greenlighted when they kill the main character, a little boy, in the first few minutes?); Contagion (scientifically accurate insofar as this non-scientist can tell, and therefore all the more terrifying); Presumed Innocent (a good adaptation of one of the finest suspense novels ever written); its sequel, Innocent (an okay adaptation of the Presumed Innocent sequel, which I haven't read); the True Grit remake (uneven, but young actress Hailee Steinfeld is a marvel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GkAH7IUWOE&feature=relmfu); the riveting and disturbing Let the Right One In (which might be described as a vampire film by Ingmar Bergman); a wildly incoherent yet still wondrous Hong Kong wuxia heroic fantasy movie, Dragon Inn (variant title, New Dragon Gate Inn, 1992 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVsqB22CQ2I), starring Brigitte Lin as a cross-dressing warrior woman and Maggie Cheung as an inn owner whose sidelines include killing and robbing guests and serving their artfully disguised remains to her clientele; and a pair of great Colin Firth films, A Single Man (whose ending irritates, though I suspect it's true to the Christopher Isherwood novel from which it is adapted) and The King's Speech (which made me care deeply about the titular character, when usually I find the travails of royalty to be of zero interest).

Movies I hope soon to see include Conan the Barbarian; Immortals; and the American reboot of the Swedish film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVLvMg62RPA).

We Gonna Rock Down to Electric Avenue (Fiction)

Despite all the time spent downloading, I read a fair bit (many more books than I'm going to try to discuss here). Perhaps ironically, my e'reads included a number of steampunk works: K.W. Jeter's early novel, the uneven but interesting mashup Morlocks (1979); Jeter's later and stronger alt.Victorian romp, Infernal Devices (1987); Leanna Renee Hieber's unusual The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, which might best be described as a romantic emo supergroup gaslight-fantasy novel; Lavie Tidhar's careening Camera Obscura, which folds wuxia and blaxploitation into its multi-culti League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style mashup; and Lionel Bramble's pair of delightful spy-fi steampunk adventures: "The Beast in the Machine" and 1901: A Steam Odyssey, which push both the League-style mashup and the erotic-fiction genre into strange, sometimes disturbing places -with the author having fun all the way.

I've just finished Thomas Marcinko's excellent new e'book collection, Astronauts and Heretics, which assembles several of his stories, all displaying his distinctly offkilter, sometimes acerbic, oft amusing Swift-via-Galaxy sensibilities. I'm not going to ruin your fun by describing all the stories, but "Whiter Teeth, Fresher Breath" is representative, with a science-fictional spin on the singles scene that I am sure no one else could ever have thought up.

Earlier this year, in anticipation of John Carter, the forthcoming movie adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Martian series, I read the first three novels. I was flinching in expectation of finding the first Barsoom novel, A Princess of Mars (1917), so racist, sexist, and colonialist that I'd throw it across the room, e'reader and all; but I discovered that ERB was struggling with the racial attitudes of his time (his heroic race of Martian "red men" is explicitly described as mixed race, while his white Martians are corrupt, decadent, and supremely manipulative). Ultimately, I'd say ERB lost the struggle with Edwardian attitudes, but I was encouraged enough to revisit Tarzan of the Apes, another favorite in the Golden Age of Science Fiction (i.e., when I was fourteen). It proved even more mixed in its attitudes than the Martian books, shall we say.

The first and second novels in new writer Aliette de Bodard's "Obsidian and Blood" series -Servant of the Underworld and Harbinger of the Storm -may both be characterized by my description of the first in Weird Tales: "Writing skillfully in a language not her first, [de Bodard] deftly combines a complex murder mystery that 'plays fair,' with a dark historical fantasy that is saturated in the supernatural and set in fifteenth-century Mexico." If you can handle the Aztecs' propensity for frequent sacrifice to appease their blood-thirsty gods, both books are well worth reading. I'm looking forward to the third in the series, Master of the House of Darts.

I also read Suzanne Collins's justly acclaimed novel, The Hunger Games (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAWODq_dMFI). This post-apocalyptic YA SF work can be read as a response to the Twilight Saga (Collins's female protagonist hardly sits around waiting for a man to save her); but of course there's far more going on than that. I don't think I've ever read a novel for which my teenaged self would've had such a sharply divergent reading from that of my grizzled current self (young me: escapist power-fantasy adventure a la ERB and Robert E. Howard; middle-aged me: sharply pointed, deeply sad critique of contemporary U.S. culture). I hope soon to read the trilogy's remaining books, Catching Fire and Mockingjay.

Other books I'll be reading in the near future include Leanna Renee Hieber's The Darkly Luminous Fight for Persephone Parker; Danya Ingram's Eat Your Heart Out; Janni Lee Simner's Faerie Winter; Milton Davis's anthology Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology; Amal El-Mohtar's The Honey Mouth; JoSelle Vanderhooft and Steve Berman's anthology Heiresses of Russ 2011: The Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction of the Year; Carole McDonnell's Spirit Fruit: Collected Speculative Fiction; and Nisi Shawl's second collection, Something More and More, and the nonfiction anthology she edited, The Wiscon Chronicles: Volume 5: Writing and Racial Identity.

Cynthia Ward (http://www.cynthiaward.com) lives in the Los Angeles area. Her most recent fiction may be found in Pirates and Swashbucklers (Pulp Empire), edited by Nicholas Ahlheim; Tales From the Den: Wild and Weird Stories for Bears (Bear Bones Books/Lethe Press), edited by R. Jackson; and Triangulation: Last Contact (Parsec Ink), edited by Steve Ramey and Jamie Lackey. With Nisi Shawl, Cynthia coauthored Writing the Other: A Practical Approach (Aqueduct Press), which is now available as an e'book.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 18: Kiini Ibura Salaam

2011-12-24T14:09:00.000-08:00

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011
by Kiini Ibura Salaam

I must confess, the dizzying logistics of everyday life claim dominion over so many of my overused brain cells that sometimes the pleasure zones of my brain lie fallow for far to long. And when they light up, the pleasures that triggered the brain activity are quickly forgotten, swallowed by the next days responsibilities—the household duties, the transportation necessities, the meal preparations, the workday intrigues and deadlines, the surviving.

I cannot pride myself on living well if I am only surviving—and finding pleasures is a central aspect of thriving. Even in a year that included no international travel—gasp!—I am happy to say that I did experience some pleasures that tickled my imagination, satiated my need to revel in beauty, allowed me to marvel in the endlessly inventive ways that we humans are creative, or gifted me with the opportunity to wet my face with tears sparked by witnessing resilience and resistance.

So I will take you through a year of pleasures—not necessarily the year’s best, but those that I remember fondly as I lay down another brick in this road I’m paving through life.

January: The Love Art Lab

I was first introduced to Annie Sprinkle over a decade ago when I picked up one of her books at a friend’s house. For all of Annie’s adult life, sex has been her milieu—it has served as her career, her muse, her source of healing, and her field of study. I remember being struck by her sex-positive history of being a prostitute, saying she was working in a massage parlor and having sex with clients, thinking that she was the luckiest massage therapist in town. It took her some time to realize that she was a prostitute, and her clients weren’t paying her for her massage. http://anniesprinkle.org/about-annie/the-sprinkle-story/

In the coming years, I came across bizarre and intriguing performance art pieces:
• Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña presenting themselves as newly-discovered Amerindians and travelling the world to display themselves in a cage.
http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco/subpages/videos/subpages/couple/couple.html

• The destructive and demanding works of Tehching Hsieh which included punching in on a time-clock every hour for an entire year and spending a year tethered to a woman (performance artist Linda Montano) by a rope.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/03/01/arts/20090301_HSIEH_SLIDESHOW_index.html

I am intrigued when people are pulled to do something out of the ordinary—bizarre by normal standards, but somehow just right to fulfill whatever internal conversations they are engaged in.

So I was tickled pink when I discovered the Love Art Lab, www.loveartlab.com. Annie Sprinkle, now a mature woman and partnered with Dr. Elizabeth Stephens, created a seven-year project exploring love with her partner. Unable to be legally married at the beginning of the project, Sprinkle and Stephens decided to have a marriage every year for seven years, and in so doing explore the nature of love. Each year was guided by one of the seven chakras. The weddings were large public affairs, celebrations of love, sexuality, and life. It reminded me a bit of parties I fantasized about throwing in my childhood: everyone will dress up and wear the same color and eat oranges! Each wedding seemed like a sublime celebration of life. Would you ever dare to raise such a ruckus in celebration of anything?

February: RETNA Art Exhibition

In February, I accepted a friend’s invitation to head out on a weeknight. We were going to an exposition by the artist RETNA. She was intrigued by his large-scale murals, most of which included beautifully rendered portraits of women. http://english.mashkulture.net/tag/retna/ When we got there, the art was completely different from what she expected. The exposition was held in a massive warehouse, so far away from the normal flow of things we had to assure our cab driver repeatedly that we had the right address. The walls were covered with humongous canvases, most of them black, covered with curling, complex lines. http://www.digitalretna.com/. Were they images? Were they letters of an unknown language? It almost seemed as if I should read the canvases, that perhaps they contained some ancient message that could help me in the future.

It reminded me immediately of something called asemic writing. A term that means writing that has no message content, but retains the emotional messaging that only writing made with a human hand can muster. http://www.asemic.net/ What was clear was that the artist had committed so much time to quieting his brain so that his hand may speak, that he could now enter into a space of deep communing with his work at will—to the point where he could cover in infinite number of canvases (and airplanes and buildings, I later discovered), with the same nuanced, graphic, graceful script. Surrounded by the fruits of his flow, I was intrigued, enthralled, and ultimately inspired to go home and let my hand dance across a canvas too.

March: Meklit Hadero, Leaving Soon

My father has a wonderful music site called Breath of Life that has taught me so much about music. Through his site, I’ve learned more about established musicians and been introduced to new artists. Listening the jukebox on his website, I was introduced to this enchanting song by Meklit Hadero that I listened to repeatedly after my first listen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfB3rnaa5hE

I love creativity and hearing someone’s authentic voice come through whatever art form they engage in. I find this song to be both beautiful, in the flow of established music forms, and also completely original and unique to Meklit. Here is my father’s write up on Meklit:
http://www.kalamu.com/bol/?http://www.kalamu.com/bol/2011/03/16/meklit-hadero-“meklit-hadero-mixtape”/

April: Revisiting Jennifer Holiday, “And I Am Telling You”

We live in a world of remakes and do-overs, when classics are done over again, and then again. I—being a person of great calm and subdued emotional expression—am always fascinated when someone has access to emotions in performance, then top it off with a god-given talent, well it gives one pause. At about 3:30 minutes into this scene from the original Dreamgirls stage play, Jennifer Holiday rolls into “And I Am Telling You.” The power of her voice alone can shake you to your soul, but the all-out gusto she puts into her performance is so intense it’s almost shocking. Is it over the top? Certainly, but it’s also spellbinding. Her own personal emotional marathon of pleading and pain, raw emotion vocalized with gut-bucket desperation. Just when you think she’s already left it all on the floor, she puts more hunger and terror into the performance. It is confounding, exciting, and astounding to witness. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtnKI3ztz9w

May: JR, a bridge for change
TED Prize Speech
http://www.hulu.com/watch/221157/tedtalks-jrs-ted-prize-wish-use-art-to-turn-the-world-inside-out

In this TED Prize speech, JR—a former graffiti artist who is now a photographer—walks viewers through his development as an artist. He talks about how art carried him into a new area of artmaking and into new worlds. He travels the globe making larger-than-life size portraits and plasters them to walls all over the world. He photographs people who live in the shadow of poverty, neglect, or conflict to trigger communication and connection. He’s photographed the children of immigrants (his peers) after major class-based riots in France, residents of a favela in Brazil and a slum in Kenya, and people on both sides of the Isreal-Palestine conflict. In Brazil, the media was forced to seek out a people they traditional ignored to interview them about his project. In Isreal and Palestine conversations across the political border were sparked. His project in Nairobi caused one onlooker to explain to another: "You have been here for a few hours, you've been trying to understand the art, discussing with your fellows. In that time, you haven't thought about what you are going to eat tomorrow. That's art."

June: Jose James @ Weeksville Heritage Center

For me, one of the most pleasurable parts of living in New York is the summertime, especially the outdoor music festivals happening all over the city. There are always great concerts in Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect. But there are also smaller scale venues like the Weeksville Heritage Center. http://www.weeksvillesociety.org/

Weeksville is the site of a free black community where three of the community’s original homes have been preserved and the organization is building a multimedia arts center on the site. Each summer they have an intimate concert on their grounds. This summer I was treated to Jose James, a young jazz singer who has received nods and accolades from established jazz musicians for working in the old tradition. I appreciated his recorded music, but seeing him live took my appreciation into another stratosphere. His love for the music was clear, the ease with which his gorgeous voice slipped out was enchanting. He took us on a melodic journey through jazz both traditional and modern. It was a highlight of my summer.

July: Amy Winehouse, “Valerie”
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqSKVv6YO8g

When Amy Winehouse died last summer, I spent a few hours listening to her music online. I found this live session of her singing “Valerie” infinitely more moving than her stage performances. Her hair’s a mess, and she looks like she rolled out of bed and just showed up. Yet she sits in that chair, without an audience, and tells a story through song. With the music and the lights and the fashion stripped away, her power as a vocalist takes center stage. The textures in her voice and the vocalizations she chooses throughout the song make this a moving piece of artmaking for me. It was on constant repeat during the month after her death. I can still listen to it over and over.

August: Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the MET
http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/about/

One of the highest attended shows in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Savage Beauty exhibition was one of the “must-see” museum shows of the year. When I finally dragged myself there, the line was incredible, snaking through two hallways and two other exhibitions. There were regularly two to five hour waits to get into the show, and once in, you were surrounded by a mass of bodies all trying to see what the fuss was about.

The McQueen show demonstrated that an artist is an artist, no matter the medium. From the fashions themselves, to the collaborations with jewelry, shoe, and hat makers, to the spectacles he mounted as fashion shows, Alexander McQueen was truly a visionary who put all of his creative fiber into his work. The show itself was mounted in such a way to demonstrate the whole environment of McQueen’s creative output and intentions. It was satisfying from the level of spectacle, artistry, and creativity.

September: Beats, Rhymes, & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest

Actor Michael Rappaport decided to go on tour with A Tribe Called Quest when they reunited for a 2008 tour. He planned to document the innerworkings of one of the most popular and commercially successful hip-hop groups, but he ended up capturing the interpersonal struggles that prevent them from continuing to work together. The documentary reflected the group’s beginnings and the raw creativity that fueled the group’s successes. It also highlighted the different approaches of the members in the group, from anal perfectionism to the trickster jokesterism to freeflowing kindheartedness and peacemaking. Artists are a complex bundle of talent, artistic impulse, issues, and personality. What we dare to do or dare not do defines us. Watching how the group successfully invested in their creativity made me want to free up my own creative impulses and make good on my potential as an artist.

October: Teaching Good Sex
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/magazine/teaching-good-sex.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ref=general&src=me

An essential aspect of being an artist is freedom—freedom of thought, freedom of expression, the freedom to create. As passionately as I believe in artistic freedom, I also believe in personal freedom. I am equally moved by displays of artistic expression as I am by people working to help others reach a higher level of personal freedom.

There’s an artistry to truth-telling and nudging people toward new understandings. I recently came across an article in the New York Times called “Teaching Good Sex” about a unique sex education class that delves into the depth and breadth of the sexual experience—from the physical to the biological to the emotional. The high school students in this class have a unique experience in a world/country where honest, authentic conversation about sex is unsupported and difficult. There are far too many of us who have been abused or have become abusers for lack of sexual clarity and awareness. This class is a chink in the wall of silence and we are better for it.

November: September 11 Memorial/Occupy Wall Street’s Liberty Plaza

On a beautiful mild Novemeber night, I took my daughter to the 9/11 Memorial site. http://www.911memorial.org/photo-albums/911-memorial-renderings There are so many things can go wrong with monuments. This monument was so emotionally-charged and there was so much public wrangling, political intrigue and conflict about the memorial, that it was anybody’s guess what the final outcome would be. I am grateful that it wasn’t some soaring mass of metal; it isn’t even a statue—it’s a hole. Two holes to be exact, molded to mark the sites of the oft-mentioned footprints of the two towers that fell. The memorial is sweeping in scale, yet it seems to humble itself to honor the losses, rather than push a nationalistic perspective or a political agenda. Water falls along the sides of the footprints, cascading into a seemingly still pool of water. That night, moonlight gently illuminated the rows and rows of names of the dead etched around the memorial. The intelligently-designed monument elicits contemplation and reflection, and beautifully memorializes those who died.

As we left the monument and walked two blocks to Liberty Plaza/Zuccotti Park to visit the members of the Occupy Wall Street movement, I thought about how close the two landmarks were to each other. We talked to anarchists, artists, and a transgender activist. As a bookend to our visit to the 9/11 memorial, Liberty Plaza left me feeling hopeful. On 9/11, we were violently connected to the world through a level of death and destruction we had previously not experienced. The Occupy Wall Street movement, drawing on the fierce commitment of Egypt’s protestors, connected us with a worldwide movement of the people using their voice. Sometimes it feels that the United States stands alone and it feeds the illusion of solitude. We are, like any people, bound by interdependence needed to be alive. We rode the waves of inspiration that the Arab spring spread throughout the world and became both a part of and a propellant of the communal unrest going on all over the world. I felt, standing there on a warm November night, that we Americans were connected to the world in the spirit of change and humanity, and it seemed that maybe, just maybe, we as humans had taken a step forward in a positive direction.

December: Neil deGrasse Tyson Interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXh9RQCvxmg

Stunning minds are always a pleasure to experience. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, is not only an intelligent scientific voice and passionate voice of astronomy, he is also a wordsmith who obviously takes pleasure in words, communication, and oration. This interview starts slow, but once they settle in, Tyson is an engaging and compelling communicator. His passion, zest, and commitment are invigorating as he shares with us the wisdom of the skies and the stars. He is rapturous and poetic about science. I will leave you with this gorgeous rant he has about “star stuff.” You can listen to it at about 24:08 on the video, or read it below. Wishing you a new year filled with varied, profound pleasures.

"We Are Star Stuff"

The atoms and molecules
in your body
are traceable
to the crucibles in
the centers of
stars that manufactured
these elements
over its lifespan
went unstable, on death,
exploded its enriched
guts across the galaxy
scattering it into gas clouds
that would ultimately collapse
and make a star
and have the right
ingredients
to make planets
and people
Which means we are
part of this universe
Not only are we in the universe
but the universe is in us

We are star stuff

--Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist

Kiini Ibura Salaam is a writer and painter from New Orleans, LA. Her work is rooted in eroticism, speculative events and worlds, and women's perspectives. Her fiction has been published in a number of anthologies, including Dark Matter, Mojo: Conjure Stories, and Dark Eros. Her essays have been published in Essence, Ms., and Colonize This. She is the author of the KIS.list, an e-column that explores the writing life. Her first collection of short stories, Ancient, Ancient, is forthcoming from Aqueduct Press in May 2012. She lives in Brooklyn.

The Body Becomes the Ground on which These Politics Take Place (ASA 2011)

2011-12-22T16:27:00.001-08:00

The ninth of a series of reports from the American Studies Association

“Vital Subjects: Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics in (Trans)national American Studies”

Moderated by José Saldivar

Kevin Floyd set out to address the convergence between vital bodies and vital consciousness with respect to Delany’s “Tale of Plagues and Carnivals.” The AIDS crisis has generated tropes of mapping, which leads in turn to the mapping of biopolitical governance. But does juxtaposing the words “vital” and “consciousness” conjure up the spectre of an intolerable contradiction? In the light of a recent New Left Review article on the inability of contemporary global capital to employ the workforce, combined with the many obstacles to workers’ organizing, a sustained consideration of neoliberalism such as “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” is timely. The novel depicts a fleeting moment before the condition to which these terms refer [AIDS, HIV, and the terms that preceded them] was stabilized by names. Multiple narratives compete with each other in attempts to comprehend an epidemic while dealing with its impact. The dearth of scholarship on this novel, given its substance and its historical import, is distressing.

The two parallel narratives that constitute the bulk of the novel — contemporary material from Delany’s journals and the stories of the plague in Nevèrÿon — are both about an immediately experienced social and economic crisis that generates mostly widespread disoriented shock: the tv news at the end, the earlier experience of dis-ease, the question Joey asks Delany, people’s fear of contact, anecdotes of the ER, rumors spread via bathroom graffiti. Everyone tries to read the signs, everyone has anecdotal evidence of something. The impossibility of mapping becomes evident. Economic anecdotes proliferate, as with the newly-unemployed in the Port Authority. The accumulation crisis is most immediately visible in people’s responses — the “Street Talk” of “Street Talk/Straight Talk”; the arrests of the homeless in response to the crisis. The epidemic that descends on Kolhari echoes the contemporary cleansing — the alarm is only sounded when the crisis is seen as affecting “the family.” Both the murders of the homeless and the spread of the plague → neoliberal lockdown. Those who are killed are represented as the killers. “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” models localized political consciousness but poses a global problem that echoes our own.

As Jean Comaroff has pointed out, seeing the AIDS “victim” as an instance of Bare Life ignores the agency of the sufferer and reflects a tendency to think in terms of life as profit: it’s the neocolonial regimes that reduce their populations to bare being, and to apply the Agambenian ideas of being in that situation just reinscribes this. AIDS activism risks strategic reductionism; the cognitive limits of South African attempts to map it reveals that such reductionism is a necessity for mapping. But we already know from the introduction to the Grundrisse that all thinking is reductive and never innocent. How does Delany present the imaginative subject? In a manner that serves as a nice counterweight to the biopolitical subject in Hardt and Negri, whose capacities are subsumed under biopolitical production and is defined ontologically, as productive being, not cognition: the problem of the multitude is to find its telos. Hardt and Negri’s trilogy performs the cognitive mapping while, like Lenin, implying no epistemic capacity on the part of the multitude. Delany and Comaroff, refreshingly, present cognitive epistemic subjectivity and not laboring ontological subjectivity. As we recapitulate conflicts over the idealized laborer, can we imagine the agential capacity of the biopolitical subject? The Delanyan subject, the subject that “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” performs, is defined by critical knowledge and by biopolitical threat. Does biopolitical consciousness still strike us as an impossibility, and if so, what does that tell us about our moment and about our tools?

Ashley Byock spoke of Union Colonel Elmer Ellsworth and his body’s circulation by train, addressing his death and the intersection of the body with national identity. After Ellsworth was killed in the course of taking down a Confederate flag from the roof of an Alexandria boarding house, and a member of his regiment killed the landlord in return, both dead men became martyrs to their respective causes. But landlord James Jackson’s fame was short-lived, whereas the circulation of Ellsworth’s body, seen by tens of thousands of viewers, kept it know. The intersection of its corporeal specificity and its imagined power is evident in narratives of his death, which involved his body being draped with the very Confederate flag he had taken down, which was in turn stained and purified by his blood.

Many questions remain. Why was Ellsworth embalmed? He was a close friend of the President; his regiment of “Fire Zouaves” had attained some fame. Did Lincoln request that he be embalmed? How was his body mobilized? It was transferred from Virginia to an embalmer in DC, then lay in state at the White House — Mary Todd Lincoln laid a wax wreath upon it [here Byock offered a detailed history of embalming and my note-taking hand got tired] . . . the rise of the sentimental culture of embalming in the U.S., when it suddenly becomes possible to preserve middle-class bodies. We see the creation of a mourning public and the fashioning of this public through a collective work of mourning. The significatory valence of a dead body is not as stable as it might seem: What do the body in question and its death signify? Whose desire? Whose control? We only know who embalmed Ellsworth, not why.

Biopolitics situates the body in a network of forces promoting the social good: vide Esposito on the Holocaust. Biopolitics has been defined as a form of racism, immunizing against the “contaminating” aspect of the population – who’s preserved? Those individuals whose existence is most identified with the perpetuity of the state. A sense of the perpetuity of the populace — the Modern notion of the “natural” posits/ enables contiguity between the citizen’s body and the body politic. Of course, the notion of the state is problematic in 1861: we see “national mourning” in only half the nation. The perpetuity of the nation relies upon past /future fantasies of a Complete Union. Ellsworth wrote letters to his mother and his brother on the eve of crossing the Potomac, anticipating his death. What does such a condition of martyrdom mean here? It doesn’t fit current theorizations of, say, the suicide bomber. Ellsworth’s body becomes significant of a nation’s perpetuity.

Christopher Breu wanted to thank Saldivar for having read the whole sixty-page chapter from which his talk is excerpted and to acknowledge that he’d conceived the paper in dialogue with a brilliant grad student. Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, its age notwithstanding, is a book for our time. Caren Irr characterized it as the postmodern, but it’s really not easy to classify. At the time when we hear of the emergence of a global aesthetic, the novel reveals the ethnocentrism of those classifications — it effects something like a transmodernity, inside and outside the histories of modernity. It addresses the metaphorical “Global North” and the metaphorical “Global South” (although one can’t really reduce its spatial orientations). Silko’s present is the durée for which the conquest of America is a recent event — geological time in which the five hundred years of occupation are brief.

Silko is not just about American Indian contexts and American Indian life: she addresses the transnational native and subaltern world versus the metropolises of the global north. The black market in biomaterials, the hemispheric drug trade, and the globalization of torture films (and torture) are very contemporary, being productions central to the neoliberal life. Her San Diego and Tuscon are postindustrial cities inhabited by symbolic means of biopolitical production. Roberto Esposito’s work on “thanatopolitics” and the logic of immunity addresses how communities and states underwrite violence toward internal and external enemies. Hardt and Negri rearticulate biopolitics as economic (as did Foucault); Silko articulates thanatopolitics as economic. Quijano’s world-systems account of capitalism as always having been behind colonization, of wage-labor as a form of racial dispossession considers the “return” of accumulation by dispossession as an ongoing process moving from the periphery to the metropole. Esposito sees “community” as central to the pacification of the biopolitical nation-state — class is about members of the nation-state, race is about the abjected; but neoliberalism takes the dynamics formerly used on the racial outsider and brings them back home. Newly uprooted and proletarianized Northern populations now connect with third-worlders.

In this political novel, new forms recognize and rearticulate the racialized categories. To the Army of Justice and Retribution, “disappearance of things European” refers to social and economic structure. The novel refigures Marxist theory and addresses how to account for resistance from the periphery, an issue that Lenin and Mao as well as Laclau and Mouffe, and indeed Hardt and Negri, have tried to address. A view of all social actors as productive – neoliberalism as a regime of accumulation in which unprecedented social alliances are possible. Breu shares many of Floyd’s suspicions of Hardt and Negri but finds their “altermodernity” useful in looking at the demands of the collectively owned, the revolution. Silko’s views break with Hardt and Negri’s around questions of materiality: they tend to background materiality and emphasize questions of “immaterial production,” but the production of material goods looks increasingly unanachronistic: these guys are erasing the material and foregrounding the First World. Their focus on intellectual property ignores the theft of land, things, and resources. They elide consciousness that’s organized around the material. Silko, rather than disavowing the material, acknowledges what Adorno called “the preponderance of the object” and offers an alternative form of biopolitics based on the recognition of the resistances of the material — not about governmentality-human capital, but about recognizing bodies and the material object world, promoting a conception of sustainable and just life.

There followed a lively q & a, of which my account will be brief because I ran out of notebook. One questioner suggested that Chris and Kevin are converging. The revolutionary space is there. They both see what biopolitics is reproducing. But Silko offers a critique of what Chris is generally trying, contra Kevin, to redeem. Breu acknowledged some frustration with the Deleuzian turn. But what he thinks is right is that power is working less through mediated categories like citizenship and is working increasingly on bodies. That doesn’t mean we lack the space for subjectivity — how do we think about the otherness of the material? Kevin thinks Breu is after some unmediated materiality, which we know from Chapter One of Bodies that Matter is a cul-de-sac; Breu suggested that perhaps that chapter and that book are not the last word on the issue and noted that the body becomes the ground on which these politics take place in Silko and Bellamy. Floyd wants to take Foucault’s turn against Hegel seriously. Some discussion of race ensued, with Priscilla Wald mentioning that Fred Jameson does not do race — you can see him shut down when you mention it. Breu’s paper had mentioned race, but Floyd’s had not. Society Must Be Defended uses “race” to mean nation. Joyce Chaplin’s Subject Matter was recommended.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 17: Kristin King

2011-12-22T15:48:00.000-08:00

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011
by Kristin King

This year's Pleasures will be a time travel trio - a show, a book, and a trilogy.

Doctor Who: The Doctor's Wife

In this episode, Neil Gaiman introduces us to the one character we've always seen but never heard: the Doctor's ship. Her name is the TARDIS, which stands for "Time and Relative Dimension in Space." Like many other ships that men pilot, she's often described as a woman -- "old girl" or "you sexy thing" -- but she's never been allowed to speak for herself. Until now. When a malicious entity called "House" downloads her soul into a woman's body, we get to see who she really is.
Picture a woman who has never had to navigate a social scene of any sort. She has no self-restraint, no tact, and no social skills. But she knows what she wants and takes it. The first thing she does is bite the Doctor. "Biting's excellent," she comments. "It's like kissing. Only there's a winner!" The Doctor, who doesn't know the TARDIS has been downloaded, just thinks she's a "bitey mad woman." That's fair.

Shortly afterward, she debunks a canonical part of the Doctor Who story - that the Doctor, a renegade Time Lord, stole a TARDIS hundreds of years ago and has been adventuring ever since. Nope. Actually, she explains, "I wanted to see the universe, so I stole a Time Lord and I ran away."

We also find out why she hasn't spoken. Until she was downloaded into a flesh body, she existed (exists? will exist?) in all of space and time, and her perception of causality is a conversation-stopper. Even in a flesh body she can't separate the present and the future.

Most importantly, we find out who is steering. The Doctor has always claimed he could fly the TARDIS, and he sometimes lands at the correct time and place with perfect accuracy, but then again, he often ends up going somewhere unexpected. How much power does he really have to choose his destination?

This question goes to the heart of the Doctor's character. If he is the all-powerful hero who can just take his time machine back anytime he wants and rearrange events to his liking, then he can manipulate the other characters in creepy ways, and we will never know. I explored this question last year in a blog post A Feminist Take on Doctor Who's Amy Pond when I described a couple of TARDIS trips that could have been planned by the Doctor in order to groom a little girl to be a perfect companion. In general, the more power the Doctor has to steer the TARDIS, the more responsibility he bears for all the deaths and other tragedies that happen.

Gaiman canonically and definitively answered the question. And he did it right.

How much power does the Doctor have? None.

She steers herself, never taking him where he wants to go, but always where he needs to be. The Doctor is a "madman with a box," and she is a "bitey madwoman" with her foot on the accelerator.
Thanks, Gaiman. You nailed it.

The Entropy Effect by Vonda McIntyre
http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781416524649-2

The Entropy Effect is a Star Trek novel by Vonda McIntyre. Every so often, I take a trip to a used bookstore and hunt for books I haven't read by my favorite authors, and that's how I found this one.
In this story, scientist Dr. Georges Mordreaux starts a chain of events leading to Armageddon when he sends his friends back in time. Spock goes back in time to chase Mordreaux down and stop him. Unfortunately, he only stops an older version of Mordreaux from stopping a younger version of Mordreaux. After that, it gets complicated and exciting as Spock and the older Mordreaux keeps trying and failing.

McIntyre takes the opportunity to explore the inner lives of the Star Trek characters, putting them in situations you'd never see in the show, and bringing in characters with more diverse shapes and sizes. I especially liked her portrayal of the junior officers who are trying so hard to impress Captain Kirk and prove themselves on the job.

What took this novel above and beyond for me was McIntyre's exploration of consciousness. If you are a character in one time stream, and somebody goes back and changes it, a person with your name and body and personality will still exist, but the "you" that you were has ceased to exist - or has it?
In other words, would you just vanish, losing all your experiences - in effect, experiencing death? Or does some part of your altered consciousness remain? This book is the first time I've ever seen that question explored.

The Gideon Trilogy: Gideon the Cutpurse, The Time Thief, and Time Quake by Linda Buckley-Archer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_the_Cutpurse

Two children, Kate and Peter, are thrown back into 18th century London when a scientist's anti-gravity invention turns out to be a time machine. The children are scared and want to go home, and Peter has unfinished business because he has just told his father "I hate you!" The children make a pact not to separate, but they are torn apart all the same. Worse, the machine has unexpected properties. Kate starts "blurring" -- making brief appearances in the present time before being suddenly thrown back. She also "fast forwards," moving so fast that everyone else seems like statues and not knowing whether she'll ever return to the proper speed.

Worst of all, it turns out that each time travel event creates a parallel universe. Each parallel universe has its own time travel events, which means that the number of parallel universes multiplies exponentially. Time travel thus becomes Armageddon.

In the middle of all this excitement, three characters from the Victorian underground act out their own dramas. Gideon the Cutpurse, a pickpocket, helps Kate and Peter. The Tar Man, a horrifically scary criminal, steals the time machine and rampages through present-day London. Meanwhile, Lord Luxon, the only irredeemable character, engineers the assassination of George Washington just as he is about to cross the Delaware.

This trilogy, like McIntyre's novel, asks the question of what happens to your consciousness when time is reset.

Kristin King is a writer, parent, and activist who lives in Seattle. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Calyx, The Pushcart Prize XXII (1998), and other places. Now that her youngest child is in kindergarten, she is contemplating a mid-life nap.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 16: Nisi Shawl

2011-12-21T13:45:00.000-08:00

Dropping My Jaw, Warming My Heart
by Nisi Shawl

Most of what I’ve read in 2011 I can’t talk about. Or else I’ve talked about it already. I still review books for The Seattle Times, and occasionally for Ms. Magazine, too. A quick search will bring to light my takes of China Miéville’s Embassytown, Joan Aiken’s collection The Monkey’s Wedding, and other worthwhile engrossments (my favorite of the Times books was Mat Johnson’s Pym, and I explain why here).

This year I also serve as a Tiptree judge. Top, top secret what I think of the nominees. Not saying a word. Yet.

Editing gigs have given me some interesting reading material, too, and about that stuff I can and will share my opinions.

I’ve seen some stellar reviews of books in my capacity as reviews editor for The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Aqueduct Press’s new literary quarterly. Victoria E. Garcia wrote two of the best: one on 80!, the Ursula K. Le Guin festschrift, in which she didn’t even mention my essay, and still so enjoyably analyzed the book’s effect that I just didn’t freakin care; the other an artless idolization of Geoff Ryman’s collection Paradise Tales. I also derived deep delight from Ursula K. Le Guin’s retrospective on Vonda N. McIntyre’s Dreamsnake. Another excellent CSZ piece I read even though I didn’t have to, was Steven Shaviro’s “Hyperbolic Futures;” it makes certain scary capitalist abstractions palpable, funny, and potentially deflatable--what you understand, you can consciously engage with.

MJ Hardman’s essay “The Russ Categories,” which I had the privilege of including in the volume of the WisCon Chronicles I edited, is by far my favorite text of the entire year. Audacious, clear, challenging, rewarding: it was truly Nisibait of the highest order. Drop my jaw and you win my heart, and MJ did this for practically her entire 9000 words.

Musically speaking, my 21-year-old niece Brittany Johnson has led to some of my most pleasurable recent listening discoveries. 2011 saw my whole family getting in on the act when I spent three weeks in my Midwestern hometown, driving kids to school and the Y. The van’s sound system recycled two CDs by a band combining intricate hiphop lyrical play with Beatlesesque harmony and production values: N.E.R.D. “Happy,” my top choice for best N.E.R.D. groove, has no official video, so check out the conflation of romantic love with stock speculation in ”Sooner or Later”.

By far the most engaging viewing experience for me in 2011 has been watching the hundreds of responses to and parodies of Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry’s “Strong” campaign ad. The original 31-second TV commercial has nearly 700,000 dislikes as of this writing, in the mere two weeks since it was first posted on YouTube.

The first wave of responses to “Strong” consisted primarily of people recording themselves as they watched the ad, their faces showing a mixture of confusion, disbelief, and disgust. Later responses became more polished and often featured costumes, props, and settings along with scripts. But that’s simplifying things a bit: search on “Rick Perry Strong,” perhaps adding filters for “commercial,” “response,” “spoof,” and “parody,” and you’ll find reactions ranging from incoherent to obscene to calculated to sincere--along more than two axes--and produced by queers, atheists, straights, soldiers, teachers, high schoolers, and comedians. Here are some of my favorites:

• Two Christian sisters quoting a well-known hymn in rebuttal to Perry’s homophobia
• Perry’s spot intermixed with a trailer from the movie Brokeback Mountain
• Lesbian activist whose incredibly expressive face pretty much says it all
• Raunchy and highly articulate speech by a self-proclaimed “butt pirate”
• Presumably deaf lesbian signs her disapproval of Rick Perry’s message
• Lovers in Santa hats provide silent commentary on the original commercial
• The elegantly simple response of replacing Perry’s head with an ass and his speech with farts

There were also quite a few recordings of people playing first-person shooters while describing how utterly stupid they found “Strong.” One fellow who referred to his enemies in the game as “faggots” and women as “bitches” was still offended by the ad. He admitted to being “10% homophobic,” but declared that Perry had gone overboard. “If I’m getting shot at and you’re carrying me to safety, I’m not going to make you put me down because of your sexual orientation,” he scoffed.

I can’t find the URL for the absolute best of these responses, which consisted merely of three young men standing around together and mocking Perry on their lunch break, showing how casual contempt for him has become.

Perry didn’t have much chance of being nominated by the GOP, much less elected President. Now he has none, because he actually alienated many of the voters he was trying to win with this particularly vicious ploy. Over and over, negative responses to “Strong” remarked that he was attacking our troops. In the minds of hundreds of thousands of voters, the fact that men and women were voluntarily laying their lives on the line in an effort to protect US freedoms easily trumped any discomfort about their bedroom practices. Soldiers are more highly valued than politicians. Even, or maybe especially, among conservatives.

This is why I spent hour after hour watching these things; this is what I found so heartening about them: that such a self-serving manipulator could be so wrong about what and who people are ready to believe.

Also, they made me laugh.

Nisi Shawl is the author of Filter House, which won the James Tiptree Jr. Award and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award, Something More and More, her WisCon GoH collection, and, with Cynthia Ward, the co-author of the celebrated Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, and the editor of The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 5: Writing and Racial Identity, all of which are published by Aqueduct Press. She reviews science fiction for the Seattle Times, is a member of the Clarion West board, teaches writing workshops at Centrum in Port Townsend, WA., and is the reviews editor of The Cascadia Subduction Zone. She was also last year's Guest of Honor at WisCon.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 15: Jeffrey Ford

2011-12-20T20:55:00.000-08:00

Books, Movies, and Music Enjoyed in 2011
by Jeffrey Ford

Read

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander (The New Press) -- Alexander offers a supremely well-researched and ultimately convincing argument that the out of control incarceration of young Black males constitutes a new kind of Jim Crow law and resultant caste system. Interesting discussion of how this phenomenon is aimed at blocking and/or disenfranchising people from their vote.

Doctor Sleep by Madison Smartt Bell (Grove Press). An Americn ex-heroin addict, self-styled hypnotherapist, who works with a secret government agency at times and lives in London, suffers from insomnia. A trippy book in which the reader is never quite sure what's happening. Errant and subtle. Terrific writing.

The Natural History of the Unicorn by Chris Lavers (Harper Perrenial). Across continents and centuries, Lavers traces the history of a myth. Interesting stories from antiquity to the 19th century concerning this symbolic creature.

Wave of Mutilation by Doug Lain (Eraserhead Press/Fantastic Planet). The universe has a hole in it and reality is leaking out. Who knew it would be this much fun? Doug Lain's Wave of Mutilation is the story of Christian and Samantha; a story that generates itself as it devours itself. Its characters and surreal scenes are rendered with an engaging style and seem to have truths to tell us about relationships, politics, sex, the history of furniture. At the same time, they convince us they are insubstantial, errant, nothing but the illusion of the world. Terrific writing, good laughs, and the flawless execution of a fictional tightrope walk between "reality" and nothing. Wonderfully original!

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdom, The Kingdom of Gods by N. K. Jemisin (trilogy from Orbit Books) -- A fascinating and original take on the genre of epic fantasy by a writer who can do it all. This is a lot of epic fantasy for me (not so much an epic fantasy reader). I was constantly engaged, delighted, and surprised by these works. Looking forward to see what Jemisin does next.

Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies: The Essential Lucy Sussex by Lucy Sussex (Ticonderoga Press) -- A retrospective collection from one of my favorite contemporary short story writers. Eclectic themes (SF, F, H, Mystery)) and styles -- creepy dolls, genetics of the snake woman, volcanoes. Sussex is an underappreciated story writer. It's great to see this new compilation of some of her best work.

R/Evolution by Tenea Johnson (Counterpoise) -- A mosaic novel. Fast paced science fiction full of ideas from a time and place where bio-technology and racial justice/injustice coincide. Nice blend of the fictional page turner and important political ideas. Also check out Johnson's new Smoketown novel from Blind Side Press.

Starve Better by Nick Mamatas (Apex Publications) -- Advice on the writing life is usually for shit, but Mamatas manages a clear headed, realistic, and humorous view of what to expect and offers credible tips on making the most of your fiction in the world of professional writing. There are few books like this that I'll recommend to my fiction students, but this is definitely one of them.

The Camel by Robert Irwin (Reaktion Books) -- Everything you might want to know about the mythology, history, and biology of the camel by an interesting author.

This year I've been lucky enough to read some books that won't be out till 2012. You might want to consider these in the new year.

The New American Crime Film by Matthew Sorrento (McFarland Publishers) -- Forward by director, Stuart Gordon. Sorrento covers the crime films of Lynch, Cronenberg, Mamet, Herzog, etc. A little pricey, but a scholarly work that is more than just gossip and glitz.

Moscow But Dreaming by Ekaterina Sedia (Prime Books) -- this new collection of stories by Sedia contains weird and twisted tales from old Russia, the Soviet system and America. Sedia's writing is alive with metaphor that renders both the beautiful and the bizarre. Her yellow Lenin is the height of creepiness. I can't recommend this one enough. Sure to be one of the stand out collections of 2012.

Technicolor and other Revelations by John Langan -- Langan, one of the best short story writers in the Horror genre, takes the archetypal themes of horror and filters them through his unique imagination and style, making them entirely fresh. Contains the classic "How the Day Runs Down" from the JJ Adams anthology, The Living Dead, plus seven other pieces, one a new story. Great book of short fiction.

Viewed

Kiss Me Deadly directed by Robert Aldrich, starring Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer, written by A. I. Bezzirides and Mickey Spillane (1955) -- Sort of an SF/Noir with espionage intrigue, a box of glowing bad stuff, and a loopy plot. Cloris Leachman debuts. Criterion Collection.

House of Numbers directed by Russell Rouse, starring Jack Palance and Barbara Lang, based on a novel by Jack Finney and a script by Don Mankiewicz (1957). Palance plays twins in this prison break caper. The scheme that Arnie and Bill Judlow put into play is preposterous, but somehow the story works. Shot at San Quentin, using real guards and prisoners as actors. The Chief, from Get Smart, plays the warden of the joint.

Two Lane Blacktop directed by Monte Hellman, starring James Taylor, Laurie Bird, Dennis Wilson (of the Beach Boys) and the great, Warren Oates, screenplay by Rudy Wurlitzer and Will Cory (1971). Ran into this late one night on, I believe, TCM. Apparently the film had been out of circulation for a long time. About a race from somewhere in the Southwest to Washington D.C. The prize is that the winner gets the loser's car. No frills movie making -- errant and at times beautifully slow. Wurlitzer plays a race car driver and a young Harry Dean Stanton plays a hitch hiker.

Listened

The Goat Rodeo Sessions by Yoyo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile.

"Just You, Just Me" by Pianica Maeda

Rough Guide to African Guitar Legends anthology

Ska Down Her Way anthology

For Your Love" by Ed Townsend

Jeffrey Ford, who has the won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award (several times), and a few other awards as well, is the author of The Well Built City trilogy and numerous other novels, as well as several collections of short fiction. He lives in New Jersey.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Vol. 2, 1

2011-12-20T14:25:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to announce that the new issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone-- the first of our second year of publication-- is out! In addition to a full complement of reviews, it has an essay by our own Josh Lukin on disability in literary criticism in general and Anne Finger's brilliant short fiction in particular, another essay by Mary Meriam on Lilian Faderman, Kij Johnson on Margaret Cavendish, and a poem by Anne Sheldon. If you aren't already a subscriber, this would be an excellent time to subscribe, especially since we have a special-- supplemental-- issue on Joanna Russ in the works, which we intend to distribute to subscribers without additional charge. And if you're subscription has expired, surely you'll want to renew! You can do both of those things here.

Here's the Table of Contents of the new issue:

Essays: Ishmael in Love: Anne Finger and the Reclamation of Disability by Josh Lukin; My Muse by Mary Meriam

Poem: History Lesson by Anne Sheldon

Grandmother Magma: The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish reviewed by Kij Johnson

Reviews: With Fate Conspire by Marie Brennan reviewed by Ebony Thomas; Master of the House of Darts by Aliette De Bodarda reviewed by Deb Taber; The Kingdom of Gods by N.K. Jemisin reviewed by Mikki Kendall; Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi reviewed by Nic Clarke; Distances by Vandana Singh reviewed by Ama Patterson; Song of the Swallow by K. L. Townsend reviewed by Karen Szymczyk
Featured Artist: Marilyn Liden Bode

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 14: Fiona Lehn

2011-12-19T09:49:00.000-08:00

2011, On the Couch
by Fiona Lehn

I spent nearly half of 2011 on the couch with my foot up, having broken my ankle while hiking the beautiful (but harrowingly treacherous) Mt. Seymour in the summer. A good friend who understands these things brought me her entire 5-season series of Babylon 5 on dvd. Avoiding tv (besides the Canucks and the Broncos) for the past 25-ish years has rendered me somewhat culturally ignorant; thus, I had never heard of Babylon 5. But now…I know my Minbari from my Psi Corps and everyone in between. This is a fascinating saga that starts out slow (the first season required concerted investment even while on painkillers that made everything warm and fuzzy) and evolves into an epic space opera that ended all too soon.

Glee (season 2, dvd). I’m a Gleek. I admit it. I have always loved musicals and I LOVE Glee! I believe that if everyone broke out into dance and/or song in our daily lives, the world would be a much healthier place. Season 2 dials down the OTT style of the first season and cranks up the higher love.

Dead Like Me (seasons 1 and 2, dvd). I discovered this show early in 2011 while babysitting a friend’s kid who had long since fallen asleep. I love the tone of this show, the wit, and the characters. Dark and philosophical, it seems to be a show for depressed people. (Reminds me of early 1900s Russian literature. Ok, maybe not that dark!)

Torchwood (all of them, dvd). Is everyone on this show sexy, or is it just me? Great acting, thrilling plots, everything you could ever ask for from science fiction. Yummy.

The Runaways (dvd). I remember when Joan Jett came out with “I Love Rock N’ Roll” and hit Number 1 with it, but I didn’t know her earlier band, The Runaways, at all. I watched this dvd during my “lie on couch with ankle up” tenure and was blown away by the spirit and the talent of the young female musicians, by their drive, their mistakes, their passion—what a fabulous film for the inner rockstar in everyone!

The visual artwork of Geneviève Pratte and Suzanne Lorenz.I first discovered Pratte, a young, award-winning Montréal-based painter, while editing an issue of Room magazine. I fell in love with her sometimes desolate and almost apocalyptic work, represented by Galerie Lamaoureux Ritzenhoff.
Northern Californian photographer Suzanne Lorenz has photographed the dying oak trees and other native beauties that have become quite rare in the San Joaquin Valley, (once one of the most fertile farm valleys of the world, now much built over as bedroom communities for the San Francisco Bay Area). The Light of Change showcases much of her work.

Pink: “Raise Your Glass” (official music video). Long ago, Pink earned my fandom. Tough, smart, compassionate, talented, she likes to push envelopes (remember her video “Stupid Girls”?) and does it well. In her video for “Raise Your Glass”, Pink raises the bar with irreverence, and celebrates all of us—just watch it!

OK GO: “This Too Shall Pass” (official music video). Never seen an OK GO video? Change that. You won’t regret it. This creative, colourful and witty band writes groovy music with uplifting lyrics and makes high-quality one-take videos that boggle the mind. This particular video features a marching band in marshland camouflage and a children’s choir. It’s hilarious, somehow Dr. Seussical, and the music rocks.

Megan Slankard: A Token of the Wreckage (independent cd). This debut album by a young songwriter from Northern California resembles Jonatha Brooke at times. High production values, layered vocal harmonies, thoughtful lyrics and smooth arrangements —reminds me how good songs can be.

Dan Ariely: The Upside of Irrationality (nonfiction). Although I haven’t yet finished this book, it has already changed the way I think about people’s behaviour. I used to believe that just a few people behaved irrationally, but now I agree with Ariely: pretty much everyone does. A good-natured and pragmatic study of why people do what they do, and how their irrational responses make sense.

Connie Willis: To Say Nothing of the Dog (science fiction). I became a Connie Willis fan a few years ago when I read Lincoln’s Dreams. Despite several attempts, however, I had trouble getting into To Say Nothing of The Dog until I was going in for surgery on my ankle and grabbed the thickest book I had yet to read from my bookcase. Somehow the desperation I was feeling while wondering if I’d walk again and waiting for the operating room to open up, helped me to leap into this time travel story that, turns out, is hilarious. Ask yourself one question: How much trouble can one little cat cause? Read and find out…

I have a few all-time faves that must be mentioned:

Stanislaw Soyka, Poland’s songwriter, and Francis Cabrel, France’s songwriter—that’s what I call them anyway. Whenever I meet someone from Poland or France, inevitably, I ask if they have seen their respective country’s songwriter live, what they think of the music, etc. Both are poets and fabulous musicians. If you love good music and don’t necessarily need to understand all the words, try them (and pick up a couple new languages at the same time).

Joanna Russ: Picnic on Paradise (science fiction). I love it, have always loved it, and always will. Russ’s anachronistic little heroine kicks ass from start to finish in a barbaric future universe, and leaves the reader wanting more.

Suzy McKee Charnas: “Listening to Brahms” (novella). McKee Charnas’ narrator in this story becomes emotionally numb after experiencing a cataclysmic trauma. When I first read this novella, I had to read it again. Many times. It sparked something in me. I became fascinated by the idea of a character who had been programmed to feel nothing, and what happens to her eventually became the story of my first novella, “The Assignment of Runner ETI”. Can people reacquire their humanity once it vanishes? And if so, how? McKee Charnas’ story is a chilling account of the end of the world as we know it. Set on a planet run by lizards. Told with a dark humour, and no hope at all. (You’ll love it!)

I look forward to walking again, and to the many artistic treasures 2012 will bring. Until then, enjoy!

Fiona Lehn made her first professional sale of fiction in 2008 when “The Assignment of Runner ETI” won third place in the Writers of the Future contest. From 1993 to 2006, she co-produced several CDs of her original songs and performed across the U.S. From 2007 to 2011, Lehn served on the editorial collective of Room, Canada's oldest feminist literary magazine. Though Lehn grew up in Stockton, CA and is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz, she lives now in Vancouver, BC as a Canadian citizen. Aqueduct Press published her novella The Last Letter as a volume in its Conversation Pieces series in 2011.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 13: Nancy Jane Moore

2011-12-17T21:17:00.000-08:00

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011
by Nancy Jane Moore

I took my ancient (but working) TV set to Goodwill when the signal changed over to digital, intending to buy myself a nice flatscreen device. But it’s been a year and a half and I still haven’t done it. It’s not the cost – a new TV set wouldn’t cost as much as the Android-powered tablet I got this year – but rather a lack of motivation. I just haven’t missed TV enough to do anything about it.

I did watch a few TV shows via Netflix (Mad Men was especially good, and I really liked the new Sherlock Holmes series with Holmes as a young computer geek), but lately I haven’t even done that. And every time I think about going to the movies, I read the list of what’s actually showing and decide not to bother.

Which means I’ve been reading a lot. When I’m really brain dead after a day of work, I tend to re-read old novels on the (misguided) assumption that I can easily put them aside and either get more work done or go to bed at a respectable hour. Alas, I have discovered that I have not outgrown reading a compelling book into the wee hours, which does not fit in well with my other recent discovery that a good night’s sleep is very valuable indeed.

One of the exciting re-reads that kept me up last year was Starfarers, the first volume of Vonda N. McIntyre’s Starfarers Quartet. This is perfect science fiction: imaginative but possible science, political hassles, compelling and diverse characters with very real human motivations, and the grand idea of exploring beyond our home. It’s been out of print, but Book View Café has brought the series back in ebook form.

As for books that were new to me: In one of my hunts through my large and disorganized book collection for something to read, I stumbled across another one of those books I can’t remember buying and didn’t even know existed: Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife. This book sucked me in so completely that I didn’t want to leave the world when the story was finished (even though the story ends perfectly). The desert Southwest, artists, mythological characters who become real, humans who can understand more than the daily grind – all add up to a magnificent fantasy world.

Suzy McKee Charnas’s Dorothea Dreams is also set in the desert Southwest (Northern New Mexico as opposed The Wood Wife’s Southern Arizona), which might explain why it’s another world that sucked me in so completely that I didn’t want to leave it when the book was over. But a better explanation is that it’s a wonderful story that uses a fantastic element to talk about real human beings. I think it might be my favorite among Suzy’s books, and am glad Aqueduct brought out a new edition.

I reviewed those two books and a number of others that I enjoyed on the Book View Cafe blog over the last year. Here, in no particular order, are some of the books I liked enough to review (I only write about books I like, as a rule). And yes, several of them are published by Aqueduct, because Aqueduct publishes the kind of books I want to read, including ones I didn’t know I wanted to read until they hit print.

• Andrea Hairston’s Redwood and Wildfire, a magnificent story that makes the truth of the Jim Crow years in the U.S. more real by adding fantastical elements.

• N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Kingdoms, a worthy sequel to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (I have to get around to the third volume of this trilogy soon).

• L. Timmel Duchamp’s Never at Home, which collects many of Timmi’s most imaginative and fascinating stories.

• Eleanor Arnason’s Mammoths of the Great Plains. Just think about that for a moment: What if there had been mammoths ranging the U.S. in the 19th Century?

• Anne Sheldon’s The Bone Spindle. A story and poems about the fiber arts, which sounds so ladylike and polite, and would be, if Anne didn’t have a wicked knack for slipping in the subversive.

• Eclipse Three, edited by Jonathan Strahan, which proves that it is quite possible to have a great anthology dominated by women authors. I particularly liked Maureen McHugh’s “Useless Things” and Karen Joy Fowler’s “Pelican Bar,” but really, there’s not a bad story in the book.

I did read some books by men this year. I finished (sigh) reading the wonderful Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin series and am now just waiting for enough time to pass so I can read it again. And I finally broke down and read Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo et al), which I’d avoided for years on the principle that hardback bestsellers prominently displayed in airport bookstores can’t possibly be good. I was wrong: these books are compelling (definitely kept me up to the wee hours), if grim in spots, and the casual political assumptions that are common currency in Sweden were very refreshing in contrast to a summer of idiotic U.S. political posturing.

It always amuses me that the supposedly “true” written word is called “nonfiction” – that is, it’s defined in the negative. I take this to mean that fiction is the higher art, since other work is defined by its absence. Not, of course, that there isn’t quite a bit of fiction in some nonfiction, not all of it acknowledged.
But I do respect and appreciate good nonfiction. This year the death of Joanna Russ inspired me to read her critical works. While I know Russ’s fiction well, I’d only read a little of the nonfiction. Two books stood out for me: How to Suppress Women’s Writing and What Are We Fighting For?

I’d like to think that How to Suppress Women’s Writing was outdated, that things had changed dramatically since it was first published in 1983. Unfortunately, it is still very relevant, as witness all the discussions about the barriers to women writers that periodically travel around the Internet (many of them held here on Ambling Along the Aqueduct). All too often while reading this book, I found myself going, “Oh, that’s what happened to me.”

What Are We Fighting For? not only provides historical perspective on the part of the feminist movement that began to grow in the late 1960s and 1970s, but also provides the analysis needed for continuing to expand those ideas in the 21st Century.

In a slightly different (but in my mind, related) direction, the book Why We Cooperate, edited by Michael Tomasello, provides an insight into the theory – currently being explored by biologists and anthropologists – that the human ability to get along with others has been a major factor in our evolution. This slim anthology of essays by scientists in different fields is a good starting point in the study of cooperation.

The most beautiful book I’ve seen this year – almost a coffee table book – is a collection of Michael Ventura’s essays illustrated with photographs by Butch Hancock: If I Was a Highway. Ventura is one of the most provocative thinkers of our time. His essays appear biweekly in the Austin Chronicle, but they don’t read like columns written on a deadline. Ventura is a writer who cares about how he says things as well as a thinker who cares about ideas, and every word he puts down is carefully chosen. The title of the book is from one of Butch’s songs, which are just as provocative as Michael’s essays – Butch knows how to use words as well as how to take fascinating pictures. This book is published by Texas Tech University Press, which shows that intelligent publishing can flourish even in the Texas Panhandle.

I’ll end with the book I’m reading now, even though I haven’t finished it and find myself arguing with it as I read: Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. This is his book arguing that human violence has declined over our history.

I am not a fan of Pinker’s; even when I agree with him I find him irritating, and I disagree strongly with his public statements on sex differences. This particular book is annoying because he has decided that violence has declined and then presented the arguments that he thinks best support that thesis. It is not an exploration of the idea, but rather an attempt to bludgeon the reader into agreeing with him.

But – and it’s a big but – I think he’s right: Human attitudes about cruelty and violence have changed for the better. I’m not sure he’s right about why, but some of his theories are worth pursuing. I suspect he’s leaving out some important ideas – such as those about the human need and capacity for cooperation – but since I haven’t finished the book yet I don’t know what all his ideas are.

Despite my doubts about this book, it does seem to be the first book on the subject to get major attention and is a good starting point for a discussion of whether the human race is on the road to eventually becoming civilized. As an optimist by nature, I’d like to think so – assuming we survive climate change, overpopulation, and the other disasters we’re not dealing with right now without losing the progress we’ve been making toward true civilization.

Bio: Nancy Jane Moore’s most recent book is a collection of her flash fiction, Flashes of Illumination, available in ebook form from Book View Café. Her other books include the collection Conscientious Inconsistencies, published by PS Publishing, and the novella Changeling from Aqueduct Press. Her short (but longer than flash) fiction has appeared most recently in the military SF anthology No Man’s Land and in several Book View Café anthologies, including the steampunk books The Shadow Conspiracy and The Shadow Conspiracy 2. She blogs regularly on the Book View Café blog. Besides writing, her other passion is martial arts, and she holds a fourth degree black belt in Aikido. She lives in Austin, where she worries about drought and bad government policies, but is made very happy by the fact that she does not have to shovel snow.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 12: Lynne M. Thomas

2011-12-16T20:31:00.000-08:00

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011
by Lynne M. Thomas

It’s hard to believe that 2011 is nearly over, but it has been filled with many wonderful things.
I began the year by reading what would become this year’s World Fantasy Award-winner for best novel, Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death. Okorafor’s prose was visceral and wrenching in the best possible way; she took on difficult topics with clarity. Lisa Goldstein’s The Uncertain Places was a haunting, lovingly rendered tale of a young man’s life among the fey. Alex Bledsoe’s subtle The Hum and the Shiver incorporated Appalachian music and traditions into a rural twist on urban fantasy that stayed with me long after I’d finished reading, as I contemplated how the novel was shaped like the music that informed it. Andrea Hairston’s Redwood and Wildfire provided an engrossing tale of migration from the Deep South to Chicago’s vaudeville and cinema theaters at the turn of the last century. Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique twisted and turned through the beautifully written tale of a post-apocalyptic circus company struggling for survival.

In young adult and middle-grade literature, I really enjoyed Catherynne M. Valente’s Andre Norton Award-winning The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making-- a quirky, sly, whimsical adventure tale of September, a young girl who is decidedly not the stay at home type. I’m very much looking forward to reading it my daughter. I also enjoyed Malinda Lo’s Huntress, which had splendidly drawn adolescent characters meeting fairy tale challenges in a haunting, wintry setting.

In short fiction anthologies, I caught up with the work of Shirley Jackson Award-winner Rob Shearman. His Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical took on love and life, and the uncertainty of whether one is actually managing to do either well with wry, self-deprecating humor and a dark amusement at human foibles.

Viewing has been a bit limited this year, and most of the things I watched were from the past. However, I can note that I have very much enjoyed this season of Doctor Who, especially the River Song arc. I finally saw for the first time the first season of the 1990s Batman: The Animated Series, which was a fantastic example of how animation can tell riveting visual stories. My favorite new-to-me series that I watched this year was The Middleman, which may well be the geekiest television series ever produced, with a heart of gold. This was a summer of comic book movies, and I found both Captain America and Thor quite entertaining. As is in keeping with the characters themselves, Captain America was a straightforward origin story, while Thor was a bit more exuberant in its storytelling.

Listening? My iPod is not the most adventurous, but I enjoyed the Radio Free Skaro (Doctor Who news and chat), and (still!) Galactic Suburbia podcasts (general SF news and chat from a decidedly feminist and snarky perspective) when I could catch them.

I’m looking forward to what 2012 will bring.

Lynne M. Thomas is the Editor-in-Chiefof Apex Magazine. She co-edited the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords, as well as Whedonistas, and the forthcoming Chicks Dig Comics (all from Mad Norwegian Press). She is also the moderator for the SF Squeecast, a monthly SF/F podcast. In her day job, she is the Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University, where she is responsible for the papers of over 55 SF/F authors. You can learn more about her shenanigans at lynnemthomas.com.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 11: Wendy Walker

2011-12-16T11:32:00.000-08:00

Best of 2011
by Wendy Walker

Without my having planned it, my reading this year seems to have circled around the topic of political pressure and how people respond to it. I started out by reading quite a bit about and by Joseph Conrad. Zdzislaw Najder’s excellent biography Joseph Conrad, A Chronicle shows how the author’s Polish background, and the political dilemmas it involved him in, inflected his life from day one. From the moment his parents were sent into exile for their underground political activities, he accompanying them though only a small child, he was launched into a world of experience which he drew on for his tales, of tyranny, imperialist exploitation, anarchism and espionage. Edward Said’s Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography delves deeply into narrative secrets and must be read by any lover of this author.

As to Conrad’s fiction, I was surprised by the power of his first and second (linked) novels. Almayer’s Folly and The Outcast of the Islands are not very widely read and have often been disparaged in comparison to the later work. Each deals with the perils of passion conceived across a cultural divide. The romantic subject matter and lush exotic setting are vehicles for a language utterly fitting, and new in English. One of the most fascinating results of Conrad’s colonial struggle is the impact of his native language upon his English prose style: Polish syntax underlies the structure of his so-distinctive sentences. Besides enriching his adopted literary tradition, Conrad’s writing went some way towards assuaging his deep sense of national loss and political estrangement.

I also read a number of books by and about brilliant American literary women. In Lyndall Gordon’s Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds, Mabel Loomis Todd, Emily’s brother’s lover, is the beautiful vampire who steals the show. Mabel Todd was responsible for getting Dickinson’s poems published after her death, but her possessiveness of the poet’s legacy was later matched by Arthur Houghton, a ruthless collector of manuscripts, who destroyed the integrity of the original fascicles in a campaign so underhanded one wishes Harvard hadn’t been capable of it. This book is a real page-turner, about hatred in a family possessed of a literary treasure, and how personal passions for dominance infect the struggle over literary legacies, to the endangerment of the manuscripts themselves.

Margaret Anderson, a leading light of the literary vanguard in Paris in the 1920s and 30s, wrote a four-volume autobiographical memoir, of which I read the last volume, The Strange Necessity. It covers the period during which Anderson’s journal, The Little Review, was put on trial under the obscenity laws for publishing excerpts from Joyce’s ms.-in-progress, Ulysses. Anderson’s book contains memorable passages on poetry, music, and publishing, as contextualized by her relationships with her friends, among them Jane Heap and Janet Flanner.

Silence and Power: A Re-evaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe, deals with one of my favorite writers, another member of Anderson’s circle. It contains a variety of illuminating essays about Barnes’s works, not least her famously difficult play The Antiphon. In an essay by Lynda Curry entitled “‘Tom, Take Mercy’: Djuna Barnes’ Drafts of The Antiphon,” the play is revealed to have been so radically reduced in length during the editing process by T. S. Eliot (!) as to render the plot incomprehensible in the published version. Curry goes over the excisions (which deal with rape and incest) and restores them, in the hope that the play as Barnes wrote it will be made available before long.

When a friend of mine died, I inherited part of his library, among which I found Friedrich Rech-Malleczewen’s Diary of a Man in Despair. This is an extraordinary document of WWII, recording the changes in a Bavarian village. The author, a member of the old aristocracy deeply opposed to the Nazis, closely observes Hitler’s changing behavior as the war wears on. Hitler is shown insecure and inept in social gatherings, a bully festering with resentments.

Susan Buck-Moss’s Hegel, Haiti and Universal History performs an invaluable service by daring to place so-called “fringe political developments,” in this case the Haitian Revolution, at the center of Western cultural history. She makes a persuasive case that Hegel’s concept of the master-slave dialectic was inspired by his daily reading of newspaper accounts of the slave insurrection in Saint Domingue, and the subsequent defeat of Napoleon’s army. She speculates on the importation of elements from Voodoo ceremony into the rituals of the Freemasons, and makes other startling, and convincingly visual, connections.

Also in the revisionist vein, Ed Kritcher’s Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (a publisher’s title if there ever was one!), argues a surprising thesis, that the colonization of the New World was largely shaped and driven by the Jews expelled from Spain by Isabella in 1492. As “New Christians” (forced converts from Judaism), they secretly used the explorations to search for new places where the Jewish community could live safely. The book is fully documented with footnotes to sources in the Jamaican and Brazilian archives. I look forward to seeing further research on this topic, a curious chapter in the history of the Atlantic, and the new vision of the part played by the sailors who rejected servitude in the European navies in favor of a rough experiment in democracy, piracy.

Easily the best exhibition I saw this year was “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was truly astonishing, and I can only compare it in its complexity and theatricality to two previous exhibitions at the Costume Institute, the Yves Saint Laurent show of 1983 and the Diaghilev Ballets Russes of 1978. I encourage anyone who is interested in these clothes to watch the runway videos here, rather than just looking at photos. They convey the spatial excitement and drama of the clothes. These are clothes for the imagination, rather than clothes to wear. The collections that will stay with me are those that express McQueen’s preoccupation with the Highland Clearances, a veiled genocide perpetrated by the English upon Scotland, the designer’s ancestral home. Two collections, “Highland Rape” (which introduced the “bumster” pant) and “The Widows of Culloden” show the power of fashion to mount a politico-sexual critique. But lovers of fantasy and science fiction may well be more entranced with the collections “The Girl Who Lived in a Tree,” “Plato’s Atlantis,” and “It’s Only a Game.” The Met’s installation was superb, in terms of pacing, lighting and music, and fittingly theatrical, as the clothing demands.

In film, I discovered a wonderful director, new to me, Rachid Bouchareb. The two films I saw, “Outside the Law” (Hors la Loi) and “Days of Glory” (Indigénes) deal, respectively, with the impact of the Algerian Revolution in France and the experience of Algerian soldiers fighting for France in World War II. If you choose to watch them (and you should!) select the subtitled, rather than the dubbed, version, as the soundtrack is in both French and Arabic, and the interplay between those languages is crucial to the meaning of the film.

Three more very special films: Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, about a 15-year old girl from the British underclass; The Beaches of Agnes Varda, the director’s memoir as seen through the filmic use of seaside world of her childhood, and Marwencol, a documentary about a man who recoups his health after a vicious bias attack by building a war-torn city inhabited by Barbie dolls.

Wendy Walker is the author of a modern masterpiece, The Secret Service, and the formally innovative Blue Fire, A Poetic Nonfiction, and several collections of short fiction, including Knots, which Aqueduct Press publishes in its Conversation Pieces series. Her most recent book is My Man & other Critical Fictions. She is currently at work on "Sexual Stealing," an inquiry into the origins of British Gothic fiction in 18th-century Jamaica and Haiti.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 10: Lucy Sussex

2011-12-15T14:33:00.000-08:00

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011
by Lucy Sussex

Ooh, what a crazy year of reading. Three reviews x 52 is 156 books. Some of them I only read because I was being paid! Some of them I wouldn’t re-read in a fit. Some I read from duty and found particularly boring. Most I simply can’t recall (extremely embarrassing if I meet the authors). So I decided I’d go with stuff I frankly loved, or if not exactly lovable was outstanding…

Best biography

PARADOXICAL UNDRESSING
Kristin Hersh
Atlantic

The publishing industry has lately turned to the rock memoir, and struck gold. Hersh of indie band the Throwing Muses might be the best of the genre so far. It draws on a diary of her eighteenth year, in which she had to grow up hurriedly. As she herself says, ‘copying down a year isn’t a particularly creative thing to do’—one of various remarks that instantly endear. Instead, the book reads like a novel, low on plot but high on living. Hersch initially seems a very bright, boho university student, with hippie parents and a band. Then she becomes stranger. Her mature-aged friend turns out to be the former Hollywood star Betty Hutton. And a head injury means she hears music, the band’s songs. The creativity becomes manic, and she is diagnosed with mental illness. Whilst on medication, she becomes pregnant. Her drugs are contraindicated for pregnancy; and severe morning sickness means she goes cold turkey. She risks insanity, but what probably saves her is the band, gaining momentum with their first record deal. Extraordinary courage is displayed here, without any self-congratulation. Hersh kept her mind, her baby, and her musical career. A fascinating story.

Best true crime

MIDNIGHT IN PEKING
Paul French
Penguin

Scene of the crime: Peking, 1937. War with the Japanese looms, and China is torn between Communists and Nationalists. The foreign devils of Peking play as if nothing is changing, from the upper-class British to the impoverished white Russians. Then, near a haunted tower, a young English girl is murdered. The police investigate, a case that takes them from elite private schools to sex slums. They get nowhere, thanks to interference from above. Then Werner, the victim’s elderly father, begins his own detection. He solved the case, but the nearing war meant justice was not done. French agrees with Werner, a man whose findings embarrassed the foreign rulers of China. The result is a brilliantly evocative book, where Peking itself becomes a character. French depicts people looking backwards, yet being propelled reluctantly into a new world. Not many true crime books present a convincing solution to a case, like Stephanie Bennett’s superb The Gatton Murders. This work is in the same class.

Best serendipity

LUCKY BUNNY
Jill Dawson
Sceptre

Jill Dawson is a British writer with varying subjects but constant liveliness. Her last novel was about Rupert Brooke; but this latest effort tackles London’s gangland. Queenie Dove grows up in the East End. Her father is often away, in prison, and her young mother cannot cope. Queenie and her brother Bobby grow up quickly, with only their old Nan to help. Queenie’s narration is forthright, honest, and vigorous. She is also very smart, and even as a child can think her way out of trouble. The effect is a bit like Moll Flanders transplanted to the Kray brothers’ London. It is also an indictment of post-war Britain. A class-ridden society creates its criminal class, and should take responsibility for it. In this attitude, Dawson is cheerfully Marxist. Queenie might go from trouble to worse, but she is never a victim. The latter part of the book concerns Queenie’s intersection with history, as she provides a new light on a famous crime: the Great Train Robbery. Dawson was new to me, but this book is a revelation.

Best crime (something hotly contested)

A TRICK OF THE LIGHT
Louise Penny
Sphere

Penny’s form is the village mystery, but she does not escape reality in an adorable rural retreat. Consistently her novels address big questions. They also form a continuous narrative of time and place. In A Trick of the Light, artist Clara, at 50, becomes an unexpected success. Then her problems start, with her artist husband getting jealous. Next, a former friend and art critic crashes Clara’s celebration, and is murdered. Clara had motive and opportunity—but then so did nearly every artist at the party. The book looks at issues of creativity vs criticism that bedevil most art forms. Can the critic separate personal issues from the quality of a work, hate the artist but admire their paintings? In the centre of these difficult, arty types, is Penny’s investigator Inspector Gamache. He will find disconcerting parallels with his own vocation, the link being the matter of forgiveness. A lesser writer might falter at this point, but Penny is exceptionally sure-footed in her weaving of technique, feeling and theme. Gamache and his team are still recovering from a gun battle; and the killer has never forgotten a spiteful, soul-destroying review. An exceptional novel, regardless of genre.

Runners-up: the Icelandic posse, Arnaldur Indridason’s Outrage and Yrsa Sigursadottir’s The Day Is Dark –the latter the only novel I ever knew set in Greenland.

Best science writing

SEDUCED BY LOGIC
Robyn Arianrhod
UQP

Émilie du Châtelet and Mary Somerville were mathematicians, working in the C18th-19th, when women’s education, let alone achievement outside the domestic sphere, was anomalous. That they achieved acclaim in a field so male-dominated makes them truly extraordinary. Both were self-taught, although Émilie had privilege as a French aristocrat. It also enabled her to become the lover of Voltaire. Both women focused on a famously difficult work, Isaac Newton’s Principia. They read, understood, and assisted in bringing Newton’s ideas to a wider audience. Science writer Arianrhod conveys the sense of excitement, of scientific discoveries reaching out into a Europe undergoing social and political change. Both women had to struggle, of which the most poignant instance was Émilie translating Principia into French while pregnant. She was 42, and had a premonition the birth would kill her. It did, but she had completed her work first. Mary Somerville would live longer, writing many books and enjoying the title of ‘Queen of Science’. She survived to see women admitted to Oxford, but not the college named after her. A fascinating read.

Books for troubled times (joint winners)

THE BORROWER
Rebecca Makkai
Heinemann

What does a children’s librarian do, when confronted with a parent’s list of verboten books: Harry Potter, Evolution and Roald Dahl. One I knew said: ‘We’ll discuss this after you’ve actually read them.” But Lucy Hull needs to keep her job, so all she can do is subversion. The child reader in question, ten-year-old Ian, is a willing accomplice; he may even be manipulating her for his own ends. Slowly Ian’s parents grow ever more atrocious—even enrolling him in evangelical anti-gay classes. When Ian decides to escape, Lucy, who has her own personal issues, drives the getaway car. What transpires is a road novel, informed by the sheer joy of reading. It takes in issues such as helicopter parenting and censorship, yet is written with a light, appealing touch. In fact it can make you laugh. At the centre of Makkai’s argument is that the developing mind needs imaginative space, which is what the great children’s classics provide. The book has some puzzling aspects: why do most of the characters assume Ian’s reading makes him necessarily gay? But that quibble apart, Makkai produces a thoroughly delightful read. For all those who believe in public libraries.

WALTZING AT THE DOOMSDAY BALL
Joe Bageant, ed. Ken Smith, Scribe

When Joe Bageant died, it was a crying shame. The veteran journalist found his subject late in life: America’s class wars. He had been born a redneck, and mined his background with great love and despair. The internet dissembled his fierce opinions, and he published two books. A socialist and atheist amongst the godfearing Right, his writing was sharp, witty, and perceptive. He never looked down on his subjects, but railed against the system that created their ‘Cultural Stupidity’. Great stuff.

Outer Adornment

SECOND SKIN: CHOOSING AND CARING FOR TEXTILES AND CLOTHING
India Flint
Murdoch

India Flint’s life is focused on textiles. It runs in the family: her refugee grandmother left Latvia with a sewing machine, which Flint inherited. In this book, which combines stunning photographs with useful advice, Flint considers how we can best use textiles. We need clothing to survive, but modern production creates social and ecological ruin. Dyes pollute water; sweatshops destroy lives; and cloth in landfill is waste. So Flint sets out to educate the reader. We learn about provenance, dyes (black is particularly toxic), and the informed choices we can make. If we can’t make our clothes, we can mend them, and even make wearable art in the process. The skills Flint describes were known to our ancestors and we should revive them. Not many books mix practical environmentalism with art, and this one should appeal to more than the crafty and green.

MINXY VINTAGE: HOW TO CUSTOMISE AND WEAR VINTAGE CLOTHING
Kelly Doust
Murdoch

Right in time for Buy Nothing New October comes this book, which addresses the vexed area of women’s clothing. For many, it eats up the budget, yet is irresistible. Doust, a craft expert and experienced op-shopper, shows here how buying old can also be a means of unleashing creativity. Wearing vintage can be nostalgic, but it also teaches the modern woman about styling. More importantly, Doust shows how vintage pieces can be reinvented. As they tend to be better made than our mass-produced fashion, they will forgive a dye-bath, or alterations. Good fabric, says Doust, deserves preserving. If too small, she adds a panel, too big, cuts. Damage, in her book, is simply an excuse for imaginative embellishment. Doust covers basics, like practical repairs, but also how to avoid dry-cleaning. But where this book shines is in the practical examples, of how to make the most of garments bought for a song. Doust freely admits to not being an expert dressmaker, and does not have the patience for constructing elaborate dresses from patterns. But as her striking before and after shots show, she is a dab hand at making the dowdy utterly divine.

The literary fantastic

THE TIGER’S WIFE
Téa Obreht
Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Last year one of my top novels was by an author from the former Yugoslavia: Dubravka Ugreŝić’s Tiptree-winning Baba Yaga Laid an Egg. Obreht’s debut shares the Balkan setting, and also the sense of myth merging with everyday life. The Tiger’s Wife is a seamless blend between personal and national grief, folklore and rationality. Natalia is a young doctor, moving across new borders. Her beloved grandfather has died mysteriously far from home. She seeks for the truth of what has happened, while re-examining their war-torn lives. Her grandfather told stories, in which fact and fancy mingled. Did he really give his copy of Kipling’s Jungle Book to a deathless man? Did a deaf-mute girl truly become the wife of an escaped zoo tiger? No stranger, really, than that neighbours should suddenly turn on each other in brutal ethnic violence. In the general insanity of civil war, often the illogical, but traditional, is all that people can cling to. An adept, engaging and powerful read.

Just simply delicious

MOOMINS COOKBOOK: AN INTRODUCTION TO FINNISH CUISINE
Tove Jansson and Sami Malila
Self Made Hero

Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll series is a much-loved children’s classic. Only recently has her native Finland realized its merchandising potential. This attractive hardback combines Jansson’s illustrations with dishes from Finnish cuisine. Certain staples recur, like smoked fish, rhubarb and cream, for this is cold climate fare, and hearty. The book is aimed at both parents and children, with recipes ranging from the very easy, like sandwiches, to the more complicated. It begins with breakfast (mostly porridges), progressing through the garden party to the picnic. Since the only test of a cookbook is to use it, I did. The onion pie, with an interesting pastry including grated carrot, worked perfectly on the first attempt, and so did the smoked fish salad. Most importantly, they were delicious. For the nostalgic, and for those who like Scandinavian food.

Best Australiana

KINGLAKE 350
Adrian Hyland
Text

In February 2009 temperatures in my home town reached 47C—a record. That same day the tinder-dry bush exploded into flame, and 200 died. Among the losses was my late parents’ bush home, lost in firestorm conditions. Adrian Hyland lived near the affected areas, and his friend was Roger Wood, a policeman at the forefront in fighting the disaster. He would gain a medal for bravery, and nearly lost his life. Hyland tells Wood’s story of that day, in a mixture of real-life action writing, fire science, and nail-biting tension. Being a crime writer, he knows all about dramatic pacing, and this book moves like wildfire.

Disclaimer: I briefly supervised Hyland’s PhD thesis of this book. But I still think it is terrific…even after he blew me off stage at a booklaunch.

Lucy Sussex was born in New Zealand in 1957. She has degrees in English and Librarianship from Monash University, and is a freelance researcher, editor and writer. She has published widely, writing anything from literary criticism to horror and detective stories. In addition she is a literary archaeologist, rediscovering and republishing the nineteenth-century Australian crime writers Mary Fortune and Ellen Davitt. Her short story, `My Lady Tongue' won a Ditmar (Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award) in 1988. In 1994 she was a judge for the international Tiptree award, which honours speculative fiction exploring notions of gender. Her first adult novel, The Scarlet Rider, is about biography, Victorian detective fiction, voodoo and a ghost. Aqueduct Press published her collection, Absolute Uncertainty, in 2006. Since then she's published two more collections, most recently Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies: The Essential Lucy Sussex, published by Ticonderoga Publications, and the delicious Thief of Lives, published by Twelfth Planets Press.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 9: Carrie Devall

2011-12-15T09:56:00.000-08:00

Reading and Viewing in 2011

by Carrie Devall

The day job took a lot of my time and brain power in 2011, but I managed to get some reading in that was not just odd bits of writing research or about distance running and sports injuries.

Most recently, I have been enjoying the fantasy novel, Redemption in Indigo, by Caribbean writer Karen Lord (Small Beer Press, 2010). Lord's novel is very funny, and it can be read in short bursts which makes it good for public transit reading. Redemption is based on a Senegalese folktale and told in an engaging traditional but modernized style, involves quantum physics in a way that hasn't yanked me out of the story yet, and has some deft characterization and observations about human (and demonic) psychology, with a feminist edge.

The best reading I went to in 2011 was Leslie Marmon Silko at the downtown Minneapolis library. The portions she read from her new non-fiction book, The Turqoise Ledge (Viking, 2010), were funny and devastating in turn, with a focus on animals and the Sonoran desert environment in and around Tucson, Arizona. Silko gets extra credit for managing to provide thought-provoking answers to the dry and reductionist questions that a gaggle of college students posed to her in the Q&A session which were clearly based on their papers they had to write for class.

The most intellectually rewarding and thematically original novel I read this year was China Mieville's Embassytown, which I started after having not been able to finish his Kraken before I had to turn it back in to the library. The plot is essentially a story about a seemingly human species relating to alien life forms in outer space in the distant future and eventual war between these people, but revolves around linguistic and semiotic theory, and likely neurology and/or behavioral theory. I confess some ignorance here, but it did not reduce my enjoyment of the book. A lot of possible alternate readings were evoked in my mind, based on human Earth-based political and economic history. I ended up with the desire to read it again at some point when I had more time to really think about it. The real strength of Embassytown to me was that this definitely did not feel at all like a story I had read before, which is a rare event even in the theoretically wide open world of science fiction.

The other standout novels I read in 2011 were Lauren Beukes' Moxyland and Zoo City (Angry Robot Books, both). My ears perked up when Buekes won the Campbell award a year or two ago, but the books were not really available in the U.S., so I kept periodically checking the Angry Robot site for quite awhile. The Zoo City paperback showed up at Dreamhaven books right when I needed something to read for a two-week work training in a less than exciting city. I enjoyed reading both books, but I ended up with mixed feelings about the (multiple) points of view in each book, which felt to me oddly color-blind regardless of the characters' race and positioning in society.

This clashed with the plots, which are built around and broadly parody corporate capitalism and government-corporate economic policies; in a setting like Johannesburg, it just seemed strange. I found it interesting that I found a lot of reviews online saying how great it was that the genre was open to a South African writer but no discussion of the treatment of race in these books about a post-apartheid near future. The treatment of a gay character was similarly normalized in a way that may represent a more liberated future way of looking at sexuality but rang untrue to me. The plot of Moxyland was a little disappointing to me in the very end, as well. I felt like I'd just finished a familiar essay on the evils of consumerist capitalism rather than a futuristic novel, having read a lot of the Sociology/ Economics/ Cultural theory literature on that issue in 2010 and early 2011. Nonetheless, I found both novels fascinating on a lot of levels, and it's hard to find new book with a cyberpunk edge, especially by a female author.

Ted Chiang's The Life Cycle of Software Objects (Subterranean Press, 2010) was also a gripping read. A bunch of software developers get caught up in the gaming world they create to test out some AI creatures. Both the human and 'artificial' characters were so well-written, I got all caught up in them too, even though I have a tenuous grasp on many of the IT concepts involved (mostly from other SF books).

I went to several joint readings by some local friends and was inspired to read their books. C.M. Harris has two books out, Mother Glory (Spinster's Ink, 2009), a multi-generational story spanning several eras about a midwestern family that runs a religious sect and has a lot of queer folks mucking up the works, and Enter Oblivion (Casperian Books, 2011), a gay male romance set in a British glam rock setting. Being a Bowie fan I had a soft spot for the latter, but Mother Glory is more wide-ranging and complicated. Catherine Lundoff, a Wiscon regular, has a couple books out recently too, an anthology and a short story collection I have only heard snippets from so far A Day at the Inn, a Night at the Palace and Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2011). The anthology, edited with Joselle Vanderhooft, Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic (Flyleaf/Drollerie Press 2011), was a good transit read: a decent variety of stories to keep things interesting and a really beautiful cover to boot. Plus there is not exactly a glut of recent lesbian SFF anthologies on the market...

Speaking of short stories, a few this year really stuck in my mind. “White Lines on a Green Field,” by Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean, Fall 2011 issue) was very funny and a nice take on the Coyote tale, not an easy thing since Trickster stories regularly get a good workout in the genre. My Clarion West classmate ('07) Dominica Phettiplace had a cool story in Asimov's, “The Cult of Whale Worship” (October/November 2011). CW alum ('08) An Owomoyela had a couple stories published this year that made me a fan. “God in the Sky” was Asimov's (#421, March 2011), “All That Touches the Air” was in Lightspeed (4/11), and these led me to some older stories on the web including “Abandonware” (Fantasy, 6/10). Lightspeed had some other memorable stories, including “The Kingdom of the Blind” by Maureen McHugh (11/11 issue) and “Manumission” by Tobias S. Buckell (7/10 issue, but I got to it in 2011). I also spent a good deal of time poring over the Paris Review summer issue that included interviews with William Gibson and Samuel R. Delany, with awesome old photos from both of them.

A couple movies stand out. Source Code, directed by David Bowie's son Duncan Jones, was a very watchable scifi movie with Jake Gyllenhall as lead, though I can't say I thought it was profound, or as good as his first movie, Moon.

I found the documentary We Were Here very moving. It's basically talking-head interviews with several gay men who survived the AIDS epidemic in 80s San Francisco, with some old footage. I'm biased because I was there too, as a member of ACT UP! SF and other AIDS activist groups, and knew many of the people they were talking about, but other audience members also seemed to have become caught up in the stories. The documentary was recently nominated for an Academy Award, so it may make it out into some sort of general release. A guy who was leaving the theater said he felt like it said nothing new to his generation, who lived through the 80s, but it seemed like many audience members of all ages (at a benefit for an AIDS service organization) were unfamiliar with basic things like the Names Project quilt and the right wing calls for quarantine of all gay men or people with HIV in the U.S. in the1980s.

Some of the commentary in “We Were Here” was annoying, like the white guy who said he felt no other community had gone through a similar experience. I had flashbacks to all the consciousness-raising arguments in ACT UP meetings about race and class and why “we” should care about Haiti and Africa in that moment. And some issues were very depoliticized, partly because ACT UP's role was barely mentioned. Hello, they did not just hand over drug treatments that easily, it took some very direct action, again and again, to cut through a ton of red tape, ignorance, fear, and downright hatred. But I liked that it focused on a small community who was both broadly and deeply affected, because it made the stories very accessible. And I also liked that it focused on what it means to 'survive' as much as the historical facts of what happened in the 1980s and 1990s, while still providing a basic historical overview.

I really like traditional musics, especially with banjos and mandolins, but it's not so easy to find bands that don't have “old-fashioned” attitudes, in one way or another. The Carolina Chocolate Drops came to town and though I did not get to go to the show, I bought a CD. (Heritage, dixiefrog.com) Old-timey spare arrangements with lush vocals and a smattering each of banjo, fiddle, resophonic guitar, akonting (a Gambian banjo-precursor), jug, bones, and drums are focused on their stated goal of rehabiliting the old Black string band tradition, in the North Carolina Piedmont style. They collected songs from elderly fiddlers and singers in rural N.C., and also pulled stuff from old records. There are some originals including one based on Schubert's “Erlkonig,” and songs from another member who has been performing African music and drumming for over 30 years.

For local Twin Cities musicians, I also have to recommend Black Blondie, a sort of jazzy contemporary rock-folk band that is mostly female, and the Doomtree hip hop collective, who were recently featured in a funny interview/spread in our free paper, the City Pages (.com). The reunited Tom Tom Club opening for the Psychedelic Furs at First Avenue (think “Purple Rain”) was a great concert; the frontwomen had tons of energy and a great sense of humor. “Whatcha gonna do when you get out of jail? I'm going to have some fun...”

Finally, for people in or near the Bay area, if Margo Gomez' latest show is still at The Marsh in San Francisco (it keeps getting extended), or she takes it somewhere else, “Not Getting Any Younger” is wicked good. I laughed throughout the whole thing, even though I've seen many of her prior shows. A lot of heads were nodding at her musings about aging, ageism, families, and growing up in Da Bronx, old school. As she said with justified pride, she is one of the “pioneer” out lesbian comics.

Writing this mostly made me look through all the lists of books and stories I need to get around to reading, which are longer than the lists of the ones I finished this year. It's (always) time to get cracking...

–

Carrie Devall is a speculative fiction writer and reader. She blogs a bit at metrospec.blogspot.com and otherwise works at the day job a lot these days, producing a lot of timeless legal prose.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 8: Mark Rich

2011-12-14T23:59:00.000-08:00

Readings 2011
by Mark Rich

Being caught in a whirl of circumstance, in 2011 I read deeply from the lists of the many fantasy publishers of 2010; and I skipped and dipped and explored widely elsewhere. (I will leave titles and even many author names unsaid; some of what I leave unsaid can be found in the list of World Fantasy nominees.) At random, for instance, I picked up a Lauren Beukes novel, about which I knew nothing. Thoroughly and maybe even outrageously impressed I went on through more books from Angry Robot. What vitality, there! Small Beer, too, seems to have a clue as to where lies the heart of contemporary imaginative fiction. Its Karen Fowler collection, for instance, offers a set of ghost stories presented as though unghostly. Several other important one-author fiction collections that I dipped into or read in their entireties have strands woven into them that give them cohesiveness, as books. The strand in Fowler's is nearly invisible ... appropriately enough. For some reason I was surprised, too, by the Patricia McKillip novel from Ace. This novel offers obstacles at first, then delivers in full to the reader who perseveres. An engrossing, absorbing experience, in prose of unusual quality. Another of her meditations on the culture of words, perhaps.

Other surprises, small and large, came from writers previously unknown to me, including Tony Burgess, Aliette de Bodard, Celine Kiernan, Karen Lord, Helen Lowe and Angela Slattery ... among others. At one point I thought I was sensing a Scottish writing-upswelling. Then an Australian one reared its head. Then I began contemplating the inexplicable energy -- and frequent literary excellences -- among the dark fantasists. And everywhere I was encountering writers well-known to me who like Fowler and McKillip were moving impressively onwards unfaltering in their strides.

The overall effect of such a reading experience was to underline what I long knew of myself, but never felt so intensely: the dimness of my awareness of the works of my own time. I started 2011 reading old books; and in ending it similarly I am letting the works published in 2011 slip away from me. On the other hand I am glad to have Asa Briggs' Victorian People now on my list of books to re-read. I look forward to placing there, too, the book I now struggle with and delight in, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism.

Mark Rich is the author of a major biographical and critical study, C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary, which was published last year by McFarland. He has also published two collections of fiction — Edge of Our Lives (RedJack) and Across the Sky (Fairwood) — as well as chapbooks from presses including Gothic and Small Beer. With partner-in-life Martha and Scottie-in-life Lorna, he lives in the Coulee region of Wisconsin where an early-1900s house, a collection of dilapidated antique furniture, and a large garden preoccupy him with their needs.

"A Project to Bend the Arc of History" (ASA 2011)

2011-12-14T20:15:00.000-08:00

“Transforming the University Curriculum with Disability Studies: Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Approaches.”

Mike Rembis, Corrine Bertram, Allison Carey, Susan Burch, Josh Lukin, Ann Keefer

An excerpt from the proposal that got the panel accepted: The panel will explore three recent disability studies initiatives at public universities and discuss how, in a time of limited resources, each has imagined and effected the introduction of disability studies into the curriculum. All three programs present themselves as part of, or logical extensions of, older social justice models, using the vocabulary of diversity, marginality, equality, and privilege; so each has set itself the challenge of maintaining disability’s distinctiveness as a social category and avoiding the elisions and distortions that accompany easy analogies to other oppressed groups. But in most respects, the three initiatives differ immensely in their approach. One encourages the introduction of disability content into a university’s core courses and explicitly seeks to support students with disabilities; one proposes a broad goal of raising awareness to identify and transform oppressive institutions and environments; one is creating a disability studies minor in a social science department, using extant thought on power and stratification to integrate disability into its curriculum. The respondent is a prominent disability historian who heads a Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, demonstrating that disability scholarship can be integrated into areas that formerly focused on other kinds of social identity.

The insight that I got from this panel was that it’s impossible for me to take thorough notes on a panel that I have organized and am on. Especially when, despite my partner’s repeated efforts to make sure in advance that the room was set up for it, there was no working microphone and no amplification for the sound on the video we projected. So we showed some of the video on this page and read the captions aloud to make it all accessible; and our copanelists gave great presentations about what they were doing at their universities, Shippensburg and Buffalo, and how they were getting support for such projects in hard times. The notes I have mostly record the enthusiastic and encouraging remarks of our moderator/respondent, Disability History star Susan Burch, and interesting lines from the q & a.

Burch said that the panel and the work it described address a key concern: how we talk about disability. People with disabilities constitute the largest minority in the world: the number of people with identifiable disabilities exceeds the population of the U.S. Disability Studies has been around for decades and addresses a growing community, as disabilities are created by war, poverty, and the other usual suspects. There have been Society for Disability Studies panels on how we build the discipline as a system, as a presence, in a world where institutions of higher learning are still wildly ableist. We are involved in a project to bend the arc of history, and for it we need sustainability, community, and coalition; we need assets and the invitation to be more thoughtful in our actions. What the panel is doing reflects the issues Disability Studies deals with all the time: all of us are so deeply interested in praxis — how do we apply this knowledge we’ve accumulated? Our institutions of higher learning are vastly diverse in terms of access, power, and privilege; so who has expertise? Who’s getting trained and how? What can maintain a university’s or an academic movement’s sustained relationship to the larger disability community? Knowledge is so “siloed”; and the way we think about disability cannot be cut off from other identity categories, nor should it be modeled on a single older movement.

The twelve or fourteen attendees in the audience were very involved in the discussion. A graduate student from San Francisco State asked a question having to do with race, and ensuring that race is not a black/white issue: she looks in vain for herself (i.e. Latinas) in disability scholars and research. I remarked that even the battle to make disability a black/white issue is still a struggle: what would one do, I asked, if one wanted to talk to higher-ranking scholars whose DS syllabi were exclusively white authors’ memoirs? Oy! (I think I actually used that interjection, inadvertently, because there was audience laughter) With Ann’s encouragement, I noted that one place where you could find engagement with disability and a wide range of racial identities was in the arts and mentioned, for example, novelists such as Ana Castillo and poets like Johnson Cheu.

A guy from the audience, trained in women’s history and feminist theory, noted that 85% of disability is acquired, from landmines, bullets, pregnancy, and the like. Mike’s global perspective is important in the light of such facts. Corrine has tried to address immigration and refugees and how the U.S. is involved in their refugee status. A woman from the University of New Mexico wanted to address the lack of inclusivity on the part of disability activists: they were, she said, long unwelcoming toward the Deaf, for example. How do we struggle productively with differences? More and more people, Burch and others pointed out, are entering the Deaf/disability dialogue. Amy Ferrell noted that nonetheless, other groups are still struggling with the stigma attached to claiming disability like the Deaf used to: the fat, for example, do not want to claim disability or even invoke analogies to disability ever.

Kathleen Brian from George Washington U remarked on how Susan Wendell’s and Margaret Price’s books begin in confessional mode, legitimating their authority with identity-claims, and asked about the necessity or drawbacks of that tactic. Allison said we need to be very socially aware of who the messenger is and we have to be aware of shutting out voices. I agreed with what I took to be Brian’s point, that self-disclosure should not be an imperative, and then told the story of a meeting five years ago, when Diane Bryen, then the director of Temple’s Institute on Disabilities, arranged a meeting with me after having seen my Black Disability Studies article in the Temple Faculty Herald and, as we sat down to talk, observed, “You’re not black.” You gotta teach these things with the human resources you have, even if it means that the three-dimensional person the students see in front of every class doesn’t always clearly belong to the social identity under discussion, or that of the authors/performers/artists whose work is being discussed.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 7: Lesley Hall

2011-12-14T14:19:00.000-08:00

Pleasures of reading and viewing, 2011
by Lesley Hall

This was a year in which I was obliged to undertake a great deal of scholarly reading to bring myself up to date on the current state of history of sexuality in the UK during the C19th and C20th: much of this was really excellent and worth reading for less imperative reasons. Works I was particularly taken with, and had not previously read, were Katharine Holden's marvellous study of singleness, The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in England, 1914-1960 (2007), Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher's Sex before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963 (2010), Frank Mort's Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (2010), and Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair, Public Lives: Women, Family, and Society in Victorian Britain (2003) (this in fact focuses on C19th Glasgow and thus forms a contribution to the gradual shift from metrocentric perspectives). Although I didn't read it cover to cover, I found Stephen Cretney's Family Law in the Twentieth Century: A History (2003) an invaluable guide to the intricate evolution of British marital legislation.

I also read a number of other academic/non-fiction works outside those parameters that I found compelling and thought-provoking. Julie-Marie Strange's Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914 came out in 2005 but only fairly recently became available in paperback and ebook editions. This is an absolutely brilliant study that weaves together personal narratives, evidence from official documents and the records of cemeteries, and accounts by middle-class observers, both medical men and C19th social observers/philanthropists. Strange persuasively argues that the idea that the Victorian poor faced family deaths with resignation or relief is very misleading and that although they might not respond in ways that the more prosperous would identify as grief or articulate their sorrow in words, emotional reactions were expressed in many different ways. Working-class cultures of funeral wakes were not just, as observers claimed, an excuse for drunken indulgence, and the deaths of children were not simply welcomed as opportunities to cash in on burial insurance. Nonetheless, the experience of bereavement was deeply embedded within situations of economic extremity which might well, especially in the case of widowed women, be exacerbated by the loss of a breadwinner. The conclusion analyses responses to the mass deaths of the Great War in the light of these longer traditions of mourning and commemoration. A wonderful book that sheds light into numerous neglected historiographical areas.

A rather different work was Jane Shaw's Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and her Followers (2011). I heard Shaw present on this fascinating work in progress some years ago and had been ardently awaiting this book ever since. It deals with an extensively documented and extraordinary religious group founded in the early twentieth century by 'Octavia' (formerly Mabel Barltrop), in which women predominated, based on the millennial writings of the earlier 'female messiah' Joanna Southcott. The 'Panacea Society' was a curious blend of radicalism (in its foregrounding of women) and conservatism (in their general social attitudes and many of their practices). A fascinating (and well-written) story with lots to offer about women and religion, class, modernity, and the wider penumbra of fringe and marginal belief systems.

I also managed to consume a fair amount of fiction. Perhaps even more impressive on a re-read than on the first devouring when it came out was Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) - I was incited to this re-read by the BBC mini-series that appeared earlier in the year, which was good in its way but I felt left out a lot of what I remembered from the book, which certainly repays a second reading. In the realm of television adaptations of novels, however, the rushed and skimpy 2011 version (in a meager three episodes! focusing on the romance plot which in the original is just one of many intertwined threads) of Winifred Holtby's wonderfully rich 1934 novel South Riding is not worth wasting one's time with - I strongly advocate trying to get hold of the infinitely superior 1974 Yorkshire TV adaptation which gave it thirteen lengthy episodes of appropriately leisurely and expansive development.

There were few new discoveries in fiction, although I did get turned on to Megan Abbott's wonderful female-centred noir thrillers - Queenpin, Die a Little, The Song Is You and Bury Me Deep. There were a number of very strong works by writers I already like - any year in which two of Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mysteries come out is a good year! I don't normally particularly go for short stories (or horror, come to that), but I was completely stunned, in the best of ways, by Sarah Monette's Somewhere Beneath Those Waves as well as by the limited edition chapbook of several of her uncollected Kyle Murchison Booth stories.

Another area of reading that gave me pleasure during the year was seeing several very nice reviews of the biography I published, The Life and Times of Stella Browne, feminist and free spirit. It was rewarding to feel that people had been made aware of a neglected figure of significant interest, and appreciated that although less well-known than many more-biographized contemporaries, her life was worth the task of recovering.

In other art forms, while I don't seem to have seen many movies that have stayed with me this year, the production of Terence Rattigan's Flare Path in the West End this spring continues to resonate, and while I had some problems with the final outcome of J B Priestley's They Came to a City this was a striking production of a seldom-seen play at the Southwark Playhouse, located under one of the arches in the entangled and labyrinthine railway bridges around London Bridge and making imagination use of the space.

During my three weeks in the USA in May and June I managed to spend some quality time with Louise Nevelson sculptures in several cities, even though I was a bit miffed that museums which I know hold several of her works didn't have them on display. I was particularly glad to have made it to her eponymous Plaza in NYC.

Another pleasure that I should perhaps mention was eating - I visited some excellent restaurants in the course of this year, and the one that took the crown was undoubtedly Heston Blumenthal's new London flagship, Dinner, which lived up to all the hype. My only regret was that I wish I had dined there before the nights drew in in order to get the benefit of the view over Hyde Park.

Lesley A. Hall is a London-based archivist and historian, and author of several books on the history of gender and sexuality. She has also published the Aqueduct Press Conversation Piece, Naomi Mitchison: A Profile of Her Life and Work (2007). Her biography of a pioneering British feminist sex radical and campaigner for reproductive freedom, The Life and Times of Stella Browne, feminist and free spirit was published by IB Tauris early in 2011. Lesley's website can be found at http://www.lesleyahall.net.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 6: Rebecca Ore

2011-12-13T22:11:00.000-08:00

Reading Nicaragua
by Rebecca Ore

I’ve been living in Jinotega, Nicaragua, since the end of July 2010, and have been an official resident since December 21 or so of the same year. When I first came here, it reminded me, sociologically, of the Appalachians, with a range of people in a number of communities all being seen as the locals, a backdrop against which the people who discovered the place, often meaning the scenery more than the people, did various things that couldn’t be done where they came from.

This impression hasn’t changed. Nicaragua has been seen as a great opportunity for the Anglo Saxons since Thomas Belt wrote The Naturalist in Nicaragua. Where I live now, he described:

Jinotega is pleasantly situated, and has many advantages over other Nicaraguan towns. The climate is temperate and moderately dry, the land very fertile. Pine trees on the surrounding ranges furnish fuel and light. Pasture is abundant; for two miles below the town the valley opens out into wide "campos" covered with grass, on which a large number of horses, cattle, and mules are reared. (Thomas Belt. The Naturalist in Nicaragua (Kindle Locations 2992-2995)).
The wide campos and the village of Apanas are now under a reservoir for hydroelectric power generations.

Belt disliked mestizo culture and preferred the indigenous:

Probably nowhere but in tropical America can it be said that the introduction of European civilisation has caused a retrogression; and that those communities are the happiest and the best-governed who retain most of their old customs and habits. (Kindle Locations 3435-3436).

I’ve had discussions with a Nicaraguan acquaintance over the survival of the indigenous culture or not. He claims that without the language, the person isn’t Indian. I get the very strong impression that a lot of indigenous ways of being with people still survive.

The one really alarming note in Belt’s book is his belief that Nicaragua will be finally taken over by Anglo-Saxon colonists, even though he notes that most Europeans and North Americans who have settled there ended up living Nicaraguan lives.

There is one form of colonisation that will be successful, and that is the gradual moving down southward of the people of the United States. When the destiny of Mexico is fulfilled, with one stride the Anglo-American will bound to the Isthmus of Panama, and Central America will be filled with cattle estates, and with coffee, sugar, indigo, cotton, and cacao plantations. Railways will then keep up a healthful and continuous intercourse with the enterprising North, and the sluggard and the sensual will not be able to stand before the competition of the vigorous and virtuous. Nor will the Anglo-American long be stayed by the Isthmus in his progress southward. Unless some such catastrophe happens as a few years ago threatened to cover North America with standing armies as in Europe, which God forbid, not many centuries will roll over before the English language will be spoken from the frozen soil of the far north to Tierra del Fuego in the south. (Kindle Locations 4585-4592).

This attitude seems to linger on, not so directly spoken, in some of expatriate plans in the current day.

Bill Drake’s Cultural Dimensions of Expatriate Life in Nicaragua is a generic ex-pat book fleshed out with some actually decent advice on living in Nicaragua, but those parts are rather Managua-centric and US embassy personnel-centric. The section on culture shock is probably useful (I suspect people more firmly integrated into their home cultures than I was will have more problems). He says learning the local language, being in immersion classes, will help there. Other advice: Make local friends and don't spend too much time with expatriates who aren't integrated into the local culture.

Drake describes a subset of expatriates who spend their time together in bars and restaurants complaining about the locals, assuming that none of the local speak the language when national intelligence agencies often have agents working in such places. The net forums have created a similar venue with even greater chance of Nicaraguan intelligence checking to see what the gringos are bitching about now.

Drake contrasts high context cultures with low context ones. High context cultures are the ones known for circumlocutions, not saying things directly, not wanting to disappoint people to their faces in matter of invitations and saying instead things like "we'll try to make it," which Drake suggests is a Nicaraguan way of saying no. (He also says that individuals have differences and benevolent stereotypes are as annoying as negative ones). I recently had a discussion with Nicaraguan friends over a visit a visiting friend and I were going to make to their finca, and my friend said that she really hadn’t been able to follow all the conversation. Southerners won’t have any problems – they do politeness as a weapon, just tone it down a bit and Nicaragua will seem as straightforward as you should want.

One of the major things that happened here was The Revolution, July 1979. From the United States, it looks more clear-cut than it looks in Nicaragua. An acquaintance, who fought for the FSLN, whose father and grandfather were opposed to Somoza, said the main thing to keep in mind was that everyone was very scared.

Three books are among the best non-specialist, non-resident introduction to the revolution and Contra War era: Unfinished Revolution: Daniel Ortega and Nicaragua's Struggle for Liberation, by Kenneth E. Morris; The Jaguar Smile, by Salman Rushdie, and Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle (Fifth Edition), by Thomas W. Walker and Christine J. Wade.

Unfinished Revolution: Daniel Ortega and Nicaragua’s Struggle for Liberation is the most recent book, published in 2010. Since then, Ortega has been re-elected President to considerable concern from the exiled Nicaraguan and Cuban community in Miami, with over 60% of the vote.

While there's some overlap with the latest edition of Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle, this focuses on Daniel Ortega and includes more details on various accusations against him, including the child molestation charges, than I've seen elsewhere. The writer is grudgingly sympathetic to Ortega, so if that would be unacceptable, start with Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle. Morris writes: "It is simply a mistake to underestimate Daniel Ortega's political savvy."

Morris’s account reminds me of Lyndon Johnson, another consummate politician who could only be kept in check by his own moral principles, which worked brilliantly for Civil Rights (Kennedy kept Civil Rights around as a house pet and would have probably never gotten anything passed) and disastrously for Vietnam (I doubt that Kennedy would have behaved any better, despite the myths of Camelot). Both Ortega and Johnson appear to have embarrassed the traditional liberal classes by the roughness that never left either.

Although Salman Rushdie pointed out that many of the Sandinistas he met had the same class origins as the Guardia, Ortega was lower-middle class. Many of the upper class Sandinistas broke with him.

Besides Ortega, the book looks closely at the personal histories of some of the other Nicaraguan revolutionary leaders: Sandino, and, in greater detail, Fonseca and the other Ortega brothers. They were almost all lower middle class men: "Also, contrary to Marx, it would seem that the lower middle class is more prone to revolutionary enthusiasm than the working class, because it has a stake in the system yet feels vulnerable."

Both Ortega and Tomas Borge were the products of private Catholic high schools, with Ortega's family having trouble paying the fees from time to time. Ortega began his political actions in his teens and when he sat for his high school graduation exams, National Guard was waiting for him. His school gave Ortega temporary asylum, an undocumented deal was cut, and he was able to graduate and even attend university briefly.

Unlike the common US left assumption that Ortega only returned to the Catholic Church to get its support in 2006, this book keeps in focus Ortega's lifelong connection to Catholicism. Also, unlike the other books I've read, Morris discusses the early bank robberies the FSLN used to support itself ("We're the FSLN and we're robbing this bank to overthrow Somoza" seems to have been what the muchachos said) and Ortega's ambush killing of a National Guardsman who had brutalized prisoners. Ortega's conviction for one of the bank robberies sent him to prison, where some of the guards were FSLN sympathizers and made sure that the political prisoners had access to radios and reading material. Prison bred the strongest alliances of Ortega's life: the only political prisoners serving with Ortega to survive the revolution, Jacinto Suarez and Lenin Cerna, remained loyal to him for life, as did Tomas Borge, who also survived both prison and the revolution. As Morris puts it, "Those who defected from the Front, usually in ideological huffs, tended to not have endured long term incarcerations."

This is another book strongly pointing out that the FSLN economic plans always included a private sector and that the Soviet Union was not an unqualified supporter of that part during the 1980s.

Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle points to Soviet-era documents that show the Soviet Union wasn't as involved or expecting as much as the Reagan and other supporters of the Contras claimed. I won’t review it in detail.

Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile said that conservative estimates of the CIA's budget against Nicaragua in 1986-87 were around $400 million, with $300 million going to influence Nicaragua's neighbors, "...you had a grand total of $800 million being spent on dirty tricks and destabilization, to bring to heel a country of under three million people….In the five years of the war, the Nicaraguan economy had suffered an estimated $2 billion-worth of damage."

Rushdie visited Nicaragua at a time when many felt a US invasion was inevitable. The Contras were failing to keep troops. According to Rushdie’s contacts, the Sandinista government pardoned any campesino who'd joined or was pressed into the Contras and who wanted to quit. The FSLN was passing out AK-47s to campesinos; Rushdie said that he couldn't imagine El Salvador passing out weapons to their peasants. The majority of people did not support the contras in most of Nicaragua (the current November 6 vote probably reflects the distribution of Contra supporting areas fairly closely: a cattle farming area went for the best of the two other parties and Jinotega voted for Ortega with a smaller majority than the other departments).

I live here now and I’ve seen more politically frightened people in South Carolina during the 1950s. A writer for the Herald Tribune accused Nicaragua of repression that was not as conspicuous or as bloody as other parts of Central America, but which was more insidious and systematic. Rushdie brought this up. "Then he (Ramirez) lost his temper, 'You see,' he cried, 'if we do not murder and torture people as they do in Salvador, it just proves that we are so fiendishly subtle."

What Rushdie saw was a mixed economy. He had negative impressions of Ernesto Cardenal, the poet who claimed Nicaragua was the first country to nationalize poetry (Rushdie quotes in his forward a person in the audience quipping, "Second," meaning the Soviet Union. He heard Gioconda Belli reading and began a correspondence with her that he mentions in his foreword, that she'd left Nicaragua, though at this time, Belli is back in Managua, at least half the year (she’s one of the country club Sandinistas, frankly, meow).

Rushdie found himself at odds with his hosts over the issue of freedom of the press and over what he felt was an uncritical acceptance of all things Cuban, particularly on Cardenal's part. The Sandinistas closed La Prensa after the US Congress voted further funding to the Contras. La Prensa took money from the CIA (most agree on that one though the Chamorro family denies it) and the FSLN government, in what Rushdie saw as a tit for tat, shut down La Prensa. He found the idea of poets closing down a press appalling. The excuse was that "Everyone censors the press in wartime." Rushdie said, simply, of the excuse, "It wouldn't do."

(La Prensa is what you’d expect if you gave a teenaged US libertarian enough money to run a newspaper. An Australian paper gave a more responsible account of a 5,000 person march in Managua protesting the recent election; and when La Prensa’s workers went on strike after the article came out, this was said to be an example of FSLN intimidation. Gray area, but Somoza or his friends shot Joachim Chamorro for his attacks on the Somoza regime. One is under the impression that nothing makes Family Chamorro happy).

Rushdie saw an imperfect state, but believed that it was better than it was bad. "And imperfection, even the deep flaw of censorship, did not constitute a justification for being crushed by a super-power's military and economic force." He remembered debates with Mario Vargas Llosa, who had insisted that the democratic process was the only way to break the cycle of revolution and dictatorship in Latin America. Vargas Llosa supported the right in his native country of Peru and did not support what he felt was happening in Nicaragua.

Rushdie's fame as a fiction writer allowed him access to people who would not be as available to other visitors. He did his homework and was an acute observer, though sometimes less than candid about everything he saw. His Preface to the 1997 edition corrects some of these omissions, and brings the story forward ten years. He said of the Sandinistas as they left office, "Now, in their fall, they had behaved, once again simultaneously, like true democrats and also like true Latin American oligarchs."

I liked seeing this period of Nicaraguan history through the eyes of someone who wasn't from one of the dominant world cultures. Rushdie's worth reading, even if one doesn't agree with all his initial conclusions and does understand that land confiscation wasn't just from those who'd fled Nicaragua.

Roger N. Lancaster’s Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua isn’t a good book to start with, but is an excellent account of what it was like to live in Nicaragua at the end of the Contra War, to be in the Managua barrios when people were stressed by inflation, the draft, and the constant fear of US invasion. The book also discusses gender and gay issues, but the section on how the barrio reacted to the vote for Violetta Chamorro (as though in mourning), and the details of life in Managua barrios, how people coped, makes this one a good book for anyone wanting to know more about how life worked in Managua at that time.

Two movies – one the street vendor selling movies insisted that I buy: Sandino and the other one a loan from some young Nicaraguans when they returned my copy of Sandino: Pancho Villa. Both together bring back an era when people first began trying to throw off US domination. Both men were murdered.

Some people argue that Ortega and his faction of the FSLN are dictators – at worst, at least now, it might be a soft authoritarian regime, but given all the complaints about him, it is not a suppressed country. The local FSLN supporters looked more prosperous and better fed than the PRI (best of the two other parties) supporters. Politics here is played hardball – the country is in some ways better off than I imagined, but those who fail to be significantly prosperous don’t that much of a comfortable middle class to fall back to yet.

Rebecca Ore's fiction burst upon the world in 1988 with the publication of her celebrated Becoming Alien trilogy, the first two novels of which were nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. Since then she’s published a great deal of short fiction and numerous novels, including Gaia’s Toys, Time’s Child, Outlaw School, Slow Funeral, the short fiction collection, Alien Bootlegger, and from Aqueduct Press, Alien Bootlegger and Centuries Ago and Very Fast, a collection of linked short stories that was a finalist for both the Philip K. Dick and the Lambda Awards. Aqueduct Press will be releasing her new novel, Time and Robbery this spring.

"Health Is Politics By Other Means" (ASA 2011)

2011-12-13T17:18:00.000-08:00

The seventh in a series of reports from the American Studies Association.

"Repairing the Body Politic: Race, Health, and Justice."

Moderator Nanlesta Pilgrim thanked everyone for having come in spite of the fact that the conference program listed the panel as being in a nonexistent room. Headliner Alondra Nelson thanked everybody for having come in spite of the fact that the panel was occurring simultaneously with Angela Davis’s panel.

Much of Nelson’s talk was derived from parts of her Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination. Her thesis is that health is politics by other means. This point is evident in, for example, Bill Clinton’s having commemorated the tenth anniversary of the decoding of the human genome by speaking of how that accomplishment demonstrated “our common humanity”; it is also clear from the recent battle over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Health is associated with the Good Society. Battles over health policy, from the fight between right-wing accusations leveled at “Obamacare” and assertions of the right to health to bigger issues of state power and business influence associated with the PPACA, showed how discussion of healthcare is a medium through which major political differences are expressed.

The Black Panther Party is not remembered for health activism. But Huey Newton and Bobby Seale sought to protect black communities using that activism, working for medical self-defense: for example, the Party-led movement against the UC Center for the Study of Violence was an instance of the Panthers protecting the community from medical experimentation. The Party consistently fought against medical abuse, real and imagined. Their newsletter published a fascinating report on the discovery of the Tuskegee experiment. And their 1972 “Black Community Survival Conference: Serving the People Body and Soul” included barbecue, voter registration drives, and health initiatives. Detractors have claimed that that conference and its successors marked the deradicalization of the Party, but health activism was part of the Party’s radical tradition. Newton and Brown revised Point Six of the Party’s platform to demand free health care for all black and oppressed peoples.

As the mid-Sixties civil rights struggles’ spotlight moved North, the movement more stridently projected health as a locus of struggles for political equality. Dr. King said, “Of all forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” The Party’s call for health care was indebted to the World Health Organization and shared that institution’s definition of health; it also built on traditions in Left and African-American thought associating health with social well-being. The struggle for health access was a signpost in the Long Civil Rights Movement. Nelson explores the ideological, tactical, and historical contexts responsible for the growth of health activism: ideologically, the Party drew on ideas from Mao, Che, and Fanon; tactically, it instituted a series of People’s Free Medical Centers, many — like the Bunchy Carter Free Clinic in L.A.— named for Party martyrs; and many, like that clinic, short-lived because they were attacked and ransacked by police.

Although the Party’s Sickle-Cell Anemia Research Foundation never got off the ground, they did offer genetic screening programs for sickle-cell anemia as well as health education outreach with media appearances, pamphlets, and the like and a series of editorials from 1971 to 1974. During the week that they hosted the Mike Douglas Show in 1973, John Lennon and Yoko Ono had Party affiliates on discussing the Sickle Cell Anemia campaign. It’s taken a lot of historical erasure to obliterate such activism from our memories. The black community has been both underserved by and overexposed to the medical establishment. The Party’s history shows that it was not anti-medicine — “they didn’t want to chuck out medicine wholesale” — but they wanted some control over what medicine did and where and to whom. As we hear in recent years about the Henrietta Lacks case, about the Guatemala syphilis case, about all these events that compound the record of uneven encounters between minority populations and medicine; as we read books like Medical Apartheid and study racial health disparities, learning the basis for black distrust of the medical system, we have to realize that people of color have played other roles than that of its victims: Harriet Washington thinks shining a light on past injustices would help us, but so will the recovery work that reminds us of black agency in the health care struggle.

Catherine Bliss spoke of “Science and Struggle: Biomedical Research as Activism.” There’s a press photo from around 2000 of Bill Clinton with Francis Collins and other researchers celebrating the human genome project and talking about what unites “all human beings, regardless of race . . . ,” implying that scientific research on race and the use of racial boundaries are no longer justified by science. We’ve seen a deluge of studies, research solutions to heal the body politic by addressing the social issue of race. But somehow genomics became the new science of race. Bliss interviewed thirty-six members of the professional elite and discovered a new activism, using tactics of the New Left era (which included the medical civil rights movement): as genomics followed the post-Civil Rights Era, and began enacting these tactics to further research goals. Thus scientists are allying themselves with progressive movements by borrowing their tactics, but how they’re deployed is limited by the pragmatics of the field: genomics is Big Science, tied closely to private industry.

Hence leading genomicists use the language of Left consciousness-raising when they talk about addressing “the lay community.” To the scientists, this means they have a responsibility to create awareness, which they do through discussing sequencing projects. So they reframe the building of consciousness as individual actions for private gains, not as challenging the built environment and the social structure. They talk about integration and use it to mean research-inclusion: it doesn’t give minorities access to health care, just to unproven therapies. And in their hands, strategic essentialism means reifying groupness to gain resources for the group in question — it deploys international and minority scientists, invoking the rhetoric of self-determination, and scientists feel that they’re helping minorities without actually challenging the status quo or contesting the categories such people are placed in. And upholding self-determination is only used in collecting data and recording it.

There’s a real interest in social justice, but it’s manifested as a consciousness-raising that promotes essentialism, enhances expert power, and creates permanent structures of racialized science. Dividing populations into the categories “Europe”, “Africa”, and “Japan”, for example, reifies strategic essentialism and self-representation. Even more dangerous is the co-optation of access: the scientists say “access” and mean new markets for drugs. In short, the professional elites are unchanging agents of change, whose practices have harmful material consequences. We need to move away from “the word-heft of ‘race’ into how best to care for patients”; we have to be concerned about how biomedical science could be (and is) mobilized for a deepening of racial difference in society.

Sean Greene, with the moderator’s encouragement, spoke at great length on “Saving King/Drew: Black Activism, Health Care, and the Future of South L.A.”: Pilgrim was not interested in enforcing time limits, so the whole panel, with the q & a included, extended into the time frame for the next set of panels (no one else had reserved the room for that time frame, so it's not as if any other panel was hurt). Greene’s topic was the struggle to preserve, reform, and reopen the King/Drew medical center in the context of the struggle over resources in South L.A., and how proponents of the center managed to build support for the center in the political climate of the last decade. The struggle shifted public debate from a rhetoric of crisis to one of reinvention/reform. It highlights the efforts of people of color to re-envision and remake disintegrating formerly industrial neighborhoods.

The prehistory of King/Drew goes back to the black hospital movement so well-documented by Vanessa Gamble but starts in earnest after WWII. In 1947 black physicians tried to create a nonprofit, nonsectarian interracial hospital in the area; there were many efforts in the 1950s to start one, with the support of such celebrities as Joe Louis; but nobody could raise the funds. A proposal in 1963 was denied on the grounds that L.A. had enough hospitals. Many physicians in times of segregation saw black hospitals as their best hopes. The Watts uprising of 1965 changed the balance: the McComb commission in listing the causes of the riots included a lack of access to health care and addressed the problem of the “Five Dollar Sick.” One of the demands that then arose in the wake of the riots was the creation of a hospital to serve the community — because it was a Movement project, self-determination and community control were central. King/Drew and analogous institutions constituted a partial fulfillment of postwar aspirations for black empowerment and community development: the hospital reflected one of the few successful post-Watts demands.

But by the end of the century, the public ground on which the hospital had been built was shrinking. People of color were fighting harder for less and less. The area had changed, becoming majority-Latino. And shifts in staffing and services were required in a time of ever-shrinking resources. The L.A. Times’s 2004 series of exposés of King-Drew revealed egregious medical mistakes and horror stories, arguing that they’d arisen from lack of oversight, corruption, and poor administration, claiming that fear and the soft bigotry of low expectations had hitherto prevented criticism of the hospital. The articles tried to argue that King-Drew was adequately funded but still spectacularly bad. In response to the reports, supervisors got heads rolling and hired eighteen million dollars’ worth of private consultants. Many in the community saw the agenda as dismantling and privatizing the institution. Many specialty units closed their doors — the ending of Ob/Gyn services in particular led to an uprising in the community. The agents of this dismantling were at the federal level and on the accreditation boards, and they’d been working on it for a while: a number of residency programs had been closed or put on probation before the LAT’s articles appeared. The general sentiment was that the hospital might be salvageable if it shrunk. Organizations to maintain the hospital arose in the community — Save King/Drew included some of the hospital’s founders and saw community leaders and activists allied with political officials. But in four years, King-Drew was reduced to an outpatient clinic. Often activists would contest the idea that the way to address the problems was to leave the area without medical resources. Activists were demonized or caricatured in the local press, viewed as driven by misguided racial loyalty; they fought back, struggling to send the message, Why close the hospital instead of fixing it? But in spite of mass mobilizations, it was closed down.

After Mark Ridley-Thomas was elected county supervisor in 2008, he led the charge to use public funds and leverage private funds to rebuild a smaller version of the Martin Luther King Jr. Multi-Service Ambulatory Care Center, to open in 2013 as part of a comprehensive plan to develop the area, and sought to go back to the unfulfilled post-Watts plans to redevelop the neighborhood, in conjunction with the UC. So what are the lessons learned? This is not an isolated story. The past few years have seen the closing of D.C. General and Philadelphia General, the destruction of Charity Hospital in New Orleans, and serious threats to Grady Memorial in Atlanta. The structural context is the same as that in which King/Drew happened, down to the same racist response in the press. The project is about struggles over urban space, redevelopment, and health concerns. The struggle over King/Drew represents victory, inasmuch as the activists changed the discourse and promulgated their vision of what these deindustrialized and privatizing urban spaces should become; but it also shows the resilience of central neoliberal power.

Pilgrim remarked that Bliss had challenged a lot of her beliefs. She noted that all three panelists had asked how we achieve health equality in an ethical and just manner. She asked Nelson, What can we learn from the Panthers’ approach? How can we reconcile the call for equality with the mistrust of the medical establishment? She asked Bliss, how do we reconcile the “unbiased” ideal of science with the kind of “activism” you described, where what gets funded is based on fashions? And how can we move away from race categories when certain inequalities are race-based?

Julie Elman, an NTT at Columbia, offered a question from a Disability Studies perspective about the reification and stigmatization of the diseased/disabled body. Bliss agrees that you need the category of disability, and the problems that category creates, to be recognized and noted that “These questions are not being asked within the realm of science that I study.” Nelson assured Elman that health for the Party was not about static categories of disease and illness; it was about needs and how your community and your ecology address your needs. She noted that she was not a disability scholar and recommended Sue Schweik’s recent piece about the Panthers and disability activism. A former Panther, impressed by mention of the “Five Dollar Sick” and Greene’s work on the hardships of transportation for the black community, expressed concern that the PPACA might divert NGO and community center funding to insurance companies and agreed with Nelson that we need more stories about agency and activism among black Americans. Greene replied that this issue is in many ways at odds with the national health care debate. It’s not about insurance, but how we get basic infrastructure when it’s drying up, and also accountability to the community.

An audience member asked how these movements got, or could get, out of a liberal model and more into biopolitics. Sickle-less anemia is a less stigmatized illness. Are these movements just asking for more access to the system? Greene said the fact that so much energy was spent demonizing these activists shows that they were onto something, and indeed, folks were pushing back against the idea that their demands should be confined to their little part of town. The backlash suggested that their activism was calling attention to big national issues. Nelson replied to the questioner’s Why sickle-cell anemia? It’s a predominantly black disease; it’d received far less funding than comparable genetic diseases; it allowed the Party to name and shame health disparities in a very clear way. It gave them a good narrative that fit into their discourse about slavery and about colonialism. Now, they had a lot of competitors in making frames around sickle-cell anemia, including the Nixon administration and older black groups who didn’t have or want a narrative. But out of this moment came many black doctors and health care professionals who went on to become activists.

Allison Carey asked about health activism as party of a broader civil rights movement: do we see that as one that included disability activism and other calls for access? Nelson repeated that she was not a scholar of the “disability studies movement” and explained that the Panthers’ narrative was not about access but about protection. Another audience member asked, how is health care shaping a political/economic subjectivity? They demolished public housing to build King/Drew, after all. Bliss said the individual who buys genetic tests is the kind of citizen/subject created by the research. Nelson noted that the downside of the story is it gets black communities to constitute themselves as biomedical entities. It’s the Nikolas Rose story of biopolitics, or the Katrina story, inspired by people after Chernobyl who had to commodify their illness to get reparations from the state. Greene cited “Civic Estrangement” in post-Civil Rights activism. At the point where King/Drew first emerges, we almost have the right to health care, and the minorities are asking for a piece. How did we get to these neoliberal times when we see that as anachronistic?

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 5: Lisa Tuttle

2011-12-13T09:55:00.000-08:00

Pleasures (Reading) of 2011
by Lisa Tuttle

My reviewing duties were severely slashed back this year, and while that was a cause for concern financially, I’m finding it pleasant to read where my fancy takes me, instead of being overwhelmed by the need to keep up with what’s going on in SF and fantasy from the mainstream publishers.

I have been thinking a lot about books, writing, publishing, and “the literary life” – what makes some people yearn for it so, endure poverty, hardship, and rejection in pursuit of a dream, and what is that dream, anyway? If you write, you’re a writer...but of course more than that is required to be an author: publication, an audience, positive feed-back, financial reward, the promise of eventual wealth and lasting fame. Think of the guides, the handbooks, the websites, the courses, the inevitable panels at conventions: How to Make a Living as a Writer. There seem to be ever more people urgently needing to know how to do it even as the real possibility for making money out of books is shrinking; not just for the writers, but for booksellers and publishers.

I’m not going to go into an extended rant on the subject here, but I just wanted to mention the topic because, as I looked over the list of books I read in 2011, I realized how many of them were about writers, and the whole question of what that means – or is that just me, seeing what interests me, everywhere I look? Here are my most memorable reads of the year:

Just Kids by Patti Smith -- Portrait of the artist as a young woman. A beautifully-written memoir, and so wonderfully evocative of time and place, both specifically (New York in the late '60s) and more generally, of a particular type of young bohemianism, when it seemed perfectly natural to put up with all sorts of discomforts and physical deprivations in order to feed the soul with the things that really matter: art, music, love, poetry, books, ideas and self-expression. I was also struck by how much sheer chance – random meetings, being in the right place at the right time – can affect the shaping of a career, and, less happily, how important a woman’s hairstyle is to how she is perceived and what she is allowed to become.

Hudson River Bracketed by Edith Wharton – I’ve long been a big fan of Edith Wharton, but this one has been sitting in a to-be-read box for years. It’s about literary life in America in the early part of the 20th century, focusing on a young man (possibly modelled on Thomas Wolfe) whose determination to become an important writer causes much heartbreak and destruction around him as he pursues his foggy ideals. It’s not Wharton’s best novel, but it has some wonderful scenes, and I found her own ambiguous attitude toward the main male character especially interesting: sometimes she mocks him, at others, she seems to believe in his importance every bit as much as the wealthy, artistic woman who devotes herself to furthering his career when she might better have done her own work (or so this reader felt).

Insinuations by Jack Dann (2010, PS) – A brief autobiography about his own literary and non-literary life by a very fine writer; I only wished it had been longer.

Proust’s Overcoat by Lorenza Foschini -- More about collecting and eccentrics who become obsessed with individual authors than it is about the literary life; I loved it, but then I would, having a slight obsession with collecting books about Proust.

The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère (translated by Linda Coverdale) Mélanie Fazi mentioned this book to me as having greatly impressed her, and since I knew other books by this author had been translated (I’d read his biography of Philip K. Dick) I looked for this one, and am very glad I did. The subtitle is “A True Story of Murder and Deception” but it is like no other true crime story I’ve read. Here’s the opening: “On the morning of Saturday January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our oldest son.” It’s a powerful, harrowing, fascinating, horrifying book, brilliantly written.

Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood by Cari Beauchamp. I think it is Martha Wells I have to think for alerting me to the existence of this book. At any rate, someone mentioned it on Facebook, I think ‘twas she, and as soon as I read the description I knew I wanted to read it. (Actually, the title alone is reason enough. It is taken from her line “I spent my life searching for a man to look up to without lying down.”) Frances Marion was the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood for three decades. She was friends with a number of other women who also were extremely important in the early days of film, even if now mostly forgotten. Although it gets a bit dull toward the end (as biographies of successful people often turn into lists of awards and achievements), the adventures and stories of her earlier life go a long way, and may change your perception Hollywood history. Especially interesting read in close conjunction with Glen David Gold’s novel Sunnyside, as the same names pop up in both books.

Best novel I read this year has got to be ‘Was...’ by Geoff Ryman. I hope everyone knows how wonderful that book is, but if you somehow missed it, find a copy and read it soon. Or re-read it.

As for the new novels of 2011, my personal best: Dark Tangos by Lewis Shiner; The Thing on the Shore by Thomas Fletcher; The Islanders by Christopher Priest; and City of the Dead by Sarah Gran.

Lisa Tuttle is the author of numerous novels and short story collections. She has also published nonfiction and more than a dozen books for younger readers. Aqueduct Press published her novella, My Death, in 2008 (which is now available as an ebook). Born and raised in Houston, Texas, she has made her home in a remote rural region of Scotland for the last twenty years.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 4: Andrea Hairston

2011-12-12T20:05:00.000-08:00

Subversive Joy
by Andrea Hairston

I’ve been on the road most of this year. Crisscrossing the United States and venturing into Canada, I lugged large tomes onto planes, trains, and rented cars. The weight of words was a pleasure. I also had slim volumes that could be consumed in a sleepless night. I met readers and writers everywhere who were thrilled at the promise of good writing. They wanted to be entertained by complex, challenging characters and stories.

“You’re a writer?” strangers would say with delight. “Science fiction and fantasy? Wow! How do you do that?”

I sold books at many a bed and breakfast during the morning spread or afternoon tea. I always got into great discussions. The passion, intelligence, and creativity of the people I met inspired and energized me.

“Have you read—” or “What do you think of—” was the beginning of many new friendships.

I lost count of how many people said, “I’ve got an idea for a book. More than an idea, I’ve written four hundred pages.”

There are books about to be born everywhere; stories aching for an audience; narratives offering transport; readers who found themselves in places they couldn’t imagine; reality recognized and revised with the turn of a page.

One of the great pleasures of 2011 was the direct experience of the marvelous international community of readers and writers that I live in.

I do know the culture of reading is having hard times. Bookstores are an endangered species. Big publishers are shrinking. Junk floods the market and assaults us on every screen. Children and education budgets (the future?) are getting slashed. These are trying times. And we are not sitting down and taking it with a shake of the head and a nothing-you-can-do resignation. One of the slim books I inhaled was Hope on a Tightrope by Cornel West. He begins the book with the State of Emergency:

The poor and very poor are sleeping with self-destruction. The working and middle classes are struggling against paralyzing pessimism and the privileged are swinging between cynicism and hedonism.

West points the reader from this to the subversive joy of ongoing activism and hope grounded in a messy, tragic-comic struggle. He makes us ask:

How did I become so well-adjusted to injustice?

Tad Williams penned two of the heavy tomes I read: Shadowrise and Shadowheart. In the final volumes of Williams’s epic fantasy series, legions of complex characters work to make the future possible. In Disintegration, The Splintering of Black America, Eugene Robinson deconstructs the racist notion of essential, monolithic blackness. L. Timmel Duchamp’s Never at Home was a serious trip. I like my hallucinogens in word form, and the stories in Duchamp’s volume take you out of the normal rut into the land of who else might we be! I loved the chimpanzee characters in Ape House by Sara Gruen and the people weren’t bad either. I reread the first three books of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle. Her sentences are delicious. After forty years, the hero of Wizard of Earthsea is still on a quest unlike any other and the enemy character are startling and complex, transforming the notions of good and evil out of melodrama and into tragic, redemptive fable. The witches in the Earthsea Cycle have no access to the great knowledge of the Wizard’s academy and women characters (even in the Tomb of Atuan where they are central) seem subordinate and inferior to the male characters. I can’t wait to read the final volume, Tehanu, to shift this perspective and celebrate the equally valuable women’s magic. I also reread Gregory Bateson’s A Sacred Unity. I relished his impassioned, well-argued plea for the metaphorical mind’s truth, beauty, and necessity in the age of reason.

At the multiplex, there were Fighters, Company Men, Cowboys and Aliens, grey- and black-suited dudes working Adjustment Bureaus, making Margin Calls, surviving the Source Code, and so few major films centering on women I could scream! Removing the women characters in many of the boys’ movies might have improved them. I did scream. Rachel Weisz does a great job in The Whistleblower, playing Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska cop who is a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia and outs the U.N. for covering up the heavy traffic in women happening on their watch.

I wrote earlier about The Help juggernaut before seeing the film. I have now seen it. The Help is about a white woman writer who encourages (enables) black women maids to speak out about their (horrific) experiences in Jim Crow servitude for a book she writes. The acting in The Help is stellar. Viola Davis tears apart the script to give a brilliant performance, creating a depth of character that is absent from the writing. I enjoyed seeing her and all those brilliant actresses up on the screen working: Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sissy Spacek, Allison Janney, Cicely Tyson, Mary Steenburger, and Aunjanue Ellis. But I must confess that the simplistic melodrama of the story was infuriating and BORING. The white character is the engine for the Civil Rights movement that happens in town. The black women are all long suffering saints. Even the one who ends up in jail is just trying to find money to send her child off to a better life! Evil is individual, not systemic. The bad white girl is not complex. In fact, as is often the case with rich white women characters, the evil bitch is trivial and petty, and we enjoy making her eat shit. Literally. Oh yeah, the fat black lady is the funny one. Smug, superior, and safe, the audience can wallow in this heartwarming rift on our national shame.

Beaucoup tickets sales, rave reviews, and breath-taking performance might mean a trip to the Oscars for Viola Davis. I will cheer her acting magic, but I am still waiting for those films that will take women’s lives seriously, that will entertain me with our follies and possibilities, with our adventures and our visions. Viola Davis could star in that. An antidote to The Help is Pray the Devil Back to Hell, the documentary on the women from Liberia who join together across a religious divide to bring peace to their country. Just after I wrote this I learned that the Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee, the subject of the film, has won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Tawakkol Karman.

I had the privilege and pleasure to read new work as writers shaped and polished it. Be on the lookout for: Eileen Gunn’s new collection of short stories that will include a wonderful Golem story. Pan Morigan is writing two urban fantasy novels about wolves, Viet Nam vets, expressways devastating neighborhoods, community gardens, and secret libraries of the spirit. Playwright Liz Roberts sends her audience down a vent with corporate execs and homeless folks. Sally Bellerose had me laughing and weeping in the junkyard with two 80-something life partners, as these women faced life and death on thin ice with heavy equipment!

Back to Cornel West. Living through the State of Emergency with these imaginative folks, I feel we can make the future different and possibly better.

Andrea Hairston is the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre and has created original productions with music, dance, and masks for over thirty years. She is also the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Afro-American Studies at Smith College. Her first novel from Aqueduct Press, Mindscape, won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and was shortlisted for the Phillip K Dick Award and the Tiptree Award. Her second novel, Redwood and Wildfire, was published earlier this year. She will be a Guest of Honor at WisCon next year.

Winter's pleasures in the Pacific northwest

2011-12-12T15:44:00.000-08:00

At this time of year, I'm always talking about the lowness of the sun in the sky, even at noon, here in the Pacific Northwest. (That is to say, when the sun's visible-- as it is, gloriously, today.) How low do I mean? At the moment, the sun's zenith is 19 degrees. By the solstice, next week, it will be 18. The quality of the sunlight, though, can't really be described numerically. It's usually both thin and richly gold, which sounds a bit like a contradiction in terms. The impression of thinness, I think, might be an effect of the way the light strikes branches and the few leaves that remain over the winter (for instance, those the thick waxy green ones on the camellia tree in my front yard), and on the sides of houses (for instance, on a house where there's only a small patch of light, which looks like a watery wash of a lighter color brushed over the duller base coat).

I did, as I'd hoped, visit the Union Bay fill. The first thing I saw was a hawk in a very distant tree-- too distant for us to identify, even using binoculars. And then we encountered a wren hopping vivaciously about the brush, scolding us with loud tisp tisp tisps. It was unmistakably a wren-- no other birds have those kinds of tails, thrusting out at a sharp angle, twitching madly. There was some rustiness in its coloring, so perhaps it was a marsh wren. (I'm too unfamiliar with wrens to be able to say with certainty.) When we arrived at the cove, we found ducks busily dabbling-- lots of hooded mergansers and common mergansers-- and several swans, mostly trumpeters, but also a pair of tunrdras. (I'd been hoping to see swans-- this is there time of year for making an appearance on the lake.) The rest of the walk was not as eventful-- lots of red-winged blackbirds, robins, and one unidentifiable dark bird, but the landscape itself was a pleasure-- much as I like the fill during the lusher seasons, the winter landscape (especially without the distraction of snow) is starkly beautiful, at least partly because of that quality of the light that's unique to the month before and after the solstice.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 3: Tansy Rayner Roberts

2011-12-12T12:06:00.000-08:00

Pleasurable Culture Consumed in 2011
by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Books first! So many, many books.

Lev A.C. Rosen's All Men of Genius is a delightful story that mashes up Twelfth Night, The Importance of Being Earnest, steampunk, and feminist giant robots. Even now, I want to cuddle it.

Akata Witch, by Nnedi Okorafor, is a powerful story of African magic, being an outsider, and soccer. I loved the complex, messy magic system, and the way that the issue of powerful magical teenagers (and how to handle their parents) was expressed.

Glenda Larke concluded her magnificent, epic desert fantasy series Watergivers with the third book, Stormlord's Exile, which shows what a powerful writer she is.

I also very much enjoyed Debris by Jo Anderton, Roil by Trent Jamieson, Red Glove by Holly Black and Deathless by Catherynne M Valente, The Shattering by Karen Healey, and so many other books. Ack, I keep remembering more. The Courier's New Bicycle by Kim Westwood, Among Others by Jo Walton, Zoo City by Lauren Beukes... God's War by Kameron Hurley.

I can also highly recommend the Twelve Planets series of mini short story collections by female Australian SF and fantasy writers: especially Nightsiders by Sue Isle (genderqueer stories set in post-apocalyptic Perth). My favourite short story anthology of the year was Eclipse 4 by Jonathan Strahan, and my favourite online source for short stories was the extraordinary YA Special Summer Issue of Subterranean Online.

My big reading excitement for the year has been my rediscovery of my love of graphic novels and comics in general. It began with my research into the works of Alison Bechdel, leading me to discover The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, a compelling 20 year archive of strip comics about a community of lesbians and their friends who grow up and change as the world changes around them; also Fun Home, an extraordinary memoir about the artist's relationship with her father which shows the creative potential in graphic novels. What better way to capture your own childhood than with an artform that allows you to recreate your past, down to the details of the wallpaper?

But it's not all earnest literary comics. I discovered the existence of Justice League: Generation Lost, a two-volume love letter to my favorite era of my favorite super team of all time. And then the DC reboot hit, and I got swept up in my old superhero addiction. I'm now reading several monthly DC titles electronically, my favourites being Batgirl, Batwoman, and Wonder Woman. Having three iconic female characters written and drawn so excellently right now feels like the height of luxury, and certainly not something I take for granted.

My rabid interest in comics has led me hunting graphic novels like a wild thing, especially those with women at the forefront of the story. Favorite trade paperbacks I've read recently include Power Girl: A New Beginning by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti with art by Amanda Conner; Runaways by Brian K Vaughn, She-Hulk by Dan Slott, Batgirl Rising and Batgirl: The Flood by Bryan Q Millar. I also fell deeply in love with the Ultimate Spiderman, the Ultimates, and even developed a fondness for the Ultimate Fantastic Four, something I never saw coming. Apparently I'm a Marvel girl now as WELL as a DC girl. Talk about time-consuming.

I also discovered Tiny Titans, an adorable kids comic (available in a great number of inexpensive trades) which enabled me to share my favorite characters in the DC Universe with my six-year-old daughter. Well, okay, I'd already sold her on many of the superhero characters via the Justice League Unlimited TV series, but Tiny Titans came along just as she was learning to read independently, and she adores it. The jokes work on levels for kids and comics-obsessed-adults, the art is DID I MENTION ADORABLE and it's packed with boy and girl characters who all, in my daughter's words, "get to do actiony stuff, not just boy stuff or girl stuff." I appreciate how much these cute comics provide a cynical but good natured commentary on their adult counterparts, and give my daughter some other options for role models beyond Disney princesses and Dora.

As usual, my current obsessions are mirrored by the podcasts I choose to follow, and luckily for me two great Australian podcasts about comics (with the right kind of feminist, lefty, racially aware, GLBTQ friendly attitudes that I look for) started up at just the right time: Panel2Panel, hosted by Grant & Kitty, and How I Got My Boyfriend Into Comics, hosted by Zoe/the Wolverina & Chris. They have become the new podcasts that make me bounce with excitement when a fresh episode loads.

I've enjoyed many viewing pleasures this year, including the sixth season of Doctor Who, the new Torchwood (yes, really, I thought it was excellent if problematic in places, and liked very much how they explored the character of action hero and working mother Gwen Cooper), Community, Fringe, and I have rediscovered my deep love of costume dramas through Downton Abbey. Despite all this, my main media consumption has been audio.

I continue to collect the awesome audio productions from Big Finish, who make original Doctor Who spin-off plays (as well as other properties such as Sherlock Holmes, Sapphire and Steel, Stargate and shortly Blake's 7). My favorite plays from their monthly Doctor Who range this year included The Silver Turk, in which Mary Shelley joins the 8th Doctor as his new companion and faces off against steampunk Cybermen; Robophobia, a sequel to classic story Robots of Death featuring the Seventh Doctor and Ruth from Spooks; and Heroes of Sontar, a satirical comedy featuring Sontarans, the Fifth Doctor, Tegan, Turlough, and Nyssa. I've also been working to catch up on the older Bernice Summerfield and Gallifrey spin-off series, which I love for their strong female leads, charismatic co-stars and snappy dialogue. There's also a four-story miniseries called simply UNIT, which features the British military hunting aliens, X-Files style, and David Tennant playing (in the final episode) a filthy-talking, bad-tempered Scottish Colonel, who is an absolute joy to listen to.

This year, I discovered that while I'm not a fan of audiobooks as my first point of contact with a story, I rather love them for re-reading. After being ruined for all other audiobooks ever by Lenny Henry's versatile and wicked performance of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, I wandered in the Audible wilderness for some time before realising this was a brilliant opportunity to reread a whole lot of Terry Pratchett novels. This led of course to a blog series reviewing how he handles his female characters, but I am enjoying the 'rereads' for their own sake too. The later books read by Stephen Briggs have better accent choices than the earlier ones by Nigel Planer, and I very much enjoyed that Wyrd Sisters is not only read by (gasp!) a woman, but that it's Celia Imrie, one of my favourite obscure older British actresses.

Music... I haven't been in the music state of mind this year at all. It's a thing that comes and goes with me, and my car journeys are filled with podcasts or audioplays whenever I get a chance to choose. However, my eldest daughter's fierce love of trock (Doctor Who fan music) continues unabated, and I'm pretty sure the only new album I bought this year was the long-awaited new Chameleon Circuit CD (I even bought the physical copy because the cover was SO PRETTY). This is what comes of raising fangirls.

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Tansy Rayner Roberts is an Australian fantasy writer, recently the author of the Creature Court trilogy, and short story collection Love and Romanpunk. She blogs at http://tansyrr.com, tweets as @tansyrr, and is one of the voices of Galactic Suburbia, a feminist podcast of science fiction news, book reviews, and chat.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2011, part 2: Eleanor Arnason

2011-12-11T13:01:00.000-08:00

Debt and Violence
by Eleanor Arnason

I saw only a handful of movies in 2011. My favorite was Thor, a Marvel superhero action flick directed by Kenneth Branagh. The movie was visually spectacular. Asgard, home of the gods, looked like a 1940s vision of the distant future. Jotenheim, realm of the frost giants, was dark, icy and eerie, made more creepy by the giants, who are tall and lean and green and wander around almost naked in a place that is obviously very cold. The third location in the movie -- small town New Mexico in the present -- looked suitably down-home and ordinary.

The plot had to be simple, to leave room for all the action. Thor, heir to Odin, the ruler of Asgard, is an immature, arrogant golden boy, who decides to pick a fight with the frost giants , after his father had forbidden this. Odin has to rescue him. As punishment for ending the long peace with the frost giants, Odin strips Thor of his magical powers and exiles him to Earth, where he has to learn how to be a decent human being.

Of course he succeeds and regains his magical powers when he is willing to sacrifice his life to the save the people in the small New Mexico town. There are problems you cannot solve with violence, something his father Odin -- the Allfather -- already knows.

The second half of the plot is about Loki, Thor’s brother, a trickster god who double crosses every one in the course of the movie, including himself. He lurks around like Iago, setting up the quarrel between Thor and Odin, then -- when Odin falls into a coma-like sleep -- seizes the throne of Asgard for himself. The guy playing Loki, Tom Hiddleston, is terrific. I don’t know if he has ever played Iago. He should. If this sounds weird -- what do you mean, saying an action flick actor should play Shakespeare? -- Hiddleston is a Shakespearean actor, as is Anthony Hopkins, who plays Odin. Kenneth Branagh, as we all know, is a Shakespearean actor and director. The movie feels like Shakespeare to me: high energy, over-the-top Shakespeare, which is the kind of Shakespeare Branagh did in Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing.

Loki is given better motivation than Iago. He adores his father Odin and has always wanted to be first with him, but Thor is the golden boy, the hero and charmer. So, envy and frustrated love. It leads him in the end to murder and attempted genocide. He decides to destroy Jotunheim and kill all the frost giants, in order to win Odin’s love.

Around the time I saw Thor, I also saw the new Metropolitan Opera production of Siegfried in a High Definition broadcast into a local movie theater. Thor reminds me of the Ring Cycle. Both have the Allfather, played by Anthony Hopkins in the movie and Bryn Terfel in the opera. Both have adolescent jerk heroes, though Thor is far more likable than the awful Siegfried . Both are over-the-top retellings of Norse myth, with all the lack of subtlety and nuance that is characteristic of myth. The special effects in Thor are better. I thought the dragon in Siegfried was pathetic. Both carry you away. With Siegfried it’s the music. With Thor, it’s the special effects and action. I don’t remember what the score sounded like.

What else is there to say? Thor is an antiwar movie, which is refreshing in the period when the US is in more wars than I can count. It’s a movie in praise of decency and loyalty and uncomplicated love. Thor, with all his failings, is a loyal friend and a loving member of his family. Over the course of the movie, he learns to be decent and genuinely brave. (It’s difficult for a superhero to be brave. He is always protected by his super powers.) Loki is destroyed by envy and twisted love, though he’s coming back for The Avengers. I look forward to seeing Hiddleston again. I doubt that he can be as good with another director. The key to this movie is Branagh.

Two final comments. I haven’t said whether or not Thor is a good movie. I don’t know. But I loved it. And remember that Thor is a Marvel superhero action flick. If you don’t like this kind of movie, you will hate it.

The most recent book I finished is Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber, an anthropologist, anarchist and political activist. Graeber did some of the preplanning for Occupy Wall Street.

It’s hard for me to talk about this book, because I’m not sure I understand it, even after reading it through twice. Graeber is writing a history of debt, beginning with what anthropological studies have told us, then moving to the very oldest written records, those of ancient Mesopotamia. According to him, tribal and small town societies have debt before they have money, because barter doesn’t work very well. How do you buy ten nails, when all you have to sell is a cow, worth far more than than the nails? According to economic theory, you invent money, tokens which enable you to split the value of the cow, without actually cutting the cow into pieces.

According to Graeber, you owe the blacksmith for the nails, and sooner or later he needs something that you have. In a small community, it is possible to keep track of who owes whom.

This system breaks down when you are dealing with strangers, but most people through most of history have not dealt much with strangers. Money in many tribal societies is -- per Graeber -- ceremonial, used to pay for marriages, funerals, and fines, not to buy a handful of nails. It is not an early form of our money, but something else.

Where does money as we know it come from? Graeber thinks it comes from war and pillage. Precious metals, which tended to be made into ornaments for kings and temples, were stolen and broken down, and these fragments became money. In a society damaged by war, he further argues, people are no longer dealing with neighbors and longtime trading partners. They are dealing with strangers, who may become dangerous at any moment. No loans are extended. Instead, it’s cash on the barrel, and this means you need cash.

He then moves on to the ancient Middle East, which left us lots of business records on clay tablets. Here he draws on the writing of Michael Hudson, an economist I read on line. I usually call him Michael “The Babylonians did it better” Hudson. According to Hudson, debt was a recurrent problem in ancient society. Farmers would borrow in bad years and then be unable to pay their debts off. In the end, they lost their livestock and land and were forced to sell their families into slavery. Finally, they themselves became slaves. So every thirty years or so, the kings of Mesopotamia declared debt forgiveness. The clay tablets recording debts were broken. People enslaved by debt were freed, and land was returned to its original owners. It was the Jubilee, done so the kingdoms would have free citizens to pay taxes and be soldiers and so all the wealth in society would not end in a few, far-too-powerful hands.

The only debts which were not forgiven were commercial debts, the deals between merchants, because trade was seen as different. Among other things, the profits on long-distance trading could be very high, which made it far easier to pay off a loan. Merchant loans were serious investments, not predatory, pawn-shop loans to people who’d hit hard times.

According to Graeber, the class struggles of the Greece and Rome were always struggles between debtors and creditors over debt forgiveness. In the end, the creditors won and accumulated debt destroyed the Roman Empire.

From this point Graeber moves into what he calls the Axial Age, when the civilizations of the ancient world broke apart, leading to the Middle Ages, though the nature of the Middle Ages varied from place to place. Because he is trying to cover so much history, I found him hard to follow. (I was also baffled by the fact that he mostly ignored the New World.)

The book becomes a broad survey of Old World history up to modern times: the conquest of the New World, the African slave trade, the rise of capitalism Through it all, Graeber emphasizes the problem of debt, which reemerges over and over, leading to peasant revolutions. In Europe, these were mostly suppressed. In China, they sometimes led to new dynasties or to the breakup of the empire, at least for a while. I will have to read the book a third time to understand its later sections.

All I can do is summarize the parts of the book I think I understand:

1. It isn’t exchange that produces money as we know it, it’s war and pillage.

2. Debt is a constant problem in human societies. If it isn’t solved by debt forgiveness, it leads to various kinds of violence: rebellion, civil war, slavery, social collapse.

3. It is violence of various kinds -- especially war and slavery -- that turns everything into a commodity and makes money pervasive.

All of the above turns the pleasant, civilized just-so stories about the rise of capitalism into something awful. Capitalism is not a rational marketplace, where most people come out okay, it is sustained pillage and slavery.

Very interesting. Debt is worth reading. But if you want something that’s easy to understand, watch Thor.

Both Debt and Thor argue for a world (and universe) at peace. This is probably a coincidence, though -- in our current world, strangled by debt and violence -- maybe not.

Eleanor Arnason has written several novels and many short stories. Her fourth novel, A Woman of the Iron People (2001), won the James Tiptree Jr. award for gender-bending science fiction and the Mythopoeic Society Award for adult fantasy. Her fifth novel, Ring of Swords (1995), won a Minnesota Book Award.

Aqueduct Press published her Lydia Duluth adventure, Tomb of the Fathers, last year, and her collection, Ordinary People, in 2005.