"Oh he couldn't really mean that"

Of course I'm way behind on my reading on the internet. So the comments made by Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider on December 6, in advance of their receiving the Nobel Prize in medicine, have been out there for awhile. But I only just saw them, thanks to a link on geekfeminism.com. In an article on MSNBC.com, Malin Rising with the Associated Press writes:

It is the first time two women have shared a single Nobel science prize. Over the years only 10 women have won the medicine prize.

Blackburn said a more flexible approach to part-time research and career breaks would help women continue to advance their careers during their childbearing years.

"I'm not talking about doing second-rate quality science, far from it," she said. "You can do really good research when you are doing it part-time."

Greider added that she especially wants to see measures to get more women onto committees and decision-making positions.

"I think that something active needs to be done to do that because there has been many, many years where there have been women coming in at a 50 percent level, and yet the levels at the upper echelons hasn't really changed very much," she said.

This has been obvious to women academics, not just scientists, for a long time. The typical career pattern often was (and still is) for women to finish their PhDs, have children a couple or maybe five years later, and then return to their research when their children are school age (with all the interruptions that go with have school-age children). In the 1980s & 1990s, at least, the tenure structure refused to accommodate the career rhythms of women who chose to be mothers as well as academics. I had been assuming that academic departments and research institutions generally were a lot more enlightened these days.

Americans Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider said as many women as men start out in science but are often unable to advance after having children because of a lack of flexibility.

"The career structure is very much a career structure that has worked for men," Blackburn told The Associated Press at the sidelines of a press conference in Stockholm.

Carol Greider's answer to a question in an interview in the October 13 New York Times by Claudia Dreifus takes up a related aspect of gender and the practice of science and the ingrained inferiority-of-women explanation for women's status in the sciences being generally inferior to men's:

Q. MANY REPORTERS HAVE ASKED WHY TELOMERES RESEARCH SEEMS TO ATTRACT SO MANY FEMALE INVESTIGATORS. WHAT’S YOUR ANSWER?

A. There’s nothing about the topic that attracts women. It’s probably more the founder effect. Women researchers were fostered early on by Joe Gall, and they got jobs around the country and they trained other women. I think there’s a slight bias of women to work for women because there’s still a slight cultural bias for men to help men. The derogatory term is the “old boys network.” It’s not that they are biased against women or want to hurt them. They just don’t think of them. And they often feel more comfortable promoting their male colleagues.

When Lawrence Summers, then the Harvard president, made that statement a few years ago about why there were fewer successful women in science, I thought, “Oh, he couldn’t really mean that.”’ After reading the actual transcript of his statement, it seems he really did say that women can’t think in that sort of scientific fashion. It was ridiculous!

I mean, women do things differently, which is why I think it would be important if more women were at higher levels in academic medicine. I think people might work together more, things might be more collaborative. It would change how science is done and even how institutions are run. That doesn’t mean that women necessarily have a different way of thinking about the mechanics of experiments. I think it’s more a different social way of interacting that would bring results in differently.

And then her answer to the following, last question is interesting. It's an answer I think most women would understand, but I'm not sure that more than a few men would:

Q. DO THIS YEAR’S NOBELS MEAN THAT WOMEN HAVE FINALLY BEEN ACCEPTED IN SCIENCE?

A. I certainly hope it’s a sign that things are going to be different in the future. But I’m a scientist, right? This is one event. I’m not going to see one event and say it’s a trend. I hope it is. One of the things I did with the press conference that Johns Hopkins gave was to have my two kids there. In the newspapers, there’s a picture of me and my kids right there. How many men have won the Nobel in the last few years, and they have kids the same age as mine, and their kids aren’t in the picture? That’s a big difference, right? And that makes a statement.

Does Art as Social Justice Lead to the Artist as Unpaid Social Worker?

Yasmin Nair, guest blogging at Dakshina, examines the connection between art and social justice with a skeptical eye, suggesting that the connections are not as straightforward as naive writers often want to believe. She also looks at how the idea of writing as a social justice project feeds into the undervaluing of writing-as-labor:

The notion that the production of art is separate from the nitty-gritty of art as labor. While I would never blame artists themselves for their woes in terms of getting paid, the truth is that many of us have a hard time seeing ourselves as laborers who ought to be fairly compensated. Most of us have been trained to think our work is sacrosanct, that our work is not labor, that it is above petty commerce, and that we must make art only for nobler causes. When you add on the patina of social justice, many of us are reluctant to or unable to negotiate with those who are supposed to pay us, in part because we do care about the issues and the people affected by them. And, in part, because, frankly, too many of us have assimilated a deeply privatized notion that our art is so profound that it can and should directly effect social change – monetary value be damned. The result, as Andrew Ross puts it in a seminal essay, “The Mental Labor Problem,” is that “…the new profile of the artist as a social-service worker is coming to supplant the autonomous avant-garde innovator as a fundable type, increasingly sponsored through local arts agencies.” In the case of the Artivist Coalition events, artists were deployed as semi-mystical healers, responsible for shining a light on matters that should be the purview of social workers and politicians.

Which is, of course, interesting in terms of the pay rate flap, as another one of those excuses which comes up for the fact that writers are not compensated for their labor is that art is unlike real work and should be done for love not money. (I note that the problematic form of this argument is not "I write for love" but "I write for love, and that's pure, but you are tainted because you write for money." We once had someone write into podcastle that if we accepted their submission, they would refuse payment, because they didn't believe that writers should get paid. This is certainly a decision they were entitled to make for themselves, but the indictment of all payment-seeking writers is problematic. Why should love and money be mutually exclusive reasons?) Nair goes on to say:

writing is profoundly devalued to the point where it is seen as work without labor – anyone can write, the argument goes. Just build a website, and pound away.

To be clear, I think it is always a good thing if people want to write more. The problem is that the apparent democratization of writing today comes along with a profound devaluing of its worth as labor that ought to be fairly compensated. Take, for example, the notion of the “citizen journalist.” Someone once had the bright idea that all it takes for a robust and civil society is to turn a group of citizens, armed with little more than basic web access and digital cameras and the ability to pound keys, to make society accountable for its ills. In return, they usually get little more than a free byline. So, what the term “citizen journalist” should really refer to is “unpaid schmuck who will work for free in hopes of a byline.” I also happen to be a professional journalist. I once covered an event and got some exclusive photos as well. When I returned home to file the story, I found that a local website had already “reported” on it. The citizen journalist in question had simply cut and pasted a press release from one of the organizing groups, without even acknowledging that the words were taken verbatim from the document. A reader who assumed that the reporter actually talked to people at the event was unlikely to see the inherent bias in the article. As as activist who has written a fair number of press releases, I know that they are always written ahead of time, regardless of what might actually transpire at an event, and about the careful crafting and messaging that goes into projecting events as spectacular successes. Without important information about the source of the material being divulged to the reader, the “citizen journalist” was able to pass off a cut-and-paste job as journalism. In the end, this is what brings down the quality as well as the expectations of what good journalism should be and it makes the work of journalists look like something that requires no effort and, hence, something that can be done for free or very little.

Let me be fair: I am also a blogger, and that work is entirely for free (a fact that escapes the notice of irate readers who summarily call for my “firing” by editors who are themselves making just enough to keep the sites up and running). I understand the value of producing work that might entice and create a reader base for my writing. But all of this goes on in a social and political environment where people assume that it is not only okay to underpay writers, but that writers should, if worth their salt, be willing to be exploited...

The situation is hardly helped by the fact that artists like me are expected to function without the basics like health care and that, as a freelance writer, I cannot seek unemployment. I have sprained the same knee twice in two years, leading to a drastic reduction in my earnings. Intrepid journalism is hard or impossible if you have to ask a fast-trotting subject at a political rally to please slow down so that you can keep up with them. I live with the knowledge that a slightly more serious accident could wipe me out. I do various gigs around town to make what I can and I try to carve out chunks of that most precious commodity, the drug of choice for writers: Time...

Most people unacquainted with the reality of a writing life cannot grasp the fact that while writing is not taxing in the same way as hard physical labor, it is draining, and not something you do on the fly... For writers, our work is not our reward; the amount paid for our work is the just reward.

I've cut a great deal of the connective tissue to try to highlight some of the article's main points, particularly as they relate to artists who may or may not also think of themselves as activists. (I do consider myself to have an activistic purpose with some of my work, but obviously not all SFF writers do or should -- it's good for the field to have writers with varying motivations.) Her article also approaches the topic from the point of view of artists who are trying to make a living from their work, which again is a connection between her and me, though obviously not all artists are seeking to make a living off of writing and I do not mean to imply that all artists should be.

But ultimately, whether or not it's also a hobby, writing is also work. It deserves respect as labor. Nair's analysis of writing-as-exploited-labor is thought-provoking. It does concentrate on certain manifestations of writing, but that's because she's writing out of her own experiences, and the article is more interesting for that.

Go to Dakshina to read Nair's whole article.

Review of Alaya Dawn Johnson's Racing the Dark (Agate Bolden, 2007)

Alaya Dawn Johnson's debut novel, Racing the Dark, was released in 2007 by Agate Bolden. The epic fantasy is the first in the Spirit Binders series.

Racing the Dark begins when thirteen-year-old Lana is initiated as a diver who seeks and finds Mandagah jewels, a profession that provides her island's main commercial export and is also religiously significant. The jewels Lana finds during her initiation mark her as chosen by the spirits, but Lana hides this fact so she can attempt to have a normal life.

The island archipelago where Lana lives is in turmoil -- her home island is suffering from environmental changes that seem to be caused by the great spirits (including water, fire, wind and death) which are struggling against their bindings. When the Mandagah fish become endangered, Lana's family flees their home, looking for work on the inner islands. Lana becomes ill from hard labor and poor diet, forcing her mother to promise her as an apprentice to a witch in order to get money to pay for a cure.

The novel follows Lana through the major periods of her life, as she learns magic from the witch, takes on the spirit of death, meets the spirit of wind, and falls in love with the spirit of water. We leave her abruptly in the middle of the climax, paving the way for the sequel.

As I contemplated what to say about this novel, I came across a review by Niall Harrison of Alaya Dawn Johnson's short story, "Far & Deep," which appeared this year in Interzone.

"This is how you trail a novel," writes Harrison. "'Far & Deep' shares a setting with, but is not extracted from (or is sufficiently well-adapted to stand apart from), Johnson’s Spirit Binders novels."

He goes on to say:

“Far & Deep” is not as firmly controlled as I wanted it to be; the stabs of emotion that punctuate the predominantly cool narrative tilt, a little too often, a little too close to melodrama for my taste. I don’t think the revelation of the world and the mystery are quite geared correctly; we don’t always learn about the possibility of a thing and the significance of a thing in the smoothest progression...

All this is to carp, however. They are little criticisms. The busyness of the story — the many details of setting, the deft character portraits, a sense of events with forward momentum — the basic shape of it all — carries you over such details, on a first reading, and leaves you looking forward to Johnson’s next tale.

While I don't feel that the momentum of Racing the Dark carries the reader over its flaws on first reading, the rest of Harrison's review is spot on for my impressions of the novel. Racing the Dark is a flawed text, but a rich one, full of minor faults and major successes.

Nisi Shawl's Nebula-Elligible Short Stories, Good Boy, Water Museum, and Bird Day, are Online

I come to you bearing recommendations for excellent fiction distributed across the web. The first three things are Nebula-elligible stories by Nisi Shawl. Nisi is an amazing, Seattle-based writer who helps coordinate the Clarion West Workshop and is fun to hang out with -- but what *you* need to know is that her fiction is awesome.

Last year, her short story collection, Filter House (Aqueduct Press) won the James Tiptree award. Publisher's Weekly wrote that, "This exquisitely rendered debut collection of 11 reprints and three originals ranges into the past and future to explore identity and belief in a dazzling variety of settings... he threads of folklore, religious magic, family and the search for a cohesive self are woven with power and lucidity throughout this panorama of race, magic and the body."

Nisi is one of those exquisitely talented writers who works slowly. She has a few prestigious sales to her name, but she doesn't get nearly the acknowledgement she deserves. I'm mad about her work, though, so this year when the Nebula eligibility questions came up, I said to Nisi, "Hey, Nisi! What work of yours is eligible for the Nebulas?" She confessed to me that three stories of hers were eligible, but that they were not available in electronic form. That would not do! said I, and convinced her to let me coordinate their web posting so that readers can look at her work and enjoy it -- and if you're in SFWA, consider nominating it.

Good Boy:

As a child on their outbound ship, Kressi had enjoyed the lessons on Benjamin Banneker, George McCoy, and technology’s other black pioneers. She’d wanted to be Ruth Fleurny, maverick member of the team that perfected the Bounce. It was because of Fleurny’s stubborn insistence on cheap access for all descendants of enslaved Africans as a condition of the “star drive’s” sale that the Neo-Negroes and a handful of similar expeditions had gotten off the ground.

Bird Day:

We sat in a circle on the side of the street. Some of us had lawn chairs, or folding chairs we’d brought out from our houses. Stepstools, even. We had a bunch of different kinds of seats we were sitting in.

This was the day to commune with birds.

And The Water Museum

When I saw the hitchhiker standing by the sign for the Water Museum, I knew he had been sent to assassinate me. First off, that’s what the dogs were saying as I slowed to pick him up. Girlfriend, with her sharp, little, agitated bark, was quite explicit. Buddy was silently trying to dig a hole under the back seat, seeking refuge in the trunk. I stopped anyway.

Take a read. It's worth it.

Claire Light's Slightly Behind and to the Left: Four Stories and Three Drabbles

Well I'm just home this afternoon-- and what should happen but that my desktop computer crashed. But then it got worse! The reinstall didn't work, and the system has gotten into a "loop" (as Tom says). It seems we're going to have to reformat the drive. Sigh. That's life with computers, eh?

But listen, I arrived home to find a box of Claire Light's bright, shiny new Conversation Pieces volume, Slightly Behind and to the Left: Four Stories and Three Drabbles, sitting on the dining room table. Here's a description of what's in it:

Claire Light's fiction shifts our perspective just enough off-center to render the world we know a strange and unfamiliar place. In this volume, a woman with the most thankless job in space will calculate a new kind of "cold equation" to get her home to port. In a fantastical place where adulthood is the biggest threat to adolescent boys, predators arise from unlikely quarters. In a world with wonky physics and no gravity, a lone human learns the meaning of "reckless endangerment of alien life." And an alien abduction is only prelude to a long phantasmagoric journey. Interspersed with evocative flash fictions, this collection of stories luxuriates in the weird and wonky, half-lit realities and sidelong looks at painful truths.

And here's just a little taste from "Vacation":

The day all the men disappeared she went outside to see if it was true, if they were really all gone. The streets were quieter. You could hear more wind. Sometimes almost half a minute could go by without a car passing. The air smelled cleaner. More people were walking today, looking around. Some faces were in wonder. But in more of them, eyes were sweeping horizontal swaths, whites showing. And in the moments between the gusts of wind, when the wind died down and there were no cars passing, you could hear, for a moment, that the sound of walking was one of swishing and clopping, of cloth between thighs rubbed together, of wooden stacks, and of feet planted more forward than back.

You can purchase this little gem from Aqueduct right now, here for $9. (It will be available other places, like Amazon.com eventually, but not for a couple of weeks.)

Dozens of Jellyfish, a Seal, and One Thumb, Bleeding

What a day it's been! I talked to a seal just a little while ago. And this morning I had another moment of understanding, but this time one that sent me back into the ms., revising scenes I'd thought I'd finished with, shaping and shading what I'd already written. Which is a good thing, of course. It's an artifact of this novel's finally making sense to me on every level.

But first things first. To start with, I'm typing this without using my left thumb. Remember what I said about not bringing a First Aid kit with me? It wasn't a joke! I've been averaging about one cut a day on the fingers and thumb of my left hand. One of them, on my index finger, made when I was peeling a carrot with a serrated peeler, still hurts (though it's well on the way to healing). Early this afternoon I sliced a bit of skin off my thumb while peeling a grapefruit (with the aid of a very sharp knife) for lunch. I'd already discovered a couple of days ago that staunching the bleeding of a finger with paper toweling while continuing to cook is a clumsy business. But this wound has been a bit more persistent. And I needed it to stop bleeding before I could go out. Finally, when I didn't want to delay taking my beach walk any longer, I folded some paper toweling into a pad which I taped to my thumb with invisible tape. My glove just managed to fit over it. Which was all well and good until I took a tumble in the sand (too busy watching out for the seal I'd seen earlier to be looking out for rocks sticking up out of the sand...Now that I'm home, I can see blood seeping through, under the tape. Which means I'll have to change it soon. (If it were a bit more serious, I could go to the park office and ask for First Aid. But for a minor kitchen cut? Which would have stopped bleeding if I'd had a real bandage to put on it? Argh!)

It was warm enough today for me to sit on a rock at Point Wilson and write in my notebook. Here's what I wrote:

I just saw a seal! I was approaching Point Wilson, at the place where the water currents get very complicated. I noticed about five sea gulls in the shallows, apparently fishing. When I looked more closely, they suddenly took off, and I saw the seal's head sticking out of the water, close in to shore, almost where the sea gulls had been. It reminded me of a dog's head, only without the floppy ears. (I think, actually, that this seal might have been ear-less.) It looked around, as if scoping out the situation. And then about five seconds later, it dove back down under the surface, and I saw its pelt-- it looked light gray to my eye, with splotches on it.

It's really a beautiful day, not in the way previous days have been beautiful, but mild, with no wind to speak of. A cap of high thin cirrus covers the sky (I had the lights on inside all day, because there just wasn't enough light to read by without them), not quite reaching the horizon, leaving a thin band of light running all the way around the horizon, exposing the Cascades in all their glory. Dawn this morning, instead of dark orange, was orange-ish gold-- an odd, rich color I didn't recognize and thus couldn't put a name to, that acquired a bit of pink just before sunrise.

Although it's still a few hours until low tide, because this low tide will be so low, a lot of the beach is exposed. Weirdly, jellyfish have been stranded all over the sand. I stopped counting them when I reached 30. They look like little humps, here and there dotting the sand, of all sizes and shapes, always engulfing something.

I'm so glad I came out for this walk, sniffles, bleeding thumb, and all!

***

Of course I took a few photos of jellyfish-- you know how I am about them!

On the walk back, I encountered the seal again. I kept watching the water, hoping to see it. And because of this (and despite my using my sticks), I went sprawling when I stubbed my foot on a rock. After I clambered to my feet and was brushing the sand off my pants (and noting that my thumb had taken a hit and might very well have started bleeding again), I saw the seal, swimming--- and looking straight at me, as if curious at the racket I'd been making. Because it was staring directly at me, I said "Hello," and then of course realized that it might not actually be looking at me at all, especially since it just swam on, with its head above the water for a little ways (like a dog, I again thought), no longer paying me any attention, until finally it lowered its head and continued on its way, below the surface.

Seducing Gay Celebrities, Two Stories by Tim Jones-Yelvington

College friend Tim Jones-Yelvington has recently published a pair of stories about the fictional seduction of gay celebrities diver Matt Mitcham and singer Adam Lambert.

His narrator is a gay sociologist who keeps a blog record of his seductions, in a contemporary take on the epistolary format. "My research methodology: I have sex with gay celebrities and write about it," his character writes.

I’ve been stimulated by tete-a-tetes with David Hyde Pierce. I’ve appreciated Ian McKellan’s oral generosity. In my crowning achievement, I orchestrated a three-way with The Amazing Race’s Reichen Lehmukl and Queer as Folk’s Robert Gant, the most difficult part of which was getting them in the same room. The rest took care of itself. …who knew their fetishes were so compatible?

Much ink has been spilled on the cult of celebrity. Some say celebrities are role models. We look to them for lessons on how to (or how not to) live. This hero worship, so the story goes, is compounded for Queers, who grow up without examples for how to be ourselves.

But this doesn’t explain why some of us, especially those of us who have long outgrown the need for role models and have recognized gay identity as a cultural construct, a regulatory fiction, are still obsessed with famous gay people. Fascinated with asking “are they or aren’t they,” with wondering what they do and with whom, and with wondering whether they’d do it with us.

What does it mean to be showered with interviews, book deals, speaking engagements on college campuses, to be considered some sort of expert, an authority, to be vested with authority, not only because you call yourself gay, but because people also know you from Adam? What does it mean to be famous and gay?

In his blog, Perverse Adult, Tim explores what it's like to be the gay author of gay-themed fiction about the meaning of gay celebrity. Identities overlap in not entirely predictable ways.

As Tim wrote his story of sexual obsession with Adam Lambert, he writes that he became obsessed himself. "When I say I became obsessed with Adam Lambert as I wrote, I’m not exaggerating. Within about a month, he became the third most played artist on my last.fm profile, a profile I’ve kept for over three years. I really did create an Adam Lambert “mii” on my Wii, and one night a month or two ago, my partner was playing a flight simulator game, and our Wii stuck my Adam Lambert mii in a two-seater airplane with him, and for a moment I was legit jealous… of my partner. I was like, “Bitch, step back from my Adam Lambert mii.” I’ve got all the parts picked out for my Adam Lambert Halloween costume. I actually went online and ordered the same eye liner Adam Lambert says is his favorite. I’m probably incriminating myself more than I really want to here."

Tim's blog features famous photographs of Adam Lambert, paired with photographs of Tim dressed like him, imitating him, mimicking the glimmer in his eyes. Tim identifies with his character in more ways than this -- recently, Tim was banned from Kevin Spacey's twitter account after proposing to meet him in London with chains for a kinky sexual encounter. (Interestingly, Nathan Fillon seems untroubled by similar overtures.)

The stories play with weaving metafiction, too. The main character claims to be writing his blog real-time, reporting on conversations as he's having them, but also altering those conversations so that the reader has little perception of the fictional "reality". When his friend annoys him, he tells her:

“Just for that,” I said, “I’m putting you in my blog. I’ll cast you as your worst nightmare, the sarcastic black best friend who has no life of her own, but exists solely to advance the white protagonist’s dramatic action. And just to ensure you’re as subaltern as possible, I’ll make you a dyke.”

And sure enough, at this very moment, Sophia is landing Grade A pussy, which she will spend the night devouring with aplomb.

“Toldja so,” I say aloud (I really did. Just now, out loud).

Where's the line between reality and fiction? Where does real life identity intersect with fictional identity? What's the line between the mask of celebrity and the personal life of the individual behind it? Where does the celebrity identity intersect with the personal one? If sex is one of our most personal and private moments, does it slip past the mask of celebrity? But then again, isn't sex also about projection?

These stories ponder what the sex lives of celebrities are like based on their public personas. The narrator wonders whether Matt Mitcham will fuck like a diver: "I imagine Matt Mitcham as a power bottom. I will lie on my back, and he will straddle me, pull me into him as effortlessly as he enters the water, with minimal splash. Then he will make love to me from the inside out, active and open." Adam Lambert, on the other hand, is "an adept engineer of others' responses," so the narrator wonders "So how does one play the player? Perhaps Adam Lambert craves a sparring partner, an opponent equal to his calculations. Or perhaps I'll convince him I've been successfully played, have become, like countless television viewers, putty in his hands. Becoming putty, it occurs to me, might be kind of hot."

In the end, the sex scenes themselves are coy, leaving the stories to center on the concepts of gayness, celebrity, image and projection. These are questions without answers. Or, at least, questions whose answers won't come simply.

The sex scene with Matt Mitcham exemplifies the way that true private identities are never available to the public.

Maybe in bed Matt Mitcham was exactly like I said he would be, a power bottom. Or maybe he spun me around and took me from behind, quick and forceful. Maybe he wanted oral only, or maybe he’s the type of person that gets off on something else entirely, like watching another man spread grapes across the kitchen floor and squash them between his toes. I bet you’d like to know more. I bet you’d like to hear about the size and shape of his anatomy, what he can accomplish with his tongue ring, and what he sounds like when he comes.

Maybe this time, I don’t feel like sharing.

In the end, the sex scene is always offstage. What we see of celebrities is always their public face, by definition. It's the face they're wearing in public.

These stories accomplish more than I've discussed here, including subtle character development of the narrator, despite their brevity and epistolary format. Tim says he'll be writing more. I look forward to more insight into the serious, complicated issues of identity -- sexual and otherwise -- that this series raises. Read Seducing Matt Mitcham and Seducing Adam Lambert.

Moments of Xenia

In my morning reading, I came across these passages in Lyn Hejinian's essay "Barbarism" (which can be found in her collection of essays, The Language of Inquiry), in which she explores the extended metaphor of a border for characterizing poetry. Her usage differs in interesting ways from the notion as used by the group of people who call their work "interstitial." And as I thought about it, it seemed to me that this same metaphor could be used to characterize the best science fiction:

Poetry at this time, I believe, has the capacity and perhaps the obligation to enter those specific zones known as borders, since borders are by definition addressed to foreignness, and in a complex sense, best captured in another Greek word, xenos. It, too, means “stranger” or “foreigner,” but in a sense that complicates the notion as we find it in barbaros. The xenos figure is one of contradiction and confluence. The stranger it names is both guest and host, two English terms that are both derived from the single Greek term and are thus etymologically bound in affinity. The guest/host relationship is one of identity as much as it is of reciprocity. Just as a visitor may be foreign to a local, so the local with be foreign to the visitor; the guest coexists as a host, the host as a guest.

The guest/host relationship comes into existence solely in and as an occurrence, that of their meeting, their encounter. The host is no host until she has met her guest, the guest is no guest until she meets her host. Every encounter produces, even if for only the flash of an instant, a xenia—the occurrence of coexistence which is also an occurrence of strangeness or foreignness. It is a strange occurrence that, nonetheless, happens constantly; we have no other experience of living than through encounters. We have no other use for language than to have them.

In using the metaphor of a border, I do not mean to suggest that poetry relegate itself to the margins. The border is not an edge along the fringe of society and experience but rather their very middle—their between; it names the condition of doubt and encounter which being foreign to a situation (which may be life itself) provokes—a condition which is simultaneously an impasse and a passage, limbo and transit zone, with checkpoints and bureaus of exchange, a meeting place and a realm of confusion.

Like a dream landscape, the border landscape is unstable and perpetually incomplete. It is a landscape of discontinuities, incongruities, displacements, dispossession. The border is occupied by ever-shifting images, involving objects and events constantly in need of redefinition and even literal renaming, and viewed against a constantly changing background.

***

One can say that no experience is possible that is not also an experience of the border; it is the milieu of experience. It provides us simultaneously with awareness of limit and of limitlessness. As George Oppen said of poetry, “it is an instance of ‘being in the world’” at “the limits of judgment, the limits of […] reason.”

The End of the Flash Fiction Project

I've spent the last year publishing a flash fiction (almost) every week on Book View Cafe. On Thursday (Dec. 10) I reach Number 50. It seems like a good place to stop.

Making sure I had a story ready to go up every week was quite a challenge. I thought I'd written quite a few very short stories, but it didn't take me long to go through all the reprints and the little gems I'd written that never found a home, which left me confronting a weekly fiction deadline.

I cheated a little. After awhile, I decided the upper limit could be 2,000 words, which gave me a few more reprints. Then I raided the personal stories I developed for oral storytelling and came up with something I called "flash memoir." I even posted a poem.

But I also wrote a lot of stories. At least half the stories in the series were brand new the week they were published, and a lot of the others were old ideas significantly reworked.

On the whole, I'm really happy with what I produced. I don't think all the stories are great, but some of them are real gems that I'm extremely proud of writing.

I don't think I'm going to do this again, though. It took up a lot of time -- I've been reminded forcefully that the length of a story doesn't necessarily correlate with the amount of work involved. And I've got a pile of ideas that need more than 2000 words to develop.

The stories will remain up on Book View Cafe for the time being. You can find links to all 50 here. They're in reverse order, with the newest one -- "An Oral History of Ceres: Lyda Gambon" -- on top, and the first one -- "The English Major's Revenge" (a homage to The Day the Earth Stood Still) -- at the bottom.

The Aqueduct Gazette, Winter 2010

The new issue of the Aqueduct Gazette-- Winter 2010-- has been posted at Aqueduct Press's website. You can download it, free of charge, here. In it you'll find a fascinating original essay by Carrie Devall, "The Shady Relationship between Lesbian and Speculative Fiction"; Eileen Gunn's "Going to Narrative," which is her introduction to the forthcoming Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles; Kristin King's "Love at the City of Books"; and excerpts from the preface of Helen Merrick's The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms. Oh, and other stuff, too, about our new and forthcoming titles.

The paper version of the newsletter is not back from the printer yet. But if you'd prefer it to the electronic version, let us know, and we'll send you one as soon as they arrive at Aqueduct.

Briefly...

I woke this morning with a cold. Disappointing. But I took some cold medicine and followed my usual routine, sneezes, aches, and sluggishness notwithstanding. No way I was going to stay in bed, pampering myself. The only question was whether I'd be taking my walk on the beach. It is, after all, in the twenties (F). But the sea looked almost like glass, it was so smooth, so I figured there wouldn't be much wind. Which would mean I could wear my hat without having to hold it onto my head while on the beach. I walked to Pt. Wilson. The tide was at the lowest I've seen it (4.33 ft), and the sun low in the sky, a rusty red color that made the light dark gold. I saw parts of the beach, exposed by the tide, that I'd never laid eyes in the sixteen days I've been walking it. The little birds were out again, hopping away from me everytime I got near. And weirdly, a lone seagull persisted in standing and walking about the beach, taking big dumps, for about the seventy-five minutes I was out there.

Cold remedy or not, if I feel worse tomorrow, I probably won't brave the walk to the building that has wifi. I'll have to see.

Review of Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight by Cat Rambo (Paper Golem Press, 2009)

In my blurb for Cat Rambo’s new collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight (Paper Golem Press, 2009), I wrote that reading her stories is like “reading the literature from worlds that don't exist. She writes as that world’s Dickens, its Calvino, its Fredrick Douglass, its E. B. White. Rather than merely relaying the events of other realities, as some fantasy and science fiction writers might, at her best Cat Rambo acts as a literary interpreter. Within these imagined fictions -- sometimes disjunctive and metaphysical, sometimes lucid and deceptively simple -- there are embedded many new ways for looking at the history and social realities of our own world. Dying little girls may not be carried away by winged pigs, but what does it mean that we want so badly to believe that they might be? Cat Rambo's fiction invites these questions, but the ultimate interpretation is left for the reader to ponder, and to answer if she can.”

I attended Clarion West with Cat Rambo in 2005 and have been a devoted fan of her work ever since. I’ve published her work on PodCastle – Magnificent Pigs; Dead Girl’s Wedding March; “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones,” the Manticore Said; Foam on the Water; In Order to Conserve; and the upcoming Narrative of a Beast’s Life, scheduled for January 19th. Paper Golem Press sent me an ARC of this book so that I could review its contents for possible publication in PodCastle, and so that I could blurb it, both of which I was more than happy to do.

Cat's stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov's Science Fiction, Clarkesworld Magazine, and... everywhere. Once she burst onto the scene as a professional writer after Clarion West, she seemed to appear simultaneously in all magazines at once, as if she were at the center of some sort of physics-defying quantum phenomenon from a Star Trek movie.

Rambo’s collection features twenty fantasy stories, including a number of originals. Publisher's Weekly calls Cat's collection a "two-sided coin," indicating that there are both excellent and weak stories in the collection. The reviewer seems to have taken against Cat's fantasy world, Tabat, which has been developed over the course of stories, role playing games, and as-yet-unpublished novels. The reviewer says that these stories are full of "predictable genre tropes that fall flat." I disagree with Publisher's Weekly on the specifics -- in my opinion, "Narrative of a Beast's Life" is the strongest story in the collection, while "Eagle-Haunted Lake Sammamish" is one of the weaker ones -- but the reviewer's broader point is supportable. Rambo's collection is sometimes uneven, as is perhaps inevitable in a collection of twenty stories.

It's not that I don't love this collection. When Cat's stories are at their best, they're more than good -- they're emotional, triumphant, beautifully rendered and profound. Her best stories are among the best published anywhere in the industry. This collection is well-worth purchasing for the strength and beauty of stories like "Heart in a Box," “Sugar,” "Rare Pears and Greengages," and "The Dead Girl's Wedding March.”

The best stories in the collection are “’I’ll Gnaw Your Bones,’ the Manticore Said” and “The Narrative of a Beast’s Life,” both set in Cat’s Tabat. “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones,” originally published at Clarkesworld here, uses its fantasy setting to contemplate issues of personhood, eugenics, and everyday cruelty. The reader watches a sympathetic narrator commit an act that would be (rightly) condemned as evil in today’s society – but which is normal to Tabatians, just as it was normal in our culture for decades.

One of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of fantasy and science fiction writers is the ability to place familiar things in an unfamiliar setting and, thereby, force readers to reexamine them. Take this metaphor – I used to live in Santa Cruz, California, where I was constantly surrounded by redwoods. At first, I paid attention to every detail of them – the beauty of the red trunks stretching upward, the light shifting through the needles, the smell of bark and soil. But as I lived among the trees, they became part of the background of my existence. It wasn’t until I left for a while and came back to visit that I rediscovered them – unfamiliarity allowed me to regard each branch and gnarl anew.

Cat’s stories create a similar kind of disjunction when they recast slavery and eugenics in a fantasy setting. Her “Narrative of a Beast’s Life” is a fantasy mirror of the slave narratives which were written and published by escaped slaves before the civil war and then used by abolitionists as tools for converting Northerners to their cause. Much contemporary African American fiction plays on slave narratives in some way – for instance, Jones’s Known World and Morrison’s Beloved have both been described as taking on the project of re-imagining the lost histories of people who could not tell their stories. Rambo’s re-imagining of American slavery adds to this discourse in a different way, by altering the slave narrative subtly to create a new perspective for analyzing the original.

Of course, “Narrative of a Beast’s Life” also brings the slave narrative form to readers who may never have read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in which case it has the potential to mirror the purpose of the original work by simply recreating a slave’s eye view of slavery (a thing which, until very recently, was not considered particularly important). Slave narratives are interesting in their own right, as well as being politically and historically invaluable, and Rambo’s homage is well-written and full of lush detail.

The publisher’s weekly reviewer appears to be one of those people who’s never read Douglass. In light of their complaint that the story is "long-winded... without a trace of tension or intrigue" one must wonder what kind of threats would count as tension. Slavery and beating don’t. Neither do castration and lobotomy, apparently. What does?

Many of the strong stories are reprints. For instance, there’s “Heart in a Box” from Strange Horizons, a retelling of The Little Mermaid that concentrates on the oft-forgotten detail that each of the little mermaid’s human steps is incredibly painful. “The Dead Girl’s Wedding March” from Fantasy Magazine is a myth from a high fantasy world, its melancholy mood and slow, dark imagery rendered in beautiful prose. And “The Towering Monarch of His Mighty Race” from Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show tells the sometimes poignant, sometimes funny story of P.T. Barnum and Jumbo.

However, I was delighted to discover several excellent pieces among the originals as well. “Rare Pears and Greengages” is a moving Victorian fantasy, imagining a Dickensian world where the unfortunate characters include magical creatures as well as humans. “In Order to Conserve” is a witty ramble, posing a world in which concepts, instead of oil, are the non-renewable resource whose scarcity threatens society. Perhaps my favorite was “The Silent Familiar,” a tale about a wizard whose dragon familiar decides to lay an egg, which made me smile with its quirky humor until it snuck up to a surprisingly emotional ending.

The weaker stories come in two broad varieties. The first pair are urban fantasies – “Eagle-Haunted Lake Sammamish” and “Dew Drop Coffee Lounge” – which suffer from cliché settings, lacking character development, and easy morals. Neither of these stories has a central spark of originality or the redeeming uniqueness of Cat’s usual voice. Both are derivative, as though the eye that observed these stories is someone else’s.

The other weak stories are all from Cat’s world of Tabat. Here, again, I find myself in agreement with the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer – these stories are “filled with predictable genre tropes that fall flat.” Cat’s Tabat stories are excellent when they focus on the social conflicts of that world, its intricacies and ambiguities, the places where it deviates from other high fantasy realms. In stories like “Twine of Flame,” “In the Lesser Southern Isles,” and the titular “Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight,” the world of Tabat appears one-dimensional – and, like the urban fantasies, derivative -- just another epic realm that could have been written by any author.

While I greatly enjoyed Cat’s collection, and while I would enthusiastically recommend it to any fantasy reader, I do think the collection would have benefited from some trimming. If Cat were presenting her best twelve fantasy stories – instead of her best twelve fantasy stories and eight lesser fantasy stories – then this collection would have read smoothly and powerfully, transitioning from one “wow” moment to the next. That streamlined collection would rival the best I’ve read.

Luckily, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight is still excellent. It’s available at Amazon and through Paper Golem Press.

Quote of the Day

One of the problems for the woman as writer...is to face whole traditions of depiction of female figures and to get some tread on what to do with them. A characteristic of that cultural figure is her stasis as icon and her quality as a receiver of the gaze-- a semifrozen, singular figure whose spiritual responsibility is often already to "be there" so that with great sweetness and intensity she can induce the male follower to "get there." (And possibly, as in the 1948 fulmination by [William Carlos] Williams, to take some grief for her causeway status.) -- Rachel Blau DuPlessis, "The Gendered Marvelous: Barbara Guest, Feminism, and Surrealism"

Winter has arrived, I say

This is going to be very quick, partly because of the novel, partly because it was too cold for me to even think about stopping to write in my notebook at the midpoint of my walk. (And besides which, I kept thinking about the scene I'm working on.) So cold, actually, that I wished for thermal underwear. And had my scarf wrapped around the lower part of my face and my ears (bits of fuzzy wool in my mouth notwithstanding).

Sharp clear air, a pretty decent low tide (5.60 ft.). The wind was a lot milder than the one I faced yesterday. But instead of walking north to Point Wilson, I walked south to Pt. Hudson, because the lowness of the tide made it reasonably easy going, which hasn't been the case for several days now. Took only one photo, of a jellyfish that had engulfed some seaweed. (Why do I keep taking pictures of jellyfish? I guess because they fascinate me.) Oh, and lots of birds. Not the pair of eagles I saw about a week ago, but little ones that squeak. (Every time I got to within 30 ft. of one, it would take off, so I can't put a name to them.)

Quote of the Day

Being a woman isn't a state so much as it's an impetus, with a certain momentum, occurring at various velocities and in various directions.-- Lyn Hejinian, "Comments for Manuel Brito"

In the Zone

Yesterday I had no time to post, log onto the internet, or even take a walk-- all the available time not taken up with writing went to doing my laundry and going into Port Townsend with Kath to grocery shop and have lunch (which was, actually, almost entirely taken up with working out Aqueduct Press's production schedule for the next six months).

I realized this morning that I'm deep in the zone, now-- at the stage of work in which details of the novel flow in and out of my mind continually, regardless of what I'm doing-- the stage at which chopping vegetables becomes risky. (Especially since I failed to remember to bring a first aid kit.) I've been within the zone for about two weeks now, though for the first week not quite this deep. This morning, in the shower, I forgot what I was doing. All the shower gel had been rinsed off and my skin was getting drier by the second as the hot water poured over it. I've no idea how long I was nonconscious of what I was doing. When I came to, the need to recollect my immediate surroundings came as a sort of irritation. This is, I think, my favorite state of writing to be in, when the work is going on somewhere in my head all the time, whether I'm sitting at my desk or not. But then for me, it's absolutely essential to occupy that zone while writing something as complicated and detail-ridden as a novel (which is why I need to be able to shrug off every other aspect of my life when I'm doing it). So totally not like writing short fiction, or nonfiction... I've no idea, actually, how this works for other writers. I'd be interesting in hearing about it...

It snowed here last night, lightly. The sun has since melted most of it, but this morning when I woke the grass and the cracks in the pavement were still lightly dusted. The air's cold, and the wind's bitter. But the view is the most spectacular yet. I decided to try my walking sticks on the beach today (at least partly because I thought the walk to the beach might have some slippery patches I'd be glad for the help with), and I was glad I did. The wind made walking hard-going. Here's the (brief!) totality of what I wrote in my notebook:

Wind has changed direction, and is now out of the northeast, making everything different! I'm writing with my gloves on, it's so cold. Walking north, I was walking against the wind, and because I was cold, moved as fast as I could, to generate heat. Had to breathe through my mouth because my nose started dripping at a tremendous rate. As I write, I'm at Pt. Wilson, sitting on the log I sit on when my rock's not available. The three guys are out with their cameras again-- each with tripods this time-- standing just above my place in the rocks (which is why I'm sitting on this log). They aren't shooting anything at the moment, just standing around waiting. For what? My theory is that for some reason they are filming container ships that come through the Strait at a certain time every day. I could ask them, I suppose, but I prefer the mystery. Besides which, when a man wished me "Good afternoon" a few minutes ago, my lips were so stiff that I couldn't form the words "Good afternoon" back-- & had to settle for "Hi."

The beach is among the things that's entirely different. You might say it's like new. Scoured clean of seaweed, shells, crab legs, driftwood, jelly fish, as well as all flotsam and jetsam, leaving only sand and rocks. Is this because of the change in the wind, or because there was a negative tide last night? Or both? This afternoon's low tide is considerably lower than the daytime low tides have been. (The tide is just starting to come in, which means my footprints will probably have water in them by the time I start walking back). Driftwood has shifted up the beach, making it almost feel as if the beach has expanded. And another thing: the sand above the tide line is scalloped, from the wind. In fact, when I was walking through the parking lot near the pier, I saw sand skittering across the pavement.

Truly, this is the most spectacular day yet. Even Whisterl's sharp in the distance northwest of Baker. Sea is marked by white caps. Must go-- too cold to sit here without a hat on my head. (And my nose is dripping as steadily as the faucet in the bathroom in the apartment!)

*

Walking back south along the beach, the wind was at my back and I saw large patches of perfectly flat sea, laid out like gently heaving ribbons surrounded by dark blue, foam-flecked chop. I tried photographing it (see right), but I fear that the camera's vision is not my own. The mushrooms in the meadow I cross daily on my way down to the beach and back are looking pinched and dried. Despite the cold, kids were playing soccer on the Parade Grounds (but no one was standing in the cold, watching them).

Only one more week to go. So must get back to my desk. I so want to be able to finish the novel this time...

Crazy as it sounds...

On Sunday I walked out to Point Wilson, as far as the pile of big rocks at the end, until I got cut off by the tide. (I'd really like to make it out there when the tide's low, so that I can round the point and walk west, along the north beach, too.) Once there, I climbed nearly to the top of the rocks and found a good (if cold and damp) perch for watching the waves. After doing this for awhile, I confirmed what I thought I saw the other day-- that some of the waves were moving sideways-- was not an illusion! Previous to perching on that rock, when I'd still been walking, at 100 yards or so short of the Point, I noted that the waves were coming in crooked. But then as I moved near the Point, I realized that whole patches of the surface were not coming forward as waves, up onto the beach (even when they formed, which happened far less often than in every other place on the beach), but were in fact as they swelled heaving north.

Here's the appropriate bit that I wrote in my notebook while sitting on the rock:

It's complicated, I suppose, because the beach curves as it approaches and then rounds the Point, until it starts going west rather than north. But more important, probably, is that the tide is going out, which means that Puget Sound is being pulled out into the Pacific. In Admiralty Bay, that means the water is being pulled north. But round Point Wilson (which I can't see for myself from here but certainly do know), that means the water is getting pulled west. Anyway, sitting here on the rocks, I can see very clearly that a huge, nearly flat patch of sea swelling with incipient waves that never come to anything is indeed moving sideways! What an incredible sight! No wonder it made me dizzy, when it took me unawares!

*

I went back on Tuesday afternoon, to take another look at what the water was doing near Point Wilson. Here are my notes:

It's a cold, brilliantly sunny day. Mt. Baker in all its massy snowy glory is stupendous. I'm sitting near where I sat on Sunday afternoon, only on a log, not a rock. That's because the rock I occupied on Sunday is still covered with water. The water is too high yet to walk south along the beach, since at high tide the water in places reaches right up against the bluff, so I've walked out to Point Wilson again. On the beach to the north there's plenty of leeway.

There isn't much surf today, but here at the tip of Point Wilson, where the waves come in at an angle to the beach and meet a clutter of rocks, there's considerable churning and plenty of foam. But wait! I've just realized that the tide hasn't yet turned! I'd been assuming that the tide had just turned and was starting to go out. But staring at the water, I can see very clearly that that flat patch of water that moves sideways is moving south, not north! It must be almost at the top of high tide. (Really must get a tidetable.) Yes, it's very clear now. The water that moves sideways is moving right rather than left. Presumably if I sit here for a while longer I'llsee the tide turn. (But with the wind whipping around the Point, and with my having worn my rain parka rather than my wool coat and left my scarf behind because the warmth of the sun in my apartment deceived me, it's damned cold, even sitting in the sun.)

[I took the picture to the left while sitting on one of the big rocks.]

I've been watching a man walking on the top of the rocks (coming from the other side of the Point) set up a tripod with an industrial-strength camera. (It's digital: I can see the viewfinder. But is it a movie camera, or one for taking stills?) He's got the camera facing Mt. Baker. Ah, now he's pivoted it toward Rainier, which is pale in the hazy distance. But then almost immediately swung it back into its previous position.

Looking back at the water, I see that the currents are now looking very weird. Is the tide about to turn? It's as though the water is confused; the wind can't be helping-- it's blowing south, mostly. But most of the water is still moving north (though there are big areas, further out, that are not). There's a lot of chop further out, suddenly-- dark blades of water without much foam, appearing and then dissipating. I wish I'd brought the binoculars. Could the guy with the camera be focusing on marine life of some sort? That would explain why the barge is hugging the opposite shoreline. Tom says that when he left me here on Nov. 22 and was taking the Bainbridge ferry to Seattle, the captain announced there was a pod of Orca whales visible from the ferry.

*

As I walked back, it became clearer that the tide had turned while I was sitting on the log, watching. Some of my footprints in the sand had been partially washed away, leaving just faint indentations. Perhaps the oddest thing I saw was a very brief surge that died as quickly as it had arisen, where long, unbroken waves formed to a height of about three feet. And then the water became nearly flat again, forming wavelets measurable in inches rather than feet. So many mysteries...

Backwash

My neck is starting to get screwed up from my non-ergonomic set-up. At home I have a wonderful, adjustable chair with a high back against which I often lean my head. This reminds me a little too viscerally of how when I was a teenager my neck would get unbearably stiff from sitting on a piano bench, hunched over the piano, for hours. (I usually had to get a workout from an osteopath twice a week to cope, as well as cut down the amount of time I spent practicing.) Until yesterday, pummeling a certain part of my neck with hot water in the shower was enough to work the kink out of it. But that's not working anymore, and now the pain's spreading to my shoulders and middle back. I suppose I should be doing a few minutes of exercise every hour or so. The trick is remembering...

It was too cold for me to stop today at the halfway point of my walk and take notes: my fingers were too stiff, even if I'd been appropriately dressed for the weather-- which I was not. I wished I'd worn the wool pants I'd brought with me in case it got cold enough for them, and I wished I'd worn my heaviest coat. (Neither of these has been necessary until now.) Worse, though, was that I forgot to change into my hiking boots before setting out! So I was wearing slip-on street shoes, totally unsuited for the beach at high tide. (I forgot, I suppose, because my mind is now always partially on the novel, even when I'm thinking about or doing other things.)

Because of the difficulty I was having walking, I decided to take the long way back, via the road. And that also gave me the opportunity of visiting the north side of the point (since the road makes a loop there). I'd thought there were no mountains visible today, but from the north side of the point I could see mountains in Canada. Walking back, the bones in my face and my ears ached. Actually, for the first time I encountered only one other person out walking on the beach-- and she was dressed with good strong boots, a heavy padded coat, and one of those hats that come with earflaps (which she had down over her ears) and tie in a bow under the chin.

Though I don't have notes from today's walk, I still have yesterday's to post, in which I learned something I probably should already have known. I wrote them from a long near the pile of rocks at Point Wilson:

So today we have three guys with cameras (two on tripods) plus binoculars. I'm pretty sure they're filming container ships going through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and into the shipping lane to Seattle and Tacoma. I'm thinking now that that's what they were shooting the other day, too.

The water's quiet this afternoon-- quieter at Point Wilson, actually, than further south-- almost silent. (Could this be because the differential between high and low tide is only about a foot?) The light is distinctly wintry. Although the sun is shining for yet another day (hard to believe this is December!) and all the mountains are out, the light seems oddly muted. When I left the apartment at two, I saw a short bit of rainbow high in the sky-- like a piece of prism-colored ribbon threaded through the clouds. Now it's almost three, and my shadow is long and fuzzy-- not sharp, as I'd expect it to be.

Really, I can't believe how still the water is at the Point-- no waves at all, except for an occasional backwash from the container ship.

Whoa! Something big is coming in-- I can here its engine, though I can't see it, and it's creating major waves. But no, it's not something on the water-- but a helicopter! I hadn't realized helicopters create wakes when they fly over water. Of course, when I think about it, it's obvious. The waves are coming in at a sharp-- say 60 degree-- angle to the shore. I can't see te chopper now, but I'm still hearing it. Must be somewhere south of here, but still over a piece of Puget Sound, since the waves are still rocking in.

So much for the sea's barely moving today!

Q. Do they ban helicopters from flying over the ferry lanes?
A. Obviously not-- since the Port Townsend/Keystone Ferry, which I can see at this moment, not far out from Whidbey Island, sails this part of Puget Sound.

The guys with the cameras have gone. I was so distracted by the helicopter's creating such a powerful wake that I didn't notice them leaving.

Quote of the Day

[George Oppen's] work exemplifies Blake's call to make "Mental Flight": a critique, an examination, a readiness to experience the ruptures and possibilities of place and time. A skeptical wariness combined with a kind of fervent hope-- beyond reasonableness but not beyond reason. This might be summed up by Octavio Paz speaking about Republican Spain and its "desperate hopefulness. The memory will never leave me. Anyone who has looked Hope in the face will never forget it. He will search for it everywhere he goes." I think of Oppen and his choices in the 1930s, and then all his later work, as searching for hope wherever he goes bu never imagining it was there when it was not: the work is investigative, not elf-deceived. He showed the importance of that "Mental Fight," with a muted critique by citation of Pound and an allusion to the Museum of Modern Art and what it represents of modernist aestheticization, perhaps, or the separation of the artwork from its context. "I am a man of the Thirties//'No other taste shall change this'." But the world being what it is, the condition of "Mental Fight" seems permanent.-- Rachel Blau DuPlessis, "'Uncannily in the open': In Light of Oppen"

Chain of Command

In the US, ruins usually aren't the remains of old castles or monasteries, but abandoned mining works, ghost towns, rural barns and outbuildings, derelict tenements, and sites once occupied by the military. I can think of several parks in Washington State that were once forts or bases. None of them, though, match Fort Worden in the extent to which the physical structures have been preserved and repurposed-- or in the number of derelict strucutres that have been left standing. On Monday, I encountered quite a lot of these. Here are a few of the notes (in one place slightly expanded after I got back to my apartment) that I took during my walk on Monday, after lunch:

The rain stopped just before I set out on my walk, and the fog that had rolled in over the bay around eleven and socked it in, lifted. When I started the walk, the clouds were going fast, exposing big patches of blue. As I pushed up the hill and came across the first derelict structures, the sun burst out. At the moment, I'm sitting on a cement bench that's cold and damp, looking out over Point Wilson from the bluff above. The water's now a silky, sedate blue. I've been tramping around Artillery Hill, randomly taking this trail or that, crossing paved roads (that may or may not be open to vehicular traffic-- my guess is not, since although I frequently caught glimpses of people walking along these roads, I never saw any vehicles. I'm glad to have brought my sticks, since the trails are slippery with mud and the paved surfaces slippery with wet moss and algae.

The sun is shining on whatever coast is northeast of here, lighting up the sand on its beaches and the sandstone of its bluffs. At this moment I'm especially glad to have the sun and the sea looking so pretty. (I don't usually think of the sea itself as pretty-- it must be the color and illusion of its silky texture, which would vanish, of course, were I actually to climb down to beach level.) Walking through these derelict military structures under the bright eye of the sun, made me deeply uneasy.

I took a few pix, but the sinister aspect may not come through. (I'm not at all practiced at taking photos.) Damn, drops of water keep shaking out of the trees, hitting the page of the moleskin notebook I'm writing on. The ink seems to be holding up, but it's distracting to have to keep stopping to blot the paper with tissue. When I started the walk, I wanted to see how close the sea was to the back side of the park. My assumption was that a view of the sea would open up once I got to the crest of the hill. Along the way I passed here and there old deserted buildings half hidden by forest growth. And then I began to see various batteries, where big canon were once placed. I walked past them without investigating, since clearly they were not going to give me a view of the sea. But finally I came to the Main Battery, which looked as though it was built into the side of the bluff. Also, I heard the sea. So I was certain it was close. There were stairs leading to a sort of concrete deck or courtyard, so I climbed them, thinking that there'd be a view over the far wall. I hadn't realized from ground level that the wall enclosing the courtyard would be too high to see over. So I went back down and wandered along a lane. As I walked, on one side were the disused structures (presumably housing the guns), each with the same set of stairs and courtyard, on the other side low storage buildings (presumably for materiel). Many of the latter had rusty heavy doors that looked as though they could still be opened and closed. I kept expecting to see a furtive pair of eyes peering out at me from their dim recesses. And so though I was walking in full sunlight, the whole aspect became unspeakably sinister. (Perhaps if it had remained overcast and raining, the effect would have been softened and blurred, and these material objects would have provoked other thoughts than those I actually entertained, would have rendered a completely different sent of images in association with them.) All the while, of course, I continued to hear the sea and grew frustrated and anxious at my inability to see it. But the concrete structures kept going on and on.

It came as a relief when the lane opened into a meadow with the usual amenities of parks-- directional signs, an outhouse, a trash can. One of the directions posted on the sign was to an overlook of Point Wilson. I would not get an overlook of the northern coast, a view of the area the guns were targeted on. But I would at last be visually reconnected with the sea, which by that point had become ridiculously important.

The battery was apparently dismantled in the 1940s. It was built in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th. Parts of the film An Offier and a Gentleman were made here in Port Townsend, which is one of the few ports registered as an official "Victorian Port." The Commanding Officer's House in Fort Worden, which stands first in a row of officers' houses and has the best view of the sea, is now a museum, complete (I understand from the literature: I myelf haven't yet been inside it) with period furniture. A huge grass quadrangle (which can host numerous football, baseball, and soccer games simultaneously) is called the Parade Grounds. On the side of the Parade Grounds facing the Officers Houses are large white wood-framed institutional structures. One of these is now the Park Office, another the Coast Artillery Museum. (Two upright torpedoes flank its front walk.) This is the sort of memorabilia I expect to see in the South and the East. But in Washington State? Just think of what a wilderness this place was in the 1890s. (For an idea of that, check out Molly Gloss's Tiptree Award-winning novel, Wild Life.)*

My notes ended there. But Tuesday morning, I wrote this:

About an hour ago, as I lay waking in a miraculous dazzle of sunlight, listening to the birds before getting out of bed to make coffee, it occurred to me that if the batteries' offered no view of the sea to me, that probably means that the men tending and firing the guns, which faced north and were placed so that they could fire at ships heading into Puget Sound through the Strait of San Juan de Fuca, would have no view of what they were shooting at. I suppose one could say thatl the masses of concrete blocking their line of sight on the sea also offered them protection from potential incoming fire. (Did the bay ever come under attack, I wonder?) But it also suggests that the identity and circumstances of their targets was perpetually on a need-to-know basis. Who needs a view of the sea when the chain of command is so tight? Depends on how you define "need," I guess.

*

And then later Tuesday, while I was eating lunch, I read this, from Lynd and Grubacic's Wobblies and Zapatistas:

Hierarchical leadership was precisely that which the Wobblies most fiercely contested. I first learned of the I.W.W. from a book in my parents' living room. It was The New Men of Power by C. Wright Mills. To offset his sad tale of the bureaucratization of CIO union officials, Mills placed at the beginning of his narrative one of the eye witness accounts of what happened when the good ship Verona, full of Wobblies, approached the shore of Everett, Washington in 1916 to support protesting workers there. As the barge approched the dock,

Sheriff McRae called out to them: "Who is your leader?" Immediate and unmistakable was th answer from every I.W.W.: "We are all the leaders."

The sheriff and his men then opened fire, killing five.

Everett, of course, is not far from here. It, too is on Puget Sound, just a little further south by water.

"The tangled web of speculative fiction," seen through the eyes of Gwyneth Jones

The first review I've seen of Gwyneth Jones's Imagination/Space: Essays and Talks on Fiction, Feminism, Technology, and Politics is Ernest Lilley's, in SF Revu's December issue.

He begins his review with this:

Not only is Gwyneth Jones a brilliant author, she's a fabulous essayist, and though the cover blurb of Imagination Space says that this is a must read for anyone that cares about feminism, science fiction, or both, it misses the mark. This is a must read if you care about, both, either, genre literature in any form, the exploration of self through literature, or a host of other topics. In fact, it's just plain worth a look.

I've always enjoyed Gwyneth Jone's writing, but Imagination Space introduces me to the author as a literary critic and essayist, and I'm pleased to make the acquaintance. The essays in this collection are clear and lucid, insightful as all get out, and totally accessible. Probably more so than this paragraph.

Gwyneth looks at lots of topics that have been murky to me, and suddenly they become clear.

And he concludes his review thus:

As a non-academic, I often bounce off critical works scratching my head. Gwyneth Jones' mastery of her subjects and engaging writing pulls me in time and again, leaving me struck by how much more comprehensible the tangled web of speculative fiction is when seen through her eyes.

The beach, it is full of mysteries

What in the world is this? I don't even know if it's animal, vegetable, mineral, or manufactured. I found it on the beach today, about half an hour before high tide, near the water line. Any ideas?

Houston? We're Reading You Loud and Clear!

Today's the midpoint of my writing retreat. Because I've settled so easily into new habits and routines here it's hard to believe that it won't go on forever. On my way home this morning from my walk, I realized I felt as though the daily walk on the beach was something I'd be doing for the rest of my life! The thought took me aback, because it made me realize I had only a week and a half left of my life here.

Since Tom came this afternoon from Seattle, to bring my laptop-- healed through the application of harsh, drastic medicine and then restored through his efforts-- I took my walk in the morning. I lef the house just as the tide was scheduled to turn; on the assumption that the beach would be completely exposed, I walked south. Here's an excerpt from the notes I jotted:

10:20 a.m. Took a really hot shower and put on my wool socks and came out to walk on the beach. Low tide today, according to Tom, should have been at 9:30. I was on the beach at about 9:40. This must be one of those low tides that isn't actually very low. The tide's clearly coming in-- moving south-- but I realized very quickly, walking along the beach south, that vis-a-vis the usual obstacles littering the beach, the water line is actually rather high. (Could Tom have gotten the day wrong, when he looked at the table?)

But it's a morning of crisp clarity, the air itself almost dazzling, though we're at low altitude here. The first thing I noticed when I stepped out into the cold sunlight was frost on the roofs of the nearby cabins and buildings: and then, as I walked through the park, I saw that any grass that hadn't yet been touched by sun was frosty (and all the rest of the grass was wet) and that a puddle still in shade had crusted over with ice sometime in the night. All the mountains are out again today. The Olympics are the sharpest (though they can't be seen from the beach, since the bluff is blocking that line of sight). Again, Baker dominates the view, stunning in its mass of snow, a soveriegn with his court arrayed across the horizon. Rainier, which though often like a fairy castle hanging in the sky above Seattle is always pulls one's gaze when it's out, is too distant to be a challenge to Baker's power here: looking out over the water, which neither sees nor cares about its majesty.

An insidious metaphor, that. And certainly misleading. The sea feels more powerful to me, complex and oceanic (so to speak), full of more diverse forms of life and ecosystems than can be found on land. But the sea's power isn't that of a sovereign (which seems puny, by comparison). Sure, the Greeks invented Poseidon, but I've never felt Poseidon bears any relation to my own sense of the sea's power. In actual fact, whenever storms whip up the sea, it's usually because of what's happening in the sky. The sea's real power is in its life and its massive, amniotic volume. (I am fighting metaphorizing it as a womb: but I'm finding resistance strangely tough-going!) Though Baker from time to time erupts, its individual eruptions will never threaten the sea, only make its force all the more towering. (Signs with directions for tsunami evacuation routes are posted in numerous places along the beach...) But it's artificial to see the sea and mountains as independent of one another. (Peter Ward's astrobiology lecture in Seattle last month made that clear.)

This isn't the first time I've found myself recalling bits from two in particular of the astrobiology lectures I attended this fall (Peter Ward's and Jody Deming's). As a result, I'm eager to do some follow-up reading. I've no doubt that my pleasure in walks like these can only be amplified by all that I'm dying to learn (though not while I'm working on this novel).

Getting cold, sitting here. The log is actually damp, which I didn't much notice until it started seeping into my jeans. Need to start walking again.

*

When Tom arrived, he brought a printout of the tide table, and it turns out that he did indeed give me the correct time for high tide. But looking at the table, I discovered that all the daylight low tides at this time of year (the few that there will be during my stay here) are all fairly high. All the lowest tides seem to be happening after dark (or before light, depending on how you look at it).

I've written several posts since I last had internet access. I'll probably be putting them up soon. The solitude has been wonderful for my work, but I have to admit I'm glad to be back in (limited) contact with y'all.