Did a neutrino beam really move faster than the speed of light?

Cern Press Release, 23 September 2011:

OPERA experiment reports anomaly in flight time of neutrinos from CERN to Gran Sasso

Geneva, 23 September 2011. The OPERA experiment, which observes a neutrino beam from CERN 730 km away at Italy's INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory, will present new results in a seminar at CERN this afternoon at 16:00 CEST. The seminar will be webcast at http://webcast.cern.ch. Journalists wishing to ask questions may do so via twitter using the hash tag #nuquestions, or via the usual CERN press office channels.

The OPERA result is based on the observation of over 15000 neutrino events measured at Gran Sasso, and appears to indicate that the neutrinos travel at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light, nature's cosmic speed limit. Given the potential far-reaching consequences of such a result, independent measurements are needed before the effect can either be refuted or firmly established. This is why the OPERA collaboration has decided to open the result to broader scrutiny. The collaboration's result is available on the preprint server arxiv.org http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897.

The OPERA measurement is at odds with well-established laws of nature, though science frequently progresses by overthrowing the established paradigms. For this reason, many searches have been made for deviations from Einstein's theory of relativity, so far not finding any such evidence. The strong constraints arising from these observations make an interpretation of the OPERA measurement in terms of modification of Einstein's theory unlikely, and give further strong reason to seek new independent measurements.

"This result comes as a complete surprise," said OPERA spokesperson, Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern. "After many months of studies and cross checks we have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement. While OPERA researchers will continue their studies, we are also looking forward to independent measurements to fully assess the nature of this observation."

"When an experiment finds an apparently unbelievable result and can find no artefact of the measurement to account for it, it's normal procedure to invite broader scrutiny, and this is exactly what the OPERA collaboration is doing, it's good scientific practice," said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. "If this measurement is confirmed, it might change our view of physics, but we need to be sure that there are no other, more mundane, explanations. That will require independent measurements."

In order to perform this study, the OPERA Collaboration teamed up with experts in metrology from CERN and other institutions to perform a series of high precision measurements of the distance between the source and the detector, and of the neutrinos' time of flight. The distance between the origin of the neutrino beam and OPERA was measured with an uncertainty of 20 cm over the 730 km travel path. The neutrinos' time of flight was determined with an accuracy of less than 10 nanoseconds by using sophisticated instruments including advanced GPS systems and atomic clocks. The time response of all elements of the CNGS beam line and of the OPERA detector has also been measured with great precision.

"We have established synchronization between CERN and Gran Sasso that gives us nanosecond accuracy, and we've measured the distance between the two sites to 20 centimetres," said Dario Autiero, the CNRS researcher who will give this afternoon's seminar. "Although our measurements have low systematic uncertainty and high statistical accuracy, and we place great confidence in our results, we're looking forward to comparing them with those from other experiments."

"The potential impact on science is too large to draw immediate conclusions or attempt physics interpretations. My first reaction is that the neutrino is still surprising us with its mysteries." said Ereditato. "Today's seminar is intended to invite scrutiny from the broader particle physics community."

The OPERA experiment was inaugurated in 2006, with the main goal of studying the rare transformation (oscillation) of muon neutrinos into tau neutrinos. One first such event was observed in 2010, proving the unique ability of the experiment in the detection of the elusive signal of tau neutrinos.

Further information:

OPERA website: http://operaweb.lngs.infn.it/

Blog post about the topic:

http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/09/23/elementary-my-dear-neutrino/

Pictures available here:

http://www.infn.it/comunicazione/scambio
http://ccwebcast.in2p3.fr/cnrs/videos/webcnrs/presse/neutrino/photos.zip

The wonderful Elizabeth Warren dissects the "class warfare" charge

Steve Benen provides a partial transcript of the video:

[Elizabeth] Warren, after explaining some of the reasons for the nation’s deep fiscal hole, pointed to a more sensible approach to economic policy in general. “I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” she said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.


“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Hey, that cup is half full!

I was interested to read a summary of a new Harris Poll, asking people about their reading habits, particularly with reference to their use of e-readers: Harris Interactive: Harris Polls One in Six Americans Now Use E-Reader with One in Six Likely to Purchase in Next Six Months.
Its sub-header is "e-Reader users likely to both read and purchase more books than non-users." What interests me most isn't the numbers about e-readers per se, but what they tell us about reading and purchasing habits generally, with breakdowns not only by gender, but also by region, generations (identified as Matures (66+), Baby Boomers (47-65), Gen X (35-65-- which must be a typo), and Echo Boomers (18-34), and genre of books read).

See, there's always so much attention on the high percentage of people who don't read, that it surprised me to see how many people do still read books fairly regularly. Answering the question of how many books you purchased in the last year, 12% in 2010 and 9% in 2011 said more than 21 books (which was apparently the pollster's ceiling), and 11% in 2010 and 10% in 2011 said 11-20. (The figures are a bit better for books read, as opposed to purchased.) Note, though, that these are not averages (or even means) of numbers of books read per person, since the poll doesn't count books per person past 21. (Which is to say, the many extreme bookaholics among us aren't skewing the figures.)

Considering all the competition for people's time and attention, these figures cheer me up. 

New in Our Surveillance Society

A proposal that secondhand record and book stores report everyone whose stuff they buy to the police has been passed by Madison's Committee of Public Safety (!) and goes before the City Council next week. Yeah, this may not be an outrage on the scale of the FBI hiring a birther who writes for WorldNet Daily to teach its agents about Islam, but it's really telling that such a law is being considered.

Call for materials for a new anthology

Call for Materials for “Missing Links and Secret Histories” 

Most writers leave out a lot of what they know about their characters and the histories and workings of the worlds their characters live in. And that’s practically an invitation for readers to barge in and read between the lines and invent more than is actually on the page in the official, authorized version of the story. For “Missing Links and Secret Histories,” an anthology to be published by Aqueduct Press, I’m looking for wikipedia-page-style entries with the aim of compiling a Treasury of Missing Links and Secret Histories of stories we know and love. Such Missing Links and Secret Histories must shed critical or transformative light on the works they riff rather than appropriate them. These entries will probably not include zombies, sea-monsters, vampires, werewolves, and other such frequently interpolated monsters. They must, of course, make sense within the framework of the official, authorized version of the story they are glossing, and the more Wikipedia-like the better. Hyper-links are encouraged. Stylishness, wit, and ingenuity will be especially prized. And for Secret Histories, the more byzantine and buried they are, the better. A word of caution: if the official, authorized version of the story is not in the public domain, it behooves the contributor to be certain that author of the original story being riffed will not view the contribution as infringing their copyright.

Deadline for submissions is Nov 15, 2011. Submissions should be made by email to L. Timmel Duchamp (use this email address: ltimmel [at] gmail.com). You may either paste your submission into the body of the email or attach it as an rtf or Word Doc file. Payment will be 1 cent a word and two contributors’ copies. Query me first before making multiple submissions.

What I read last summer, part 1

Last December, when I was posting others' essays about their year's reading, listening, and watching, I never got around to writing my own. It's occurred to me that it would suit me better to write about my reading at shorter intervals-- say, seasonally. (Not, of course, that I don't already occasionally post here about what I'm reading.) So what have I been reading this summer, besides James Boyle's "Endowed by Their Creator" and David L. Ulin's The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time? A hodgepodge, of course. To make the task of reporting a bit less daunting, I'll do just a few titles at a time.

Let me start with Tansy Rayner Roberts' Love and Romanpunk, which I read early in the summer. This slim, elegantly produced volume is the second entry in Twelfth Planets Press's "Twelve Planets" series, which will be offering up twelve small collections by twelve Australian women writers. These are reasonably priced, especially if you get a partial or half subscription to the series (which you can do at www.twelfthplanetpress.com). Love and Romanpunk features an alternate history that begins with the Roman Empire, in which certain individuals (for instance, Livia, wife of Augustus) are lamias. Lamias, in Roberts' fictional world, are dangerous, vampiric autocrats; but in that world, they are offset by the "Julias," who have "a strength that meant something beyond death to your enemies, and poison in a cup." As you might expect, the Julias engage in deadly, centuries-long battle with the lamias, which is in fact the theme bridging the volume's four stories, each set in a different time and place though all in the same world, whether in Roberts' alternate history or its resulting future.

The first story, "Julia Agrippina's Secret Family Bestiary" is a cleverly structured tale, told through the alphabetically organized "Bestiary" that despite its rigid principle of organization nevertheless facilitates the telling of a sly, dramatic narrative involving fantastical feats of swimming and the fierce assistance of naiads. I can easily imagine Suetonius's (contemporary) readers delighting in this first tale. (English male aristocrats, among the core of Suetonius's  later readers, would probably have loathed it.) I imagine Robert Graves, though, would probably have been charmed by it.

Livia separated the world into those who were of use to her, and those who were expendable. She had a particular hatred for Julias. How could she not, when we had a power she could never understand, a strength that meant something beyond death to your enemies, and poison in a cup? (15) 

The second story, "Lamia Victoriana," begins "The poet's sister has teeth as white as new lace. When she speaks, which is rarely, I feel a shiver down my skin." I don't think I need to add much more to give you an idea of the tone and style of "Lamia Victoriana." I'll merely remark that in this alternate history, the "poet" and his sister are never identified, though the story takes place in Florence, the poet's lover is named Mary, who is pregnant, and the narrator is Mary's sister, Frances "Fanny" Wollstonecraft...

The third story, "The Patrician," is set in the future, in a place called "Nova Ostia," while the fourth story, "The Last of the Romanpunks," also set in the future, takes place on board a Roman-orgy themed zeppelin tavern. As the narrator says, "Of all the watered wine joints in all the world, I had to let myself be trapped on this one. The newly christened Julia Augusta was a two hour round trip across the Sydney skies." (80) Trapped together on a zeppelin programmed to stay aloft for exactly two hours, a pair of ex-lovers, one a lamia, the other a Julia, fight it out to the death.

All great, witty fun. Recommended.

Very early in the summer (really, more like late spring), I read Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Sciencefictional Universe. Before I read the first sentence, I was intensely aware of that "sciencefictional" in the title. The novel begins with the narrator, Charles, holing up in a "time machine" that it is his job to repair. Before long, though, the narrator has classified the time machine in terms of the universe it is "zoned" for-- number 31-- and explicitly states that universe 31 is not zoned for "space opera." The universe in this novel is, indeed, sciencefictional. In fact, while exploring the sf trope of time travel, the novel tells the story of Charles's struggle with his past (i.e., his childhood) and with his feelings about his painfully distant relationships with his parents (who are separated). I will say only that repetition and time-loops take on a whole new meaning in Yu's hands. Everyone, the narrator tells us, has a time machine and is a time machine (though most of these are-- like his-- broken).

Thought-provoking; emotionally painful. Recommended.

At the end of Sycamore Hill, when Richard Butner drove Veronica Schanoes and me to Asheville, we had a bit of time before our flight departures, so the three of us had lunch and spent some time in Asheville's Malaprop's Bookstore & Cafe. I bought three books, as I recall, all of them slim. I read one of them, Rikki Ducornet's Netsuke, on the flight back to Seattle, and another of them, Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town: lectures and essays on poetry and writing the week after my return to Seattle. Given its subject matter, Netsuke could have been painful, but the dazzling elegance of its stylish prose gave me ample emotional distance, as did the predominance of present-tense narrative. The tale the novella tells can pretty much be summarized by this description of David, a wealthy sociopath who passes himself off as a psychiatrist solely so that he can fuck emotionally vulnerable, hurting women:

For now all the rest is the edge upon which he glides. It is a necessary edge; he would not know how to live without it. But it is growing sharper and soon it will be razor thin.So there is this edge and on either side the dark water that will someday claim him. There is no way out of it. None that he can see. (28)

The novella shows us David manipulating his wife Aikio and his "patients," constantly juggling his many lies and teetering on the edge until finally, he leaps off it. It's all about treachery, baby.

Recommended for Ducornet fans, for those interested in obsessive personalities, for those who prize beautiful prose. Not recommended for those who find depictions of emotional abuse from the perpetrator's viewpoint triggery.

To be continued...

Living in the future means thinking like an sf writer, pt. 3

Douglas Rushkoff's post at CNN.com (reposted at Dangerous Minds), Are Jobs Obsolete, discusses another aspect of "living in the future":

New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures—from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.

We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace.

And so the president goes on television telling us that the big issue of our time is jobs, jobs, jobs—as if the reason to build high-speed rails and fix bridges is to put people back to work. But it seems to me there’s something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.

And question it he does:

We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that’s even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings to get the empty houses off their books.

Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff—it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

He goes on to argue that "jobs, as such" are an artefact of the Industrial Revolution. And that maybe we ought to be thinking of them in that way.

We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do—the value we create—is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.

This sort of work isn’t so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another—all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.

For the time being, as we contend with what appears to be a global economic slowdown by destroying food and demolishing homes, we might want to stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we want to save. They may be a means, but they are not the ends.

That's all very interesting-- and it's right out of a science fiction novel. Which seems appropriate, right, since we are, after all, "living in the future." But there's a serious hitch. In the US, we've been retreating ever more rapidly from being able to accept even the idea that human beings have a right to food, shelter, and clean water. So far are we USians from making food and shelter a human right: many cities are happily (or at least self-righteously) denying people similarly basic rights-- for instance, the right to urinate or defecate. (They do this by refusing to provide facilities for people lacking homes and then criminalizing urination and defecation that doesn't take place in a "private" space. Which pretty much makes it a crime to be homeless.) Recently, a special investigator for the UN excoriated the US for making homelessness the crime of the victim rather than the gratuitous, deliberate human rights violation it is.

So I'm wondering about the part Rushkoff mentions: the attachment in this country to punishment rather than reward as a means of administering and regulating status. The very existence of the homeless serves to make the merely hungry or those suffering from medical conditions because they can't afford treatment realize it could be worse. And after all, the threat of "worse" rather than the promise of "reward" is what keeps people in their places, right? Ressentiment is the universal super-glue, that prevents fluidity and the ability to shift gears when necessary. Following Rushkoff's thinking would be, well, revolutionary-- and for the right-wingers who are quick to accuse, nothing short of "class warfare." And lord knows, we couldn't have that here, in the US.

Much More Than That

In her essay Just Like a Woman, Audrey Bilger reviews (for the Los Angeles Review of Books) two works focused on their authors' passionate devotion to the "genius" of Jane Austen. One is by William Deresiewicz, who has previously published a more scholarly work, and one by Rachel M. Brownstein, formerly famous for her feminist work Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels (1982). The tale that Deresiezwicz tells is one of enlightenment, evident at once in his title: A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter.

Bilger begins her essay by reviewing the V.S. Naipaul kerfluffle.

If Naipaul’s goal in putting down women writers was to get attention, he couldn’t have picked a better target than Jane Austen. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any other woman whose disparagement would have garnered so much notice. In a word-association game, if I say “woman author,” odds are the first name in your head would be that of the creator of Pride and Prejudice. It’s worth noting that when I tried to talk to one of my nonliterary friends about Naipaul’s remarks, his immediate response was “Who’s V.S. Naipaul?” Nobody ever says, “Who’s Jane Austen?”

And she references Naipaul when she begins talking about Deresiewicz's book:

Deresiewicz is someone who might have agreed with Naipaul’s point about Austen’s inferiority had he not undergone a dramatic conversion. When he was a young graduate student in the 1980s, he could barely bring himself to think of Austen: “Wasn’t she the one who wrote those silly romantic fairy tales? Just thinking about her made me sleepy.” In his misguided youth, Deresiewicz identified with manly modernist writers and their ungovernable heroes. “I was Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, raging against the machine,” he gleefully reports; “I was Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, the rebel artist who runs rings around the grown-ups. I was Conrad’s Marlow, the world-weary truth teller who punches through hypocrisy and lies.”

A Jane Austen Education recounts how Deresiewicz overcame his bias against Austen and became a better person because of her. When he actually sat down to read the novels, he discovered that “Austen wasn’t silly and superficial; she was much, much smarter — and much wiser — than I could have imagined.” He blames masculinity for his initial skepticism: “If I was slow to catch on … there was a very good reason. I’m a guy, after all.” As he recounts his moral education at the feet of the author he once thought of as the “girliest novelist of all, the godmother of chick lit,” he makes a case for why men need to take women seriously and why Austen is the perfect teacher.

For Deresiewicz, Austen becomes not just a representative woman writer, but a stand-in for all women, and his ongoing surprise and delight at being schooled in the art of being human by, of all people, a female, is certainly honest, even if it leads to some cringe-worthy moments.

Bilger's discussion of Brownstein is where her essay gets interesting. Consider this passage:

Rachel Brownstein, author of Why Jane Austen?, shares Deresiewicz’s humanistic approach, but unlike him, she would rather we stopped talking about gender altogether. In referring to her 1982 study, Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels, a foundational text for feminist literary scholars, Brownstein expresses nothing but remorse. In fact, she claims to have written this new book “to atone for joining the chorus that has ended up by imagining Jane Austen as first of all and most of all a woman, the paradigmatic prisoner of sex and gender, and a paragon of proto-feminist romance — in other words, by misreading her, and not reading her as she meant to be read.” Brownstein now wants to focus on “genius” and on how “Jane Austen’s subject is, as she wrote, human nature.”

Both Deresiewicz and Brownstein are critical of ideological readings and of the current state of the academy, and Brownstein is, in addition, particularly hostile to feminism. She begins the book by expressing discomfort at having been called, at a literary party in the 1980s, a “feminist critic,” — this would have been a new term then — and although she comes to admit that this is exactly what she once was, she wants to distance herself from “the women’s party,” as she calls it.

According to Bilger, Brownstein wants to rescue Austen:

A subtext of Why Jane Austen? is Brownstein’s own disillusionment with academia and her recovered faith in the life of the mind via this exploration of what Jane Austen means. She recalls what it was like to encounter Austen before the late-20th-century culture wars erupted: “When I was in college in the 1950s, Jane Austen was the author of great works that were by the way delicious, six peaks of pink icing on the cake of English literature (or perhaps its rich center).” In discussing what happened in the decades that followed, Brownstein claims, “the critical attack on the canon in the late 1960s, and feminism and queer and postcolonial criticism, and the new media and the sense of a new millennium” all combined to diminish Jane Austen’s status. Toward the end of the book, Brownstein writes, “We reread Jane Austen because she persuades us to be nostalgic for what we never knew, and because we want her clarity.” She concludes by identifying the history of the novel as the “story of civilization,” and she associates Austen with the highest possible meaning: “[M]any of us see civilization now as a fiction, a story threatening to come to an end. Jane Austen is the focal point of nostalgia for that old story, a name for it.”

Rescuing Austen, as Bilger reminds us, is an old, old mission. Fans of one sort or another have been battling one another over Austen's ownership for more than a century. (Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, ed by Deidre Lynch, which she quotes from, is a fascinating book that addresses just that subject.) But I find it hard to wrap my head around the notion that "feminism and queer and postcolonial criticism" are responsible for ruining Jane Austen, given that Brownstein seems to be fussing most about Austen's being associated with "girliness" (which isn't an association that feminist, queer, or postcolonial criticism ever makes). Unless, that is, I zoom in the phrases "the story of civilization," "nostalgic for what we never knew," "civilization as a fiction, a story threatening to come to an end..." And once I do that, I'm really rather aghast. Brownstein is reading Jane Austen for that? Wow. I've never felt nostalgic when reading Jane Austen. Ever. So what is that all about? Oh: civilization. Ah, yes. The reactionary's longing for the Good Old Days, when the wealthy were ladies and gentlemen, and the poor knew their place and were grateful when the Mr. Knightlys condescended to them. Before a band of outlaws attacked the US exactly ten years ago. Now I get it.

Bilger doesn't zoom in on that, but she does go to the heart of what's at stake in the Naipaul kerfluffle:

For Brownstein, emphasizing Austen’s role as a woman limits any sense of artistic greatness. “Readers who excoriate (or, indeed, adore) her too narrowly imagine Jane as first-and-foremost a woman, a writer of romances, and/or a moralizing goody-two-shoes,” she declares. “She was in fact much more than that.”

This, from someone who used to call herself a feminist critic? Why in the world does she imagine that feminist, queer, and postcolonial critics don't see her as "more than that"? (Unless by "more than that" she means the reactionary ideologue filling us with nostalgia for the Good Old Days? For me that would be less, rather than more.) The problem is sexism, not feminism. For, as Bilger notes, "If feminism ever succeeds in making men and women full-fledged equals (for what else might?), we will be able to stop talking about whether women genuinely belong to the literary canon. Maybe there will even come a time when we can speak of Jane Austen without thinking of her as a female. Then comments like Naipaul’s will be universally mocked as the sexist “tosh” they so obviously are. Whenever this comes about, Jane Austen will still be a great author." I can't imagine why Brownstein thinks that rescuing Austen from feminist and queer theorists will bring about Austen's universal recognition as a Great Writer. It certainly won't bring the day on which we stop thinking of her as "female" a step closer.

More to the point, perhaps, is Bilger's quote of Deidre Lynch:

“Shakespeare fans, we should note, can act like fans, parade through Stratford-upon-Avon every April 23 sporting sprigs of rosemary, and not put at risk the plays’ claims to be taken seriously. No one, it seems, feels compelled to take this cult audience to task for their excesses and their failure to blush over them.” Bardolatry does Shakespeare no harm, but Austen’s cult following has, in the eyes of many, branded her as a chick-lit exemplar, a frivolous writer of “feminine tosh.”

And isn't that the real problem?

Wildcat Action in the Pacific Northwest

I fell down on the job on Labor Day, I know. But here's some hot labor news from my part of the world. A corporate consortium, EGT Development, has just opened a new grain terminal in Longview, Washington-- with the express intent of employing nonunion labor to staff it, despite their having signed a contract with the port requiring they use union labor. They then said they would employ workers form a union that has never done the port work that the International Longshore and Warehouse Union always does on the West Coast. (Every other grain terminal on the West Coast is operated by members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.) The actions taken by workers to prevent EGT from smashing the union began in early July and have been escalating. Early this morning, at 5 a.m., 500 people broke down the terminal's gates, prevented security guards from interfering, cut the brake lines of the train they attempted to block yesterday from leaving Portland, and dumped the train's load of grain onto the tracks.  A local newspaper reports (citing the AP):

In Seattle, Tacoma, Everett and Anacortes, hundreds of Longshore workers failed to show up or walked off the job Thursday in apparent solidarity with the Longview activists, halting work at those ports. Union leaders said they had not called for any such actions.

"It appears the members have taken action on their own," said ILWU spokesman Craig Merrilees from union headquarters in San Francisco.

He said some workers maight have been motivated by a photograph circulating on the Internet of ILWU President Bob McElrath in police custody in Longview. Police arrested 19 protesters as they blocked railroad tracks on Wednesday night.

The protesters in Longview have portrayed themselves as being on the front line in the struggle for jobs and benefits among American workers in an economic downturn. But while union strife has flared up around the country _ most notably in Wisconsin _ the aggressive tactics seen in Longview have been a rarity in recent labor disputes.

Labor activists insist that after receiving tax breaks and promising to create well-paying jobs at the new $200 million terminal, EGT initially tried to staff the terminal with nonunion workers. Following a series of protests by the Longshore workers this year, the company announced it would hire a contractor staffed by workers from a different union.

Evan Rohar and Jane Slaughter conclude their report for Labor Notes:

LWU spokesman Craig Merrilees said, “There is no formal action at either the local or International level, but large numbers of individuals appear to have taken action on their own.” He stressed that no arrests were made at this morning’s action and called the AP’s report of security guards taken hostage “ridiculous.”

“When corporations and the government turn their backs on working families,” Merrilees said, “it shouldn’t surprise anyone to see people step forward and try to fight back.”

Ports in Tacoma and Seattle are closed today, though the international said no job action has been called. One worker said work would resume at 3 a.m. Friday—unless it doesn’t.

Would that Will could answer back

This afternoon at our writing date, Eileen Gunn put me onto this: William Alexander's review, for Rain Taxi, of Orson Scott Card's Hamlet's Father. It's a novella, published by Subterranean Press, retailing for $35. It's meant to be a sort of Hamlet for Dummies. "Updated" for our times. Only...

In this adaptation, Hamlet was never close to his father. The prince is unfazed and emotionally indifferent to the old king's death, feels no sense of betrayal when his mother speedily remarries, and thinks that Claudius will make a perfectly good monarch. Hamlet is also secure in his religious faith, with absolute and unshakable beliefs about the nature of death and the afterlife. He isn't particularly hung up on Ophelia, either. Throughout the novella, Prince Hamlet displays the emotional depth of a blank sheet of paper.

Card has completely removed the dramatic stakes and haunting questions posed by the play, and the threadbare result is a failure of narrative craft on every level. Only one question remains: Is the ghost of Hamlet's father really a ghost, or is it instead a demonic liar? (Both, as it turns out.) But most of the novella is filled with pedantic moralizing, made all the more bland by Hamlet's smug and uncomplicated certainty.

But you'll never guess what Card thinks Hamlet is all about (Never, I say, in a thousand years):

Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people. The old king was actually murdered by Horatio, in revenge for molesting him as a young boy—along with Laertes, and Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, thereby turning all of them gay. We learn that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are now "as fusty and peculiar as an old married couple. I pity the woman who tries to wed her way into that house."

Hamlet is damned for all the needless death he inflicts, and Dead Gay Dad will now do gay things to him for the rest of eternity: "Welcome to Hell, my beautiful son. At last we'll be together as I always longed for us to be."

Here is Alexander's critical judgment:

The extent of the novella's failure is surprising—and embarrassing, given that Card is a skilled veteran novelist and Subterranean a well-respected press. The most polite thing for us to do would be to walk away and quietly forget the whole painful exercise. But Card does not deserve our polite amnesia. His failures should be known and remembered, because the revelation in his "revelatory new version" turns out to be a nightmare of vitriolic homophobia.

To which I say, Amen.

They "might as well be living in 1927" (Living in the future means thinking like an sf writer, Part 2)

In talking about "living in the future" the other day, I didn't mean to imply that we are all of us living in the future. Or that every aspect of our lives is spent in the future. It's all uneven. As ABC News quoted a doctor at Vanderbilt University a couple of days ago, as far as medical resources go, a lot of people in the US "might as well be living in 1927." 

A 24-year-old Cincinnati father died from a tooth infection this week because he couldn't afford his medication, offering a sobering reminder of the importance of oral health and the number of people without access to dental or health care.

According to NBC affiliate WLWT, Kyle Willis' wisdom tooth started hurting two weeks ago. When dentists told him it needed to be pulled, he decided to forgo the procedure, because he was unemployed and had no health insurance.

When his face started swelling and his head began to ache, Willis went to the emergency room, where he received prescriptions for antibiotics and pain medications. Willis couldn't afford both, so he chose the pain medications.

The tooth infection spread, causing his brain to swell. He died Tuesday.

That was just last week. As Carrie Gann notes in the piece, it is not unusual for people in the US to die of simple-to-treat problems:

"People don't realize that dental disease can cause serious illness," said Dr. Irvin Silverstein, a dentist at the University of California at San Diego. "The problems are not just cosmetic. Many people die from dental disease."

. . . .

"When people are unemployed or don't have insurance, where do they go? What do they do?" Silverstein said. "People end up dying, and these are the most treatable, preventable diseases in the world."

This would be a very easy problem to fix, if our elected officials cared to serve anyone but the wealthy. Unlike health insurance, medicaid costs almost nothing to administer. But that's because government-brokered health insurance is a nonprofit undertaking. If Dante were alive now and writing the Inferno, insurance executives (along with proponents of torture and banksters) would no doubt be found in of his choicest circles.

It can't come as a surprise...

When journalists and Human Rights Watch workers reported that they had discovered a cache of documents found in Tripoli showing that the CIA had contracted out torture to Libya's External Security Organization, CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood commented: "It can't come as a surprise that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country from terrorism and other deadly threats. That is exactly what we are expected to do."

Reading that is like having a finger shoved down my throat. The fact is, many of that agency's former employees would beg to differ with the atrocious-- and disingenuous-- assumption she uses to rationalize war crimes.

What doesn't come as a surprise is that the official CIA position is still, like our former VP, claiming torture is legitimate (and useful).  

Reading for a Saturday

Over at Torque Control, Nic Clarke has kicked off a discussion of Gwyneth Jones's Life with a post that puts Life in conversation with Vandana Singh's most recent Diffractions column.

Aliette de Bodard expatiates on the dominance of Hollywood and US publishers' tropes and narrative conventions in the wider sf field and how confining and frustrating that is, particularly for writers living in other parts of the world (though of course that applies to many, many writers here in the US as well). Her post resonates powerfully, I think, with my WisCon 32 GoH speech.

Kim Wright, on The Millions, says that lit-fic writers are saving their careers by moving into genre writing (though they risk not being allowed back into the hallowed precincts when they do so). The other alternative, she says, is incorporating elements of genre into literary novels.

It will probably always be open to debate whether these innovations are the result of writers seeking creative expression and wider audiences or a calculated move on the part of publishers who are simply trying to sell more product, even if it means slightly misrepresenting a book to its potential audience. But either way, the future seems to be stories which combine the pacing and plots of genre with the themes and style of literary writing.

In other words, this crappy market may actually end up producing better books. Because hybrids, bastards, and half-breeds tend to be heartier than those delicate offspring that result from too much careful inbreeding.

Hmm.... (or should that be ho-hum...?)

Living in the future means thinking like an sf writer

I recently read an absolutely fascinating paper at the Brookings Institution site, Endowed by Their Creator?: The Future of Constitutional Personhood, by James Boyle, a law professor at Duke University, that takes up an issue that the author suggests might be looming-- viz., the legal and ethical treatment of human/nonhuman animal hybrids and sentient AIs. He begins with a quote from an article in the Emory Law Journal by Scott Bennett, "Chimera and the Continuum of Humanity: Erasing the Line of Constitutional Personhood":

Presently, Irving Weissman, the director of Stanford University's Institute of Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine, is contemplating pushing the envelope of chimera research even further by producing human-mouse chimera whose brains would be composed of one hundred percent human cells. Weissman notes that the mice would be carefully watched: if they developed a mouse brain architecture, they would be used for research, but if they developed a human brain architecture or any hint of humanness, they would be killed.

As Boyle writes,

In the coming century, it is overwhelmingly likely that constitutional law will have to classify artificially created entities that have some but not all of the attributes we associate with human beings. They may look like human beings, but have a genome that is very different. Conversely, they may look very different, while genomic analysis reveals almost perfect genetic similarity. They may be physically dissimilar to all biological life forms--computer-based intelligences, for example--yet able to engage in sustained unstructured communication in a way that mimics human interaction so precisely as to make differentiation impossible without physical examination. They may strongly resemble other species, and yet be genetically modified in ways that boost the characteristics we regard as distinctively human--such as the ability to use human language and to solve problems that, today, only humans can solve. They may have the ability to feel pain, to make something that we could call plans, to solve problems that we could not, and even to reproduce. (Some would argue that non-human animals already possess all of those capabilities, and look how we treat them.) They may use language to make legal claims on us, as Hal does, or be mute and yet have others who intervene claiming to represent them. Their creators may claim them as property, perhaps even patented property, while critics level charges of slavery. In some cases, they may pose threats as well as jurisprudential challenges; the theme of the creation which turns on its creators runs from Frankenstein to Skynet, the rogue computer network from The Terminator. Yet repression, too may breed a violent reaction: the story of the enslaved un-person who, denied recourse by the state, redeems his personhood in blood may not have ended with Toussaint L'Ouverture. How will, and how should, constitutional law meet these challenges?

Boyle lists some of the best known genetic experimentation resulting in hybrid creatures, some of which have been used for drug testing, some as a source for harvesting stem cells, some for creating organs that can be transplanted into humans (i.e., as living organ banks). As quoted above, he says that his point is a "simple" one: "In the coming century it is overwhelmingly likely that constitutional law will have to classify artificially created entities that have some but not all of the attirbutes we associate with human beings." The rest of his paper, though, shows that it's not a "simple" one at all.

My heart sinks at the thought. Consider the state of the public sphere in the 21st-century US. Given that Guantanamo continues on, its capricious horrors and tortures all rubber-stamped by the Justice Department, its constinued existence supported by the very POTUS who claimed, on the campaign trail, that one of his first acts as POTUS would be shut that chamber of horrors down; given that so many people don't consider all human beings deserving of human rights; given the state of our many, many prisons and politicians' continued reveling in executing people known to be innocent of crimes they've been convicted of; and given that the most mundane policies of cities--that of how they treat people who lack housing-- which a UN report recently denounced as a widespread violation of human rights: I don't see a morally decent outcome resulting.

Boyle notes that collectively, in the US, we "disagree radically on the status of a fetus and... about the individual in a coma with no brain stem activity at all. How much harder will it be to come to agreement on the status of a chimeric construct or an artificial intelligence?" Boyle's exploration of this question is well worth reading, and draws interestingly on Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" as well as on a paper about the Turing test that mischievously suggests that Turing himself might not have passed it.

Boyle also discusses the difficulty of establishing "species identity"-- given how similar, genetically, humans are to a huge range of animals and the contentiousness of the question of which differences matter and which don't. When he poses the question of whether the Constitution "protects artificial entities," he cannily points out that according to the Supreme Court, it does: having long ago granted corporations legal personhood-- and then goes on to note that this is probably not a train of reasoning we want to follow: "The history of corporate personhood is hardly one of the Constitution's shining moments. Is its confused and partisan process of pragmatic muddling the best we can do with the more morally wrenching questions that the future can bring us?" He concludes with a reflection on Turing's article: "The most striking conclusion of Alan Turing's article may not be how difficult it is to identify machine consciousness or personhood but how uncertain we are about the boundaries of our own."

You can download a pdf of Boyle's entire paper here.

Not only must constitutional lawyers be thinking science fictionally, but apparently farmers using genetically modfied seed to grow corn for producing ethanol need to be doing so, too. It looks as though Monsanto's genetically modified corn is leading to super-resistant insects (corn borers and rootworms). Farmers using such seed are supposed to do certain things to prevent resistance from developing, but apparently are not, or are taking inadequate measures.

Reading for a Monday

It's Pat Cadigan Week at Strange Horizons, featuring an article on Cadigan's work by Tanya Brown, a reprint of Cadigan's "Home by the Sea" with an introduction by Tricia Sullivan, a review of Cadigan's most recent novel, and an essay by Matt Cheney on Cadigan's short fiction. I know may of this blog's readers will want to check it out.

Strange Horizons is, by the way, kicking off its fund-raising drive this week. They've posted the first batch of prizes for their drawings, which will include several books from Aqueduct Press. I'm not only a great fan of Strange Horizons, but a frequent contributor. The content is free to its readers, though the magazine in fact pays its contributors. I don't have to tell you what that means.

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brooks Landon offers a lengthy review of Karen Joy Fowler's short fiction in general, and  What I Didn't See in particular. I especially like his conclusion:

Fully engaging characters in their own right, people we think we know and instinctively like, Fowler’s narrators also help account for the sense one gets, from reading her, that one is in a conversation with the author herself, as she looks over her own shoulder and offers a running commentary on the very story she is writing. What results is an unusual feeling of authorial intimacy and wit, an act of friendship from a remarkable writer to her readers.

POLs

A friend who's been visiting from NYC for the last two weeks missed the earthquake, but then had to rebook her flight back because of the hurricane. Since she was here on vacation, and her vacation's over, she's needing to work remotely for the next week (return flights now being like hen's teeth). She's happy to know the hurricane wasn't as severe as it could have been, and that her cats are safe. As any sane person would be. I really don't get the folks (George Will, for one) who are yammering about "over-reaction." Seems to me the preparations were just as they should have been.

More outrageous-- but all too typical of right-wing insanity-- are the remarks of Republican ideologues who were in full swing beforehand. First there was Pat Robertson on the earthquake-caused cracks in the Washington Monument:

“Ladies and gentlemen I don’t want to get weird on this so please take it for what it’s worth,” [television evangelist Pat Robertson] said. “But it seems to me the Washington Monument is a symbol of America’s power, it has been the symbol of our great nation, we look at that monument and say this is one nation under God. Now there’s a crack in it, there’s a crack in it and it’s closed up. Is that a sign from the Lord?”

“You judge, but I just want to bring that to your attention. It seems to me symbolic.”

Don't want to get weird on this? Take it for what it's worth? Interesting qualifiers. But his reasoning, not his declaration, is what really grabs my attention: the Washington Monument-- that great big phallus thrusting up into the DC landscape-- is "a symbol of America's power"-- and "a symbol of our great nation"-- he says, and then goes on to assert "this is one nation under God." (Hmmm.) And so: if there's a crack in it, it must be from God! In other words, God sent the earthquake in order to introduce fractures into the stone tower built to honor the first POTUS! (How did I not figure that out for myself?) And if God took that much trouble to cause fractures in a symbol of our "great nation," it must mean something BIG.

These guys, I guess, really do beleive that, as Israelis were the chosen people of Yaweh, the US is the chosen "nation" of the Christian fundamentalist version of God. All these different Gods. All this magical thinking. It's not only enough to make my head swim, it gives me a vision of historians in the future reading such tripe and deciding that 21st-century North Americans had a mythopoetic view of the world (as I wrote in a paper back in the mid-1970s that Columbus and Cortez held a mythopoetic view of the world, based on their interpretation of what they saw and experienced in the "New World.")

And then there was Glenn Beck. Hurricane Irene, he tells us, is a "blessing." Actually, it turns out he has a financial interest in the nature of this "blessing."

“Warning! Warning! We are headed for global disruption in food,” Beck proclaimed on Friday. “I asked you two weeks ago, how many warnings do you think you’re going to get, and how many warnings do you deserve? … This hurricane’s that is coming through [is a warning] … for anyone who’s in the East Coast and has been listening to me say, ‘Food storage! Be prepared!’”

As Mediaite explains, “Beck has been talking up the need to stockpile supplies due to what he sees as a coming ‘global disruption in food.’”

Last October, however, Business Insider commented on the commercial relationship which appears to be behind Beck’s crusade for food preparedness. “You may have heard about Beck’s relationship with Goldline International, which urges people to buy gold and stay safe from the supposed inevitable devaluing of the dollar,” the website noted. “Now meet Food Insurance, which sells survival kits of freeze-dried food and other items to help people live from two weeks to 12 months, depending on the plan purchased (and post-apocalyptic conditions). Beck has promoted the company’s products, is featured prominently on the company’s website, and a banner ad for the company, bearing Beck’s image, was spotted on his website Monday.”

Beck is no longer with Fox News, but his passion for food preparedness appears to be as strong as ever. “You’ve heard me say this for years. People have made fun of me,” he concluded on Friday. “If you’ve waited, this hurricane is a blessing. It is God reminding you — as was the earthquake last week — it’s God reminding you, you’re not in control. Things can happen. Be prepared!”

And then there was Ron Paul, who thinks we'd all be better off without FEMA and, like Eric Cantor, is calling for additional spending cuts before allocating so much as a dime on hurricane relief.

Seems to me, also, that they ought to change Grand Old Party to Party of Lunatics. It really is time.

To get us back to reality, consider this: recently large blooms of crude oil have been seen swelling up to the surface above the Deepwater Horizon drilling site. A few people are concerned that it could "indicate the formation of fissures on the seabed" of the plugged oil well that's already done so much damage. Not a sign from God, perhaps, which means it won't cut any ice with the POLs. But I hope someone's looking into it.


ETA: I didn't actually mean to slight Michelle Bachmann. She, too, has been telling folks that God sent the hurricane (as well as the earthquake) in support of the Tea Party's message. But it seems that there must be a sane person on her staff: according to the Washington Post blog, Bachmann's press secretary has since been spinning this pronouncement, saying that Bachmann was "saying it in jest to prove a point."

Unfortunately, that same blog cites a Public Religion Research Institute/ Religion News Service poll from earlier this year reporting that nearly 40% of USians “believe that earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters are a sign from God.” I'm beginning to feel like an inmate in one gigantic asylum. I can't help wondering if these same people also believe the earth is flat. In Europe, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, they blamed earthquakes on "sodomites" (and, sometimes, Jews). I guess we can just be thankful that notion got lost somewhere along the way.

Reading for a Monday

Vandana Singh's column is up at Strange Horizons today: Diffractions: On Science, Emotions, and Culture, Pt. 1. She takes up an issue that has long been of interest to feminist science fiction:

There are two main stereotypes of the Western scientist: the mad scientist and the coldly logical Vulcan. One type is distanced from emotion entirely, while the other is literally deranged, with an emotional spectrum restricted to the dark pleasures of world domination. Both are usually male. In the Western perspective, science itself is emotionless, as is the universe at large, a view well expressed in the classic SF story, "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin. Reading Justine Larbelestier's excellent book, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, I was struck by how overt early American science fiction is with regard to both women and emotion. In one early SF story it is only after women are eliminated that humanity (i.e. men) can found a truly scientific culture. Other stories and letters from readers of the era reveal an attitude that conflates the existence of women with emotion, and science and real science fiction with things that are emotion-free.

Check it out.

Strange Horizons is also running a review, today, of Kristin Livdahl's A Brood of Foxes. If you haven't already read this novella, you probably need to know that the review is loaded with spoilers. Whether that matters to you or not depends, of course, on the kind of reader you are. 

Oh Grant Morrison no (fourth in a series of disillusionments)

Grant Morrison, a lifelong Leftist who's written some awesome heroines, responds to outrage over the elimination of most of DC's female writers and artists by cracking wise about putting on a dress. The experiences of the woman who asked the question says something sad about group dynamics at the comic con she attended (via Cheryl Morgan, who notes that Paul Cornell was the only man present who seemed to take the question of underrepresented women seriously).

[ETA: I mean, look at this chap. He sometimes thinks about these issues: he's capable of criticizing the ubiquity of "rape-as-plot-device" and even saying explicitly that "the sexism in DC because it's mostly men who work in these places." But when faced by a question at the comic con, he just goes along with the crowd and doesn't say anything that would contradict the attitude projected by his bosses. Which I imagine a writer of his stature could safely do.]

"Heartbreaking and joyful"

Nancy Jane Moore has posted Reading for Fun: L. Timmel Duchamp’s Never at Home at Book View Cafe. I'm a bit worried that this collection is flying under even my usual readers' radar, so I'm thrilled to see it.

Help On the Way

THE HELP Juggernaut is about to cruise through International Cultural Waters!

The cover of Entertainment Weekly (August 12, 2012) features Emma Stone, Viola Davis, and Octavia Spencer from the upcoming film, The Help—based on the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett. The feature article promotes the film in which two black women maids are encouraged (enabled) by a white woman writer to speak out for Civil Rights.The article does mention the fact that the success of the novel might have to do with an aggressive marketing campaign to readers of all colors that the vast majority of black woman authors have never gotten. However this inequity is not Kathryn Stockett’s fault!

Besides, The Help’s a good story!

Critics on the wire give The Help thumbs up and urge us to go see a film that takes on serious, touchy themes without getting “preachy.”

That’s code for: white people won’t have to feel guilty.

There’s still some small worry that black people might cringe.

The rest of the world can hopefully just sit back and enjoy a good screen story.

The premise of The Help grates on me (and on others—see Martha Southgate’s response) but I plan to attend the film. The performers are supposed to be phenomenal and how many blockbuster Hollywood features offer so many actresses a chance to fill the screen? Besides those mentioned above, there’s Bryce Dallas Howard, Sissy Spacek, Allison Janney, Cicely Tyson, Mary Steenburger, and Aunjanue Ellis. Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer proclaim that their characters are the most dimensional they have gotten to portray. Dark (and even plump!) black actresses don’t get much play in Hollywood so Davis and Spencer were, after initial skepticism, excited to sink their teeth into meaty roles. They get why folks might be suspicious, but plead for a chance to be seen.

I find their pleas incredibly painful.

The filmmakers have screened the film for black audiences and received much applause and also blessings from revered elders—like Andrew Young. The filmmakers don’t want a firestorm but a sweet box office swell.

If we—the audiences who want to see black actresses on screen but are troubled by the premise of The Help and the politics of Hollywood Blockbuster films and Mainstream Bestselling novels which still, in 2011 not 1963 or some other painful past, exclude black screenwriters, directors, actresses, and novelists from the kind of support and marketing that made The Help a juggernaut—if we don’t go to The Help—why the Hollywood machine won’t risk featuring black ladies again, probably for a long time. The systemic repercussions will be our fault, not the writer’s fault. I keep hearing this. If the film fails, if execs don’t greenlight films featuring black ladies after a disappointing showing for The Help, it’ll be because we—the skeptics—didn’t give this movie a chance.

The logic of this is brutal. We are blamed for systemic problems, but those capitalizing on them are just doing…well, good art. Who can blame them for that?

The premise of the film is the familiar “whites enable colored people to fight for freedom” myth. This storyline gets published or produce more than the colored people enabling each other story. Avatar and Mississippi Burning leap to mind. Good is subjective, of course. Still, it’s not so much a question of whether Avatar or The Help are good stories with complex characters well told, but what kind of good story is aggressively marketed? A story that doesn’t center on the intervention of a benevolent/repentant member of the privileged class helping the downtrodden to rise up is a less marketable “good” story. If the help help themselves out of the stinking mess, odds are against the story. The story might even be labeled preachy, angry. Mainstream audiences might feel guilt just watching the trailer!

That we get the same "good" story over and over again is no one’s fault! Certainly not the author of The Help who wrote her particular heart-rending version of it, nor the actresses who play their complex incarnations of the familiar. Who can blame the author for taking advantage of a system stacked in her favor and stacked against other writers? Who can blame the actresses for snapping up the opportunity? So few of us get any kind of opportunity!How many Blockbusters have more than one woman featured?

What do we want? What do we expect? A revolution? This is commercial literature and film for God’s sake. Would we rather see nothing at all?

Stuff of Interest

--Wendy N. Wagner interviews Nisi Shawl for Fantasy Magazine.

--Nnedi Okorafor offers her personal definition of feminism.

--Brit Mandelo reviews Joanna Russ's We Who Are About to..., of which she says:

Books rarely ask so much of the reader, true, but perhaps they should. We Who Are About to… is brutal, unforgiving, and also supremely, astoundingly beautiful, not simply because of Russ’s phenomenal, unmatched prose but because of the journey it takes the reader through. In fact, I might go further than Delany—I might be willing to call this book perfect, not just pristine, in the sense that it does exactly what it was intended to do, on every level it was intended to do it on, at the same time.

--Karyn Huenemann reviews Ursula K. Le Guin's Cheek by Jowl for the International Research Society for Children's Literature.

--Jo Walton reviews C.J. Cherry's Cyteen, about which she notes

I’ve probably read Cyteen forty times, but it always grabs me and won’t let go, and I always see more in it.

--After reading Patricia Anthony's The Happy Policeman, Gord Sellar wonders

why she is one of those authors I feel like we don’t remember in SF, and I think this fact in itself indicates something problematic in SF circles. Authors who have impressed me less (or at least less consistently — Harlan Ellison and Norman Spinrad, among others) are far better-remembered, and I think there are perhaps a few reasons for this.

This is the sort of question for which one explanation will not suffice as the definitive answer. Back when Anthony was still writing and publishing, she was on my sight-unseen must-buy list. In his list of possible explanations, Sellar misses at least one that occurred to me when I read that Anthony had decided to leave the genre and found myself wondering the same thing.

Here, by the way, is Anthony herself, speaking to to Sara Martin, on her career difficulties:

Your work is habitually labeled as science fiction or speculative fiction. How does labeling affect you as a writer?

To be frank, it destroyed my career. For the first few years I'd not seen myself as a science fiction writer, but instead as something of a thriller writer whose books just happened to include aliens. Well, my fault - what can a bookstore do with an alien except sell it as science fiction? But I'm afraid that I disappointed many s.f. readers who came to my books seeking a "worlds of wonder" adventure, a high concept cerebral story, an escape from the day-to-day troubles in their lives. Hah! My books are not concept-driven, but character- and story-driven. They deal with very real, very mundane tragedies, more the fodder of mainstream readers. But because the books contained aliens, a very small number of mainstream readers would read them. Neither were they accepted by the s.f. audience. By the way, I caution new writers to try not to make the mistake I made. I don't know the solution to this dilemma, since how else can bookstores make sense of their inventory? And yet slotting a writer kills a lot of creativity. Many of the books available out there tend to look and sound the same.

In times of upheaval, should there be one story, and one story only?

When an event that has bee recognized as a crisis is underway, the official news media always make it clear that they're there not to offer comprehensive coverage and an attempt to present the many different stories that would be helpful for understanding what's going on, but merely to reiterate the one monolithic narrative that is meant to be the official view. They do this, I presume, to make sure that people don't draw their own conclusions at a time of upheaval, when new perceptions might conceivably occur to the those who are watching. Sometimes the media will give voice to an "opposition" narrative, but it's always one that's carefully crafted to be rejected, one without nuance, one that is represented as tired and subjective.

Don't you just love the way people in the news media (in this case the BBC) ask questions of people who are not one of them (or one of the 5%) and then either ignore and mischaracterize what they say (CNN recently did this when asking "people on the street" their opinions of the "debt crisis") or try to put words in their mouths and then when they refuse inform them they're wrong and then go in for wholesale character assassination? This YouTube video, of the BBC interviewing Darcus Howe, a West Indian writer and broadcaster, offers a classic example:

Fonts that push our buttons

Fonts, of course, are a major deal for publishers. And that's because they're a major deal for just about anyone who's a reader or writer. I swear Kath's favorite part of the production process is choosing a book's display fonts. (Walbaum is the house font for our larger trade paperbacks, so there's no choice there, unless the text requires an additional font.) Before the days of computers, writers didn't have much choice, except during the 1970s, when IBM allowed the typist to change the ball that provided the typeface, and she had a choice in font size (10 or 12) and in font, either "Elite" or Courier. (Elite was similar to Times-Roman and made Courier look flabby and cold by comparison.) Some fonts, as we all know, are laborious to read. Some are just plain ugly. A post at the NYRB blog, The Human Face of Type by Edward Mendleson, discusses these aesthetic and, dare I say, emotional, reactions to fonts, in the wake of his seeing a documentary film titled Helvetica, which he characterizes as 

a sharp comic essay about human folly. Its unspoken and apparently unintended theme is the folly of utopianism, the ancient fantasy that disorder can be tamed, that the disruptive elements of life can be suppressed, and that people can be shaped and trained into behaving as the authorities think they should. The film’s comic hero is an anti-utopian rebel who despises Helvetica for its corporate anonymity. A utopian graphic designer who seems to prefer Helvetica to human beings is its comic butt.

Mendleson confesses he put off seeing the film because of its title. Mendleson detests Helvetica. Fortunately, the film does too!

Helvetica was also designed in the 1950s, but some of the designers interviewed in the film seem almost surprised by the fact that it was made by human hands and not generated parthenogenetically by the simple lines and curves that shape its letter forms. Unlike the greatest type designs, which are always the work of individual artists, with their own unique genius, Helvetica was produced by two designers working together to create a neutral typeface, neither of whom (as the son of one of them says in the film) was capable of designing a typeface by himself. Still, Helvetica is so anonymous and impersonal that the thought of two human beings conceiving it over a drawing board seems faintly obscene.

That "also" in the first sentence above, by the way, refers to Courier. Courier, he notes, was based on the type designed by Howard Kettler for IBM typewriters in the 1950s. Reading that gave me a Eureka! moment. Designed in the 1950s! That explains why it has that inelegant, soulless look, like so many things designed during the first decade of my life. If I had only known that earlier! IBM probably thought it was producing a modern look. Instead, it cursed a couple of generations of editors with chilly typescripts trying to project objectivity.

But I must not end on a note of hysterical accusation. (You see how emotional some of us get about fonts?) In fact, not all fonts designed in the 1950s suffer from that decade's pretensions. Here is Mendleson on Optima:

Optima is the anti-Helvetica. Zapf designed it in the early 1950s, around the same time that Helvetica was taking shape, but he had a completely different and far more profound sense of what a typeface ought to be. Instead of being mathematically perfect and untethered to a particular time or place, Optima embodies a subtle understanding of history. It is nominally a sans-serif, but its lines swell subtly toward their endpoints, with the result that they suggest classical serifs without actually having them. Zapf based the letterforms on carvings he found on Italian renaissance grave stones, and their overall shape and proportions unmistakably derive from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But their sleek lines suggest the aerodynamic curves of modern technology, and the whole design could only have been invented in the mid-twentieth century.

People who love type have been known to confess to each other in secret—so they can avoid being quoted in Private Eye’s Pseuds’ Corner—that in certain moods they are emotionally moved by Optima. Its echoes of renaissance carvings evoke nostalgia for a lost and unrecoverable past. Its streamlined curves evoke the forward-looking hopes of the machine age. Like other great works of art it prompts intense mixed feelings, a double sense of loss and gain: it simultaneously portrays something that has receded into the abyss of time and something that is still emerging.

The lesson here is: if you have a favorite font, cherish it, if only in private, for the first draft of anything you write is an intimate undertaking. You'll feel better about your writing if you do and have a better sense of when you're getting it right. It takes only a few keystrokes to switch the font of your ms to Times-Roman, Courier, or --goddess forbid--Helvetica and is easier, probably, than changing your clothes.

Murder, She Blogged

Jess McCabe has been presenting a series of posts-- Murder, She Blogged-- at Bitch Magazine that you might want to check out, if the detective genre (some print, mostly television) appeals to you. (She's about halfway through.) Here are the posts she's made so far:

Murder, She Blogged: Why Detectives?
Murder, She Blogged: The First Female Detectives?
Murder, She Blogged: Class and Fashion in Miss Marple
Murder, She Blogged: Retrosexism in Life on Mars and LA Noire
Murder, She Blogged: Let's Celebrate the Spinster Detective
Murder, She Blogged: About the US Killing
Murder, She Blogged: Lund
Murder, She Blogged: Castle
Murder, She Blogged: Detectives in Distress
Murder, She Blogged: Prime Suspect
Murder, She Blogged: Mrs. Columbo

I was pleased to see her citing Lucy Sussex's work in her post on the first female detectives.

Invisible Heroism

The Talk About Equality blog asks: If a Married Lesbian Couple Saves 40 Teens from the Norway Massacre and No One Writes About it, Did it Really Happen? 

The story has been well-covered by International media and the mainstream press here in the US.

What you probably have not heard about is the married lesbian couple who rescued 40 teenagers during and after the bloody event. Several blogs and gay and lesbian publications are now picking up the story, but the heavy hitters who usually kill for hero stories like this, have remained silent.

(Link thanks to the F-Word Blog.)