Science Fiction as Theory Incarnate

I've just posted, on my personal website, an essay that was published in 2007 in Sci-Fi in the Mind's Eye: Reading Science through Science Fiction. It came to me, after my panels this weekend in Eugene, that it might be interesting reading for people wanting to know more about the relationship of feminist science fiction to political theory. You can download it at http://ltimmelduchamp.com/essays/theory_incarnate.html.

Ada's Feminist Science Fiction issue

I'm just back from Eugene and the CSWS's 40th-Anniversary Celebration. And I have lots and lots of stuff I want to blog about. The first thing I want to tell you about, though, is the new issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. This is Ada's third issue, which is devoted to feminist science fiction, edited by Alexis Lothian and the Fembot Collective, has a cover by Jeanne Gomoll, and a wonderful variety of articles by Joan Haran and Katie King, Donna Haraway, Marleen Barr, and others. Do, do, do go check it out! All of the journal's content is available for free download. Because I've been just a leetle busy since the issue launched last week, I've just begun to read individual pieces, but I can already assure you that I'm finding it interesting and provocative (two adjectives with overlapping meanings for me, anyway).  

Two new e-book editions from Aqueduct Press

Aqueduct Press has released two more volumes in the Conversation Pieces series as e-books:

--Spring in Geneva, a novella by Sylvia Kelso

--The XY Conspiracy, a novella by Lori Selke


 You can order them now, DRM-free, for $5.95 at http://www.aqueductpress.com/.


They'll soon be available elsewhere.

Quote of the Day

Many, if not most, Americans are unaware that the Constitution contains no explicit right to vote. To be sure, such a right is implicit in the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-Sixth amendments that deal with voting discrimination based on race, gender, and age. But the lack of an explicit right opens the door to the courts' ratifying the sweeping kinds of voter-restrictions and voter-suppression tactics that are becoming depressingly common.

An explicit constitutional right to vote would give traction to individual Americans who are facing these tactics, and to legal cases challenging restrictive laws. The courts have up to now said that the concern about voter fraud—largely manufactured and exaggerated—provides an opening for severe restrictions on voting by many groups of Americans. That balance would have to shift in the face of an explicit right to vote. Finally, a major national debate on this issue would alert and educate voters to the twin realities: There is no right to vote in the Constitution, and many political actors are trying to take away what should be that right from many millions of Americans.

Reps. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., and Keith Ellison, D-Minn., have introduced in Congress a constitutional amendment that would guarantee the right to vote. It has garnered little attention and no momentum. Now is the time to change that dynamic before more states decide to be Putinesque with our democracy.--Norm Ornstein, The U.S. Needs a Constitutional Right to Vote

The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Vol. 3, 4

The Fall issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone is out! You can purchase the issue for $3 (or subscribe for $10) at http://www.thecsz.com/.

Vol. 3, No. 4:Vol No. 4 — October 2013

Essay

Seeing C.M. Kornbluth as Gender-Egalitarian
  by Mark Rich

Poem

a tipping point
  by Gwynne Garfinkl

Grandmother Magma

Two Eleusinian Mysteries
Lud-in-the-Mist and
Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees
 by Michael Swanwick

Reviews

Big Mama Stories
by Eleanor Arnason
  reviewed by Andrea Hairston

We See a Different Frontier
edited by Fabio Fernandes
and Djibril al-Ayad
  reviewed by Cynthia Ward

Caution: Contains Small Parts
by Kirstyn McDermott
  reviewed by Kiini Ibura Salaam

She Walks in Darkness
by Evangeline Walton
  reviewed by Caren Gussoff

One Small Step
edited by Tehani Wessely
  reviewed by Karen Burnham

Sea Change
by S.M. Wheeler
  reviewed by Nisi Shawl

Featured Artist

Luisah Teish

The XY Conspiracy by Lori Selke

I'm pleased to announce another new volume in the Conversation Pieces series-- #37, The XY Conspiracy, a novella by Lori Selke. Among the questions driving Jyn to undertake a long road trip is this one: Why are there no Women in Black? Why is it always Men in Black?

An Asian-American lesbian, Jyn makes her living stripping in clubs in San Francisco. But stripping is only her day job. Her true vocation is UFO hunting. One night, working at her day job, she sights a Man in Black and realizes he is stalking her.

But why would they be after me? Sure, I’d posted a few things on various message boards, and, like everyone else these days, I had a blog and a mailing list that I was supposed to send monthly newsletters to, except it was more like quarterly. My correspondents didn’t know about the day job, though. How had they found me? Why did they care?

Unless I was onto something? Unless I was right? My theories aren’t entirely orthodox within the UFO community, after all. Maybe I had accidentally stumbled on something a little too hot, a little too close to closely-held secrets that I’m not supposed to question.

Jyn’s “not entirely orthodox theories” involve the origins and history of the XY chromosomes. The next day, Jyn packs up her car and sets off on an extended road trip—part “serious UFO tourism” and part flight from the MIB—that takes her though a variety of western states, stripping in clubs and bars as she goes, drawn, inexorably, to New Mexico…

Aqueduct is selling The XY Conspiracy for $9 at www.aqueductpress.com. We'll be releasing an ebook edition soon. And of course the book will soon be available in the usual places you can find our books.

Spring in Geneva by Sylvia Kelso

I'm pleased to announce the release of a new volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series: Spring in Geneva, an original novella by Sylvia Kelso. (Sylvia, as you'll recall, has published with Aqueduct before-- as editor of the fourth volume of the WisCon Chronicles, and as author of Three Observations and a Dialogue: Round and about SF.)  In her new novella, Mary Shelley, a young banker's son, and William, an excessively tall man with a "lividly hued visage, watery eyes, and blackened lips within a straggling beard," pit their wits and derring-do against Lord Byron, master of steampunk technology, and his thuggish minions.

"...my beloved Percy’s ardor bore him to lengths I could not go. There were plans, between him and Byron, that I could not condone. I nerved myself to protest: you may conceive how difficult, against such visions, such intellects. When protest failed, I forced myself to act.” She took her hand quickly from my arm and drew out a handkerchief. I paced beside her, managing not to exceed my position as mere listener, until she recovered herself. “Then—I was forced to depart, in haste, and to choose between discovery, outcry, wrath—perhaps, retribution—and my child.”—from Spring in Geneva

“I loved it! By heaven, this woman can tell a story. I was entirely gripped, right from the hyacinths.”
—Caroline Stevermer, author of Sorcery and Cecilia
“The voice and character of Anton render it delightful; haven't seen that much earnest gallantry since Reepicheep. “
—Lois McMaster Bujold, author of Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance 

Aqueduct is selling it for $9 at www.aqueductpress.com. We'll be releasing an ebook edition soon. And of course the book will soon be available in the usual places you can find our books.

Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA SF and Fantasy Anthology

by Alisa Krasnostein

One of the best things small presses can do is to publish work that sits outside of “mainstream publishing” and to champion works that large corporations don’t consider. At Twelfth Planet Press we look to publish fresh, original, well-written work that seeks to interrogate, commentate, inspire or provoke thought. We look to provide opportunities and to advocate for fiction that might otherwise not be written or find a home and audience. Kaleidoscope (http://www.pozible.com/project/34920) is an anthology of diverse contemporary YA science fiction and fantasy stories. Our crowdfunding campaign ends in just a few days.

I became passionate about the idea of making Kaleidoscope after listening to an episode of the Outer Alliance Podcast. It was a panel discussion about the lack of QUILTBAG characters in YA dystopian novels (http://outeralliance.podbean.com/2012/06/), and it made me want to publish more YA stories with underrepresented voices so young adult readers would see themselves reflected in the fiction they read. 

I’ve always been committed to publishing diverse material, and I was very interested to work with Julia Rios, who has been actively promoting diversity in our field for quite some time. She’s half-Mexican and bisexual, and the ideals of feminism and intersectionality are important to both of us. She was enthusiastic about the idea, and we set about collecting some wonderful stories.

At present we have five stories by Sofia Samatar, Vylar Kaftan, Ken Liu, Jim Hines, and Sean Williams. They are beautiful, fun, heartbreaking, and adventurous, and their protagonists are neurodiverse, people of color, mentally ill, and part of the QUILTBAG. These stories are strong anchors, but the anthology is still in its nascent stages. We have much material still to come, and we are hoping to see many great stories in our open submissions call (http://kaleidoscope.twelfthplanetpress.com/?page_id=42).

We're not limiting this book to authors who have already established themselves in the field. We're reaching out to anyone anywhere who might have a story to share. We want to see protagonists who are not the mainstream default (straight, white, cisgendered, able-bodied, neurotypical) character. We want to delight in their adventures, be awed by their magic, and geek out over their tech. 

If you're a writer, or know someone else who is, spread the word about our call. If you're a reader, like us, and if you want to see these stories for yourself, please back Kaleidoscope today! (http://www.pozible.com/project/34920)

Social learning in non-human animals

Received wisdom  assumes that most non-human animals are almost entirely instinctual in their behaviors (except, of course, when humans deliberately train them either through stimulus-response mechanisms). This assumption underlies the fantasy that should human culture result in the extinction of most mammal and avian species, all humans need do to restore them is find a way to use extant genetic materials to bring these species back to life-- presumably just as they were. (I.e., that DNA=the magic blueprint for replication.)

Lately, though, I've been noticing reports (particularly in Science) suggesting that education plays a role in birds' and mammals' behaviors. Crows, of course, have come in for a lot of attention over the last decade (though I suspect that even before scientists began to study crows' intelligence most of us already knew from personal observation that crows share information about particular humans with other crows, sometimes, disconcertingly, over a period of years). In the August 30 issue of Science, though, researchers are now reporting that whooping cranes bred in captivity have to be taught migratory performance. Here is the abstract of the report:

Successful bird migration can depend on individual learning, social learning, and innate navigation programs. Using 8 years of data on migrating whooping cranes, we were able to partition genetic and socially learned aspects of migration. Specifically, we analyzed data from a reintroduced population wherein all birds were capitve bread and artificially trained by ultralight aircraft on their first lifemtime migrations. For subsequent migrations, in which birds fly individually or in groups but without ultralight escort, we found evidence of long-term social learning, but no effect of genetic relatedness on migratory performance. Social learning from older birds reduced deviations from a straight-line path, with 7 years of experience yielding a 38% improvement in migratory accuracy.

The authors note more generally that in some bird species, "innate programs alone are not sufficient, and experiential learning is critical to successful navigation, as adult animals often have markedly better navigational capabilities than juveniles. Information transfer from more experienced individuals to inexperienced ones can be essntial to navigational success, especially for species that travel in groups. Current hypotheses, richly supported by theoretical studies, posit that social learning, coupled with interindividual coordination of movements, is esential to successful migration and the maintenance of group structure."

Whooping cranes, of course, are being bred in captivity because they are an endangered species. There is much to learn, also, from other species whose social structure is being altered by human impacts. The September 20 issue of Science, interestingly, has a focus on recent changes in the behavior of species subject to hunting. Some cougar behavior, for instance, has changed in Washington State because in the 1990s, the state, under pressure from livestock owners, extended the hunting season on cougars and increased the number of cougars a hunter was allowed to take while also decreasing the cost of a hunting license. Cougar deaths have skyrocketed in Washington state--along with "complaints about problem animals." What has now become clear is that cougar society and therefore behavior is changing as a result:

[Wildlife] managers hadn't considered what happens to cougar society with such a high mortality rate. "A stable cougar society has senior, adult males," who patrol large territories and protect the kittens of several females, [WSU wildlife ecologist Robert] Wielgus explains. When a male dies, incoming younger males will fight over his territory, and kill kittens in order to bring the females into estrus again, as his team will report in Biological Conservation in November.

When the researchers looked at the cougar population of the Selkirk Mountains in eastern Washington, where lion complaints had increased, they discovered that most of the older male cats had been replaced by adolescent males. Because of the threat from these infanticidal young males, many of the female lions there had also moved to higher elevations with their cubs, Wielgus's team discovered. "The females moved to areas they would normally never use, where they eat prey they normally wouldn't eat, including the highly endangered mountain caribou," Wielgus says. The younger males also attacked livestock. "They're the ones that haven't learned to avoid people and so get into trouble."

The article also discusses alterations in bear and wolf behavior. It's all fascinating and thought-provoking. Nurture and education is nature, and not some artificial additive outside of it. When will it become common sense to see that nature vs. nurture is a false dichotomy? I'd love to see more sf writers getting that one right.

US Culture vs Women & Girls doing Science

The New York Times Sunday Magazine has an article by Eileen Pollack on the problems faced by women in science. Here's the opening paragraph:

Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts.

Interestingly, Pollack reports that before she met Meg Urry, a Yale astrophysicist, in 2010, Urry

predicted that the female students in her department would recognize the struggles she and I had faced but that their support system protected them from the same kind of self-doubt. For instance, under the direction of Bonnie Fleming, the second woman to gain tenure in the physics department at Yale, the students sponsor a semiregular Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics at Yale. Beyond that, Urry suggested that with so many women studying physics at Yale, and so many of them at the top of their class, the faculty couldn’t help recognizing that their abilities didn’t differ from the men’s. When I mentioned that a tea was being held that afternoon so I could interview female students interested in science and gender, Urry said she would try to attend.
Judith Krauss, the professor who was hosting the tea (she is the former dean of nursing and now master of Silliman College, where I lived as an undergraduate), warned me that very few students would be interested enough to show up. When 80 young women (and three curious men) crowded into the room, Krauss and I were stunned. By the time Urry hurried in, she was lucky to find a seat.

The students clamored to share their stories....

Their stories included treatment from instructors that one would have supposed long gone from the college classroom. Pollack confirms that conditions at Yale are not anomalous:

In the two years that followed, I heard similar accounts echoed among young women in Michigan, upstate New York and Connecticut. I was dismayed to find that the cultural and psychological factors that I experienced in the ’70s not only persist but also seem all the more pernicious in a society in which women are told that nothing is preventing them from succeeding in any field. If anything, the pressures to be conventionally feminine seem even more intense now than when I was young.

For proof of the stereotypes that continue to shape American attitudes about science, and about women in science in particular, you need only watch an episode of the popular television show “The Big Bang Theory,” about a group of awkward but endearing male Caltech physicists and their neighbor, Penny, an attractive blonde who has moved to L.A. to make it as an actress. Although two of the scientists on the show are women, one, Bernadette, speaks in a voice so shrill it could shatter a test tube. When she was working her way toward a Ph.D. in microbiology, rather than working in a lab, as any real doctoral student would do, she waitressed with Penny. Mayim Bialik, the actress who plays Amy, a neurobiologist who becomes semiromantically involved with the childlike but brilliant physicist Sheldon, really does have a Ph.D. in neuroscience and is in no way the hideously dumpy woman she is presented as on the show. “The Big Bang Theory” is a sitcom, of course, and therefore every character is a caricature, but what remotely normal young person would want to enter a field populated by misfits like Sheldon, Howard and Raj? And what remotely normal young woman would want to imagine herself as dowdy, socially clueless Amy rather than as stylish, bouncy, math-and-science-illiterate Penny?

Although Americans take for granted that scientists are geeks, in other cultures a gift for math is often seen as demonstrating that a person is intuitive and creative. In 2008, the American Mathematical Society published data from a number of prestigious international competitions in an effort to track standout performers. The American competitors were almost always the children of immigrants, and very rarely female. For example, between 1959 and 2008, Bulgaria sent 21 girls to the International Mathematical Olympiad, while the U.S., from 1974, when it first entered the competition, to 2008, sent only 3; no woman even made the American team until 1998. According to the study’s authors, native-born American students of both sexes steer clear of math clubs and competitions because “only Asians and nerds” would voluntarily do math. “In other words, it is deemed uncool within the social context of U.S.A. middle and high schools to do mathematics for fun; doing so can lead to social ostracism. Consequently, gifted girls, even more so than boys, usually camouflage their mathematical talent to fit in well with their peers.”

The study’s findings apply equally in science. Urry told me that at the space telescope institute where she used to work, the women from Italy and France “dress very well, what Americans would call revealing. You’ll see a Frenchwoman in a short skirt and fishnets; that’s normal for them. The men in those countries seem able to keep someone’s sexual identity separate from her scientific identity. American men can’t seem to appreciate a woman as a woman and as a scientist; it’s one or the other.”
That the disparity between men and women’s representation in science and math arises from culture rather than genetics seems beyond dispute.

Do go read the entire article. After looking at entry-level problems and their cultural context, Pollack goes on to examine the discrimination-- much of it based on unconscious bias-- that qualified and successful women in science in the US continue to face.

Worlds beyond World Symposium

In about a month's time, the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon will be celebrating their 40th anniversary with two symposiums, one of them focusing on feminist science fiction. All the programming will be free and open to the public. So, if you live in the Pacific Northwest, you might well want to consider attending, especially when you see who will be participating. (I'm thrilled to say, the list includes several Aqueduct Press authors. including me.)

 Here's the relevant scheduling info:


Symposium 2: Sally Miller Gearhart “Worlds Beyond World” – Nov. 8-9 
In this symposium, authors and cultural critics explore feminist creative production and the roles of science fiction and utopian ideas in imagining feminist futures. Sessions include the following:

FRIDAY, 6:30-9 PM • Keynote event: “A Conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin”

SATURDAY, 9 AM-6 PM

• Session 1: “Feminists in the Archives,” a panel featuring Clark Honors College students working with the papers of feminist science fiction authors housed in Knight Library Special Collections and University Archives

• Session 2: “Science Fiction as Feminist Political Theory” featuring Suzy McKee Charnas, L. Timmel Duchamp, Vonda N. McIntyre, and Kate Wilhelm

• Session 3: “Building Feminist Worlds” featuring L. Timmel Duchamp, Molly Gloss, and Andrea Hairston

• Session 4: “Directions in Feminist Science Fiction Research” featuring Andrea Hairston, Joan Haran, and Alexis Lothian

Registration: Free and open to the public, but registration is required at guestli.st/164928. For travel and other event information, go to csws.uoregon.edu and click on “40th Anniversary.”

Quote of the Day

The influence of the feminist publishing movement can be seen far and wide. It's there in the enormous power of women in publishing today and in the ongoing insistence that women's voices should be taken seriously, that if literature is important – if it both shapes and reflects our lives – it should represent something beyond a narrow corner of the world. And it is there in every story where women's lives are central, in mediums well beyond the book world. For instance, Callil says, she is madly in love with the Danish TV show Borgen, which centres on a female prime minister. "Borgen is a Virago modern classic times 500," she says. "It's human life, and it's wonderful."--Kira Cochrane, Has Virago Changed the Publishing World's Attitudes towards Women?

This week at Strange Horizons

As a special feature of its fundraising drive, currently underway, Strange Horizons has posted three excellent essays I know most Aqueduct readers will find interesting:

--Recentering Science Fiction and the Fantastic: What would a non-Anglocentric understanding of science fiction and fantasy look like?, by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay

--Set Truth on Stun: Reimagining an Anti-Oppressive SF/F, by Daniel José Older

--Recent Brazilian Science Fiction and Fantasy Written by Women, by M. Elizabeth Ginway

I'd also urge you to make a contribution to Strange Horizons. Many Aqueduct Press and Cascadia Subduction Zone writers publish both fiction and nonfiction with Strange Horizons. Strange Horizons reviews more of Aqueduct Press's books than any other review publication. And finally, a donation will give you a chance at winning one of many excellent books, including several recent titles from  Aqueduct Press book. Details can be found at http://www.strangehorizons.com/fund_drives/2013/main.shtml.

Banned Books Week

September 22-28 is Banned Books Week! Here's the press release of the American Library Association:

Readers from across the United States and around the world will demonstrate their support for free speech by participating in a Virtual Read-Out of banned and challenged books during Banned Books Week, Sept. 22 – 28, a time when the nation celebrates the freedom to read and the American Library Association (ALA) brings attention to the censorship of books in schools and libraries.

The Virtual Read-Out is the digital centerpiece of Banned Books Week, featuring individuals reading from their favorite banned or challenged book. Participants, libraries and bookstores will upload videos at [http://tinyurl.com/bbwvro13]  for posting to the Banned Books Week YouTube Channel [http://www.youtube.com/bannedbooksweek ]. Contributors are encouraged to share a reading, discuss the significance of their favorite banned book, or mention a local book challenge.

The event will serve as the backdrop for the announcement of Banned Books Week Heroes. It takes courage to stand up for intellectual freedom, and Banned Books Week sponsors will honor outstanding individuals and groups that have stood up to defend the freedom to read.

More than 1,500 videos have been submitted since the read-out began in 2011, including many by bestselling authors.  Sherman Alexie (“Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”), Laurie Halse Anderson (“Speak”), and Khaled Hosseini (“The Kite Runner”) are among those contributing new videos.  Bookstores and libraries across the country are already participating in the Virtual Read-Out. Bookmans Bookstore (Ariz.) produced the video “Bookmans Does Banned Books” and Mooresville (Ind.) Public Library produced two promotional trailers.

For the first time this year, Twitter parties will help promote the message of Banned Books Week.  A party will be held on Monday, Sept. 23, from 10 a.m. to noon, Eastern time; a second party is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 25, from noon to 2 p.m., Eastern.  Supporters are urged to tweet using the hashtag #bannedbooksweek. More information about the Twitter parties is available on the Banned Books Week website, http://bannedbooksweek.org .

Banned Books Week is sponsored by ALA, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Association of American Publishers, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the National Association of College Stores, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the National Council of Teachers of English, PEN American Center, and Project Censored.  The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress has endorsed Banned Books Week.

For more information on Banned Books Week, book challenges and censorship, please visit the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom’s Banned Books website at www.ala.org/bbooks, or www.bannedbooksweek.org.

Biologically speaking, what is an individual, pray tell?

The New York Times published a fascinating article yesterday, DNA Double Take, by Carl Zimmer, that calls into question the nearly universal belief that every cell in an individual's body contains the same DNA-- the DNA determining an individual's biological identity. This now appears to be a gross oversimplification.

[S]cientists are discovering that — to a surprising degree — we contain genetic multitudes. Not long ago, researchers had thought it was rare for the cells in a single healthy person to differ genetically in a significant way. But scientists are finding that it’s quite common for an individual to have multiple genomes. Some people, for example, have groups of cells with mutations that are not found in the rest of the body. Some have genomes that came from other people.

“There have been whispers in the matrix about this for years, even decades, but only in a very hypothetical sense,” said Alexander Urban, a geneticist at Stanford University. Even three years ago, suggesting that there was widespread genetic variation in a single body would have been met with skepticism, he said. “You would have just run against the wall.”

But a series of recent papers by Dr. Urban and others has demonstrated that those whispers were not just hypothetical. The variation in the genomes found in a single person is too large to be ignored. “We now know it’s there,” Dr. Urban said. “Now we’re mapping this new continent.”

Dr. James R. Lupski, a leading expert on the human genome at Baylor College of Medicine, wrote in a recent review in the journal Science that the existence of multiple genomes in an individual could have a tremendous impact on the practice of medicine. “It’s changed the way I think,” he said in an interview.

Scientists are finding links from multiple genomes to certain rare diseases, and now they’re beginning to investigate genetic variations to shed light on more common disorders.

Science’s changing view is also raising questions about how forensic scientists should use DNA evidence to identify people. It’s also posing challenges for genetic counselors, who can’t assume that the genetic information from one cell can tell them about the DNA throughout a person’s body.

Carrying more than one type of DNA is called "chimerism." It was previously considered rare, since evidence for it only occasionally thrust itself into visibility. Now that sequencing the human genome has become much less expensive to do, chimerism is becoming more visible. These weren't previously unknown-- Zimmer notes that in 1953, when a woman donated a pint of blood, some of which was Type O and some Type A, it was concluded that she'd acquired some of her blood from her twin brother, while in the womb. But now, scientists have begun to search systematically for chimeras-- and are finding that chimerism is not at all rare, and in fact occurs

in a remarkably high fraction of people. In 2012, Canadian scientists performed autopsies on the brains of 59 women. They found neurons with Y chromosomes in 63 percent of them. The neurons likely developed from cells originating in their sons.

In The International Journal of Cancer in August, Eugen Dhimolea of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and colleagues reported that male cells can also infiltrate breast tissue. When they looked for Y chromosomes in samples of breast tissue, they found it in 56 percent of the women they investigated.

Besides the implications for medicine, the discovery of the prevalence of chimerism is likely to complicate forensic science. Zimmer cites a case that arose last year, in which a saliva sample and sperm sample from the same suspect in a sexual assault case didn't match because the suspect had two sequences of DNA in his body.

I see the discovery of the prevalence of chimerism as further undermining the common, even cherished conception of the genome as a master blueprint that allows everyone to be neatly pigeonholed and offers the means for tinkering with and easily controlling desirable traits once the practical issues of genetic engineering have been worked out-- and, of course, bolsters the illusions people have about the biology of sex differences. Some people, of course, will be certain that acquiring neurons with Y-chromosomes will make a significant difference to the operation of women's brains following the birth of sons. I imagine there may even be a few neuroscientists willing to squander grant money in attempt to locate and prove such a difference. But such old, cliche-ridden projects will inevitably begin to look less and less interesting. Just the other day I read an article in Science reporting that the hottest, fastest-moving research of the day is on bacterial immune systems (and to tell the truth, until I read that article I hadn't even known bacteria have immune systems!)-- and that bacterial immune systems are being used to harness features to target the destruction of specific genes in human cells. Nothing about human biology is as simple as it once seemed. And I say: Glory hallelujah!

Quiet pleasures

When back in 1979 I first moved to Seattle, my number-one favorite destination in the Pacific Northwest was the Washington coast, especially the La Push area, and after that, the San Juan Islands. I've spent a lot of time in those places over the decades, but a couple of other places have been edging their way into my heart, particularly the Columbia Gorge, which straddles a good stretch of the Washington-Oregon border. The Gorge possesses a stark beauty that the many dams that have been foisted onto the river haven't begun to diminish. Its pleasures, for me, are of the quiet sort. And interestingly, as one moves away from the Columbia River (north or south, back into the Cascades), the climate quickly shifts and the land moves from scrubby chaparral to lush Pacific Northwest forest. I think I intuitively understand why such pleasures failed to draw me when I was younger, but I can't easily put that understanding into words. If I were a poet, I think I'd give it a shot. Seems like that's the sort of thing poetry can address without rendering the subject dull and labored-- which I suspect my attempt to write about it in prose would inevitably be.

When I spend time in the Columbian Gorge, I almost always visit the museum at Maryhill (which has a winery associated with it-- wineries being as thick on the ground in the Columbian Gorge as they are in Sonoma, California). During my visit the week before last, I found, in the museum's sculpture park, a sculpture of a horse that evoked, for me, a sort of Wild West Steampunk aesthetic.

Dixie Jewett's sculpture, titled Merriweather (2011), was constructed from scrap metal-- specifically welded metal, wheels, and gears. According to the placard accompanying the sculpture, the artist specializes in larger-than-lifesize horses. I generally think of Steampunk aesthetic as all shiny brass and polished wood powered by steam and lubricated by springs and gears, but the materials in Jewett's horse evoke mechanized locomotion shaped to look like a horse. Hmm. Maybe this is more an 18th- rather than 19th-Century conceit-- pre-steam rather than steampunk, when mechanized creatures in Enlightenment circles were all the rage. (I don't know that anyone other than E.T.A. Hoffman ever wrote about those.) Was such an evocation the artist's intention? Probably not. The materials she used were probably chosen for their aesthetic rather than associational qualities. But the image she has created engages my imagination, and I delight in that evocation nonetheless.

WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 8-- an update

I've been pretty much off-line for the last month. But now I'm back, and my first post in this long while must be an announcement:

 Farah Mendelsohn has found it necessary to withdraw, regretfully,  from the editorship of the next volume of the WisCon Chronicles. This is sad news, but the show must go on, right? And so I'm happy to say that longtime WisCon attendee Rebecca Holden, who co-edited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler with Nisi Shawl, is stepping up to take her place. Rebecca has asked me to put out a call on her behalf to anyone who might be interested in contributing pieces in the usual forms (essays, panel notes, poetry, and fiction) or even in unusual forms. If you attended WisCon this year and have something to say about it, please query or contact her for further information on deadlines and word counts etc at rebecca (at) holdens.net.

Reissues and fonts

I used to spend hours every week browsing in bookstores, new and used. I'd even think nothing of devoting an entire day to doing so. In recent years, all that has changed. Instead, I do a lot of browsing online and have a good idea of what I hope to find before I set foot in a bookstore. I followed that procedure yesterday on a visit to University Bookstore here in Seattle, but since I didn't find a single one of the books I specifically looked for, I ended up spending a couple of hours browsing instead and thus buying a lot of books I hadn't given a though to in advance, just as I used to. I was surprised to find on the shelves a number of books from the early and middle parts of the 20th century I knew of but had never actually read, all newly printed complete with modern new prices, too.

After I bought them and sat down in the cafe with an iced tea and my booty, however, was that though these books were all newly printed, they had not been set in modern fonts, but simply reproduced as if they were nothing more than digitally printed pdfs of the original pages. (I suspect that's exactly how they were produced.) It would have reduced the cost to the publisher considerably to do, I suppose. To my annoyance, in two cases the books don't even have the grace of showing the date of the reissue, presumably on the pretense that the copyright date is the only date that matters.  Since the book is not, of course, being sold as a part of the original print run half a century (or more) earlier, this pretense leaves me feeling deprived of data about the book's publication history. Have these books been in continuous print all this time? Or is it just that the changing technology of printing and its economics has made a no-muss, no-fuss reissue economically feasible? 

 Does it sound as though I'm complaining? I guess I am. I will admit it: I find many of the older fonts uncomfortable to read. That isn't to say I won't read them when I have to. Back in the 1970s I read hundreds of books printed in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, most of them florid or even Gothic,  fonts that, for instance, turned esses into effs. I've always been willing to read old books set in old fonts when that's the only choice for books I really want to read. Just last year, for instance, inspired by a chapter in Alexis Lothian's thesis, I read a pdf of Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett's late ninetheenth-century New Amazonia that took considerable effort to read, partly because the pdf reproduction is rather poor, partly because the font was tiresome-- and then typed the whole thing out it in preparation for having it typeset for Aqueduct's Heirloom Books series. Most older fonts just can't be read by an optical character reader, and so they have to be keyed in by hand. Seeing these graphically reproduced reissues, it occurred to me that unlike all those publishers, neither Kath nor I would ever have thought of merely reproducing the pdf of the Corbett novel (or any other) book. Apparently, book design and ease of reading matter to us tremendously. Now that I think of it, I recall, in the first months of our preparing to start Aqueduct, Kath's intense interest in choosing our house fonts, all based on her own experiences as a reader-- and I also her complaints over the years about various fonts (of which I had previously been less conscious than she).

Clearly, fashions in fonts change. You have only to look at books published in different decades to see that. One of the reprinted books mentioned above, one with a 1951 copyright date and the statement "Vintage Books are published by Alfred A. Knopf and Random House, Inc." and no other date after that, apart from a bio of the author which mentions his death and two awards won post-1951 that Vintage must have added in a later reprint that the copyright page does not bother to mention, has a font one never sees now, though it's a font I would have found familiar in the 1970s. (Don't ask me for its name: there are very few fonts I can actually identify by name.) I find myself wondering whether the fonts I find the most readable now would have seemed as readable to me in the 1970s as they do to me now. Are publishers actually using increasingly readable fonts (perhaps due to better and better design), or is readability an illusion created by changes in taste? Fashions do affect how we view clothing, shoes, and hair styles (not to mention home, car, and book cover designs).

It seems I have a subject of conversation when next I see the one font-designer I actually know. And who knows, maybe neurobiologists will someday serve up new evidence shedding light on the question, particularly given the interest they've been taking in investigating what happens in people's brains when they read different sorts of things and finding perceptible differences in the brain between reading printed and electronic texts. 

It's Howard, everywhere you look

It seems it's Howard running things here in the US, wherever you look. You remember Howard Hunter, the guy on the 1980s television series Hill Street Blues? The guy who was a rabid advocate of militarizing the police and acquiring and using every gadget known to the surveillance state? Howard always got it wrong, of course, missing the forest for the trees, making sloppy mistakes (as real-life police constantly do, rushing to batter down doors and shoot up homes and sometimes their inhabitants because they got the wrong address or malicious information (kind of like the military so often do, too, for the same reasons), and incapable of figuring out the situation because common sense has gone out the door with hyped-up threats and stereotypes. And speaking of stereotypes, Howard, of course, would have applauded Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin.

Such sloppiness and carelessness with people's lives is only heightened, though, by the increasing disappearance of that little constitutional right that used to be known as "due process." Just the other day we learned of the horrific case of Daniel Chong, a UCSD engineering student who in April 2012 was locked into a 5x8-foot room without water or toilet much less food and "forgotten" for five days--only to be discovered near renal failure (and covered with his own feces). How does a law enforcement agency "forget" a human being they've locked up? Since this appears to have been genuinely unintentional, it signals a blatant disregard for procedure much less a total lack of a sense of responsibility for citizens taken into custody. (Which may actually be more dire in its implications than if he'd been deliberately tortured in this way.) This lack of a sense of responsibility is seen is continual, immoral force in the many, many prisons and jails in every corner of our country.

Why do I say Howard is in charge? I invite you to look at a few of the other such news stories of the last few days. We've had more revelations about what the NSA is able to do (and in fact does)--including the capability of tracking any internet user's every email and website visit. We've learned that Oakland's city government has decided to open a special surveillance center, "The Domain Awareness Center," which, according to the Oakland wiki,

will act as a “fusion center,” aggregating video feeds and real-time data from a number of sources around Oakland. Possible program components include integration of closed-circuit video feeds (CCTV) from all over Oakland, including 700 cameras at Oakland public schools and 135 cameras at the Oakland Coliseum complex. Video and data feeds from all over Oakland would be aggregated at the DAC, then analyzed with license plate recognition software, thermal imaging and body movement recognition software, possibly facial recognition software, and more, all with absolutely no privacy or data-retention policies in place, or substantive debate at the committee or council level about the program.

And then there's the case of the suburban Long Island family who have reported a visit from "the counterterrorism police" arriving at their home in three black SUVs, apparently because they decided that the searches the members of this family had collectively done made them a justifiable target for (further) investigation. See, Michele Catalano was researching pressure cookers (for preparing lentils and quinoa), her husband was shopping around for a backpack, and their son, a teenaged "news junky," had done searches on the Boston marathon bombing. These three series of searches coming from the same ISP endowed them with a suspicious profile--suspicious enough, that is, to warrant a visit from half a dozen armed officers. Here's Michele Catalano:

They mentioned that they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing. I don’t know what happens on the other 1% of visits and I’m not sure I want to know what my neighbors are up to.

45 minutes later, they shook my husband’s hand and left. That’s when he called me and relayed the story. That’s when I felt a sense of creeping dread take over. What else had I looked up? What kind of searches did I do that alone seemed innocent enough but put together could make someone suspicious? Were they judging me because my house was a mess (Oh my god, the joint terrorism task force was in my house and there were dirty dishes in my sink!). Mostly I felt a great sense of anxiety. This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.

All I know is if I’m going to buy a pressure cooker in the near future, I’m not doing it online.

I’m scared. And not of the right things.

99 times out of a hundred? I bet it's a lot less than that, considering that they're bothering people who have the temerity to google pressure cookers, backpacks, and bombings. Anyone who's a writer has got to find this worrisome-- just think of all the things we're constantly running online searches on. Just think of the sort of scenarios we write about. I'm amazed they haven't shown up at my home yet. Am I to take it that it's only a matter of time?

There are many more news items I could mention--we're constantly reading of the consequences of the apparently indissoluble union of technology with surveillance and military applications. When I read a week or so ago about the program used in many US cities to track license plates, I realized that if you write mysteries or thrillers you're probably always out of date. The potential for blackmail, for instance, must have been raised tremendously in the last five years, given the number of secrets most people try to keep from those around them--secrets we used to think the government had no business uncovering. Maybe we should be calling this particular historical era the Age of Surveillance. In any case, writers haven't a chance in the world of keeping ahead of this technology curve.

ETA: Josh Lukin has pointed me to another version of this story, namely that the family's online searches at home didn't trigger the visit, but a "tip" from a former employer: see http://gawker.com/how-a-paranoid-blogger-made-everyone-scared-to-google-p-992804224. This article quotes a statement from the police: "Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.”" That may not be as scary, but it doesn't make me feel better. I'm a writer, after all. I explore all kinds of menace and doom. Should that make me a target for suspicion?

Do book publishers' slush piles have much relevance to gender issues in sf/f publishing?

The latest Galactic Suburbia podcast-- episode 85, July 21, 2013-- is a must-listen for anyone interested in the on-going conversation about sexism in sf/f publishing. The podcast series as a whole, of course, is acutely tuned in to gender issues in our field,  but I was particularly happy with this episode for tackling Tor-UK editor Julie Crisp's post focusing narrowly on the failure of women writers to send out as many slush submissions as do men writers--an thus implying that that failure is the reason for the under-representation of women's work in the field. Alex notes in the podcast that the word she would use to characterize this post is "surface," and Tansy suggests that the post is "a bit disingenuous." The fact is, as Alissa reminds us, slush accounts for a minuscule portion of what gets published-- a fact Crisp neglects (or perhaps takes care not) to mention in her post. (She does not, after all, give any figures for how many slush submissions actually get published, or what proportion of published books were unsolicited submissions.) Sadly, a lot of people have hailed Crisp's post as a credible explanation for why so little women's work gets published in the UK-- as though slush has much bearing on anything other than itself. For a thorough discussion of Crisp's post and the context needed for evaluating it, I urge you to listen to episode 85.

Helen Thomas, 1920-2013

Journalist Helen Thomas died yesterday at the age of 92. The obituaries now appearing characterize her with a variety of epithets-- "trailblazer," "pioneer," "feisty scourge," "barrier-busting," "former dean of White House Press," as well as others considerably less respectful. I knew her name for all my adult life, and I recall numerous occasions on which the sharpness of her questions to presidents and presidential press secretaries and the often faux-jocular but pained way presidents responded to her directness delighted me. I loved that though they wanted to dismiss her for being a woman, their attempts at handling her were transparently not to their credit.

Thomas was the US-born daughter of Lebanese immigrants ("Thomas" apparently being Ellis-Islandese for "Antonious"). Wikipedia has a couple of quotes from her about growing up as the daughter of Middle-Eastern immigrants: "We were never hyphenated as Arab-Americans. We were American, and I have always rejected the hyphen and I believe all assimilated immigrants should not be designated ethnically. Or separated, of course, by race, or creed either. These are trends that ever try to divide us as a people." The entry notes that she remarked that as a child in Detroit in the 1920s, "They wanted to make you feel you weren't 'American'... We were called 'garlic eaters'."

Wikipedia offers lots more details-- about the course of her career, her honors and awards, the books she published, and her increasing frankness after she quit UPI in 2000. (I suspect this increasing frankness also had something to do with her age. Over the last few years, I've been noticing that women become franker and franker the older they get.) They quote her saying in a speech at MIT, "I censored myself for 50 years when I was a reporter. Now I wake up and ask myself, ‘Who do I hate today?’" This was, as the entry notes, a quip. But I think the entry's description of a skirmish at a press conference in 2007 best illustrates the point:

In a press conference on November 30, 2007, Thomas questioned White House Press Secretary Dana Perino as to why Americans should depend on General David Petraeus in determining when to re-deploy U.S troops from Iraq. Perino began to answer when Thomas interjected with "You mean how many more people we kill?"

Perino immediately took offense, responding: Helen, I find it really unfortunate that you use your front row position, bestowed upon you by your colleagues, to make such statements. This is a...it is an honor and a privilege to be in the briefing room, and to suggest that we, the United States, are killing innocent people is just absurd and very offensive.

Refusing to back down, Thomas responded immediately by asking Perino if she knew how many innocent Iraqis had been killed and then questioned the worth of regret when Perino responded that the administration regretted the loss of all innocent Iraqi lives.

For the harsh, interminable duration of the Bush II Administration, the White House press corps happily assumed the role of courtiers admiring the Emperor's New Clothes. The press secretary's remonstrance underscores the press corps' failure to call the administration on its war crimes. In short, Thomas was one of the few public persons during the Bush Administration openly daring to speak truth to power.

Thomas's national career virtually ended in 2010 with an outburst against against Israeli Jews, fueled by long anger and frustration at the State of Israel's brutal treatment of the Palestinians. A few days later, after she had resigned, she noted "I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon." Her outburst, of course, was publicly unforgivable. As Ralph Nader commented, one off-hand "ill-conceived remark" ended Helen Thomas’ career while "ultra-right wing radio and cable ranters" engaged in "bigotry, stereotypes and falsehoods directed wholesale against Muslims, including a blatant anti-semitism against Arabs."

Thomas's trailblazing, of course, refers to her having forged a successful career despite being a woman, which was definitely a liability in the 1940s and 1950s. She started as a "copy-girl" for the Washington Daily News in 1943-- a job she lost less than a year later after joining a strike action. In 1959, she and a few of her fellow female journalists forced the National Press Club, then barred to women, to allow them to attend an address by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The entry notes: Many female journalists memorialized Thomas on Twitter, including Judy Woodruff, who called her a "trailblazer", and Lynn Sweet, who said she was a "glass ceiling breaking journalist".[89] Andrea Mitchell tweeted that Thomas "made it possible for all of us who followed."[90] Dana Perino, who served as press secretary to President George W. Bush, remembered that on her first day as Press Secretary, Thomas approached her to give her words of encouragement. (Presumably Perino didn't hold that exchange about killing innocent people against her.)

Of all the epithets characterizing her, let me add this one: indomitable. In my mind, she belongs to the pantheon of women journalists like Molly Ivins and Mary McGrory whom we forget at our peril.

More theater of the absurd--

-- this time in Texas. Due to the success of Wendy Davis's filibuster of legislation that would have virtually ended legal abortion in Texas, the governor felt the need to call a special session of the legislature to push it through. According to Katherine Haenschen,, who is liveblogging the session, one "Senator Bob Deuell made the charming remark that low-income abortion seekers are "unsophisticated patients" who need the legislature's help. Yes, Senator Deuell actually said that poor and less-educated women need the legislature to make decisions for them." So far the Democrats opposing the bill have been focusing on procedural issues.

But what has captured the most attention for the national audience is that women wanting to watch the session from the gallery are being searched for tampons and sanitary napkins, which when found are being confiscated-- unlike, say, guns, which are legally allowed in the chamber. Progress Texas has duly produced this graphic (which is flashing madly across Facebook, thanks partly to the Daily Kos, and partly to women tired of such now-commonplace ironies):

The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Vol. 3, 3

The summer issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone is out! You can purchase the issue for $3 (or subscribe for $10) at http://www.thecsz.com/.

Vol. 3 No. 3 — July 2013

Essay

Musing on Sandberg’s Lean In
  by Nancy Jane Moore

Poems

Censorship
  by Sonya Taaffe

The Marriage He Saw Beneath the Shade
  by Sonya Taaffe 

 

 

Grandmother Magma

How to Suppress Women’s Writing
by Joanna Russ
  reviewed by Kathleen Alcalá

Reviews

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember:
How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction
by Annalee Newitz
  reviewed by Victoria Elisabeth Garcia

Death by Silver
by Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold
  reviewed by Cynthia Ward

The Other Half of the Sky
edited by Athena Andreadis and Kay Holt
  reviewed by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Space Is Just a Starry Night
by Tanith Lee
  reviewed by Craig Laurance Gidney

Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Courtroom
by Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez
  reviewed by Karen Burnham

Wolfhound Century
by Peter Higgins
  reviewed by Natalya Volkhovets

Featured Artist

Ta-coumba T. Aiken

A few thoughts about freedom of speech

It's Independence Day in the US. And so I'd especially like to honor the US Bill of Rights today, with particular attention to the first and fourth amendments, which (like the fifth, sixth, and eight amendments) are under increasingly serious threat.

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

 And yet, drawing attention to these amendments, I feel compelled to make certain that I'm not misunderstood in our little corner of the blogosphere by neglecting to assert that certain people who are claiming they are being censored when their disrespectful speech, whether thoughtless or hate-driven, is scrutinized and condemned. Censorship is something governments and government-directed agencies (which corporations sometimes behave as) do. Professional organizations, publishers, and editors are not agents of the government. They have limited powers. And they have responsibilities to their members and readers respectively. One of the responsibilities of a professional organization is upholding the ethical standards of its members.

 In her recent, four-part post, Liz Bourke sums up the current situation in the sf/f sphere with elegant succinctness:

The month of June 2013 saw sexism (and bigotry in several forms) bubble to the surface of the SFF genre conversation. Not fictional sexism, but the real-life kind: the Resnick/Malzburg dialogues (liberal fascism! censorship!) were followed by repugnant white supremacist and ex-SFWA presidential candidate Vox Day’s vile rhetorical attack on award-winning author N.K. Jemisin. And then we were faced with the news that Elise Matthesen had made the first formal report against Tor editor James Frenkel, long rumoured to be a man with whom one should avoid getting into an elevator.

I hope you have all read, at the very least, N.K. Jemisin's excellent speech, Elise Matthesen's courageous post, Amar El-Mohtar's righteous post insisting that SFWA needs to abide by standards of professionalism. Liz Bourke quotes from and links to other posts, too. By examining the outrageous, ridiculous post made by Rod Rees on his publisher's blog, she arrives at this significant, critical point:

In the last month, “freedom of speech” has been seized upon as a cri de coeur in the face of criticism in the SFF genre community. The response of Resnick and Malzburg to legitimate criticism was not to say, “Hey, you might have a point, we’ll think about it,” or even, “I think you’re wrong, but we’ll have to agree to disagree,” but to talk about “censorship” and “liberal fascism.” Likewise, calls to expel Theodore Beale from SFWA for, essentially, bringing the organisation into disrepute, were met with but you can’t punish him for exercising his freedom of speech!

(The right to freedom of speech is not the right to a platform, or to a megaphone. Nor is it freedom from the consequence of speech – which can be criticism, in the form of more speech.)

In other words, the claim that freedom of speech has been endangered by criticism of that speech is a red herring. The crucial question people should be asking themselves is this: what behavior is appropriate in professional situations, and what speech is appropriate in professional venues? Do we (I mean SFWA) have no professional standards at all (beyond, of course, the three-professional-sales qualification)? That, really, is the question. How professional is it to call a fellow (more talented and successful) writer an “ignorant half-savage” and proclaim that “self-defense laws have been put in place to let whites defend their lives and their property from people, like her, who are half-savages engaged in attacking them,” as Beale did? To me, such talk sounds like nothing more than vile hate speech (and a thinly veiled threat). Beale availed himself of a SFWA twitter feed to spew his vitriol: in other words, he used his professional status to amplify his bandwidth for what any reasonable person would call an unprofessional utterance.

So let me ask again: what ought the standards of sf/f's professional organization to be? We've recently begun demanding certain minimal standards for sf cons.

Liz Bourke sees these rhetorical assaults and the excuses made for them as signs of "systemic failure." And so they are. We've had exposure after exposure. Clarity must follow, right? 

Bank of America's latest bit of theater of the absurd

The news for civil rights, women's reproductive freedom, and democracy has been see-sawing like crazy lately. The latest, breaking news of the trial of Jeff Olson, who was prosecuted for writing--with water-soluble chalk-- on public sidewalks in front of San Diego Bank of America branches, offers a victory--even as it reveals just how off-kilter our judicial system is. Olson faced a sentence of thirteen years in prison for writing protest messages that could be easily washed away by anyone who wanted to. (Not quite as bad as that Texas court's sentencing a kid who'd attempted to steal a candy bar to prison for life, but ridiculous enough.)  In a nutshell,

Bank of America pushed for the prosecution of Olson on vandalism charges for writing his First Amendment opinions on public sidewalks (and in one case on Bank of America pavement). In fact the elected conservative SD City Attorney, Jan Goldsmith, didn't even initiate charges against Olson until months after he wrote in chalk on sidewalks in front of three Bank of America branches in SD. It was only after the local security officer for Bank of America relentlessly prodded the City Attorney's office that Olson was charged with the 13 counts of vandalism.

The trial judge, Howard Shore, not only forbade Olson and his defense to mention the First Amendment or little things like freedom of speech in his defense, he also put a gag order on Olson for the course of the trial. And he had special condemnation for the mayor of San Diego, too:

Judge Howard Shore also chastised the Mayor of San Diego, Bob Filner. Filner apparently in the judge's eyes had the temerity to call the trial of Olson a waste of time and taxpayer money. According to the San Diego Reader, Filner sent out a memorandum on June 20 that read in part:

This young man is being persecuted for thirteen counts of vandalism stemming from an expression of political protest that involved washable children's chalk on a City sidewalk. It is alleged that he has no previous criminal record. If these assertions are correct, I believe this is a misuse and waste of taxpayer money. It could also be characterized as an abuse of power that infringes on First Amendment particularly when it is arbitrarily applied to some, but not all, similar speech.

Judge Shore, in essence, warned the mayor of San Diego, who happens to be a Democrat in a traditionally conservative city, to keep his comments to himself, and would likely have issued a gag order on the mayor if Judge Shore were able.

It's farcical, sure. But just think for a minute how serious such farcical abuses of the law really is. Many of us are always talking about how it's gotten to be difficult to tell the difference between reports of political reality and displays of political satire. As Mark Karlin writes, "No Bank of America top officials were prosecuted for any number of questionable legal activities leading to this nation's taxpayers bailing out the banks too big to fail." As far as Bank of America officials (and certain judges and prosecutors) are concerned, the law is not an instrument of justice, but of protecting the interests of a tiny, wealthy elite. We see this every day not only in the way that political activists are treated by our various judicial systems, but also--and especially-- in the large-scale jailing of black men. We're also seeing it used, now, by the Obama Administration to punish whistle blowers revealing government policies to citizens, declaring them "traitors" as though they were the revealing secrets to foreign powers rather than government policies and actions to the citizens they supposedly work for.