Rachel Elizabeth Dillon's Journal

11:55pm: Readercon Planning Post
(If you're not considering Readercon, you can probably stop reading now.) First of all, here is the schedule. If you were unsure about coming on Thursday, I'm talking on Thursday. Come on Thursday. My van fits six not-me people and I will be doing rides to and from Somerville. You can also take the 350 bus or the Minuteman Bike trail; on at least two of the days I may leave after the bus stops running. If you want a ride there, you should show up at my house at the relevant time listed below; it's first come first served via LJ comments.

• Thursday, 6:30 PM: rax , rivenwanderer , rushthatspeaks , postrodent , gaudior , Ada, 1 available
• Friday, 10 AM: rax , eredien , rushthatspeaks , postrodent , Ada, 2 available
• Saturday, 9:15 AM: rax , eredien , rivenwanderer , rushthatspeaks , postrodent , gaudior , Ada, FULL
• Sunday, 9:15 AM: rax , eredien , rivenwanderer , rushthatspeaks , postrodent , gaudior , Ada, FULL

So... yeah. It will be awesome. Here are the events I will be panelisting at: Thursday 8:00 PM, Salon B: Panel

When The World Ends, And Nobody Notices. Rachel Elizabeth Dillon with Faye Ringel, Greer Gilman, Tui Sutherland

Apocalyptic fiction often allows the death of society to stand in for anxieties about our individual deaths. In Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital, where the world floods and seven hundred ill children and their support staff float above the end of the world, the characters are too busy ensuring that the children live to process their anxiety fully. In Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes, the world is broken and reformed, but the only ones who seem anxious are the gods. How do these stories fit into the canon of apocalyptic literature (assuming they do)? We'll look to critical work for other examples of cases where the world ends and no one cares, and discuss the reasons why.

Friday 9:00 PM, RI: Discussion (60 min.)

Bookaholics Anonymous Annual Meeting. Rachel Elizabeth Dillon, Nancy C. Hanger (L), Walter H. Hunt, Lawrence Person, David Streitfeld

The most controversial of all 12-step groups. Despite the appearance of self-approbation, despite the formal public proclamations by members that they find their behavior humiliating and intend to change it, this group, in fact, is alleged to secretly encourage its members to succumb to their addictions. The shame, in other words, is a sham. Within the subtext of the members' pathetic testimony, it is claimed, all the worst vices are covertly endorsed: book-buying, book-hoarding, book-stacking, book- sniffing, even book-reading. Could this be true? Come testify yourself!

Saturday 2:00 PM, Salon A: Panel

The Fiction of Greer Gilman. Rachel Elizabeth Dillon, Lila Garrott, Donald G. Keller, Faye Ringel (L), Michael Swanwick, Sonya Taaffe

This panel, according to the Readercon staff at least, needs no description; for those of you not familiar with nineweaving 's work, it's nothing short of astonishing and this is a great group of people to hear talk about it. If you've not read it, you'll come away wanting to, and if you have, you'll learn something new. I believe I also have an interview with Greer in the con book, which I encourage you read the entirety of; Readercon puts together a wonderful book every year.

12:29pm: Anthrocon Planning
So, I'll be at Anthrocon starting on Wednesday evening, rooming with eredien  (and sadly not lutris) . I have some work I have to do because I am me (for work, for other cons, for school...), but I will be spending most of the time being social. The Race for the Galaxy tournament may or may not be happening --- I'm talking with the games person now, apparently I screwed up the application process a couple months ago and didn't realize --- but I'll definitely have a few copies with me just in case. If you're going, let me know! I don't actually know who else is going. Also, if there are cool people I should be meeting, let me know! I like cool people. If you are one of those cool people, feel free to call me or post here.

If people want to get a hold of me, here's my contact information:

• Phone: +1 617 820 4954
• AIM: RaxMobile (it's on my phone!)
• Hotel Room: Doubletree 406
• Appearance: I suppose "goth catgirl or fox with pink and black hair" is less likely to be a unique identifier than more or less anywhere else. My glasses have pink lenses. That's actually pretty uncommon.

I'll probably make a similar post about Readercon in about a week.

Edited to add: The Race for the Galaxy tournament/free play will likely be from 6-8PM on Saturday. circuitfour I am looking at you. Pointedly. (I don't remember how to say less than three in HTML.) Maybe dinner afterward or something? I'll remove "likely" when this is confirmed, or change it if it changes.

7:55am: Readercon notes and book review: Lud-in-the-Mist
Probably most of you who would want to read Lud-In-The-Mist already have and are like "Wait what, Rachel just read Lud-In-The-Mist for the first time? Seriously?" But just in case, here's a review. Before I start, though:

• Readercon is July 9-12 in Burlington, MA; you should totally come if you're into speculative fiction or talking about books. (I actually read speculative fiction because of Readercon, rather than vice versa.)
• I'll be giving a talk called "When The World Ends, And Nobody Notices" that will focus on nineweaving 's Cloud & Ashes and Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital. You should all come! Also, if you have any suggestions for other books that might fit the theme, let me know. My pre-Readercon reading list is only like four books right now, I can handle more? Maybe?
• I may also be doing other things; I'll keep you all posted.
• I read two other books over the weekend and hope to get to at least short reviews over the next week or two.

Anyway, Lud-In-The-Mist, by Hope Mirlees, first published in 1926. The edition I bought off of Amazon was terrible; titles of books were marked like _this_ as if the whole thing were a printout of a Usenet conversation, there was no front or back matter at all, the image on the front was pixellated, the font was bad, and I couldn't even find the name of a publisher. And by page twenty or so, I didn't care. All of my experience in the fantasy genre has been post-Tolkien and generally derivative; I found that most fantasies I read (this was way back in high school) offered me less than Lord of the Rings without offering me much that was new. Reading Cloud & Ashes, I felt that some of the things there had just sprung up out of whole cloth, that Greer had woven them out of nothing and created an entirely new mythscape. Well, she has, but she had some guiding lights I didn't know about. :) One of them must have been Hope Mirrlees.

( I guess there are spoilers here, though they are really rather mild. )

Someone really needs to do a nice reprinting of this book, if they haven't already.

9:31pm: Does Penny Arcade pass the Bechdel test?
There are 1000 things I should be doing instead of this but it is the time of day where I've given up and am hopped up on cold medicine. So! First of all, some terms:

• Penny Arcade is a ten-year-old web comic about two men (Gabe and Tycho are their characters/aliases/whatever) who play video games that I'm actually rather fond of; it's periodically crass, periodically brilliant, and occasionally surreal. It would probably make more sense if I played many contemporary video games, but most of the time it's comprehensible, and it's actually often funny. (This is as distinct from the lesbian performance artist Penny Arcade, who used to have pennyarcade.com. I don't know much about her other than that Make/Shift magazine has reviewed her poorly and said she was offensive to trans men.) It's usually three times a week, and it's been going for 10 years, so at 52 weeks per year that's more than a thousand comics.
• Alison Bechdel is probably best known for Dykes to Watch Out For but has also done a number of other comic projects, including "Fun Home," which I really need to read, and probably some other non-comic projects that I'm not familiar with.
• The Bechdel test is a litmus test traditionally applied to film: At any point in the film, do two women speak with each other about something other than a man?
• Cold medicine should not need explanation. But just in case.

Recently, Penny Arcade decided to run three different concept comics to suggest alternate projects they might do: Lookouts, Automata, and Jim Darkmagic. [0] All of these look interesting, and Lookouts seems like it could be downright hilarious. Normally, I don't think about gender in Penny Arcade; I've been reading it for a long time and the main characters are male and that's never bothered me. In these three comics, though, there's one female character, who is accidentally burned and frozen to death on stage as part of a magic trick. I was like: Hold up, did they just propose three new ideas with no women except someone who gets murdered to further the plot? I mean, I accept that Penny Arcade is occasionally homophobic [1] and doesn't have many female characters, but I was sort of hoping the new concept comics would feature women. Why? Well, no good reason, admittedly. But the new comics totally fail the Bechdel test.

This got me to thinking. Would the whole ten years of comic archives pass the Bechdel test at all? ( gender gender gender gender gender gender gender gender gender gender gender gender MUSHROOM MUSHROOM )

11:41am: Short Story Review: "The Catgirl Manifesto" by Richard Calder
You can read "The Catgirl Manifesto" online in its entirety through Google Books just by clicking this link. As I will explain, for many of you, there is no excuse not to do this. This is a short story that opens with an extended quote from Foucault, for God's sake. It's a fictional theoretical introduction to a fictional manifesto about a mutant race of highly sexualized females calling themselves catgirls and engaging with critical theory. No, actually. Yes, really. It falls under the "experimental fiction" heading --- there isn't really a plot per se, and the character is the impenetrable narrator of an academic paper, so there's no growth --- but it's still a fascinating exploration of how people might respond in such a situation and puts real authors in conversation with the fantastic through the subversion of academic discourse. Can you say: SQUEE!!!? The story is a Tiptree Award winner, and volume 1 of the Tiptree Award anthology is available really, really cheap used if you'd like to own a copy in print. Seriously, it will take you like fifteen minutes and it's sitting right there for free on the Internet. If any of that pushed any of your buttons, go read it.

9:49am: Dipping a toe into the future
So I've given in and dipped a toe into the future, which for most of you is probably the present. I'm planning to actually swim, or at least float. Help me out here:

• If you're using Twitter, I'm user raxvulpine; let me know so that I can follow you! (Or just follow me, and I'll notice and follow you back.)
• If you're using Facebook, you can friend me by clicking here. (I gave in because my UMass Boston friends are sufficiently from the future that they don't even use email.)
• Expect me to actually write up book reviews and such more frequently now.
• You can be my LinkedIn not-friend-because-that's-not-professional-enough-but-I-have-pink-hair-so-who-cares here. Thanks, jadia .
• Do I need to care about Dreamwidth?
• I've refreshed my personal website. I'm actually not embarrassed by it now! Yay!

What social technologies or mumbledy-whatevers am I missing? I'm going to be going to conferences and talking to people and want to be able to jump into networking with people and not seem like some sort of hopeless luddite. Eventually I will need to write some Javascript to automate the news bits but for now I think this is OK.

8:53am: This book kicked my ass, and I deserved it.
A week or so ago I finished Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran by Fatemeh Keshavarz. (You can read about it or order it here; Amazon also has it.) The premise of the book is that Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, which I've not read but had heard very good things about, constructs what Keshavarz calls a "New Orientalist" narrative that paints Iran as a society composed solely of religious oppressors and victims. I've not actually read RLT, but Keshavarz makes a very compelling argument, pulling both long and short citations from the book, that even if this isn't the author's goal, it is what actually happens. RLT is the memoir of a professor in Iran teaching English language literature, and operates under the conceit that this is highly unusual, that engaging with literature is a huge deal for the women of Iran, and that reading English language literature, including controversial works like Nabokov's Lolita, is radical and controversial. Keshavarz argues that while the terrible things that Nafisi describes --- abusive relatives, oppression of women, censorship ---  are real and real problems, that they are taken out of context to make Iran seem like a society without nuance or positive male figures at all.

Now, I like to think of myself as a person who is good at nuance: Seeing multiple sides of an issue, appreciating the complexity and value of people and ideas I disagree with, recognizing that things are rarely just black and white, just good or bad, just right or wrong. I like to think of myself as a person who knows what she doesn't know and takes that into account when making judgements. This is why this book kicked my ass. I hadn't even read RLT, but a lot of the assumptions that Keshavarz broke down in it were assumptions that I had. Whether this is because of similar effects in media coverage or other books I've read or just my own ignorance and bigotry, I'm still trying to break down. What's important about this book, and what I am thankful for, is that Keshavarz was able to convince me that I had my head up my ass.

The first thing she did to do this was to present a number of stories from her own personal experience. Chief among them are stories of her uncle, a military officer and painter, and of a radio show on poetry that she ran in Iran. If you wanted to cling to the New Orientalist narrative in your head --- or maybe "wanted to" isn't the right phrase there --- you might say "Well, her uncle was an exception. Of course there are going to be some nice guys, that not the point." But when she talks about running a radio show on poetry and having huge numbers of listeners, and of people calling in and appearing on the show who couldn't even read but had memorized a number of poems and thought deeply about them? A series of those stories in a row is a pretty compelling counterargument to "reading literature would be revolutionary for 'those people.'" Stories about her family and friends confirm that some, if not all, lives in Iran are not just livable but vibrant, full of literature, full of art. Keshavarz doesn't deny that they're also full of problems, but she doesn't harp on it either, since that's probably the one thing that readers come to her book already knowing. (Plus, whose lives aren't?)

The second thing she does is engages with contemporary works of Iranian literature to combat the idea that Iran is a dead cultural zone whose "new" culture comes primarily from Europe and America. Certainly, she says, Iranians are reading a number of our authors and engaging with those texts personally and critically. But look, she says, check out all of this Iranian work of merit that you could engage with. One book, Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur, sounded so compelling in its multiple-threaded genrequeerness that it bumped up close to the top of my reading list right away. The excerpts of Forough Farrakhzad's poetry that Keshavarz shares didn't lean on my must-read-this buttons in the same way, though her stories of engaging deeply with the poems over the course of many years and sharing them with her close friends reminded me of my own engagement with my favorite poets, and how I keep coming back to new things in Elizabeth Bishop or Adrienne Rich.

The third thing she does is to engage critically and aggressively with RLT throughout the book, calling out the structures it describes or implies when they are different from reality or have erased crucial complexity. I found these arguments compelling, but maybe because I did not read the text she was critiquing, I was most engaged when Keshavarz talked about her own life and the literatures of Iran. The book is titled Jasmine and Stars because she wants to bring the reader a view of the beautiful things in Iran as well as the terrible things, the "grasshoppers," provided by RLT and works like it. I strongly recommend this book, and am happy to lend it out once eredien  is done with it. I know that hari_mirchi recommended it to me, and I think someone else did as well; thank you! If you're looking for other things to read that will kick your ass, Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon was all over mine. (I still have a couple of chapters to go, but I might write about that one eventually, too.)

8:52pm: Local: Sassafrass concert May 17
May 17th, Sassafrass is having a concert at 4:30 PM in Harvard Square. Sassafrass includes a whole bunch of my friends who you might know, including gaudior , rushthatspeaks , weirdquark , occultatio , tiamat360 , faerieboots , lignota , and aurelia_star . gaudior asked me to let people know about it, so, I think you should go! I've actually never heard them and am sort of excited about hearing them for the first time at the concert, but you can check them out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Irsy55kwvf4 if you want to see what you're getting into. Under the cut you'll find the advertising text they've written up for themselves; if you're coming, eredien  and I will be at table 15 if you want to reserve space nearby.
( Details! )

6:33am: Books Review
So one of the reasons that I'm such a big McSweeney's fangirl is that when I first picked up an issue or two of their magazine and read a few stories I was blindsided and basically like "Oh my god, you can do that in fiction?" Issues 18 and 20 in particular knocked my socks off with things I had never seen before and even a couple I had never imagined; that's what got me to subscribe to their novel feed, in the hope of seeing more of the same in long form. And a couple of them delivered, The Children's Hospital in particular, though Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth also qualifies, and maybe that tiny book of short shorts by Sarah Manguso. Some of the others were quite good if not revolutionary: Here They Come, for example. This winter I read and re-read a lot of McSweeney's short fiction and for the most part it didn't catch my breath in the same way even though it was mostly very good, because it seemed mostly very good in the same way. So I asked the professor in the fiction class I'm taking right now if he could recommend something to read that woud be different from what I've been reading, and he suggested two books to me.

The first, Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, is a short novel I finished a few weeks ago that I've already recommended to a few of you. If you hate thematic or emotional spoilers, you should just let someone else hand you this book after blacking out all of the back cover and inside dust jacket text. (I'm looking at you, gaudior .) ( So don't read this part, I guess? Except do anyway, maybe. )

The second book, and this one took me two weeks because I was biking everywhere instead of taking the train, was Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters. This is a much longer epistolary novel that takes place over a wide range of time. ( Spoilers, but it's way less important here. )
The end of the novel reveals that actually this is a prequel to another set of novels based on the characters who show up in the last fifty pages of the book and don't seem to fit in. It's possible that there's a giant superstructure that's amazingly awesome, but I'm not sure if I'm willing to read five more books to find out. I'll probably pick up one other when I am next unsure what to read; right now, I've started on Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita In Tehran at the recommendation of hari_mirchi , and I need to spend less time reading and more writing for a while. 

5:08pm: More vanity.
The following photograph may contain Steer Roast spoilers. You probably don't care, but I cut tagged it just in case.
( Also I guess it's kind of big. )

4:22pm: Local: Of Montreal concert Tuesday April 21
Cassandra and I have two extra tickets for the Of Montreal show at the Paradise Rock Club this Tuesday, April 21. Tickets are I don't know like $30? $33? I forget exactly. Let me know if you're interested. They put on an absolutely insane live show! I recommend seeing it.

3:25pm: Off and On Kilter
For the past week I've been feeling either a step behind or a step ahead, but generally at a fifteen degree angle to the rest of the world. I still can't place why, and it's been very concerting. But a trio of amusing interactions this morning helped make it better. I had a doctor's appointment this morning, which wasn't actually terribly helpful for the whole off-kilter bit, but I took the train there, and on the way home I got into three separate conversations about my cat hat.

First: I'm standing on the platform at Park Street, reading Make/Shift 5 (good so far!), when a girl walks up to me and says "Excuse me, did you make that hat?" I take out my headphones and say "Not this one, this was a gift, but I've made things like it in the past. Why?" She says, "Well, I have this friend who is making a hat like that, and I think she'd be really happy if I took a picture so I could let her know she's not alone." I said "Sure!" and got photographed in a cat hat. She said "She's actually making a whole costume to express her inner cat or something." I said "People do that, yeah. I've got this dress and gloves and ears combo I wear to parties sometimes." She said "Wow, she's going to be so happy!" and then basically ran away.

Second: I get onto the train and sit down. A guy walks up to me and says "Excuse me, I'm just curious, what kind of reactions do you get when you wear that hat?" I talked to him about the girl who just asked for a picture, and how I get various reactions, mostly good, including little kids pointing at me and shouting "It's a kitty!" (I think half of my largely dormant Twitter feed is "I just got this odd reaction to having a cat hat.") Apparently he and his ex-girlfriend used to have the same exact hat, but they were always afraid to wear them in public. We also talked some about how people don't have conversations with strangers enough in the US in general and on the East Coast in particular. THen he got off the train.

Third: The girl next to me turned to me and said "That's a really awesome hat." We talked some about how wearing cats ears gets different reactions from the cat hat and I suspect but don't know that it's because the hat is more viewed as a functional object. Then she said, "Also I'm glad to hear you wear a helmet when you bike, that saved my brother's life." I said "I don't know that it's ever saved my life but it's sure never harmed it." She nodded. Then she said "You should get cat ears for your bike helmet! Like, you can get them for ski helmets, I bet you could work something out." We talked about how to weatherproof cat ears on a bike helmet until I got off the train.

I feel maybe only twelve-degress off now... and like maybe I want to stay at least two or three. :) I love my cat hat.

1:08pm: Anyone looking for a 3 bedroom in Davis Square?
The apartment underneath will be empty as of June 1st. It's an 8-10 minute
walk from Davis, it's got three bedrooms, a living room, a dining room,
a kitchen, a pantry, a bathroom, free laundry in the basement, storage
space, gas stove, dishwasher, and potential off-street parking. While
there were trials and tribulations aplenty to get there, there is now a
new gas heater! :) We've had friends downstairs for the last couple of
years and it's been really nice, so if you think living downstairs from
eredien, doma, lutris, occasional
faerieboots, and me would be rockin' hardcore, drop me a
line. Rent is currently $2100/month. More details available on request.

12:46pm: Summer travel and event scheduling
Short version:

• Brother's college graduation in Chicago, Jun 19-21 (you probably don't care about this unless you're family)
• Anthrocon (Jul 2-5 in Pittsburgh)
• Readercon (Jul 9-12 in Boston)
• Not Worldcon, sadly (it just costs as much as the other three put together and I'd rather do those)

Long version:

( Do you care? You might care.  )

9:42am: Did you leave a new-in-box flatscreen from 2006 at my house?
So this morning, since there's snow, there were a bunch of us around, and we were staring at a package in our dining room. It's been there for a few weeks; it was shipped by Amazon to someone named S------ P------ in Falls Church, Virginia. It appears to have been successfuly delivered in July of 2006, according to the packing slip. It's a reasonably nice NIB flatscreen that we haven't opened. No one in the house claims ownership. Did one of you leave a monitor from Virginia from 2006 here? Are we going to open it up and find that it is full of drugs? If we can't find the owner then Cassandra can probably use it, but what in the hells?

I feel like someone cluttered my house with a Mystery Hunt puzzle.

EDIT: Mystery solved, but still hilarious. (S---- P----- is a friend of a housemate and sold her the monitor; that was the one housemate not around last night or this morning.)

8:51am: Local: Concerts!
Two concerts in April that I have extra tickets for on the grounds they are very likely to sell out:

• The Faint and Ladytron and two opening bands I've never heard of, House of Blues, Wed Apr 8, 8:00 PM. eredien and I have three spare tickets. They're will call, so you'll have to show up with us. I've heard good things about this venue, but not been yet; I'll have been by then, though. I think the tickets are like $32 or $34? "I don't know, give me some money."
• Of Montreal, Paradise Rock Club (not the gay Paradise in Cambridge), Tue Apr 21, doors at 7:00 PM. You can get really good standing or even sitting positions if you show up to a Paradise show early, so that's what I'm likely to do. I guess it will be less spectacle than their last show, since the stage is smaller, but that might be OK. Not sure if I'll be going for "get all the way in the front and nab a guitar pick" again or just "view from a comfortable distance where no one will jostle me." Two tickets, $29 each.

Let me know! If you're not local, um, I guess you could fly in for a concert, or at least take this as a recommendation of the bands in question.

6:57am: This might be a really good book that you all need to read! Or not!
So I read a book this week. I've been reading an amount that is utterly ridiculous for me and I love it. I just read read read read read. Basically whenever I have more than two minutes to spare I have a book open. It's awesome. So actually I read more than one book this week, but I want to write about this one before it falls out of my head: The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin. I bought this book immediately upon reading this NYT book review a while ago and then forgot about it until this week, when I picked it up and tossed it in my bag as one of the books I might start on the way to work on Tuesday. While you absolutely need to read this if your name starts with circuit- or ends with -iquidjewel , I think a number of the rest of you might want to check this out too. Here's my plot synopsis:

An ancient werefox virgin hypnotist prostitute with a literary theory obsession attracts the attention of the Russian military. While her sister is trying to hunt the British aristocracy and she is studying philosophy, they both run into the concept of the super-werewolf, which may or may not have anything to do with the super-ego. Our protagonist finds herself swirled up in a conspiracy of conspiracies and hanging around with werewolves, to boot; between the action (and, yes, the action) she and her sisters exchange long emails about Freud and Foucault.

If you're me, you've already clicked the Amazon link above and bought the book. But most of you probably not so much. :) I have A Thing for depictions of foxes in literature --- not a thing I've nurtured all that much but a thing nonetheless. Adrienne Rich's fox who is more my sister than they are, Joyce's fox digging and scraping, red reek of rapine in his fur... So when Pelevin hands me a fox character whose approach to learning is much like mine, I am basically hooked. She understands herself and others by conversations in which she bounces things she has heard off of other people to see if she agrees with them or not, and works from there. I don't think a book has made me tempted to incorporate things from it into my own life since I read The Crying of Lot 49. I'm not an ancient werefox virgin hypnotist prostitute, and that's probably for the best for everyone involved, but there are a lot of similarities between the ways we think and the things we think about. (I need to read Berkeley now. No, this one.) If I start signing emails "Heads and tails," this is why.

The mythological magical what have you in the book borrows from a bunch of traditions in ways that might be problematic? I'm honestly not sure. I'm not familiar with the Russian relationship to Taoism or Buddhism or chakras or Norse mythology (yes, Congery, it has Norse mythology in it) and for the most part it didn't feel problematic. The British aristocrats go around appropriating everything and its mother but... well, that's sort of in-character, isn't it? (More books should narrativize powerpoint presentations on the occult. It's awesome.) I'd be curious to know what other readers think of this mishmash of philosophies and --- the narrator uses this word herself, many times --- discourses.

I also feel like there's a layer to the book I'm not entirely getting because I don't know that much about Russia. There are a lot of multi-lingual puns that are explained in translation. Pelevin wrote in Russian, but there are a whole lot of riffs in English (the apparat as "upper rat," werewolf sex as "tailechery") that fit in very well even if they weren't there originally. Various reviews talk about the subtle political satire, and while some of it was pretty apparent to me, some things, I'm sure, sailed right over my head. This does mean that clearly eredien  should read it, though, and then I can pester her with questions.

I'm not honestly sure if this book would be a great read if you didn't think werefoxes arguing about philosophy for twenty pages at a time was the best thing ever. I don't want to give away too much about the plot or directions because I know a lot of people care about spoilers, but things do happen --- it's not just werefoxes arguing about philosophy for twenty pages at a time. A lot of the action is laugh-out-loud funny: I got some weird looks sitting in cafes or in trains laughing at the book with the naked werefox silhouette on the cover. Buy or borrow this book, and you could too!

8:03pm: Vanity
Three-letter usernames are the way and the light. I'd been waiting for that to be free for years.

I'm still raxvulpine where rax isn't available, though I also snagged rax on IRC today. This is sort of vaguely related to doing my job maybe.

Anyway, back to work. *glee*

9:01am: Place/Time binding party
We've got 50 copies of Place/Time printed and bound, and 51 more to go. If sitting with needle, thread, and gaff tape next to a giant printer and a paper-folding machine sounds like your idea of a good time, we could use a couple pairs of hands on Tuesday night. Tasks we'll be rotating include babysitting the printer, folding signatures, cutting covers, drilling holes, threading books, and taping books. Hopefully I'll also have the website set up at that point such that we will go live and start selling books by the end of January. Exciting! Anyway, let me know. I'll start printing when I get home from work and by 7 we should have enough of a page backlog to really get cracking. Actually, maybe I'll even print off some signatures on Monday night after class if I don't fall asleep right away...

*bounce bounce* Books!

10:08am: New Year and a Publishing Question (or two, I guess)
I went to bed before midnight. It was nice. Happy New Year.

One of the many awesome things about this year for me was that for the first time since high school I read more than 50 books this year. I'm not sure I read more than 50 books outside of required or recommended reading for classes, though I'm also not sure I didn't; I don't really keep a list. But I actually feel well read and steeped in things that I am interested in and care about, which is pretty rocktacular. Last night I read Dude, You're A Fag, an ethnographic study of masculinity in American high schools by C. J. Pascoe that completely rocked my world. I definitely recommend it, and I'd be happy to lend it out after my gender and sexuality book group meeting on the 14th. Terrifyingly, I knew a decent number of the papers the author cited when she talked about theory just from the author and year. And yes, I rang in the new year curled up on the couch with eredien  and a cat reading about gender.

Since everyone else is doing it, here's a little bit about this year for me: I presented at a conference for the first time, I spent a full year in both grad school and the tech industry, I got promoted, I read scads of books, I got a teaching position that takes effect in February, I visited Seattle for the first time, I discovered that I write really well on trains, I found new housemates twice, I biked more than 20 miles a day on Wednesdays and Thursdays for a good portion of the year such that it started feeling easy, I made new and awesome friends, I got unreasonably into Race for the Galaxy, I threw an awesome party, and I've got a literary magazine in production that will be available this month. I've been really lucky, I've been really privileged, and I've worked really hard, so, I guess those things all worked out well for me. I hope I can help make some of your years more awesome in the 365 days to come.

There are things I would like to do that I haven't yet done. I talked in more detail about some of those things on my personal mailing list, and if you're not there and think you could or should be let me know. One of them is submitting my work for publication --- if you've known me for a while, you probably know that I have a completed novella and two half-novels and dozens of short stories and a plethora of poems that I've put a tremendous amount of work into and have never sent anywhere. I was talking about this elsewhere on the Internet and someone asked to see something, and so I sent them the novella, and they read through the entire thing immediately and praised it effusively. Unlike when I usually get effusive praise, this was someone I don't really know (though a queer twentysomething which is arguably my "target market"). I re-read it this morning and it's not how I would write it now and it's not what I would want to write now, but I also read the whole thing in one sitting and enjoyed it, so I figure I might as well start sending it places.

I figured I would start with McSweeney's, who inspired me to start publishing other people's works and also are just awesome, and also I think it would actually fit there, and not much of anywhere else I can think of. In the long term I need to start reading more places, but in the short term, I need to decide if a 30,000 word novella is better sent to the Quarterly, which mostly publishes short fiction on the short side but does sometimes do a novella as part of an issue, or the Books division, which mostly publishes novels 60K words and up but a couple of the books have been shorter. Oh LiveJournal Friends List, many of you writers, readers, and publishers: Which one should I submit it to?

(Yes, I know no one wants a novella from an unheard-of author. I'm not submitting it so they will accept it, I'm submitting it so as to work through my anxieties surrounding having my work rejected from places, but I figure I might as well do it right.)

Also, these aren't 100% ready to get sent out the door, but looking forward, any ideas for venues for:

• A 60-line pantoum about sex in both senses of the word featuring an awkward dinner conversation
• A 5000-word retelling of the Echo myth taking place in the modern-day Rockies that is primarily a critique of third-wave feminism
• An unfinished novel about personal decay, focusing on the intensely sarcastic relationship between a bookstore clerk and a compulsive liar, that takes parts of its structure from and shares goals with Joyce's Dubliners
• Other things that are the sort of thing I might write? (If you're not really familiar with my writing, that's basically "vaguely surreal but not actually fantastic, incredibly non-epic, skeptical examinations of gender and social roles, usually funny in a dark way except when they suddenly stop being funny and you feel vaguely ill.")

My first step will probably be "Read things from that venue" if you recommend something, unless I already have, so even if they end up not being good fits or I end up deciding maybe that poem is too personal and oh god I should lock it in a box and lock that box in another, larger box, and then throw the boxed box into the ocean, it should be an opportunity to pick up some new places to read!

Thanks for your time, and I hope you are all well. I need to get back to that one paper I still have due now...

1:02am: Book.
The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian is one of the finest books I have ever read, and possiby, though who am I to judge, one of the finest books. It would have to be, to have me up this late reading an apocalyptic novel for fun, a six hundred page apocalyptic novel, when the very last thing I needed this week was another bloody apocalypse. However, the very first thing I needed, as it turns out, was Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital. I suppose now I try to sleep.

3:37pm: Irony 2: Bride of Irony
Got grazed by a bus on the way home from work. Didn't even fall, but I could feel it pulling along my arm as it passed me, and had no room to the right of me to pull away... I think the driver misjudged his right side. I'm fine, it didn't even touch the bike. I just... gah. Didn't get this plate, either, because I then immediately had to veer behind the bus to dodge a car door and just sort of stopped to catch my breath. Not dead!

Some days are good days. This is not one of them. I am taking the subway tomorrow.

10:41am: Irony!
I was quoted in today's Boston Globe article about healthy living in Somerville, talking about cycling and bike lanes. You can read it here.

On the way to work today I was hit by a large black sedan with tinted windows, which then ran away before I could get its license plate number. I'm OK.

( Details. )

8:51pm: Place/Time deadline extended!
A little while ago I posted about my most recent mad creative project, Place/Time, a literary journal based on focusing on a specific place and time and seeing what falls out. For our first issue, we're looking at Boston in 1997, and may be putting that in conversation with 1897, the turn of the previous century, after a longer submission that did a brilliant job of doing just that. We've pushed our submissions deadline back to December 1st; the stuff we've gotten is great but we're hoping to get a little more of it. Realistically, starting a journal out of nothing like this on a tight schedule, I don't expect to get inundated with submissions from friends, let alone strangers; but consider this a first reminder if I haven't gotten around to emailing you yet, and an invitation to drop me a line if you've got an idea in your head, whether it be something you'd like to produce or otherwise. We'd love to read some more fiction, especially, but we're also interested in book reviews of books that either were written then or deal with that time. (I've had someone recommend Zodiac, recently, as a book that would be particularly good for this.) So if this sounds exciting to you, drop me a comment or an email! (rachel@akrasiac.org) I'd love to hear from you, and I look forward to presenting issue 1 of Place/Time to all of you and to the world at the end of December.

...And then going to sleep for, like, a week. :P

1:13pm: Taking "Read or Die" a bit too literally.
I think I might have read five books in the last seven days. Graduate school is kind of insane. I just keep reading. I take the train so that I can read on my commute, I read when I get home, I read over dinner, I read when I wake up. Yesterday I did three things: go to work, go to class, and read a novel from start to finish. I'm hosting a party tomorrow (you should all come, if you're local: Catgirl Goth Rave!) and I'm sort of afraid that I am going to get up and dance for four hours and then sit down in the midst of flashing lights and thumping beats and keep reading. For extra bonus points, I'm reading at least one apocalyptic book a week, sometimes two. All of humanity dies inside my head on a weekly basis. It can stop now.

Here are some mini-reviews of some of the books I've been reading:

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart: Apocalyptic novel written in 1947. Totally made me cry, and gave me nightmares too! But brilliantly written, especially in how it weaves through time at different speeds. It's set up as a triptych much like Leibowitz is, but with something in between to sate my desire for continuity a bit more than Miller is willing to give me. Genuinely suspenseful while thought-provoking; genuinely sympathetic characters that I nonetheless wanted to reach into the book and smack around. The pacing had me a little suspicious from a realism perspective but I was happy to forgive those little doubts to embrace the book as a whole.

Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller: Post-nuclear apocalyptic novel written in the Fifties. Also engaging, and with a fascinating treatment of a post-nuclear Catholic church and the quest to rebuild knowledge. Essentially three related novellas; harder to swallow than most apocalypses without acceptance of the supernatural. While a couple of the devices felt like Miller was trying to make a symbol and not showing me where the symbol pointed, it's still a book that will stick in my head for quite a while. It's also a breezy and pleasurable read that I would recommend to anyone who is really into books. (Books as objects or symbols, as opposed to reading texts.) If I wanted something that really dug into what language and religion would be like after the collapse of civilization, though, I'd pass on Canticle's too-familiar Church and Earth Abides's comfortable familiarity as well, and go directly to Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald: Heavy-handed nuclear apocalypse novel, written as the diary of Push-Button Operator X-127, who is trained to push buttons that launch nuclear missiles and lives in a bunker 3500 feet below the surface of the earth. A little on the didactic side, but genunely engaging, at least in part because it makes such good use of the diary form. I don't know that I'll re-read it --- I've gotten the message that nuclear war is bad and that mutually assured destruction is crazy fragile --- but it makes me want to re-read A Handmaid's Tale to compare the diary forms, and pushes me to finally get to We.

Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth: I read this book purely for pleasure. Not for class, not for work, not for the class I'm teaching, nothing. Just curious about it. Well worth the time spent --- it's a number of stories striated together like heart muscle, all of them interconnected but independent, overlapping but discontiguous. I think she shares a lot of my influences and admirations from how she considers names and labels and careful descriptions secondary to tricks of language and trying to cut into motivations and compulsions. [1] There's a little Pynchon-Wallace conspiracy nut in here, too, just enough to satisfy the taste without getting lost inside a Mason & Dixon or somesuch. Her flash fiction is hit or miss for me, though the hits are way on target; this novel was definitely a solid hit. Apparently she's reading in Boston in December, I'll probably go.

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto: Featuring a minor passing character, this was technically not entirely for pleasure, though I mostly read it because liquidjewel  recommended it more than anything else. It reminded me a lot of Norwegian Wood by Murakami, though more compact, feminine, and careful. Apocalypse in microcosm, death before its time, the unexpected sloth of desperation. Murakami caught the sloth and just the slowness better, but Yoshimoto's characters were much more engaging to me. It comes with a free short story, 1/3 the words and with extra magical realism!

McSweeney's 19: This is the box with a bunch of old propaganda and then some stories and a novella by T. C. Boyle. The novella, Wild Child, is wonderful and I highly recommend it. For the most part, the fiction in the collection seems to be actively chafing against realism, working against the boundaries of the completely absurd with a chisel. In some ways this is awesome, and the shorter bursts of it are actually rather pleasant, especially Adam Golaski's three-page reinterpretations of classic paintings. (He's now an editor at Flim Forum press; I bought a couple of their first anthologies, I need to read those. Also, around ten years ago, he opined at a poetry slam that he couldn't stick his dick into another dimension. Remembering this allowed me to totally embarrass him at Readercon. :) One or two of the pieces of short fiction just bounced off of me, though; I'm actually working on a paper focusing on this issue of McSweeney's, [2] along with Issue 17, right now. I had previously started this issue but given up when two stories in a row bounced and never made it to the novella; I'm glad I came back.

OK, I'll stop at six. If you're local and want to borrow any of these, let me know!

[1] At least, these are things I try to do. I wouldn't say I'm necessarily as successful. :)

[2] LJ's spellcheck says that McSweeney's might have meant "Waxwings." Sadly, the band name is already taken.