Rachel Elizabeth Dillon's Journal

8:18am: Rachel Scheduling
I'm now registered for Transcending Boundaries, hotel room and everything. That's Nov 20-22.

I have five days of not-working I need to use up in, at this point, the last two months of the year. Two of them were originally scheduled for Nov. 6 and 9 for Fur and Loathing, but that's fallen through. I'm considering taking that weekend or some other long weekend this year and running away to some city on the West Coast and mostly sitting in coffeeshops and writing. There aren't a lot of candidate weekends, but I think I could do Nov 6-9, Thanksgiving, or the middle weeks of December. I'm sort of tempted to go totally incognito and get hotel rooms, but couch-surfing is astonishingly more economical, so. If you'd enjoy having a rax around for a few days and not mind that your rax spends most of its time staring at a glowing screen and devouring soy cappucinos, drop me a line. I'm happy to cook and such to reward your hospitality.

6:35pm: Date grab and airfare sale: Catgirl Goth Rave, Dec 4 2009
Remember, remember, the 4th of December, catgirls, glowsticks, and goth. More information later.

JetBlue is having a sale today; people are finding $79 one way fares to Boston from places like Seattle and San Francisco. If you are on the fence, it would be worth checking JetBlue's website before 11 PM Pacific time. I do not have any business relationship with JetBlue, in fact I don't fly them that often, but dude, sale.

8:25am: A variety of news very quickly
First, the course I taught at MIT is now available via Open CourseWare. The person who put it together (attending most of the class sessions and taking notes, building the webpage, &c.) did a wonderful job and I'm really happy that it is now available. The delay, for the record, was mostly due to my being hosed and flaky. I have unflaked, and now it exists! (Relatedly, if I'm flaking on something you care about, kick me; it might not be on my tasklist, and if it's not on my tasklist, I can basically promise you it won't happen. This is not good, but it's likely to be true for a while, so I figure I should warn y'all.)

Second, is anyone interested in going to Transcending Boundaries? It's a conference Nov 20-22 in Worcester, MA focusing on trans, bi, poly, and intersex issues. That's a fascinating smorgasbord and relevant to both my life and research, and so I'm tempted to go even though I should be focusing on my thesis and PhD applications. I'm not made of money so I'd love to have people to share transit and/or hotel costs with. (Also they recommend vegans bring their own food. Seriously? Huh.)

Right, PhD applications. I'm not 110% sure yet but I am planning to seek a PhD in either gender studies or English with a gender studies focus. I'm selling myself as focusing on the process of identity self-construction through gendered narrative and the disruptions both caused and soothed by the trans and genderqueer movements. In other words, the stuff I talk about all the damn time. :) I'm looking for programs to apply to, and if you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. I'm doing a bunch of research right now, but I know there's more still to come, and I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on the matter.

Also, it is so cold why am I not in California right now.

4:21pm: Two Books: The Convalescent and Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand
I spent Friday, Saturday, and some of today in Wisconsin visiting my family; this meant two plane trips, which means I read two books that I was not required to read for a class, book group, or other specific obligation. Yaaaaaaaaay. :) The first one was The Convalescent by Jessica Anthony, who won the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award for this book. The second one was Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand by Samuel R. Delany, who did not win any awards for it but I am not sure why. The first I read because McSweeney's sent it to me as part of my book subscription package; the second I read because rushthatspeaks cornered me at some point and insisted I read it right now, which while it didn't get me to actually read it right now, got me to purchase it and put it in the Read Me pile and it finally bubbled up to the top of the list when I got tired of rererererererereading Dubliners and taking notes for my novel.

The Convalescent, in brief, is an enjoyable and surreal novel that resolved itself in a satisfying way and made a good airport read. I think most of you would like it; it does a lot of the things I think of as "standard" for "McSweeney's sent me this" without being terribly long, challenging to enter, or failing-to-end. That means:

• It's surreal but not completely arealistic, in a way that feels a lot like magical realism
• It has nested plot threads that inform each other (in this case, a mythic history of the creation of Hungary involving a hypothetical extra cursed tribe that's actually really hilarious)
• The language is clever and you will be annoyed if you would like to be able to completely ignore it but it is also not going to force you to push through it like a broken hedge maze
• None of the characters are totally "good" but all of them are at least a little bit sympathetic

If this sounds kind of general, it's because it is; the specifics of the story are fun and it's an enjoyable book but I didn't feel terribly moved by it, nor do I feel I'm going to be remembering it for a terribly long time. I think Deb Olin Unferth's Vacation has most of the same elements, but it's subtler and I felt more connection to the characters; that said, the Amazon reviews for Anthony's book are all five stars and so obviously some people think this book is astounding. I think it's good, but not worth writing home about. I guess I wrote here, though at least in part because McSweeney's accidentally sent me two copies, so if you'd like to borrow one, that can absolutely be arranged, and if you really like it, you won a book.

Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand, in brief, is an intensely frustrating and rewarding experience that will engage you academically, intellectually, emotionally, and erotically. It's science fiction, which I still have a limited toolkit for reading, but that didn't get in my way as much as it did for the last few; I think I'm getting better at it. (scifibookqueue has been pushing me, it's great.) The first fifty or so pages tell a fairly contained and engaging story, and then the book explodes open with information and perspectives pushing for attention and position. I actually found this quite difficult --- fifty pages was long enough that I had gotten into a groove with the way the text worked and I expect that Delany did that on purpose. The recontextualizing switch definitely pushed me outside of my comfort zone for the majority of the book, and I will probably need to reread it to see what I missed while I was getting back on track --- because once I was back on track, it mashed a few of my ( spoilers. )

8:51pm: Yesterday I attended and presented at the MIT Women's and Gender Studies 25th anniversary conference, "Futures of Science, Race, and Gender." There were some introductory remarks, three panels, and then a reception for faculty and presenters with a celebration of the department's 25th anniversary. I'm going to talk primarily about the three panels, although I have a couple of things from the reception I want to share as well.

The first panel was called "Mentoring Women: Four Generations of Women Scientists at MIT" and featured Molly Potter, Nancy Kanwisher, Rebecca Saxe, and Liane Young. All four of them do Brain and Cognitive Sciences work, though it seems like there was some variance in the amount of psychological versus neuroscientific focus between them; I'm sufficiently ignorant in the field as to have basically nothing useful to say about their research, unfortunately. They all seemed to be, at least to some extent, rock stars in their field, and the reason they were brought together for this conference is that each was the advisor of the next youngest either as a graduate student or as a postdoc. ( Details, talk about mentoring, audience members talking about race. )

The next panel was called "Racialized Bodies" and featured Pilar Ossorio (University of Wisconsin, Law School), with respondents David Jones (STS), and Amy Marshall (MIT Alum). The one sentence summary of Ossario's talk is "The way race is used as a categorizer when doing scientific studies is a problem, and not only that, the conversation surrounding it is a problem; instead of using race as a standin for genes, which is not terribly effective, we should be keeping track of it in cases where it may reflect population differences we don't know about to consider." ( Details, some links, a couple of examples. )
The third and final panel, "Race, Gender, and IVF in Ecuador: A Reproductive Economy," featured Elizabeth Roberts (University of Michigan, Anthropology), Corrine Williams (MIT Alum), and Rachel Dillon (ESG, MIT Alum, me). I don't have good notes at all, because I was noting things to talk about, not things to write about here; I had also read her paper in advance, although I am pretty sure I am not supposed to share it, or I would. The one sentence explanation is "In Ecuador, in vitro fertilization is used by people of various classes and races as a way to economically obtain whiteness through the act of childbirth, in ways not limited to but sometimes including actually having whiter children."
( Mostly about my presentation, because that's sort of where my head was. )

( Extra, footnotes. )

4:30pm: My KFA talk: Basic Gender Theory and Why You Should Care
So my goal in giving this talk was to get through a coherent arc explaining gender theory and why you should care in 12 minutes and then have time for discussion. (KFA time slots are 20 minutes long.) I left out roughly a zillion things, which is OK, because that was sort of the point; I also think I actually did a good job, and got people thinking, and sparked interesting discussion, and hopefully encouraged people to do some further reading and/or conversing.

In giving the talk, I set myself the challenge of not using the words "discourse," "problematic," or "deconstruct." Obviously (or at least obviously if you talk to me a lot) this is not because I think those words have no value; I find them important in how I understand the world around me and if anything overuse them. Arguably, though, theorists and genderheads as a whole if anything overuse them, and it's something people have explicitly said turns them off to thinking about theory at all, and so I figured in a basic brief talk, I should avoid them. Another word I've been told is a major turn-off, although I didn't explicitly set out not to use it in this talk, is "oppression;" I've as a result been trying to think twice before using it. Unlike the others, which generally have less loaded (if also less usefully loaded) synonyms, not using "oppression" makes me nervous for calling-a-spade-a-spade issues. I'm torn, and I figure "thinking about it" is the right place for now.

You can watch the presentation video by clicking on this link. I'd embed it but I'm pretty sure LJ won't let me do that due to the recent security issue; just in case, here it is:

Gender Theory and Why You Should Care from maymay on Vimeo.

I'd really love to know what people think. I'd especially love to hear from people about what you think the most important things missing are; I have some thoughts but I want to hear other perspectives before I share them all. A bit of explanation (not that it necessarily negates potential criticism) --- I wasn't sure how to introduce myself because I wanted to avoid using identity labels but also wanted to express that it was worth spending twenty minutes listening to me talk about this topic. In general (and I blame circuit_four in part for this, as well as the whole ##crawl-offtopic gang) I've been trying to hold both "identity affiliations are powerful" and "identity affiliations reinforce things I don't like" in my head at the same time lately. It takes a lot of energy, but they do interesting things when put in the same place; I think that the end of this talk is one of them. If you have suggestions for things I should go read by other people who have been holding those ideas in their head together for much longer than I have, I'd love them; in particular I recently read Covering by Kenji Yoshino (Amazon link) and while he doesn't focus on that duality, he does touch on it. Really, though, that book should be its own post...

Anyway, I'd love criticism, and I'm also in a mood where I could really go for any praise you've got lying around, too. :)

2:53pm: KinkForAll Boston Writeup
( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

12:28pm: Working From Home: Pros, Cons
Lately, due to a series of minor maladies and injuries not healing in the ways they should, I've been spending a lot of time working from home. It's actually gone very well; I think I get more done. While the repertoire of things I can do that are not my job is larger, my good ol' Puritan Work Ethic kicks in much harder when I'm not already at the office for some reason, and the "in by 9 out by 5" that I try to stick to is totally out the window. So if I find myself spending twenty minutes reading the news at the office, I say "Well, I was at the office," and whatever. But at home --- where I probably started working at like 8 anyway --- I say "Oh well I spent that time not working so clearly I need to do something extra" and at 6:30 PM I'm still logged in and working on documentation. I suspect my boss has figured this out, and this is part of why he is not stopping me from working from home so much. :) (In addition, much of my work can be done over the phone, since most of the people I work closely with are in DC or Houston anyway.)

In some ways this is great for my sanity, too; I can spend my obligatory staring-into-space time doing laundry or hanging art on the walls in the office finally or talking to the cats, who are much cuddlier than my coworkers. (As it should be.) My favorite perk is that I get to make my own hot lunch every day --- it's cheaper than going out with coworkers, it's less time-consuming, and it's at least a little bit better for me. However, having worked from home three or four days a week for the better part of a month now, I have started to notice longer-term problems. Specifically, as I was making my lunch today, I realized I was talking to the lunch. Specifically, I said: "Join me, smoked red chipotle pepper! Let us usher in a new era of burning flavor across the earth! Muahahahaha!" as I added flavor to the pasta sauce.

bossgoji , I blame you for this.

9:31am: An unconference and a conference and a link
I'm speaking two places this month, and I encourage you to come to one or both if you want to hear me and some other people natter on about theory. The first one is this Saturday, and it's at KinkForAll Boston [0] which will be at BU from 10:30 to... 4? 5? The webpage describes it as "an ad-hoc unconference on sexuality for anyone and everyone, drawing participants from an astounding range of both sexuality-related and other communities. Anyone with the desire to learn or with something to contribute is welcome and invited to participate." It's basically based on BarCamp, which I've always thought was interesting --- which does something similar with tech people instead of sexuality people. I'm going to give a talk called "Why Gender Theory Matters To Your Sex Life;" I'll be cribbing some from Riki Wilchins's Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer and then disagreeing voraciously. Sadly I don't think I'll have finished Covering by then... If this sounds interesting, you should come! And talk about your relevant research or experience!

September 26th I'll be on a panel called "Race and Gender in Technology" at the MIT Women's and Gender Studies 25th Anniversary Conference, "Futures of Race and Gender." I'll be responding to Elizabeth Roberts (the anthropologist, not the RI Lt. Governor [1]) and I am very much looking forward to it. I'm pretty sure it is open attendance, but I can confirm that It is open to the public; if you're into issues of race and gender, and I know a lot of you are, I very much encourage you to sit in. The other two presentations are "Mentoring Women: Four Generations of Women Scientists at MIT" and "Genetic Testing: Gender, Race and Medicine." Ooooh, do I have opinions on the second one! I am looking forward to hearing what the panelists have to say. :) The room is 32-141 which I think I can translate into a handy-dandy link for people not familiar with the MIT campus. [2]

I hope to see some of you at one or both of these! If not, I should have writeups after they're done.

Oh and I promised a link! It's depressing, but David Neuwert's articles about Eliminationism in America are really, really worth reading. I don't know much about him or his politics other than these articles, but they seem very solid to me, research and citation-wise. He also reminded me to spend one of my Amazon gift certificates on Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James W. Loewen. You can read the first chapter in PDF format; if you haven't heard of this concept before, you should really click that link sometime you are ready for the sad-making. (Someone on my friends list posted this a while ago and I went OH MY GOD WHAT but then didn't buy the book. Remedying that now!)

And back to work.
( footnotes wheeeee )

6:08pm: So How Do We Talk About Rape?
Lately I've been working on talking about things when I think it's important to talk about them, even when doing so makes me uncomfortable. I've also, very recently, been trying to be more frank about what I don't know, and willing to be publically uncertain. So here's a post that contains a bunch of things that make me uncomfortable to share, and that I have absolutely no idea what to do about. As such, it might also contain a lot of things other people have said before or said better; I might be totally off base or missing something obvious. Please let me know if so.

I roll with a pack of genderheads, and sometimes conversation turns to rape[1].( Trigger warning (though no explicit detail). )

6:55pm: Penny Arcade Takes On Gender --- But Not How I Wanted
So Penny Arcade, which I had talked about not really addressing issues of gender in the past, recently featured a discussion between the two creators about pick-up artistry (PUA) and the "seduction community." You can read the whole exchange here. I'm not going to get into the basic stuff here; you can already go read other bloggers who actually blog on a regular basis talk about those things eloquently. (At least one of those has some genuinely good dating advice in it.) I want to focus on a few specific things I think are interesting about this:

• Gabe's assertion that they were joking and dismissal of people who took him seriously
• Who the assumed reader is (both for their posts and the other posts I'll mention)
• What are the pickup artists saying about this?
• How this ties into the other post I made a while ago

Here's the thing that Gabe said that really bothered me:

I decided to play devil's advocate yesterday with Tycho just because that's something I enjoy doing. I think in reality I fall somewhere in the middle of this argument but that's not as much fun. What I didn't expect was to get flooded with mail from guys thanking me for sticking up for this system because they use it. I also got my share of mail from angry girls but honestly I expected that. I made some pretty ridiculous exaggerations for the sake of a silly argument. Just like any time we exaggerate for the sake of a joke, we end up offending people who don't see the humor in it. We've been doing this for ten years and so the angry mails were no surprise. It was the mails from guys thanking me that really threw me for a loop.

If you go and look at what he'd written up to that point, I don't think you'll find "ridiculous exaggerations" --- I think you'll find things that I see and hear people say all the time. I disagree with them, mind you, but it's not like he said "We should kill all women and replace them with robot orifices" or something that was clearly a ridiculous exaggeration. Maybe I missed some subtlety in there, but if so, I wasn't the only one. I see the humor in exaggerating for the sake of a joke, but I don't think they did a good job here. That in and of itself isn't, you know, a killing offense or anything, it's just failing at being funny to part of your audience. I do this all the time :)

The thing that bothers me is that "Oh I was only joking" is kind of a standard tactic in coming back from saying something offensive. It's hard not to read this as backpedaling, especially with how dismissive of "angry girls" he is. The women (and presumably other people who are not women) who wrote in and said "Hey, that is not cool" are just "angry" and "no surprise," but when men actually agreed with him, they weren't "not seeing the humor in it," they were providing a new and potentially enlightening viewpoint. If he actually exaggerated and said ridiculous things, and people wrote in being on the side of the ridiculous things, shouldn't that be more troubling than people who just didn't get the joke?

Now, he does say some things I actually agree with: "My advice for what it's worth, is that the girls you really want aren't playing a game, and they won't expect you to play one either." "I understand how badly you want to believe that there is a system out there that if you can simply master will resolve your problems. Sadly I don't think that's the case and if there is such a system, it certainly isn't this one." I totally agree with those things. I sort of feel left out of the equation here, though. I mean, their conversation includes the two of them, and one of the people from Love Systems (who blogs about the experience behind this link). Could they perhaps have asked a woman her opinion on the matter, or imagined what she might think or feel? They have wives, it's not like this option was unavailable to them --- and of course women wrote in "angry" as well. Were none of them quotable, summarizable, or otherwise mentionable? If not, why not? I think it could have added a whole lot to the discussion.

The people in the pick-up artist community (which you can find out all about because they have blogs! Wandering into the spaces of people like that is fascinating) at least act like they are actually concerned with what women think about them. Here are a few examples: a Love Systems instructor, who says "some of our most robust critics are usually guys with zero game, whereas all the women that I know who know what we do think its not only awesome, but necessary to make sure guys know how to flirt and hit on them properly!", another instructor going by "tenmagnet," who says "Women, (for example Tyra Banks) tend to understand and appreciate what we do," and the original person who responded to Tycho suggests a few links where women have written about his seminars. One of them seems pretty clearly directed at men; the other less so, though I can see both how it would read to me as "ewwww" and it would read to interesting guys as "Hey, that sounds like maybe I should spend money on this." (I'm also curious if they've ever tried marketing to queer women --- or queer men --- and if so, what happened. Certainly, despite being someone with a theoretical interest in picking women up at bars, I'm pretty certain they are not selling to me.)

They're all pretty on-message about what women think: "Women approve of what we do." But they're not actually asking women to engage them in specific conversation on this, they're positing Tyra Banks and a couple of columnists as an authority for "Women" and moving on. I don't feel engaged in discussion or invited to see what they're all about; I'm just assumed to be on board or of no use to them. They've also figured out that readers of Penny Arcade are going to follow along to their websites and blogs because of this, and in their blog posts, for the most part, try to emphasize the distinction between them and the "bad PUAs": "us and 'PUA's', which I would definately [sic] not class myself or any of the other instructors as," "the seduction community is not the place to go. Most of Love Systems’s competition are second-rate or outright charlatans," "Update: As of this writing, there is now a 30 page thread on the subject of Lovesystems and PUA’s (not the same thing)" (For what it's worth, the forum with that thread has been down for a while, and I've thus not read it. If I'm duplicating work, oops.)

On this issue, they fail miserably at staying on message. "Savoy," who is apparently one of the big names in this cluster, says "Tenmagnet also writes a great blog. I love all PUA blogs, but his is really one of the best." Tenmagnet himself has "pickup" in his tag cloud, and his blog header is "Free Dating and pick up artist advice from Tenmagnet, a Lovesystems/Mystery Method Corp instructor." He also links to "PUA Braddock," another instructor. Future links to "Pickup Artist Tenmagnet," 5.0 uses "PUA" as practically a gendered title like "Mister"... uh, guys, I understand you probably had like four hours to try to take advantage of this huge marketing opportunity (since they charge what, $3000 per attendee to these things?) but.... This is your cake. This is you eating your cake. You can not has.

So other than getting a chance to go and look at how successful these guys are being at marketing themselves, what does this allow us to say about Penny Arcade, and its relationship with issues of gender? Well, sure enough, Automata and Lookouts had no women in them, to the surprise of few. (Automata did have people of color! They play music in a club and get shot at.) I mean, OK, sure, whatever. I get that I'm not part of your audience. And that's just it, I think... I don't feel like they're including me when they address or consider their audience. It's fine that they're guys, I don't have a problem with that. But in situations like this I feel like they are assuming that their readership, or at least the part worth addressing, is male. I think I'm worth addressing, and I think I'm not male, so I feel left out. If their webcomic wasn't funny, I could just go somewhere else, but it's actually pretty funny, and I also don't know where else to go to get the same things. "Gamer girl" things I've seen have mostly seemed to be addressing guys, too.

I'm lucky to have the (incoming shameless plug) Crawl community, which has its share of problems, but there are women on the Dev Team, the playerbase spends its off time discussing gender theory, and calling things "gay" because you don't like them on the IRC channel results in calling out. (In fact, the offtopic discussion group that we joke about calling "##gender-offtopic" started because other people called me out for being sexist. How cool is that?) We're having a tournament at the moment and it's going great. But if I played Halo, I have absolutely no idea what I would do... wait, scratch that. I do know. I'd probably stop playing, and go find something where it felt like the community wanted me there. I think this is also part of why you don't see a lot of women at chess tournaments, &c., but that's another blog post.

I know I wasn't the only person to be bothered by this whole brouhaha --- krinndnz  brought it to my attention and it actually caused me to meet sylvanstargazer . This basically confirms what I already thought: "Penny Arcade isn't great about gender, and it's not likely to change, and I can take it or leave it." Does it change anything for anyone else?

3:11pm: Review of a furry porn card game (no, actually)
( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

7:54pm: Readercon, Interlude: Wait, What? Really?
I've been distracted from Readercon updates by a number of things, not least by getting voted onto the Readercon ConCom. Wait, what? The first meeting was frustrating but fruitful, harrowing[1] but hopeful, and an impressive amount of energy considering the con just happened last weekend. People care, a lot, and that is good. Anything I say on LJ (unless I say otherwise) is of course my personal opinion and not the opinion of Readercon as a whole, but that said, please do point me at things that you think I should read (I've probably read some of them already but I'm sure I missed things) and if you want to say something to me but not on LiveJournal, I'm at rachel@akrasiac.org.

Many of you will not be surprised to find out that I've been made the minutes-taker for meetings because of my tendency to write down everything anyone says ever. :) More later, now is recovering-before-work-tomorrow time. Also, I will post about not-Readercon sometime soon, I promise.


[1] And, Greer-like, I do mean "the tilling of soil in order to place things there that can then grow" and not just "painful."

10:48pm: Readercon, Part 3: Friday II
Before I start on panels, if you haven't readcoffeeandink 's post about the various problems with Readercon behind this link, you should. I don't think these are all insurmountable in and one case I'm not entirely sure that there's a problem[1], but what she ways and the ensuing conversation are important and valuable if you're interested in the present and future of the con.

Panel: Novels You Write Versus Novels You Talk About At Bars
( This should have been held at a bar.  )

Tarot, Myth, and Imagination: Talk by Rachel Pollack
( Not what I was expecting but still enjoyable. )

A Contextual Definition of "Hallows" in the Work of Greer Gilman, byrushthatspeaks 
( Hallows hallows hallows ... hallows hallows unweave unweave )

"Sword in the Hand" byeredien 

( I guess I need to read Vinge now.  )

Aaand I am totally burning out on doing these, I might wait a day to continue to make sure I am actually providing something awesome. Is it seriously only 4 PM on Friday in my notes? Wow, Readercon. Wow. Also hi to my new LiveJournal friends! I don't post this often normally, don't worry. :)



[1] I really enjoy being lectured to and taking pages and pages of notes. Maybe it's because I've learned to absorb information that way and then process it later at work and in grad school. I do think it's important to have things with other structures --- and for me to attend them sometimes --- but the way Readercon is structured really works for me, and I hope parts of it continue to be structured that way, so that I can keep going there and getting slammed with information and enjoy it.

6:10pm: Readercon, Part 2: Friday I
Here are the first two panels I attended on Friday. It's going to take me a few days to get through all of this, holy good lord is there a lot of information. (In case it's not clear here, most of this is transcribed from notes and cobbled together; if something has my original ideas in it, it's probably in parentheses.)

The Literature of Things: A Panel.

( A detailed summary of this panel. )

Catharsis of Myth, Shock of Invention: Panel

( And another cut tag so I don't eat your friends page. *chomp* )

7:30am: Readercon, Part 1: Thursday
I'll start with general notes and Thursday. I know it will take more than one entry. First, general thoughts, in bulleted list form:

• This was my fourth year at Readercon, and I finally felt like I knew most people, if not by name, by sight. It was a good feeling, and not a place I really expected to have it. Also, I took Friday off, and it was totally the right call. Not doing so would have caused me to miss like half the con. As a came-Thursday-and-took-Friday-off person I was really glad that Saturday and Sunday were a little more chill; if I had showed up Friday at 7 PM I would have been rather miffed.
• It was my first year as a "pro" and I think I actually did a good job of giving other people things to think about the way that they've been giving me things to think about. So that's a win. Readercon does value some type of credentials in a way I don't fully understand and I should probably explore more at some point, but it was really nice that no one cared that I didn't have a PhD.
• As veejane  notes in another con roundup, there were not that many people of color, and most of them were panelists. The sad thing? I had also been prepared to remark that it felt more diverse than last year. (I do think there was more representation of gender variance than in previous years, but I might just be primed to look for it. Come to think of it, that could be going on with race too.)
• I actually only bought three books, mostly because my budget is still smarting from the Anthrocon art show. But the Anthrocon posts don't require as much memory, so I'm writing them later. :)
• Two cons, two weekends, too much. I never want to do anything social ever again, ever. I'm hoping this fades by like Thursday and I return to "I'm an extrovert whose friends are introverts and I'm loooonely" as per normal. :)
• A lot of people have been criticizing the plan for Readercon 21 and, while I don't like "This is your father's Readercon" either, I actually think there's a lot of potential. This might be at least in part due to my I-guess-no-longer-secret plan to help out and do a bunch of organizing to make sure it's awesome. Of course I have to somehow combine that and "thesis!!!" and "moving!!!" and maybe also "wedding!!!" So we'll see. EDIT:  Lots of interesting commentary here.
• I literally took more than 100 pages of notes. I filled most of a 5x8 Moleskine. My right arm still hurts, fingers to shoulder. It was worth it. I won't be retyping all of the notes here; I am hoping that summarizing will actually provide a better reading experience, but that depends on me translating things well and choosing the interesting bits, I suppose. :)

OK, now onto panels, one by one. Only two in this entry.
( Long, with long sauce. But also awesome. )

[1] My notes say "writers" but I'm pretty sure that "readers" was both said and meant.

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.