Rachel Elizabeth Dillon

Rachel Scheduling

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:04:13 GMT

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.

Date grab and airfare sale: Catgirl Goth Rave, Dec 4 2009

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:47:05 GMT

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.

A variety of news very quickly

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:35:17 GMT

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.

Two Books: The Convalescent and Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:03:26 GMT

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 buttons super hard.

Here's the biggest one: it had the best explanation of desire I have ever seen, barring Barthes. (I actually expect Delany had read and was in some ways responding to Fragments: A Lover's Discourse but of course I'd say that.) It's not surprising that I would prefer to read Barthes's explanation of desire, given that he wrote an entire book about it and I am as much a Barthes fangirl as I am an anything fangirl. It is surprising that the next best I've seen was not in theory, was not in poetry, was not even in love letters but was a natural part of the running text of a science fiction novel. For squee. Aside from that, though, it also has a whole lot to say about the place of literature in society, the problems with "free flow of information," and the way marginalization of groups and social practices is effected and evolves. He even presages (the book came out in 1984) the World Wide Web, and more importantly, a major organization with some political ties that controls much of how that information is accessed and polices, to a certain extent, why.

The major thing he didn't seem to presage was a shift in how people were sexual with each other. I think in some ways this was on purpose, in order to echo the gay male sexuality of his time, but I found it sort of difficult to believe that there was no digital or otherwise non-somatic sexuality at all in the universe. In particular, Marq talks about having thousands of sexual encounters, but it seems like all of them were in-person sexual encounters that focused on genital stimulation. Maybe that's what she was into I guess but if she's going to talk about totally understanding desire on the basis of extreme experience you think she'd try phone sex a few times, you know?

Oh and if you're interested in alternate uses of gendered pronouns you should also check this out. And I know some of you are! ;) I could write a longer review, but I will not, in the interest of actually posting reviews before it has been three months.

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:31:55 GMT

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. The conversation started with a presentation about women at MIT at a very broad level, showing when the percentages of undergrads, grad students, and faculty changed, and correlating those changes with various events (such as reports to the Dean about gender bias, &c.). This provided a good background for the part I found most interesting, the discussion of mentoring and in particular the potential value of being mentored by a woman. Personally, although I'm somewhat uncomfortable with this, I do tend to prefer women mentors, and also authority figures in general (doctors, therapists, professors, &c.).

The panel participants, particularly the younger ones, didn't seem to think the gender of their mentors mattered, which was interesting; in fact, the two younger participants did not seem to think gender mattered very much at all. Saxe, in particular, said "All of my mentors have been women, but it was just coincidence; I was working with the people I thought were doing the best research in my field." (Not exact quote.) That certainly may be true, but I found it surprising, perhaps just because it's not what I'd expect to hear at a Women's Studies conference. Unfortunately, neither Saxe or Young said very much at all; I had hoped to hear more of their perspectives. On the plus side, we were treated to some great banter back and forth between Potter and Kanwisher, including some stories about graduate school and the difficulties Kanwisher faced that sounded a lot like some things a few friends of mine have been going through. The fact that she got through them was very encouraging.

In the comments portion --- and this conference was great in that it provided 20-30 minutes for audience comments for each presentation --- a woman brought up the question of race, and why it hadn't particularly been included in the panel. This seemed like a reasonable question, especially given the title of the conference; the main response was "There weren't four generations of women that included more people of color, in fact this is the only instance we know of." (Young is Chinese; the others are white.) Potter talked about the MIT Committee on Diversity and also the effects of affirmative action; the panel acknowledged that there was a problem here. One of the panelists --- I think actually this might have been Kamwisher but my notes don't say --- said "these issues came up in the 90s, when we showed that people were not consciously misogynist --- I thought we had figured out that you didn't have to intend to disadvantage someone in order to disadvantage them. Hearing the same 'But we're not trying to be biased' argument around racism ten years later is very disappointing."

One woman got up to challenge them and accused all four of them of being white; while what she said about Asians being a "model minority" had merit, I think it was pretty rude to tell someone of color that they were white. (Young's facial expression was very much "Ummm... what the WTF?") This audience member did bring up the good point that, if there's a change in the load of unconscious discrimination that each generation is carrying, there's a risk that people will say "Oh I don't have the problems the previous generation had" and stop paying attention. When the conversation shifted completely, I was tempted to feel like "You're kinda derailing, and the next panel is called Racialized Bodies, so... yes this panel is just about gender and science but the next panel is specifically about race and the third panel deals with race." On the other hand, why shouldn't it have been discussed? It's not like all three panels couldn't have discussed race, gender, and science; the other two discussed all three. I'm glad the conversation happened and it's something that I need to chew on.

(Also written in my notes was "Are all of them straight?" which seemed true based on talk about husbands, but (a) that doesn't necessarily mean straight and (b) there's the same "this is the four generations of women we have" argument.)

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." A lot of this was fairly hard science having to do with genes versus gene expression, the process by which certain genes are or are not converted to RNA and at what times. (Genes use four different bases, ATCG, in three-character strings that translate to complementary RNA molecules with three bases, which are shaped so as to encode a different amino acid each. The DNA opens up, RNA binds to it, RNA releases, RNA binds to the relevant animo acids, RNA relases, congratulations you made a protein. If I remember my biology corrrectly. Maybe just go read Wikipedia's DNA page instead.)

Ossorio presented an example that was very helpful for me in understanding the difference between genetics and genetic expression, which I will share here. She showed a picture of five mice of identical fur pattern but very different color, ranging from a light brown to a dark brown. "These mice," she said, "are genetically identical. However, their mothers had different diets while they were gestating, and now they are all different shades, because there was a variable amount of genetic expression based on conditions in the womb." Wow. My mental model of how genetics worked was waaaaay too simple. She also talked about how winning at things, or being successful, causes your body to produce more testosterone --- and they've actually verified it's the winning that does it, not that the winners had more testosterone to begin with. This is social positioning reflected in biological expression, and offers a model how race might be relevant biologically without being an innate biological fact. If race, as a social construct, leads to behavior patterns in the aggregate that affect pathways like this, it could still be relevant in hard biological or genetic expression research. Ossario compared this to standpoint theory but at a biological level, and called for a careful consideration of the role of race categorization in scientific studies. Awesome stuff; her website lists a bunch of papers if you'd like to read more.

Jones spoke next; apparently Ossorio's paper hadn't been sent to him or to Marshall, so his presentation was largely just another talk on the same topic with less detail and a different set of examples. A couple of different things came up that I thought were really interesting, though; for example, that environmental effects were just as likely to cause variance as pharmacogenetics but many fewer people were studying it, and patient non-compliance has more effect than either and is still studied less. He also called attention to the work of Pardis Sabeti in terms of natural selection --- suggesting that natural selection was primarily either about immunity to various diseases, or about skin and hair color and texture, although it's apparently quite controversial. Perhaps the most interesting to me, partially for being local, is that the Boston Public Health commission stratifies all of its statistical data by race, rather than other categories like location that might potentially be more useful. (In fairness this is only public graphs; for all I know all of the data is available in huge spreadsheet form somewhere. But while some of the charts did seem usefully framed by race, others really seemed like they would be better framed by different variables. It's certainly interesting that they emphasize race so strongly as a statistical factor. Also my apologies if I am butchering the terminology here.)

Marshall only spoke briefly, but gave examples of genetic theory being used in medicine and in criminal justice. In medicine, there's a drug called BiDil that is being marketed primarily to African-American patients as a heart disease preventative. Apparently it provides a 43% decrease in mortality, but on the basis of only one study with an ill-defined sample group --- what constitutes African-American in this context? This study may have fallen into the "correlation is not causation" trap. Unfortunately my notes are illegible on the specific criminal justice case described, but she did, borrowing from one of Ossorio's papers, talk about how there was a high possibility of reinforcing antiquated folk notions of race when using race as a selection mechanism. The main thing I took away from the audience discussion was that I should look up the Council for Responsible Genetics, in particular for refuting the human biodiversity nonsense I've seen going around lately. [1]
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."
If you google "Elizabeth Roberts Ecuador" you will turn up a few papers, including this one, although they're marked as drafts so someone was being sloppy. (I assume it was other people who she sent conference papers to, which is why I am not putting anything up. :) My personal favorite was "Extra Embryos: The Ethics of Cryopreservation in Ecuador and Elsewhere." [2] Suffice to say that her presentation was awesome and if the topic interests you, lots of additional reading is available.

Williams's presentation was also great --- she started where Roberts left off, basically, and asked about the ethics of doctors having so much power, and about the ethics of sex selection of embryos. Apparently the organization that makes recommendations on these things --- unfortunately I don't have a copy of her slides --- decided that whether or not it was OK to select for sex depended on whether or not you were already doing IVF and already doing genetic testing. That didn't make sense to me as a justification: "Oh, well, since I'm already here and already checking some things, why not give you a child with the sex you want." (Not the same as the gender you want! Although I've managed to restrain myself thus far from sending people cards like "Congratulations! It's Probably A Girl!" becuase that just seems rude. [3]) I mean, is it OK to pick the sex of your kids, or not, ethically? The reasons that they came up with for doing so or not doing so seemed orthogonal to me. (The speaker's and mine matched much more closely; she and eredien and I had an awesome conversation that touched on this and other topics later.)

In my response, I covered the three topics I really wanted to: values hierarchy, economic self-construction as normative, and assisted sterility. In the first part I talked about "Extra Embryos" and basically cited some of Roberts's other research about how Ecuadorians with different values systems were more or less opposed to cryopreservation and donation of extra embryos. One thing in particular I found fascinating is how Catholic communities find justifications for handling extra embryos in a way that doesn't involve giving them away to other people and thus causing them to leave the kinship group. It really drove the point home to me that humans do not bend our moral structures to fit new technologies as much as we bend our new technologies to fit our moral structures, and I think I managed to express that point cogently to the audience. If nothing else, I made people laugh. (Actually, I made people laugh a whole lot while I was talking. I guess I just do that.)

The second thing I wanted to cover was also the hardest. Throughout the conference, no one had made any mention whatsoever of queer, genderqueer, or trans issues --- among both the things I care most about in the field and the things I would have wanted to include in the "future of gender." I was hoping to talk about digital identity construction, the shifting ground of authenticity, the increasing availabilty of optional surgeries, muddling and jamming of the binary... but those were not discussed. I saw a lot of parallels between the economic self-construction of Ecuadorian women and families through IVF and the economic self-construction of transsexuals through surgeries, and I managed to bring them up in a way that contributed to the conversation and --- this was the hard part --- pointed out that the conference had not engaged with these issues at all without shifting all of the focus onto trans issues, since the conversation about Ecuadorian IVF was legitimate and important. Based on the conversations I had with audience members afterward, I actually managed to do this, which I feel really good about, even if I sort of stumbled on the last point.

The last point --- that it's much harder to get assisted permanent sterility, and that no one questions your decision to have children, just your decision to not have children --- was sort of old ground. I think there was a bunch worth saying surrounding surgical sterility specifically, and the difficulty of accessing that as compared to ads for IVF in the newspaper, and the difference in ease of access for men versus women, but I didn't come to the conference as prepared to talk about that as I would have liked to. It wasn't the material that I expected to be talking about, it was an extra point I decided on during the day, so I didn't have as many notes on it; I would have liked some numbers or at least anecdata. But people seemed to think it was a good point, so maybe no one except me thinks I botched it, I don't know. :)

In general I got a lot of positive responses, which was awesome, did some great networking, and picked up a bunch of citations for books and papers I should really go read. The celebration had a bunch of speeches and readings, mostly not worth commenting on because I don't have notes (although I have to say that the same largely-invisibility of queerness and non-binary gender seemed to be present in the speechifying, which I was really surprised by), but the fiction reading by Helen Elaine Lee from her upcoming book Life Without just completely blew me away. Like, wow. You can't pre-order it yet, but I'll let you know when you can, because, damn did that hit me like a brick.

Aaaand... I am now caught up on conference posts. Sadly I am not caught up on 8000 other things. But these took me like eight hours, and now they are done.

[1] Incidentally, damn does TSRoadmap have some pagerank.

[2] http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120127053/abstract may help you find it.

[3] And it's not like you're guaranteed to get the sex you want, either, although you can maybe control some types of variance I think?

My KFA talk: Basic Gender Theory and Why You Should Care

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:51:22 GMT

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. :)

KinkForAll Boston Writeup

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:26:03 GMT

So I'm going to be fairly brief in the interests of actually writing this up at all, so as to get through it and move on to the next conference I need to write up. KinkForAll (KFA), for those of you who missed my first post about this, is an unconference, sort of like BarCamp (Wikipedia link as well), which describes itself as "an ad-hoc unconference on sexuality for anyone and everyone, drawing participants from an astounding range of both sexuality-related and other communities." There have now been two in New York City and one in Boston, and there is one scheduled in Washington, DC. There's also talk of one in Providence in a few months. I took a bunch of notes; I'm going to pick a few panels that I haven't seen writeups for and have notes for, and talk about those here. If you want to see all of the schedule, you can click this link.

The "Assault, Battery, and You" presentation was a pretty standard "Just so you know hitting each other with things is technically illegal and while you probably won't get prosecuted for it you should know about it." [1] (You might, of course, get prosecuted if the police would really like to charge you with something; the search term you want is Paddleboro.) There were a number of details specific to Massachusetts law; probably if you care about these things you're already familiar with the details but there were a couple of things I thought were interesting enough to mention. First, someone brought up that it's OK in Massachusetts to engage in boxing or martial arts these are currently socially approved activities that are considered separately due to "social benefits." To the best of the presenter's knowledge, no one had attempted to strech this definition to sexuality. Second, assault with a deadly weapon is apparently different depending on whether the weapon is deadly as used (like a shod foot or chair) or deadly per se (like a shotgun). Personally, I think that people who like to hit each other with dyed cow pelts should be free to do this in the privacy of their own homes, clubs, questionably zoned post-industrial spaces, &c. But I do think that being able to prosecute when such situations turn abusive is valuable. Other people have thought about this way more than I have, like the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, and probably most of what they're suggesting is good. If you're not familiar with them, and you're curious about this sort of thing, check them out.

The discussion about creating an umbrella sexuality organization across various Boston-area colleges was interesting. I got to share the cautionary tale of the New England Queer College Organization, founded in 2000 (see this old Crimson article) [2] and now defunct: basically, while the original founders were involved, it had tons of momentum, but not being attached to a school meant it was attached to people, and when the people dispersed, so did the organization. This can happen to student groups too, but it's usually easier to keep an organization alive at one school than across schools, I think. This new organization hasn't really figured out its mission yet, I think; the goal is to be "sex-positive" and I'm totally in favor of that as opposed to sex-negative but in a more specific sense, what to actually do, I'm not sure anyone knows. But that is an OK place to start! If you want to help this group find its pants, there's a Google group. I'm joined up though I probably won't be able to contribute much (THESIS THESIS THESIS).

Maymay's presentation on "Freeing Sexuality Information" attempted to convince the audience that we could change the world by talking about ourselves. I like talking about myself, so I figured I'd see if he could convince me. :) I sadly can't read all of my notes, but his main point --- that having lots of freely available information about sexuality is beneficial for people who want to explore it --- made a lot of sense to me. (I'd add a third point, making it "freely available information of high quality," and I think that complicates the picture; however what I'd do with that is not to prevent the creation of information, but to try to make sure that the things I choose to share are of high quality. Lots of noise is not useful.) A lot of information about alternative sexual practices, particularly those that are illegal (see above), is tied up in small press books [3] or in cloak-and-dagger sekrit communities. [4] But does blogging about what I do actually help anyone with this, especially if what I'm interested in seems orthogonal to what other people care about? Recent experiences and anecdata suggest actually yes, if only because they provide useful networking. I'm not yet certain how to combine that with wanting to not freak out my friends and potential google-stalkers, though. (And, potentially. PhD application committees... [5]) If you want more, maymay has written it up (with video!).

The "Therapy and Kink" presentation, which was basically "how do you find a shrink who will not flip out at you and work with them" in twenty minutes, is also available on video. The point I tried to make in the discussion --- and I think sort of failed --- was that this is a general application for lots of sorts of weirdness, and the best thing I've found is to seek out someone open-minded and then work with them to help them understand what you do rather than what they think you should be doing because you identify as $LABEL. This has served me very well in the past for a number of $LABELs.

Emma's presentation on "Defining Kink," which also has a video available, was an enjoyable walk on the line between descriptive and proscriptive definition. I'm not sure if she intended it this way, but it felt to me like an attempt to refute a lot of the pre-conference mailing list chatter about whether or not the word "kink" in the conference title was going to drive people away. (The reason being that while some people think of "kink" as "non-standard sexual practices or attitudes," other people think of it as "BDSM.") I really enjoyed the presentation, and I think it's been beaten to death, but the way my father blanched when I told him what conference I was presenting at convinced me that yes the name is going to drive some people away, and arguing about what Wikipedia has as a definition for kink is not actually going to change that even if it is an exciting intellectual exercise. It was a good conference so I don't particularly care, but. Yeah.

I attended Braden's two discussion sections and unfortunately did not take good notes (the later it got, the less detailed my notes got...) but luckily he's written them both up in detail: "The Law of Attraction" and "Political Correctness and Your Kink," which I found particularly interesting, in that it featured discussion of desiring things that one might oneself find offensive. It definitely fits into the "Is this problematic? Should I do anything about it?" conversations I have with myself periodically surrounding gender roles.

The diversity discussion brought the problematic but also covered a lot of interesting things. Of particular interest to me, and a new idea to me, was the idea that using a wiki as an organizing mechanism might itself be exclusionary of people who aren't nerds. This hadn't occurred to me before, but as soon as I heard it, it was obvious. Hell, I don't even like wikis, but it's not like I'm not conversant enough in them to navigate them. I can easily imagine some of my not-dork friends getting sent to the KFA main page, though, and being intimidated and running screaming. Importantly, this is not because it doesn't try to be welcoming, convenient, and anticipating of the questions you might have; if anything, it's because it does that very well, very densely, all on one page, and without chrome. I find this useful, because my brain has been shaped to find it useful. It would be interesting to explore the different possible design paradigms for people whose environments shaped their information handling patterns differently. I'm not going to do it, because I have other things to do. :) It also had the standard pair of "most of the people present are white" problem combined with the "people in diversity discussion claim that everyone is white and the people of color go um hello I am here" problem. At least it got called out!

Finally, there's my talk! I'm going to write that up as a separate post, so that I can ramble on.

[1] You might, of course, get prosecuted if the police would really like to charge you with something; the search term you want is Paddleboro. Whether the police had legitmate reason to want to charge them with something I can't answer, having not been there and having difficulty finding coverage that is not of the form "PROTECT THE KINKSTERS" or "BURN THE KINKSTERS."

[2] Oh man! I was one of the student leaders from MIT! And Voop was cool, I wonder what happened to her. I'm sure I could Facebook or something but I am lazy.

[3] I don't mean to suggest that small press books are not awesome, because they are; however they are unlikely to be in your local library and, in some cases, available conveniently for purchase. While it hurts other things, Amazon helps here.

[4] Apparently if you want to learn, say, suspension bondage, you have to go study with an expert. I don't really know what it takes to get this instruction, since I don't want to learn how to tie people up and hang them from the ceiling. That sounds like the not-hot kind of dangerous and the not-engrossing kind of time consuming.

[5] Although, seriously, I want to study gender and sexuality theory. If they can't handle at least this post, do I really want to be in their department?

Working From Home: Pros, Cons

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:39:21 GMT

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.

An unconference and a conference and a link

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:05:06 GMT

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.

[0] Despite having the word "Kink" in the title, it is at least in theory not primarily about BDSM; I hope that actually works out, because I'm interested primarily in things other than BDSM. There was apparently lots of stupid mailing list wankery about the name; I'm just showing up to talk and to listen. (There are lots of places I can go to hear people talk endlessly about BDSM, including "the Diesel, by accident." There are many fewer where I can hear about "an astounding range of ... sexuality-related and other communities.")

[1] I don't think I need to say anything snarky about Wikipedia's Elizabeth Roberts disambiguation page. I think it snarks itself.

[2] I actually had to look it up, because I don't think of that as "building 32," I think of it as "the architectural atrocity."

So How Do We Talk About Rape?

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:07:26 GMT

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].I usually refrain from talking about my own experiences. Frustratingly, not talking about my experiences makes me feel like I am silencing myself; I often am actively preventing myself from participating in conversations. However, when I do come in and bring up my own experiences, I feel both silenced and silencing. If a conversation is theoretical or about a specific issue of policy or behavior, and I say "This one time that I was sexually assaulted, the following things happened," conversation often shifts radically to be centered around my own personal experiences of sexual assault. Everyone is so sorry that I had to deal with that, and I have no idea how to respond. How did it happen? What have you done about it? Who did it, so I can be mean to them? That's not actually what I wanted to talk about. I didn't share the anecdote because I was looking for sympathy; I gave you details because they were relevant. I wasn't trying to win the argument, I was trying to relate to the issue the only way I know how, as someone with personal experience. At best when this has happened I've felt like the thread of conversation got lost in people tripping over themselves to make sure I knew they thought what happened to me was terrible; at worst I've felt like I accidentally used "I've been raped" as a thought-terminating cliche, winning an irrelevant argument, and felt guilty about bringing it up at all.

At the same time, when someone says "I'm sorry that happened to you," I do appreciate it. And I've gotten used to it. I don't know what it would feel like to be talking with a group of friends and just be frank about my experiences and have everyone take it for granted. What if it actually felt really horrible? I don't want to take rape and sexual assault for granted, I don't want that sort of statement to be just part of the scenery, and I don't want my experiences glossed over as if they aren't important, either. If this sounds like I want it both ways, it's because I do; I want every assault to be treated as unacceptable but I want to be able to discuss them calmly and impersonally. I have no idea how to do that.

At this point, anyone sufficiently on the Internet to read this post shouldn't need me to tell them that rape happens to many people, regardless of age, color, creed... There are various blog posts and forums and LJ communities where survivors (I'm pretty sure that's the right term? I'm not really a part of this community) get together and discuss their experiences, and anyone who wants to have an absolutely depressing and reality-inducing evening can go and read them. Hopefully you already know that a number of the people in your social group have been victims of rape, and most likely some of them have been perpetrators, too. You'll note I didn't list gender; for the most part these collections of rape stories are very gendered. Partially this is because rape itself, as a cultural phenomenon, as an exercise of power, is gendered. What we know both anecdotally and statistically suggests that this is true: The lion's share of rapes and sexual assaults have male perpetrators and female victims.

I recently read something someone I didn't know wrote that said something like "No discussion of rape is complete without referencing the Ceretapost." (I don't remember exactly where it was, or I would reference it.) This sort of bothered me. I don't know cereta , and I think that her original post --- about men and rape culture --- was valuable and worth reading. The comments made me really upset, though. I didn't read all 4000 because, well, I have a job, but there were a few themes I picked out, that I've also seen other places where this topic comes up in conversation:

The idea that women shouldn't have to feel unsafe walking alone at night, because most rapes are committed by friends and acquaintances. Yes, thank you, I know this; what I'm concerned with here is a feeling of safety, something that can't just be rationalized away, because most is so, so far from all, and even if I'm not likely to be raped, I may very well be harassed.
The idea that considering men dangerous or as potential rapists first is bad. I really want to agree, but I have a lot of difficulty doing so. There's a part of me that thinks this is one of the ways sexism hurts men and that I don't want to be part of perpetuating that in the name of feminism, and a part of me that looks at the other part and says "Are you crazy? Can you really afford to give men the benefit of the doubt like that?" The answer is, I don't know.
A small number of people came up with things like "What about men raped by women, or same-sex rape? Where does that fit into this?" To which the answer was "That doesn't fit into the topic of this post," with a side of "You're derailing." Now, a couple of those posters actually were derailing, but is the idea derailing? I don't know. Having been raped by a woman, and raped while not everyone around me considered me a woman, I feel left behind by this argument, actively pushed out of the conversation. At the same time, I just said above that I wanted there to be room for serious conversations about specific elements of rape issues that weren't focused on my experience. So shouldn't I be glad that this conversation didn't apply to all of my assault experiences, not angry at being excluded? Isn't it important to have these conversations that happen in broad sweeping gendered terms, even if they leave some people or experiences out? (I think part of the problem with that is that the same people get left out, time and time again, but I don't have a good solution for that, or even know if it's true.)

I recently had a personal conversation with a good friend after having talked about one of my assault experiences. She felt strongly that I should push my friends to terminate connection with my assaulter, and to call my assaulter out on their behavior. I did not and do not want to do this; I do not feel the energy spent in making a big deal out of it is actually worth what little I might gain. After all, even if 100 people walk up to this person and tell them "You raped rax and you're an asshole," I'm not going to be unraped. So I'd rather just let it slide and get on with my life. At first, I thought my friend was bringing it up on my behalf, and I tried to explain that it just wasn't worth it to me. After a while, I understood that it wasn't just about my experience --- it was also about her anxiety and her anger that someone could hurt me like that, and feeling of powerlessness in the face of horrible things happening to people she cared about. She expressed that she wished she knew who in her life had done such things so that she could call them out and ostracize them, and that it was difficult to not be able to, knowing that people she associated with regularly had gotten away with rape. And I feel bad, now, to be contributing to that; to some extent, it's like I'm defending and protecting them by not revealing them, even though what I'm trying to do is defend and protect myself. Oh, cultural systems of power, how clever you are at preserving yourselves!

So what do I want from people when I tell them this has happened to me? Mostly I want them to keep seeing me as a person, not as a "victim," not as someone needing physical or emotional protection, not as a shrill man-hater. Really it depends on context; I'm not averse to expressions of sympathy but if that takes away from the conversation, can we save it for later? Also, it's important to keep in mind --- but it's the sort of thing that I might forget if I didn't write it down here --- that not everyone's desires and needs in this space will be anything like mine. Maybe some people really want and hunger for that sympathy, that focus. Maybe some people feel very strongly that it should go completely unremarked, as if saying "Many years ago, I ate a sandwich." All of these things and more are valid, and I don't know how to handle them any better than anyone else, except when it comes to myself, really. [2]

So, given this, how do we talk about rape? How can we normalize these conversations so that we can be comfortable and make real progress? How can those of us with experiences share our experiences without centering them and without denying the trauma they contain? How can those of us without experiences express our opinions and participate in the conversation? How can we silence no one?

[1] I'm going to use "rape" here as shorthand for "rape, attempted rape, and sexual assault" both because it's convenient and because having a four-letter word to cover that seems valuable and maybe "rape" should be it? I don't know. I could write a whole post on that too except no thank you I have spent enough time on this already.

[2] What I do know is how I'd like you to respond to this post: Please, please don't comment and tell you how sorry you are that I was raped. I consider it safe to assume that you are displeased. If you really want to tell me anyway, send me a private message or an email. I'm much more interested in talking here about how we talk about rape and handle these conversations than in the particulars of my experiences or how terrible they must have been. Thank you.

Penny Arcade Takes On Gender --- But Not How I Wanted

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:28:05 GMT

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?

Review of a furry porn card game (no, actually)

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 20:39:55 GMT

At Anthrocon, [0] one of the things I did a good amount of was play games, because when I'm surrounded by people I don't know I do much better with structured or semi-structured activities and then talking to those people about other things rather than just walking up to strangers and starting conversations. (This is especially true at something like Anthrocon, where I did not know the social conventions really at all and oh my God there are three thousand people in animal costumes I am not particularly equipped to handle this despite considering it awesome.) Much of the time I was playing Race for the Galaxy, although I learned a couple of new games (the most fun was Red Dragon Inn which was surprisingly fun to play). The game I'm going to be talking about here, though, is called Furoticon. [1] That link is totally not safe for work; there won't be any images in this post, but the text won't be particularly safe for work, so, here's a cut tag in case the adult content warning didn't scare you away or you filter those. :)

So, Furoticon. The game plays a good bit like Magic, if you've played that; there are Havens (which we all restrained ourselves from calling lands) that produce energy and that energy is used to play Furres (creatures) and other cards into play in front of you. There's then a combat mechanic by players swing (attack) with their furres and then other players send furres to bed (defend). They then deal pleasure (damage) to each other and sometimes orgasm (die). [2] If you fail to send anyone to bed against a swinging furre, that pleasure is dealt directly to the player, and if you orgasm, well, it's game over. [3] When you use cards, they are exhausted (tapped) and you can refresh (untap) them under certain circumstances. If you're interested in the complete rules, here's a link; that's all you really need to know asie from bits that I'm going to explain. 90% of the rules are very simple and easy to pick up even if you haven't played Magic; if you have it's very simple, although a couple of the differences can take a game to figure out. "Oh, I don't draw a card every turn?"

At the same time, it's not quite Magic; I overheard the designer telling someone it was a "totally different game" and while the parallels I draw above suggest maybe it's not totally different, there's one mechanic in particular that I thought made a great addition and changed around the way the flow of a turn and the game worked. Specifically, there's a concept of "Action Points," or AP, which I thought of as time; you get a certain number per turn, carrying over into your opponent's turn, and you need them to play some cards (like you would energy from your not-lands). The interesting bit is that you also need them to do things that a Magic player would take for granted. You need to use AP to:

refresh (un-tap) your furres
draw cards (this is a great way to force players to make choices with limited resources; maybe other games have already done this, but I haven't seen it, and for me it was up there with Race for the Galaxy's "discard cards from your hand to pay for playing cards from your hand" in terms of "makes me stretch my head new ways around gameplay)
swing (attack other players)
send furres to bed (defend)

Cards that increase your AP per turn are quite valuable; not keeping good track of your AP may lead to you being unable to defend against attacks. Different people used different things to track how many they had: dice, tiny plastic chips, counters. I think the game would benefit from a computer interface because of this tracking; that said, a standard way of using counters would probably be sufficient. In the five games I played, basically everyone had a different way of tracking what counters meant what for damage to players, damage to furres, energy, AP, and occasionally something else on top of that. I'm glad everyone did what worked for them, but I had to spend a lot of cycles remembering how to translate what other people were doing to what I was doing, and the rules didn't specify anything for how to handle it. In Magic, damage to creatures wears off at the end of every turn [4] ; in Furoticon, it sticks around, so you need to track it on a per-creature basis. This is not a major problem but it's definitely something that was a bit clunky for new players. Pen and paper would be fine, except that everyone should be able to see all the information easily; this is totally an opportunity for Furoticon's manufacturers or some third party to make a useful product to serious players of the game.

That's all well and good --- and I considered buying the game on the basis of the mechanic I liked and the hilarity of the theme. But there are a few things that stopped me, even though I had fun playing the game. In this review, so far, I've been talking about "energy" like a Magic player would talk about "mana" --- there are five colors of magic mana that represent, I don't know, fire, air, water, earth, and death or something? I (blissfully) forget. Furoticon has four types of energy: Male, Female, Herm, and Otherkin. Now, if you're a gender theory buff like me, you are probably saying "What in the hells?" But Wait, There's More!! The Otherkin category contains transpeople (if you can call a kitsune in a skirt or a rabbit with breasts and a penis or a cuntboy trans (or people)), who are apparently not "male" or "female" or even "herm" but in the same category as robots, balloons, and whatever these are. Now, I realize that the target market of a furry porn card game probably doesn't spend its spare time reading Riki Wilchins, but... the places they drew the lines here felt really problematic.

Now, the designers had a tough task here, admittedly, wanting to include cuntboys and hermaphrodites along with their buxom tigresses and Snarling Dominant Wolf #7s. The thing is, though, they had a tough task because they chose to structure their whole energy system around gender, and blur the boundaries between sex (what's between your legs) and gender (what's between your ears) in doing so. Now, I'll grant you that sleeping with a transperson isn't necessarily the same as sleeping with a cis [5] person of the same gender... but it's probably more similar than the difference between a cisperson and a "Cockmind" or a tentacle creature. I respect that the game designers weren't setting out to make "Managing The Difficulties Of Gender-Variant Sexual Expression: The Collectible Card Game" [6] but this rubbed me the wrong way like whoah. Maybe they tried balancing things another way, but here are some ideas just off of the top of my head:

Separate out energy by the type of animals, playing off of furry stereotypes for felines, canines, vulpines, fantasy creatures, &c.
Separate out energy by the types of abilites that the different furres have; perhaps they all, regardless of gender, come from different schools of sexual expression. Books with different competing orders of prostitutes seem to sell well; why not do a little worldbuilding and have the furres here have different training and backgrounds that explain why they require different kinds of energy?
Use gender, but exception-handle genderqueer characters in more interesting ways; you'd have to avoid or subvert obnoxious tropes like "trap" but this could be hilarious: "That's girl dick!"
Separate out energy by what you play with it: Furres, treats (enchantments), interrupts, &c.
Just... don't separate out the energy at all!

Admittedly, those would be somewhat different games, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The gender isn't why I didn't buy the game, though; if the game were strong enough, I would hold my nose and play it. (Whether this is bad of me or not is arguably an open question.) The real thing that disappointed me was my perception of the game balance. Maybe it was just the people I played against, but I took an unmodified starter deck and either won or drew all five of my games, two or three of them against people who had played the game a decent number of times before. I say drew not because draws are particularly common, but because the tournament I played in declared games a draw after they had been going for an hour; the strategy I found (and not through being particularly clever, it's basically what the deck was built around) took more than an hour to execute, and so I ended up with two draws and a win, one tiebreaker point away from the finals.

The strategy, for those who know the game or care for whatever reason, is to set up a bunch of healing and defense so that the opponent can't kill you, and deplete his deck down to zero; you can then play the "Titties" card, which deals ten damage per turn to players without a deck, and just wait. [7] In both cases I had the game locked up; a successful strategy in a two-player game that takes longer than an hour to implement and doesn't require a whole lot of thought is actually fairy frustrating. It seemed like most other people's games went much faster; it's possible the female deck is particularly slow, but at least from the other cards I looked at and other decks I played against, it looked like there was a lot of potentials for games to drag out, and not drag out in a "very close down to the wire lots of exciting decisions" kind of way, but drag out in a "we're both waiting for the other person to screw up or to draw a power card" way. I feel like Magic, at least in the 90s when I was playing it, had a lot of cards to help prevent this from happening; the Furoticon games I played did not, though they are a pretty small sample.

I'm still somewhat curious if that's the case with more experienced players and better-constructed decks; but for the cost of the cards, $20 per starter deck and $5 per booster, it's not worth finding out. The theme is potentially interesting --- lots of people don't want to touch sexuality with a ten-foot pole when it comes to game design and it's something that's an interesting mix of cooperative and competitive, strategic and tactical --- but ultimately this game boils attraction down to gender and pleasure down to an integer, which may make for interesting gameplay but makes me feel like the theme is pasted onto an elemental combat game. The mechanics for playing cards and taking actions are really great, but between the thematic/genderhead issues and the balance problems I encountered, I'm going to continue spending my card game time on Race for the Galaxy. If you're likely to be at a furry convention in the future and some of this sounded interesting, I'd give it a try; the designers go to conventions and run panels where they teach you to play for free, which is pretty awesome and an excellent marketing tool. If you're not likely to be at a furry convention, though, just pick up Magic instead.

(Or don't, because it's a terrible idea that will eat your life. :) But you know what I mean.)

[0] Which is not Readercon! I know.

[1] There's no BGG link for this game, which I find somewhat surprising since they do include things like Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls (which I've never played).

[2] Thank you, John Donne.

[3] Obviously this game was not designed by lesbians. ;)

[4] At least according to Yahoo Answers; I've not played the game except for once at Anthrocon in aaaaaages. (Yes, Yahoo Answers. Don't judge me.)

[5] Does this even need a link in this crowd? Well, just in case.

[6] "I play a Disclose card." "As an interrupt, I use the Train Rushing Past card to prevent your paramour from hearing your disclosure." "OK, I pull down my pants." "You roll a one. In doing so, you knock off their glasses." ...Maybe someone should make this game. "I use the Prohibition to force your Jacob Barnes to move to Europe." "Aw man, but I'm not running an international deck!" "Tough luck for you and Mr. War Injury."

[7] The tournament did actually have another woman playing in it! But I didn't play her; all of my opponents were male. The free play actually had a good number of women involved; I'm not sure if other women didn't like the game as much or just aren't as competitive. I don't blame Furoticon for this; if they can manage a better gender balance for a furry porn card game tournament (~15%) than the average chess tournament can (~6%), they're doing something right! (See also Chess Bitch by Jennifer Shahade or a number of academic papers on the subject.)

Readercon, Interlude: Wait, What? Really?

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:11:40 GMT

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."

Readercon, Part 3: Friday II

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 02:49:03 GMT

Before I start on panels, if you haven't read coffeeandink '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 panel was supposed to have a woman on it but did not. I'm not sure that choosing not to write novels that are terrible ideas particularly needed a female voice (whatever that means) but I noticed it immediately and it seems worth mentioning. The panel wasn't exactly what I was hoping for --- I was hoping for discussion of lots of ridiculous ideas and whether or not they could be made into books --- and it was mostly about the three writers and how they either did write the crazy things they wanted to do or worked them into other things. That was still pretty entertaining, though, and I'm not sorry I attended or anything. I just wanted more crazy. (Partially this is because there's this book I'm working on, and it has fictional books in it, and I'm vaguely pondering their contents, but I think they're terrible ideas...) I'm just going to talk about each author and what they said because that seems like the best way to break it up.

Alan Steele has written something like fifteen books? He talked about having a scope so big that it eventually defeats you. He wanted to write a book about every planet in the solar system, but couldn't manage the outer planets. This was his "Near Space" series --- Uranus, Neptune, and Mercury do not lend themselves to fiction in his opinion. (I think one of those gets settled in Last and First Men but that's sort of cheating --- I'm not a big SF head but I can't think of books that use those either, really.) He also wanted to do a single book that was a grand tour of the entire Milky Way galaxy but he decided it would be the size of a Manhattan phone book and take ten yeas, so instead he's carving it up into little chunks; Galaxy Blues is one such chunk. He also has a book he's been spinning on for ten years that's about the history of science fiction that he's talked up in bars a lot but not been able to sell. He said it was a bad time to be doing experimental work and he might have to wait until the economy got better. This was really interesting to hear --- since I have a day job, those are just not my concerns. It's a great time to be doing experimental work! :)

James Morrow is known for thematically ambitious work (says my notebook, I've never read any of his stuff, though I've always enjoyed his appearances at Readercon). "What is there that even Morrow won't do?" A lot of reviews of the last novel of his trilogy were like "the whole premise is more suited to late night bullshit sessions in college than fiction." After reading Tolkien because he was hired to write a curriculum about it (which is an awesome reason to read Tolkien) he kind of wanted to write a straight-up fantasy novel. He's never going to write it, but the premise survives barbarically in Philosopher's Apprentice --- it's hard to read my handwriting here but I think the hero and three clone women are trapped in a beaker while a city burns around them and one of the clones tells a story about the fantasy novel that he wanted to write but never will? (This made me go do some research and realize the Invisible Library is gone. Oh no!!! I linked to the archive.org copy. Apparently there is a blog but Dear Internet, Not All Content Is Best Organized In Wordpress Goddamnit. Anyway.) He als suggested writing a review of a book that you didn't actually want to write, which is Borgesian. Apparently Lem has a hypothetical Gigamesh which is sort of a Gilgamesh/Ulysses/Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge crossover.

Barry Malzberg said that with one exception he had written everything he wanted to write. Apparently he always wanted to write a series of stories in which scifi and mainstream writers crossed over --- Ernest Hemingway trying to sell to John Cambpell and angry at a successful Asimov. (I couldn't actually tell if he was being serious here or not.) He talked about "the perfect example of a notional novel that should have stayed in the bar": The Iron Dream, a portrayal of a world in which Hitler became a hack fantasy writer and wrote a fantasy novel. (What the WTF.) He said Pale Fire might be the same thing as well, which I disagree with pretty strongly. I thought maybe that Icelander by Dustin Long might be in that category until I realized that: Ada. That novel is for Ada. It wasn't for me, that's why I didn't much care for it. I still have a review written up like five moleskines ago.

Tarot, Myth, and Imagination: Talk by Rachel Pollack

I thought this was going to be about divination systems in fiction. Nope, that was another panel. This was mostly about Tarot. After five minutes of "Oh God why are we not talking about novels" I actually got really into it; it had a lot of interesting additional detail on top of the basic stuff I had learned in the tarot class I took with my mother a while ago. (That is a story in and of itself.) I'll share one of the many stories that Pollack shared both to save my time and to encourage you to take one of her classes or books if you like it and want more like it. (Plus it's not her story per se but her telling.)

Two angels are up in heaven, Shemhezai and Azazel. They say to God, "How can you give these humans attention? Aren't they vile?" God says "You just think that because you don't have bodies." They say "No, no, we're just pure." So God gives them bodies and they immediately fall into lust. Azazel rapes a woman who may or may not die; this is bad. Shemhezai decides to be more subtle, not that that's a high bar. "Hey babe, why don't you come with me, I'm an angel!" "If you're an angel, you should know the secret name of God." He blurts it out, and she repeats it and flies up into Heaven and becomes a star. Azazel is unrepentant and chained upside down in an abyss. On the ritual day of atonement, one goat is slaughtered and another is sent out into the wilderness to Azazel. He's a figure sort of like Milton's Satan. Shemhezai, on the other hand, begs for God's forgiveness, and is hung upside down between heaven and earth with a halo of golden light around his face --- the Hanged Man of the Rider-Waite tarot. Also the tree of life, roots in heaven, fruit on Earth. The ten of pentacles and the hanged man both have the Kaballah Hopscotch pattern. (Her idea of Kaballah Hopscotch is just awesome.)

Will this do much for my writing (since I don't tend to use Tarot for divination since I don't tend to do divination except when my brain chemicals tell me I'm not being a skeptic occasionally)? Probably not, although I sometimes will take out cards and do readings for characters when I get stuck and having a bunch more associations to make that denser is always good. I now have more associations to add to that, and after three hours of straight PANELPANELPANEL it was nice.

A Contextual Definition of "Hallows" in the Work of Greer Gilman, by rushthatspeaks

A twenty-minute talk on the use of the word "hallows" in Greer's work. Absolutely awesome. It convinced me that the biggest spoilers for Greer's work are things like "Hallows" and "un-" and "Ship." Lila actually did the work of finding every occurrence of the word and saying things like "it's used 232 times." This is awesome. I don't want to steal the thunder of her paper which she may still want to publish or something but the definiton of hallows that is used most often is a 12th centry one for "holy person or saint, or the relics or shrine of such a holy person; a conflation of person and place." This would have been archaic to Shakespeare. This is because Greer is awesome. There's also a definition that means "hare's guts," apparently, though it's never used. Hallows also gets conflated with a time of year, and Unhallows with its opposite; so there's a whole lot of the word doing double and triple duty each time it appears, on the planes of place and time and person. ( I actually talked with Greer about language operating polyphonically, though not in anywhere near as much detail in the interview published in the Readercon 20 souvenir book. Which you should read if you have one.)

"Sword in the Hand" by eredien

A twenty-minute talk on how language, and by extension the author, manipulate characters and readers in both Greer's work and the work of Vernor Vinge. I've not read Vinge, so mostly this made me think of Moonwise, and I think it said a lot of interesting things about the relationship of author to reader to text. When we pick up a book, we accept that we are along for the ride; when we write, we are really making the same compact. In Moonwise, Sylvie and Ariane allow us to experience both of these compacts simultaneously through them. They write and are written. Cassandra asked us: Is this ethical? Is it manipulative? I think the answer to both is yes, personally.

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.

Readercon, Part 2: Friday I

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:41:26 GMT

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.

This panel had a lot of Cyberpunk focus; I went partially because postrodent dragged me. I don't know much about cyberpunk, so I mostly just wrote things down to follow up on later. The opening statement is "Cyberpunk has many different objects that people interact with," which I guess I take on faith. DiFilippo starts Victoria with a crazy gadget, implying that steampunk may have this cyberpunk ethos wherein things, "revelatory of everything," are potent symbolic indicators. Clute says: Gibson offended people deeply when his books first appeared. Why were his texts so radically treasonous? It's possible in Gibson to read a trash can straight out of 20th century modernism that isn't loyal to SF relationships to things as usable by an engineer protagonist. Neuromancer has someone who is streetwise but does not have a noton as to what the street is. Things envelop us. It's no longer a legitimate part of the SF enterprise to advocate a particular instruments future; texts are now governet by recognition. Demonstrates a sens of a word we are trying to describe, decentered from the story. </Clute>

I enjoyed a conversation about Pattern Recognition, which contains a character who is described primarily by the objects in his apartment in his absence. The panelists alleged that this was radically different from 30-50 years ago where a reader wouldn't have cared about the objects in the flat; it would have been glossed. The panel then compared "The Roads Must Roll," a story with a major tech advance that doesn't permeate people's lives very intimately, with later work in a "ghostly interzone between pressent and future." Technology like the iPhone does permeate people's lives very intimately, and more contemporary work has to address that. Someone called this a "Technologically mediated Borgesian experiment." Is this revolutionary? "The street finds its own uses for things, but so does capital," says Chris Nakashima-Brown. Revolutionary figures are doped up to the point of inaction. (How droll!)

DiFilippo talked about how Halting State is written "thirty seconds in the future." He talked about the difficulties of writing such a book when events that happened in real life in real time affected what he could and couldn't use in his plot. (This is one reason why I tend to set my work five or ten years ago. Yes it's dated, but it's actually dated.) The events in Halting State --- a virtual theft of virtual money that is then translated into actual money --- actually occurred, just recently, on EVE Online, and were actually within the terms of the EULA. Here's an interesting link about it.

The panel attempted to tackle the question of whether or not things could be reliable narrators. The counterargument, weirdly, was from Cosmo: "What should be on your bookshelf?" The magazine alleged that if you have more than one book by an author, it demonstrates commitment, and so you should purchase books as decorations in order to suggest that. (Ohmygodwowsobroken.) Do people construct their environments or vice versa? Clute's answer is that things may not be a reliable narrator, but they can be a narrator, and that in and itself is interesting. The "central calculus may be that [that] form of narration is how we begin to think we understand each other in this world."

Catharsis of Myth, Shock of Invention: Panel

The panel was all women and about fantasy; they noticed this right away and talked about creating a hard fantasy manifesto. What would hard fantasy even be? According to Wikipedia, it would be something like this, though I'm not sure that's what the panelists meant. Goss asked, early, if all literary genres had to reconcile the expected with the unexpected; the panel and I both seemed to think yes. The next question: Why do we like to read similar books? Why do we want the same thing over and over again, looking for books like the other books we've read previously? The panel talked about children and needing to be able to filter the world so that you can stay alive with it, but also about how children's brains are wired differently from adults' brains and reading See Spot Run a hundred times is doing something different for a five year old than it would for me. (Children's literature as mantra?) Writers are all about repetition too: patterns, ideas, and symbols that repeat over and over again in literature.

C. S. Lewis said that certain ideas qualified as myths and had lives of their own that could be explored in many different ways to many different ends. The story of Orpheus could be told thirty different ways and have many different nuances and meanings but it would still be Orpheus --- it has some extra-literary quality, a feeling of recognition. Lewis created Narnia; other writers, like Poe, actually created genres. How does that work? (This leaves me curious about what modern stories have this mythical quality. Frankenstein comes to mind; I've seen the Frankenstein story used many different ways for many different ends and it's always been Frankenstein. ~~Thus demonstrating that despite The Last Man, Mary Shelley could write~~.)

Mythology and folklore exist to explain actual occurrences; we recognize the way that they reflect real life. We all have people who fail to take care of us and we all have thwarted desires --- we recognize real life in these stories because they reflect it. We keep rewriting them because there's an archetype we need to make reflect right now. Or maybe not right now, but instead just an expectation that there needs to be something new, modern, shocking? Is that legitimate, or unnecessary? There's the question "If it's not new, will it be boring?" No one wants to wear the same outfit day after day. (Some guy in the audience said "Well you would say that, you're all women." I think someone held me to keep me sitting down. The panelists told him off.)

Really important reworkings have changes that aren't arbitrary --- the change illuminates something that maybe you've neve thought about before. Maybe taking a different role. We're at fairytale retelling 2.0 now! Much more creative diversions. We want to make people feel invited in but also challenged: Here's the enchanted forest, but wait! Want to excite people into rediscovering story. Cat Valente says she has to watch out for "Not awesome enough." She's driven to do these retellings but doesn't want to just write another Wicked. She thinks most things sucks, and needs it to be way more awesome. (YES! This is the best attitude ever.) She tried doing a Cinderella just to see if she could, and ended up thinking about her relationship with her family and writing about cutting heels off. She wanted to resonate forward.

They then talked from the critic or reader's persepctive about how fantasy with patterns is not given critical respect but someone like Murakami is an absolute critical darling despite telling the same story over and over again. (I've only read Norwegian Wood, so I can't comment on that. Anyone read a lot of Murakami?) Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has a man sitting at the bottom of a well. Why does the bottom of the well feel so important? IT means something about the depths of depression but it's more than a metaphor, it's true. People resent genre but are open to this: It's an Underworld motif but because it's a guy in a well and not an actual underworld people don't have a knee-jerk reaction.

So, is there a gender bias in critical reception of mythic work? Well, Angela Carter's been dead for a while, but the best a woman can hope for is to be compared to Angela Carter. Men get called original when they do what women writers are already doing. Someone on the SFWA forums (I guess they must have been important if people remembered this) said that there are "penis stories and vagina stories. Vagina stories have characters and emotional arcs in them." There's a part of the critical apparatus that thinks this way. Valente: "The words that describe genre are sexist. There is no real logic to sexism. As soon as womenn start doing it, you can denigrate it."

Rose (I'm pretty sure that's rosefox) from the audience: "Fanfic, everyone knows how the story ends but people will write about parts in the middle and rigidly mange how they get surprised. Is this the most modern way of dealing with the unexpected?" In many cultures, you start stories with the ending and the excitement is in the process of telling. The twist ending is a recent Western obsession. Most fanfic comes out of movies and TV, which now people are watching when they feel like it and not just when it airs or never.

It's super-super-hard to tell stories from non-Western mythologies for a Western audience. You can't rely on the audience knowing anything, even the smallest thing; you have to do double duty in making it completely clear and also making it new. It's almost impossible without footnotes. Someone (Valente again?) called it a 9th-level spell to much laughter. Then someone brought up Joseph Campbell and Valente hates him and his ubiquity. Apparently he hates women and sees them as sexually available or unavailable and that's that; he's a dead white man being given preference in a conversation about living writing and she doesn't care. I'd never even heard of him, but apparently Valente wrote a paper about how he sucks. It's probably one of these although I have not done the research to figure out which one yet (this link is as much for me as for you).

Readercon, Part 1: Thursday

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:24:38 GMT

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.

Thursday, 8 PM: My talk on "When the World Ends, and No One Notices." I wasn't taking notes, since i was talking; the format was me talking for 30-35 minutes, and then respondants. At first I prepped for just talking for an hour, but then I heard it was going to be in a panel room with other people instead, so I prepped for conversation. (I actually had a lot of the conversations I ended up sort of having on the panel in the week prior with coworkers, friends, and cats.) The other panelists wanted to just not talk for a half hour, though, so it ended up sort of a combination of everything. There were a couple things I wish I got to, but I think it was largely successful, since people came up to me and said "That was awesome." If nothing else, I made a lot of people want to read The Children's Hospital, which is good, since it is astonishingly wonderful. Talking with sovay about it also gave me an idea for another project; something moving toward a taxonomy of apocalypse by imagining different categories and seeing how each categorization puts texts in conversation with each other differently. What does following Gary Wolfe's "The Remaking of Zero" to the letter do to the way we read end of the world fiction? What if we characterized things by didactic/confusing? Cyclic/full stop? Bang/whimper? I think this has the potential to be very fruitful (if a bit meta).

Thursday, 9 PM: You Don't Know Dictionary! This was a panel ostensibly about how readers react to unknown words in texts and whether or not looking them up is an important part of the reading process, but it ended up being wider-ranging, which was OK. Sarah Micklem, one of the panelists, did talk about saving looking up words in Greer Gilman's fiction for a second reading; that sounded like an interesting way to go about it, actually. Read it once for the sound, a second time for the subtext? Hm. William Barnes came up --- in brief, a philologist obsessed with removing the Latinate who had influences on Hopkins and Morris --- in terms of his incredible influence on fantasy, so little of which is Latinate. Gene Wolfe was proposed as a counterexample.

Greer was asked if she ever encountered words she didn't know; she said yes, there are words with very unusual origins, and she sometimes looks them up. She made a remark about having an OED on an iPhone that would automatically update whenever there was a new word. "A word is born!" This got the panel talking about technology --- specifically about how you can select words to define on the Kindle and how this could hamper reading. (This conversation was quite interesting, and did not have quite so much of the Fear Of Technology I am getting used to seeing in book people. Nonetheless, much like you have the option of either just turning to a page of a reference work, looking at the one thing in the reference work, and then going back to the text rather than browsing around, you have the option of clicking to a definition and spending four hours browsing around Wikipedia. Technology may change the nature of browsing, and maybe the nature of browsing is less or more focused online, but browsing still exists. Yes, the skill of looking things up in books might someday be lost. We also have culturally lost the skill of starting an engine with a hand crank. I'm sure someone somewhere else has nostalgia over that. Sky not falling! Moving on.)

One of the interesting points of discussion was whether or not it mattered if words in a novel were made up or real. Micklen alleged that it didn't matter; she loved the sound, loved encountering the words she didn't know in Wolfe, thought they meant something even when she thought they were made up. Someone (Greer? Lila Garrott? My notes here are vague) mentioned the use of "scoliast" to mean "automaton" in Winterlong as something that straddled the boundary there. (I actually hadn't picked that up when I read Winterlong, though I did pick up other words used in similar fashions.) In defense of not looking things up, someone said that "A definition strips down, takes away a connotation." Greer rhapsodized about "fell": "Mountain, beast of the mountain, cruelty, fall of the spirit. A dictionary won't do that for you."

There is a problem with looking up just words --- it won't help with phrases. (I'm reminded of being in high school and finding an NI-2 at a yard sale and going through and picking out the weird latin phrases and writing short stories based on each one.) I think this was an audience question from Faye Ringel: "Even if you look up all the words, you might not get the depth of allusion ---- You may not get it anyway. A freshman reads Conrad like I read Akkadian." I believe she was talking about her freshmen specifically, as opposed to all freshmen. Lila talked about idealect some, which had previously been mentioned in the context of Seamus Heaney (who you arguably shouldn't need a link for). Does it mean readers[1] get to know more about you than you might be comfortable wth? No, it makes its own camouflage, hides itself under the surface. It's something of a persona or a mask, not naked language; it's always a way in which the writer is guising. But that's another panel. (Indeed it is; Barry Malzberg had some really intersting things to say about this on Sunday.)

The book recommendation to come out of this was Sturgeon's Venus Plus X; looking at the Amazon summary, I can't see why. Anyone know? :)

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

Readercon Planning Post

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:15:56 GMT

(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.

Anthrocon Planning

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:49:59 GMT

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.

Readercon notes and book review: Lud-in-the-Mist

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:24:46 GMT

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.

A brief plot synopsis: Lud-in-the-Mist is a city in the fictional nation of Dorimare, which has a rich history but is currently very wrapped up in Law and Order after disposing of a despotic Duke a couple centuries ago. Over a series of hills is Fairyland, which may be the land of the dead and may be a fairy kingdom and may just be another country. However, Fairyland and all things fairy are considered taboo, and unspoken in law or polite company. There's a lot of focus on law and bureaucratic process for a fantasy; it fits perfectly, though, as the main character is the Mayor of Lud-In-The-Mist and enjoys spending time with the old boys' club drinking wines and talking about legal precedent. I'm used to fantasies having Kings and Queens and Lords and Ladies; this novel has an upper class, for sure, but the society is decidedly modern in a number of ways. It's refreshing.

Over the course of the book, an increasing number of children start to become delirious, accusedly under the influence of Fairyand and its nefarious fruit. The Mayor takes it upon himself to ferret out the source of this corruption, and his task becomes increasingly urgent as the victims grow in number and intensity. Here, the book turns almost into a detective story, wrapped around attempting to re-prosecute a court case that was tried many years ago and find the facts in order to bring a fair trial. I think this is awesome --- I'm not a big mystery reader either but I do like puzzles, and watching the Mayor work through the puzzles was enjoyable. The puzzles themselves vary between the fantastic and the dry investigative; the world and the people in it feel real and feel, for the most part, like bit players rather than The Mighty Protagonists. This is excellent, and what is called for here.

Near the end of the book, things slip way into the fantastic, and Mirrlees handles the writing with aplomb. I almost understood what was going on, which was exactly right; I almost had a visual picture but it kept slipping and sliding like a series of overlaid tiles and putting one thing in another's place. A whole book written in this way would, honestly, probably drive me insane. (I'm sure some people would love it.) But after so much matter-of-fact, it was a refreshing if frightening contrast, and worthy of the Fairyland hype that the people of Dorimare had been building up for centuries. I don't want to spoil too much about this book; it's a relatively easy read and well worth the investment. If you'd been sort of missing the disreality of fantasy but couldn't get into the things that people handed you when you asked for fantasy, give this a shot. Then sit back for a bit and wonder what the world would be like if everyone and their dog had emulated Mirrlees instead of Tolkien...

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

Does Penny Arcade pass the Bechdel test?

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:36:13 GMT

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? A few people said yes, but I wasn't convinced, and so in the last couple of days of cold medicine haze I flipped through the archives. [2] I think the answer is that it does pass, but only just barely. Out of more than a thousand comics, here, in chronological order, are the ones that meet either two or three of the criteria:

Now, Picture It Vicious: One of the main characters' wives speaks to the other about the main characters.
Up On The Rooftop: The two wives decide to call 911, hearing noises that the reader knows are the two main characters falling off of a roof. Are they talking about a man or not?
Red and Blue in... The Party: Two women talk about their husbands, who are enemies in a video game, at a cocktail party.
The Speed of Thought: The two wives discuss killing their husbands.
Probably Safer To Burn 'Em: Gabe's wife confronts a DiVX player who is in bed with a prostitute. Is she talking to the prostitute? Probably not, no.
Fruit Saga, Part 2: The two wives discuss the "Fruit Fucker" robot who has been touching one of them in her sleep. They use the pronoun "he." Is the Fruit Fucker a man? It is a robot, but the jokes are basically just about the robot penetrating things sexually.
Tormented, Science-Fiction Youth: A girl and her mother (and father) discuss the boy who impregnated her.
The Scion, Part 2: A girl (Annarchy --- she's awesome) fights with her mother and father over whether or not she can go to a LAN party because there might be boys there. It's not directly about a man? Maybe?
BFF!: Gabe and a group of young girls shout "Barbie Horse Adventures!" in unison. I don't know if that's really a conversation, but Barbie Horse Adventures is pretty clearly not a boy.
The Turkey Trilogy, Episode Two: Annarchy and her mother discuss vegetarianism and the enslaving of indigenous peoples. This is the one point at which I can unequivocally say that Penny Arcade passes the Bechdel test.
Perfectly Reasonable: Gabe, his wife, and a (female) realtor discuss whether or not a house might contain a "spectral bride." The wife and the realtor never actually speak to each other; they both talk, separately, to Gabe.
The Breaking Point: Gabe, his wife, and their son are trick or treating; a woman answers the door and gets into an argument with Gabe about the Star Wars canon details of the son's costume. Never do the women speak to each other. Arguably they would be talking about the son anyway, though I would be inclined to count it if they spoke to each other.
The Sussorous Sandwich: A woman and her daughter sit at the table. The daughter is playing a Game Boy, which says "ISLAM IS THE LIGHT." [3] The woman chides her daughter. Then the woman's sandwich says the same thing, and a variety of fantastic creatures show up and overtake the last panel. I guess this technically passes the test.

I probably missed one or two, but I doubt I missed a hundred. So, while I'd be comfortable just posting this and letting it sit, I'm hopped up on cold medicine, so I'm going to take a stab at actually discussing it. If you look at these and at some of the other comics, you're more likely to get multiple women or women talking to each other in longer plot arcs or non-three-panel-arranged comics. Why is this? Well, it's a comic about two guys who play video games. Usually the main characters are either the two guys or characters from video games. The characters from video games are basically all male --- or, when they're not, it's a single woman like Samus Aran or Lara Croft. So female characters show up in speaking roles most often when there's a longer plot arc or a panel with a large number of characters in it. (The Turkey Trilogy, Episode Two has both. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's the best Bechdel buster in the bunch.) This makes sense. Of course, if the rule were "Two men who talk to each other not about a woman," it would pass at least half the time. It is, after all, a comic about two men who talk about video games.

So, why do I care? I was spurred on to caring because the three different concept comics present three alternate ideas for story universes and tropes, one or all of which could have been constructed in such a way not to minimize female characters. Admittedly, we don't know too much about them, but from the teaser comics none of them seem like settings that would feature female characters. Lookouts is about a group of boys in a Boy Scouts-like organization in a fantasy universe --- no girls there. Automata is noir and it looks like basically everyone is a gruff and gritty man in a suit; maybe there are interesting women but not on the first page. The Robots in the role of Other have the potential to be interesting, though. Jim Darkmagic... well, he kills a woman and gets away with it and is apparently the protagonist? Uh, I guess it could work out to be uproariously funny, but the concept doesn't make me think Oh Wow How Awesome. (The fanbase didn't seem to like it as much either.)

It's not like it's Gabe and Tycho's responsibility to be out there making comics about awesome women who play or might be in video games. I mean, if they did, that'd be great, but they're doing their thing and for the most part I really enjoy that thing. I just think it's worth pointing out and thinking about: Hey, how come this is so gendered? Sure, fewer women than men play video games, but even the nerdcore games I play like NetHack and Crawl are more than 13 women per 1500. (Crawl actually has a very dedicated, if small, female and gender-variant playerbase.) I I think it's more that the choices Gabe and Tycho have made are representative of larger problems that I am totally too drugged out to try to explain cogently. I know there is also a larger dialogue about women in the webcomics community --- both in terms of authors and in terms of characters --- that I'm not really a part of. Still, other webcomics pass the Bechdel test much more easily, even blatantly sexist and sexualized ones. [4] So when the Penny Arcade guys have the chance to do something different and it doesn't change anything, it makes me kinda sad.

How could they change this if they wanted to?

More second string female characters. The two wives appear periodically, as does Annarchy, as do a number of the characters' male friends. Add more women to the list, get more women in the comic in general.
Make more gender-irrelevant characters female. Lots of characters in the comic are once-offs who are "a Warcraft player" or "a character in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance." Often there's one or more guys and one woman; those could have multiple women without any significant change to the comic storylines. (Of course, I don't know how much this actually matters. I guess if nothing else it would have made me feel better about the comic.)
More longer plot arcs that explore secondary characters.
When choosing to deviate from their standard form (Cardboard Tube Samurai, Twisp and Catsby, the current three concept comics), do something about women.

What do you think?

[0] Oh yeah, everyone in all three of the promos looks white, too, and that's probably true of most of the comic as well. If I'd not been hopped up on cold medicine, I would have taken notes on that too.

[1] Homophobic in the "fag discourse" sense (see Dude, You're A Fag by C. J. Pascoe) generally. I had totally forgotten about this issue until I skimmed through the archives. I don't know that I'd tolerate it if I hadn't been reading the comic for nine years, though I probably would, because I've seen much worse and tolerated that too. How I feel about that, both the homophobia and the tolerating it, is outside of the scope of this head cold.

[2] I sometimes clicked rapidly through when I saw that there weren't two women even in the comic, but I did at least look at every image. I may have missed 2; I probably didn't miss 20. (If I did miss two, I'm happy to add them to my list.)

[3] This merits some explanation so that it doesn't sound more bizarre and bad than it is.

[4] Just picking from things I read, I know Questionable Content does, say, and Order of the Stick (which is even a male-written gamer comic). I considered making every word in that sentence a link, but checking my work there would have been a bit much. And, of course, passing the Bechdel test doesn't mean it's full of strong female characters I'd like to emulate; I'd take Penny Arcade's treatment of women, however sparse, over something like Menage a 3, even though it totally passes the test. (Annarchy is more awesome than Zii and it only goes downhill from there.)

Short Story Review: "The Catgirl Manifesto" by Richard Calder

Mon, 25 May 2009 16:50:05 GMT

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.

Dipping a toe into the future

Mon, 25 May 2009 13:59:14 GMT

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.

This book kicked my ass, and I deserved it.

Sat, 23 May 2009 13:57:02 GMT

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.)

Local: Sassafrass concert May 17

Thu, 14 May 2009 01:00:26 GMT

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.

Mixing medieval harmonics with modern energy, the sound of Sassafrass
is unlike anything you?ve heard before. The (nearly) all-female a
cappella group?s pieces combine unusual and stunning close harmonies
with lyrics and themes inspired by folklore, fantasy and ancient myth.

Intrigued? Come hear for yourself! In their Club Passim concert,
Sassafrass will perform everything from folk songs from nonexistent
cultures to a duet on the nature of magic dragons to the autobiography
of a mad scientist to a mock-operatic rendition of the Balder murder
cycle from Norse myth. Written and performed by area geeks, the music
is sure to reverse your polarity!

Concert details below; hear samples and see Sassafrass's other
upcoming concert dates at http://adapalmer.com/sassafrass/.

Sassafrass at Club Passim

Sunday, May 17th

4:30 - 6:00 PM

Tickets available online at http://www.passimcenter.org/

Books Review

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:27:13 GMT

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 .) But since most of you are only going to read a book if it sounds interesting, here's reason number one to read the book: Winterson successfully produces a compelling narrator whose gender is never revealed. At first you're fumbling around and being like "Wait, am I supposed to be just picking up on this?" After a while, though, you realize that Winterson is screwing with you, passing you hints in multiple directions, creating scenes that read differently based on the character's gender and forcing you to consider both at the same time, creating scenes where it really doesn't matter at all and you forget for a few pages. Personally, I think this was brilliantly done; there are one or two sentences I felt were maybe needling me too much about the fact that I was reading the story rather than telling me the story, but really, who am I to complain about that. :)

Every five to ten pages, it felt like Jeanette Winterson was punching me in the face through the book. I would stop what I was doing, which on at least one occasion was walking down the street, and just stare at the book for a moment, shouting "What? What? You can do that? What?" IT was really really refreshing. She did things I hadn't seen done before! I can actually see myself pushing in some of the same directions in the story I'm working on right now, which is exciting. Maybe they're things you'e seen before, in which case it might just be a good book. But the way she switched discourses, the way she aggressively pulled the rug out from under me and then substituted a different rug within the space of a sentence, and the choice of whether or not to make shocking events feel shocking... wow. I was blown away. My one major criticism, and admittedly it's a pretty major one, is that when I got to the end of the book, I was really hoping for Winterson to explain why she had been punching me in the face all novel. To me, the novel's ending is just her shrugging her shoulders, smiling, and walking away without delivering an explanation or even a parting shot. Incredibly frustrating. Is that the point? 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. At first I thought it was setting me up to be something like Michael Cunningham's The Hours, except good; then I concluded that homosexuality was a red herring. Which isn't actually quite true, but it's more like one of a large number of interwoven subplots set against the backdrop of Europe between World War I and World War II. We follow the two main characters from childhood to old age, though some times are paid far more attention than others. I almost want to draw their lives out as diagrams, affecting each other from afar and intersecting at seemingly random points in order to form some sense of pattern.

One of my favorite things about this book is the way that, even in letters, the characters have conversations with themselves, going down into two or three levels of thought and often using the voices of people close to them. I actually want to write a short paper about how this way of structuring a stream of consciousness is a lot like A Hu-Li in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, except more subtle. As they receive each other's letters, sometimes voices cross the narrative streams; certain phrases recur like musical motifs across the various letters. "Hopeful monsters" is one of those phrases, and one of the ideas of the book is that of a macro-evolution of thought, the terrible events of the first half of the 20th century constructing an environment where humanity could fundamentally change. This is an uncomfortable thing to think about the deaths of many millions but, especially having read scads of apocalyptic fiction recently, it's actually a really interesting idea. Certainly you could argue that the near-apocalypses of books like Earth Abides or The Children's Hospital produce hopeful monsters. (Though then what in the hells is Pickie Beecher?)

The way the characters deal with sexuality and relationships is fascinating. The homosexuality is not quite a red herring --- but it's not specifically a queer novel, except that it queers the discourse in general. If you called the main characters queer or polyamorous or other modern labels they would just sort of stare at you confused and respond with vague witticism, because they're not really mindfully engaging with their non-normativity in that space; they're much more interested in physics, biology, and philosophy. The way that the characters and the narrative itself are blase about their actions is both really refreshing and a little frustrating, but given the characters in the story I'm working on right now, I have no right to complain :) Is it fair to say that they act too much like people in books and not enough like real people? Is that cogent? Because that's how I was left feeling. Nonetheless, I recommend this book as well; the writing was very striking and I might edit this to show a couple of examples later but right now I need to get to work.
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.