Random Acts of Observation

So, The turning of the year has come and gone. Our celebration was as always quiet, perhaps more so this year because we have had an annus horribilis which has only just barely begun, we hope, to improve.

So we sat in the living room and exchanged gifts and ordered a feast of Chinese food and watched the Doctor Who Christmas special, and the Murdoch Mysteries Christmas special, and had a lovely time.
My prezzies were wonderful.

A long list of ebooks:

Andrea ​Hairston, ​Lonely ​Stardust ​
Carter ​Scholz, ​Gypsy
Charles ​Saunders, ​Abengoni: ​First ​Calling
Charles ​Tan ​(ed), ​Lauriat: ​A ​Filipino-Chinese ​Speculative ​Fiction ​Anthology
Chinelo ​Okparanta, ​Under ​the ​Udala ​Trees
Craig ​Laurance ​Gidney, ​Skin ​Deep ​Magic
David ​Pilgrim, ​Understanding ​Jim ​Crow
Deborah ​J. ​Ross, ​The ​Heir ​of ​Khored
Deborah ​Wheeler, ​Collaborators
F.H. ​Batacan, ​Smaller ​and ​Smaller ​Circles
J.M. ​Frey, ​Hero ​is ​a ​Four ​Letter ​Word
Jackie ​Hatton, ​Flesh ​& ​Wires
Jeanne ​Theoharis, ​The ​Rebellious ​Life ​of ​Mrs. ​Rosa ​Parks
Johanna ​Sinisalo, ​The ​Blood ​of ​Angels
John Miller, Judi Dench: With a Crack in her Voice
Katharine ​Kerr, ​Dark ​Magicks
Marge ​Piercy, ​My ​Life, ​ ​My ​Body
Michelle ​Sagara, ​Cast ​in ​Honor
Minister ​Faust, ​The ​Alchemists ​of ​Kush
Rachel ​Pollack, ​Alqua ​Dreams
Sheree ​Renée ​Thomas, ​Shotgun ​Lullabies
Silvia ​Moreno-Garcia, ​Signal ​to ​Noise
Sumiko ​Saulson, ​Things ​That ​Go ​Bump ​In ​My ​Head

And the extended version DVDs of Hobbit II and Hobbit III

I am saddened and ashamed.

A Muslim woman was picking up her children from Grenoble Public School on Monday when she was attacked. Two men approached the woman and started hurling anti-Islamic and racist profanities at her. Police said the men started calling the woman a “terrorist” and said “go back to your country.” One of the men started punching the woman in the stomach and a second man ripped off her hijab during the assault.

A Toronto couple put a sign on their property, asking Muslims if they were sorry for the attacks in Paris.

Police are investigating a fire deliberately set at Peterborough’s only mosque. Police and fire officials arrived on Saturday at around 11 p.m. at Parkhill Rd. west of Monaghan Rd. to Masjid Al-Salaam after receiving a call of smoke coming out of the mosque. Peterborough police have confirmed that the fire was deliberately set.
Police in Kitchener, Ont., are investigating vandalism at a Hindu temple. Ram Dham Hindu Temple president Dilip Dav says several windows at the rear entrance of the temple were shattered late Sunday night.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall wants the federal government to suspend its plan to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of the year.

And this is just what I know about, what has been reported in the news I've read so far. It's not only that responses like this mean the terrorists have won. It's that when we act in this way, it shows that we are lost, lost to the light, lost to humanity and empathy and compassion. Doing evil in the name of good is still evil. We may think that we are defending something, protecting something, avenging something - but in truth, when we respond to hate and fear with yet more hate and fear, we are destroying light, destroying love, and destroying ourselves.

Recently I've been going through a rather deep and dark existential depression that results from my response to being pretty much completely lacking in mobility. As this plaint that I posted on Facebook a few days back during an acute attack indicates, I feel pretty damned useless in all things.

******
Losing my identities
I used to be a lot of things.
I used to be a person who sang, who danced, who played guitar, who drew and painted stuff. I used to be someone who acted in plays, who stage-managed and even did some directing.
I used to be a person who marched in protest and in celebration, who spoke at public meetings and presented briefs. I used to be a person who was active in political movements. I used to be a person who could do things to help make the world a little bit better.
I used to be a person who could work, whether it was with my hands or with my mind. Who could be productive, support myself and the people I loved.
I used to be a person who could be of use to my friends and loved ones, who could actually be a friend to them, a person to turn to, to rely on. I used to have something to give.
I used to make a difference in the world.
There are so many things I used to be, and am not not now, and likely will never be again.
Take all my identities away from me, and what is left? Nothing.
******

Well, in an attempt to try to change at least one of these "I used to be"s, I have been playing with a program that is supposed to be a way to make pixel art rather than hand-shaped art. Here are a few of my investigative forays into the world of electronic art.

wordweaverlynn on Dreamwidth asked for my top five favourite foods.

I'm going to answer this in two ways - as top five individual foods or ingredients, and as top five prepared foods.

First, the individual food items.

Cheese (Just about any kind), mushrooms, chocolate, strawberries, freshly baked bread

Now, the prepared foods.

1. Chocolate peanut butter ice cream

2. Thai basil fried rice (with chilis, tofu, mushrooms, zucchini, carrots, onions, bok choi, etc.)

3. Lasagne with three cheeses (mozzarella, parmesan, ricotta), spicy tomato and mushroom sauce, spinach and lots of pasta. And herbed garlic bread on the side

4. Curried chicken - I'll take various styles of curry as long as it's nice and hot, with rice, yogourt and a sweet chutney on the side.

5. Any kind of heavy, sweet chocolate torte-like dessert, with a rich buttery cream filling, if it has almonds and strawberries so much the better.

My friend evil_macaroni from Livejournal asked me to list my "Top ​5 ​non-speaking ​animal ​characters ​in ​movies, ​TV ​or ​books?"

And my answers are:

White Fang and Buck. I mention these two characters in the same breath because they are mirror twins. White Fang, the title character of Jack London's classic novel, travels from the feral circumstance of his birth in the Far North to an old age lived in placid domesticity in the gentle south. Buck, the main character in Call of the Wild by the same author, is stolen from his owner's home in California to become first an Alaskan sled dog and then a wild dog among wolves.

Pixel, the Cat Who Walks through Walls. He does say "blert" a lot, but that doesn't count as talking, does it?

Because they belong together, I'm naming them together - Tao, Luath and Bodger, aka Ch. Boroughcastle Brigadier of Doune, the three animals in The Incredible Journey. I refer of course only to their depictions in the book or the first movie, as I understand some idiot made them talk in the remake.

Shadowfax, the silver horse companion of Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. Chief of the Mearas, the fastest horse in Middle Earth.

And, because you didn't specify fictional characters, Elsa the Lioness, from the book Born Free, written by Joy Adamson.

I did not make a book post last week. This is largely because we have had two bad and very smoggy weeks, in which my brain took a long vacation and left me incapable of doing much more than playing solitaire on my ipad.

Fortunately, my brain came home again and i have some reading to report.

Since my last book post, I have finished Katha Pollitt's Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, Margaret Atwood's Second Words: Selected Critical Prose 1960-1982, and Isabel Allende's Ripper. I have also read India Edghill's Queenmaker: A Novel of King David's Queen, Gillian Bradshaw's Island of Ghosts, and Syrie James' The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen.

At present, I am reading Lavinia Collins' The Warrior Queen, the first volume in her Guinevere trilogy, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. And I'm still working on Metzel's The Protest Psychosis, and am also picking away at Stine's Future Eves anthology.

Coming up soon: it's time to start some serious reading of sff published this year, so that I will be prepared to nominate. I have drawn up a list of books I have seen recommended in multiple places - most of which I was planning to read anyway - and will be starting in on the ones I've already got on my virtual TBR pile. I've also got some recommended novellas lined up. I should start looking at recommended novelettes, short stories and graphic novels, too. And related works.

As ever, if you're interested in my thoughts on anything I've read, check out my book journal:
http://bibliogramma.dreamwidth.org/

I have a few things to say about the Hugo Awards this year and the sadly rabid puppies who did what puppies do all over them. I know that, as puppies, they will keep on doing what puppies do, because they can and because they are full of the bubbling rage of denied entitlement, so I offer this suggestion. If the puppies really want to put the stories they think have been neglected up for consideration against all the other award-nominated works, don't load up a voting slate with crap that ranges from mediocre to barely readable. Because for this year's Hugo's, that's what they did, with few exceptions - most of whom pointedly disavowed themselves from the puppy kennel by declining their nominations.

If puppydom really wants to make a statement about what it thinks speculative fiction should be, then they should lead with their best. Nominate - as individuals, not as a slate - the very best of what they like in science fiction and fantasy. Honour original ideas, good writing, strong characterisation, tight plotting. Because nominating material that is merely competent, or worse, is not the way to showcase the kinds of fiction one loves.

Seriously. I read all the Hugo-nominated works in the fiction categories this year. And rejected the puppy offerings as not worthy of an award, a rejection based on merit, not genre or content. There was a lot of bad to mediocre writing there. There were some competent and interesting pieces, and one or two things that suggested real potential. But nothing that demonstrated the level of skill that merits a
Hugo. And that had nothing to do with the kinds of stories being told, some of which I enjoyed despite the quality of the work.

If indeed there are great works out there being overlooked or ignored, then next year, when we look at nominations for the best works of speculative fiction, let's see the best of all of speculative fiction's many faces, including the genres beloved by the puppies - because work that's good will be recognised for what it is. It doesn't need a slate to support it. And if the Hugo voters as a whole decide that no, the quality expected in a Hugo winner isn't there in the puppies' choices - then if puppies want awards for the stories they like to read, they should demand that kind of quality from the writers of the kinds of fiction they prefer. Whining that they are being shut out purely because they are puppies doesn't cut it.

And that brings me to another point. Not everything that one enjoys is award-worthy. I love Mercedes Lackey's writing, she pushes buttons for me that few others do. But I don't think her work is Hugo or Nebula or World Fantasy Award calibre. And that's all right. Maybe your most favourite authors will never win an award - because they are competent writers who know how to tell a story that you and others think is lots of fun to read, but are not trying to challenge you, or blow your mind, or take you somewhere you've never been before. Writers who lack the special something - originality, skill, perspective, vision, depth, power, insight, whatever - that lifts a book beyond the competent and entertaining. There's nothing wrong with that. Not every book can or should be an inspiration to other novelists, an example of the best a genre can produce.

In the long run, if we take them (or at least some of them) at their word and believe that this fuss is all about neglected kinds of stories and not that they just aren't comfortable with stories that challenge assumptions and decentre privileged viewpoints, then surely the gap between us is not as huge or as unbridgeable as they seem think it is.

Take me as an example. I've been a fan for going on fifty-five years. I read the old and the new with pleasure. I grew up on Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke and all the same folks they did. I read widely in the field now, as I always did. Space opera, military science fiction, planetary romance, sword and sorcery, urban fantasy - I read and enjoy these as much as I enjoy more philosophical, sociological and politically themed speculative fiction. I read for fun as much as I read for challenge and enlightenment. I accept that certain kinds of stories - urban fantasy and milsf, for example - are less likely to be found on the nomination lists for many reasons, some of which are inherent to the nature of those kinds of stories. But that doesn't mean I've stopped reading these kinds of stories, both new and old.

(I'll also note that when works that do draw on the motifs and themes of those "neglected" neglected kinds of stories do get awards, puppies claim they are tainted by the "message" of the work or the "intersectional politics" of the author. John Scalzi and Ann Leckie have won awards with books that sure read like space opera and milsf to me.)

But there is something else that's true of me that may not be true of some puppies. As the years have
gone by, my tastes in reading have grown and diversified. I still enjoy the things I used to, but I enjoy more kinds of things than I did then. The field of speculative fiction has changed, and grown, found new stories to tell and new viewpoints to tell them from. But the traditional kinds of stories are still around, still being written, and shock of shocks, I can read and enjoy them both.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid that there is more to this than a desire to restore certain kinds of stories to their traditional place nearer the mainstream of speculative fiction. Reading the pronouncements and conversations on various blogs, full of puppy paranoia, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that the puppies are frightened and confused by speculative fiction that takes the defining question of the genre - what if? - and puts it in the words of people who do not have the same experiences and perspectives that they do. It was fine to ask what-if when the asker was white, American or occasionally British, preferably male, unquestionably cis and straight and binary, and espoused good American values or at least some approximation thereof. Certainly, there have always been those who spoke from outside that narrow vision, asked the questions no one with those forms of privilege would ask. But mostly, in the beginning of the genre, they were not loud or visible or numerous enough to be disturbing. But as more and more "other/ed" voices began to ask what-if, and to challenge all the accepted viewpoints from which what-if had been asked before - well, that's when some people started to find it scary.

And that, unfortunately, is a gap that may be harder to bridge, the gap between those who can only imagine limited sorts of new worlds, in which they can remain the same as they ever were, and those who are willing to go further and question everything, even their own vision of themselves.

I've been thinking maybe I ought to do this, if for no other reason than to give me something to post about every week. Of course, if you follow my book journal, you already know what I've read, but not what I'm reading or planning to read next, so this should not be too boring for you.

So... I finished my massive re-read of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover post-Contact novels, including the ones written by others after her death. The last ones were The Alton Gift and Children of Kings, by Deborah J. Ross. I'm going to wait a while before tackling a re-read of the pre-contact novels - will likely take that on ad we get nearer to the publication of Ross' next Darkover novel, Thunderlord, a sequel to Bradley's Stormqueen.

And I finished Elizabeth Bear's Range of Ghosts, the first of her Asian/Mongol/Silk Road inspired The Eternal Sky trilogy. I'd actually started it some time ago, but put it aside to do the Hugo nominations reading thing, and then picked it up again once i got through that. A very good read, with some wonderful female characters.

Because I have been reading a lot of sf and fantasy in the past two months, I'm feeling a need to shift genres. I took a glance over the several hundred books on my TBR list and picked out some crime/suspense/thriller books to look at, and maybe some Tudorporn. My first selection was Kathy Reichs' recent murder in the mountains novella, Bones on Ice, which was fun, and also one of the better things she's written lately.

I'm currently reading crime thriller The Detective's Daughter, by Lesley Thomson - a new author to me, and one who has received sone good reviews. I'm not quite as engaged as I'd hoped to be - the author's frequent and totally unmarked switches of POV are a bit disorienting, though part of me is wondering if perhaps this is a case where shifts that were indicated typographically in the printed text in sone way that has not carried over to the ebook. It's not the first time I've seen that happen.

I'm also partway through Future Eves: Classic Science Fiction about Women by Women, edited by Jean
Marie Stine, which features short stories from the early pulps, most of them totally new to me.

Also reading two non-fiction books. Black London: Life before Emancipation, by Gertrude Gerzina, and The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, by Jonathan Metzl. The titles speak for themselves.

Up next? In fiction, probably some more crime thrillers. I have unread books by Nicci French, Maureen Jennings, Kathy Reichs, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Laurie R. King, Sujatta Massey, Tess Gerritsen, Jennifer McMahon, just to mention authors I'm already familiar with, plus some selections from new authors (to me) to try out, including Tana French and Val MCDermid. Also, I need to finish Bear's trilogy.

In non-fiction, I want to read Ta-Nehisi Coates's new book, Between ​the ​World ​and ​Me. Also, there are relatively new books by Laurie Penny, Barbara Ehrenreich and Naomi Klein that I've been meaning to get around to. Plus the several hundred other unread books on the ipad. Time will tell which I pick up next.

So I've been feeling pretty sick this past week - kind of par for the course - but I think I'm going to try to get out to the living room tonight and catch up on some TV viewing. Lately I've been watching the British SF show Humans, and enjoying it immensely, but last night was the last episode of that. I'm also watching Rizzoli and Isles, Killjoys, and (sporadically, and i'm quite a bit behind) The Lost Ship, and I'm working my way through Sense8.

What shows are other people watching and enjoying this summer? Anything new and good that I might have missed hearing about?

Yes, I am still alive. As anyone who follows my book journal (bibliogramma on Dreamwidth) as well probably knows. But in increasingly more difficult circumstances. Health still sucks, life is pain, finances remain tenuous as I look into the future, etc.

But I am so far finding ways to keep going. Books help a lot. So do various mindless computer games. Anything that takes me away from my body a little bit.

I find myself sort of resurfacing after two years of not really communicating much. I don't know if this is simply due to some weird holiday season euphoria, or if I'm moving into a longer-term phase of reconnection with the world via this electronic medium. But there is some possibility that I may start posting stuff again from time to time.

So fucking tired.

My body's latest plan to torment me consists of not letting me sleep. Persistent dry cough that either keeps me from falling asleep or wakes me up soon after I fall asleep. Plus a very overactive bladder that wakes me up far too soon on those rare occasions that I do manage to sleep through the coughing. At least some of this is, I believe, due to the meds I'm on - or possibly due to going off one of them.

Today I actually managed to accumulate seven hours of sleep - haven't gotten that much sleep in at least a week. Almost feel human.

I am so fucking tired these days that I am not really able to keep up with posting here. I read journals, and comment, but most days it seems like such a mountain to climb just to marshall my thoughts in order to post.

For anyone who actually might be interested in occasional updates, I am thinking of trying to post a sentence or two now and again on FaceBook. I'm Morgan Dhu on FB too, if you are there and want to connect with me.

I learn via oursin that today is World Book day, and that there is a meme questionnaire going around as a celebration of the day.

The books I'm reading: Alison Weir, Innocent Traitor; Suzie Bright, Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir; Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life; Charles R. Saunders, Imaro: The Naama War; Helen Merrick, The Secret Feminist Cabal: A cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms; Gwyneth Jones, Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality; and I'm re-reading Emma by Jane Austen.

The book I love the most. This is a silly question. There are hundreds of books I love the most, depending on my mood and circumstance.

The last book I received as a gift: My beloved partner gave me a package of out-of-print (and one very expensive when new) books I have wanted to own that he found on various used book hunting sites. These included: Gwyneth Jones, North Wind; Gwyneth Jones, Phoenix Cafe; Eleanor Arnason, To the Resurrection Station; Diana Paxson, Brisingamen; Maureen McHugh, Mission Child; Jody Scott, I. Vampire; John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting ; Patrick McCormack, The Last Companion; Patrick McCormack, The White Phantom; Ellen Galford, Queendom Come; and Joanne Findon, A Woman's Words: Emer and Female Speech in the Ulster Cycle.

The last book I gave as a gift: Christmas presents for my partner: Modesty Blaise: Death In Slow Motion, Modesty Blaise: The Double Agent, Modesty Blaise: Million Dollar Game, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, The History of Hell, Delusions Of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, The Crowded Universe: The Race to Find Life Beyond Earth, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche and The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease.

The nearest book: My e-reader is right beside me, and it contains approximately 100 ebooks I am reading or want to read. The nearest physical books are Charles R. Saunders, Imaro: The Naama War and Helen Merrick, The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms.

For those interested in the short version of what's been happening for the past couple of years, it find of goes like this:

I got sick, which involved a bed-rest of several months, during which I discovered an addictive MMO called Travian, which I played intensively, being sick and bored and in great need of diversion. I got better but my mobility didn't, so I kept playing, when I wasn't working. I started running out of spoons for anything except basic living and holding onto my job. This lasted a year or so.

Fast forward to the beginning of this year. My father-in-law was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Then I developed a very bad case of shingles which still has not wholly cleared up. Then my niece developed a severe form of auto-immune anemia which did not respond to standard treatment and she almost died, but managed to pull through but only with chemotherapy and immunosuppressants, which have kind of put a wrench in her ability to conduct a normal life. Then my father-in-law died. Then my mother died - intestate, and in another province. I, as sole heir, have a whole lot of bureaucracy to deal with which is made ten times more difficult by the fact that my mobility issues are now such that I cannot travel to where she was living to handle any of the estate settlement issues in person.

I am not really bothering to comment on my emotional response to any of this, nor on my current emotional state. Y'all can probably make accurate guesses anyway.

So that's where things are right now.

Having broken the ice, I will probably continue posting now and again. But don't expect too much. It's hard to find free spoons around here these days.

... and thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have died because of his religious mania.

I always suspected this was what was really going on in his mind - after all, Bush had some pretty close ties with all sorts of millenialist evangelicals - but I simply am boggled by the fact that he came out and told world leaders that they should join in the invasion of Iraq because he was on a mission from God.[1]

Some exerpts from the article:

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France's President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

...

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush's invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs".

In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on "a mission from God" in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.

You know, this is almost enough to make one think that prospective heads of governemnt should be required to affirm, with their hand on a copy of Darwin's Origin of Species, that they will not in any way allow public policy to be influenced by their personal religious beliefs before being allowed to take office.


[1]And yes, I am totally trying to keep myself from seeing GWB in my mind's eye wearing dark sunglasses and an ill-fitting black suit, singing the Blues while Ackroyd plays harmonica and Belushi does backflips, because that would not only be wrong, but also so disresepctful to the people who have suffered from this man's delusions of divine inspiration.

SHATTER THE SILENCE

I post this not because I think fans and writers of colour need my help, my acknowledgement, my recognition, my approval, my white-assed whatever, in order to declare and celebrate themselves. They don't.

I post this because I want to hear their stories, and keep on hearing their stories. I want white publishers and white editors and white agents and all the other white gatekeepers of the white-dominated mechanisms of publication and distribution to know that I want to hear their stories, just as much as I want straight male cisgendered non-disabled publishers and editors and agents and gatekeepers to know that I want to hear the stories of women and PWD and queers of all kinds.

I grew up believing in IDIC. I still do.

I want to talk about what is possibly my favourite book, Margaret Laurence's The Diviners. It's the story of Morag Gunn, who grows up in a small Canadian prairies town in the period between WWI and WWII, and eventually becomes a respected middle-aged author dealing with her own daughter.

Morag is orphaned at an early age, and is adopted by the town garbage collector, who served with her father in WWI. She grows up poor and socially stigmatised, and all her adoptive father Christie has to give her for pride is his legacy of settler culture - the stoy of the Scots who left the British Isles under some duress and hardship, and established new homes and hopes for the future in the new territories, a trek made by both his and Morag's ancestors. He tells her stories of Piper Gunn, a heroic (albeit mythical) leader of the Scottish settlers in the Red river region of Manitoba. These tales not only help to sustain her pride, but eventually lead her toward her ultimately successful career as a creative artist.

But there's more to this book than an unquestioned revelling in the adventure of the colonial project. Becasue early on in her life, Morag meets her Aboriginal counterpart. Skinner (Jules) Tonnerre is Métis, and he too is poor and socially stigmatised and at the same time bright and creative with gifts too large for a sleepy prairie town to hold, but as a Métis, his options are very different. Yet he too has a mythic family legacy that gives him pride - the legends of his ancestor Rider Tonnerre, who fought in the Riel Rebellion at the side of Gabriel Dumont.

This is a book that tries to look at the settler culture of Canada from the perspective of both indigene and immigrant. And that doesn't shy away from rubbing the painful truths of Aboriginal experience in the face of the poor and socially outcast, yet at the same time privileged because of her whiteness, protagonist. Skinner and Morag are lovers at certain points in their long yet sporadic relationship, and for every step up the social ladder that Morag makes, there is some counterpoint in Skinner's life that kicks Morag - and the reader - in the gut, becasue no matter how hard it's been for her, she never has to face what Skinner and his sisters face.

And it's important that she try to learn, even though she never really does, because she and Skinner have a child, and no matter how hard Morag tries to pretend otherwise, her daughter is always going to be on the other side of the racial barrier, as her father was.

It's a subtle and complex book, one that explores a great many things at once - the power of story and myth, the struggles women face in being themselves (it's an intensely feminist book), the writing life among others - but this unrelenting juxtaposition of settler romance and Aboriginal realities is one of the things that lies at the heart of the novel.

As a white woman (and one of settler Scot background myself, and therefore having a personal inclination to be carried away by the tales of the heroic Piper Gunn) I don't know and haven't the experience to make a definitive assessment of how well Laurence did at this - but it's clear that she wanted to tell this story as a part of her creation, and that she tried very hard to do it right. And it's certainly had a powerful effect on me. (I have more to say about the book from a less directed perspective here.)

===================

Among my positive memories of the last few iterations of RaceFail was the opportunity to find many wonderful recommendations of books by people of colour.

Reading about a book that has erased Aboriginal peoples makes me only more eager to read books that don't erase the indigenous peoples of entire continents like North and South America or Australia and New Zealand, and that deal openly with settler/colonialist issues instead of handwaving them aside.

I'd love to hear about what you have read and enjoyed/appreciated/learned from about the settler invasions that isn't about an Empty Continent.

And She Was
(The Talking Heads)

And she was lying in the grass
And she could hear the highway breathing
And she could see a nearby factory
She's making sure she is not dreaming
See the lights of a neighbor's house
Now shes starting to rise
Take a minute to concentrate
And she opens up her eyes

The world was moving and she was right there with it (and she was)
The world was moving she was floating above it (and she was) and she was

And she was drifting through the backyard
And she was taking off her dress
And she was moving very slowly
Rising up above the earth
Moving into the universe and she's
Drifting this way and that
Not touching ground at all and she's
Up above the yard

The world was moving and she was right there with it (and she was)
The world was moving she was floating above it (and she was) and she was

She was glad about it... no doubt about it
She isn't sure where she's gone
No time to think about what to tell them
No time to think about what she's done
And she was

And she was looking at herself
And things were looking like a movie
She had a pleasant elevation
Shes moving out in all directions

The world was moving and she was right there with it (and she was)
The world was moving she was floating above it (and she was) and she was

Joining the world of missing persons (and she was)
Missing enough to feel alright (and she was)


Written by David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison

Shall we call this AmazonFail 09?

It seems that Amazon.com and its subsidiaries Amazon.ca and Amazon.uk – and possibly other Amazon subsidiaries as well – have decided that books addressing gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and other queer issues – and a number of other books dealing with issues of sexual diversity - are very naughty books. You can still buy them, if you know how to search for them, but books that have been identified as dealing with these issues have been stripped of their sales rankings and therefore do not appear in bestseller lists or (I am told, I haven’t in the past used Amazon often enough to know the ins and outs) certain kinds of searches based on sales rankings.

One small press publisher who noticed that the titles he sells had lost their sales rankings asked Amazon what was up, and received this charming note in response:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D
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Amazon.com Advantage

People who have been checking out the extent of the stripping have reported that, while the exact list of “disappeared” books varies from country to country, the kinds of books being excluded are:

*Gay and lesbian romance which is not sexually explicit, or is no more sexually explicit that your typical straight romance

*Literary classics such as James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle and E. M. Forster’s Maurice

*Books on gay and lesbian parenting

*Non-fiction books on everything from theological discussions of homosexuality in the church to gay histories to reports on the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy

*Biographies and autobiographies of gay, lesbian, bisexual and trangender people from John Barrowman to Christopher Isherwood to Harvey Milk to Oscar Wilde


Apparently, fiction and non-fiction books dealing with BDSM, polyamory, and other kinds of sexual difference, ranging from Jacqueline Carey’s very popular Kushiel fantasy series to non-fiction books on sexuality aimed at people with disabilities, have also lost their rankings.


A master list of books known to be affected on at least one of the Amazon websites can be found here.


Information on how to complain to Amazon.com and its various subsidiaries is being posted in various places. On-line petitions are in process and strategising for protest is happening. For more information on taking action, look through the posts being archived here.


As for me, I certainly won’t be shopping at any Amazon website until this policy has been changed, and I certainly urge anyone who reads this to consider doing the same – and to let the Amazon website that serves your country know exactly why you are refusing to buy anything more from them.

And if you can think of anything else you can do to bring pressure to bear, the more power to you, and to us all.

OK, I have finally seen Iron Man, and while there was certainly lots of cool comic book geekery and a pretty, if superficial message about greedy corporate merchants of death, I'm tempted to suggest that the movie should be subtitled "A white American hero's adventures in the land of swarthy threatening people."

There are a lot of swarthy threatening people in this movie. They seem to be living in caves somewhere in Afghanistan, and have international connections that allow them to obtain weapons from the afore mentioned greedy corporate merchants of death (specifically, our wastrel hero's business partner at Stark Industries, the biggest and sexiest purveyor of weapons of almost mass destruction around). I guess that means that they are Taliban fighters, or maybe Al-Queda, even though they seem to be a gang who use ten rings as a symbol, and there's some throwaway lines about them being nasty swarthy people from all over the world, not just from Muslim countries. Hey, maybe they're some of the warlords, who were well known for terrorising the people... oops, no I forgot, the remaining warlords are good guys now that they're in Karzai's government.

Basically, the point I'm trying to make here is that the situation in Afghanistan, the real country, is very complex, and pretending it's as simple as frightened villagers, swarthy frightening terrorists and noble heroic American soldiers really does a massive disservice to a tragic situation.

Anyway, whoever they are, the villains kidnap our soon-to-be great white hero Tony Stark who is in Afghanistan showing off his latest weapon of not quite mass destruction to the American army, who he wants to sell it to. And here's where the movie really annoyed me.

Because here is where we meet Yinsin, a character who apparently was East Asian in the comic books but who is portrayed as Central Asian and Muslim in the movie. In this relatively short sequence, we learn that Yinsin really has no plotline of his own. He is Tony Stark's fellow prisoner so that he can save Tony's life, help Tony communicate with his kidnappers, assist Tony in his escape (note to some extent it is Yinsin's method of preserving Tony's life that gives Tony the idea for the super-powered suit), and then nobly and courageously sacrifices his life for Tony, surviving just long enough to assuage Tony's fleeting moments of guilt by assuring Tony that he always knew the escape attempt would end in his death, and he was willing to do that, because Tony is a great man and all Yinsin wants to do is rejoin his family in Paradise.

Now I may be wrong, but doesn't Yinsin seem an awful lot like the Muslim cousin of the Magical Negro?

And I know that this movie has been praised for its stand against the arms trade, but I found myself thinking that for a movie that purports to be about how war is evil, it was very convenient for the conscience of the Western audience that it was only the nasty men hiding out in those caves who used weapons against helpless civilian villagers, and not, as has been the case far too often, the Western forces currently in Afghanistan.

So, yeah, the action sequences were cool and there's nothing like watching two CGI
Transformers fighting it out in the streets of LA, and the noble sacrifice of Yinsin made it possible for Robert Downey Jr. to skillfully portray Tony Stark's character development into a post-modern superhero with flaws and a suspect past as well as a conscience and a desire to do right (permit me, though, to express some doubts as to whether working with a shadowy organ of the American government that calls itself Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division is going to do the world as a whole all that much good).

But despite the frothy geeky goodness, it left a bad taste in my mouth.

So, all those people who don't want the government to have anything to do with marriage are of course perfectly willing to give up all of the associated privileges appertaining to the married state, right?

And all those people who specifically want the church to decide which marriages are valid are willing to accept all the definitions of marriage proposed by all the various religions in the world, right? Or even just all the religions with churches in your country or community? Because you've got your Metropolitan Community Church, as well as a few other denominations, which most certainly consider same-sex marriage as valid, and a number of religions that approve polygamous marriages, and there's probably at least on of each in your municipality if you live in North America.

Oh, did you mean only "real" churches, like the ones that share your ideas on marriage, should be allowed to decide which marriages are valid? And who's going to make sure that only those "real" churches are allowed to be in your community, recognising marriages? How do you prevent the ones you don;t like from recognising marriages you don't like, unless it's through intervention from the state, which would mean violating separation of church and state, which you've already insisted is a key principle that you can't violate.

Tell me another one, please, that was hilarious.

I certainly don't want the church, any church, determining which marriages are valid for everyone in my country.

Since marriage (churched or not, legal or common-law) is, at least in my country, a legally recognised state with a variety of rights, responsibilities, obligations and special circumstances attached, both between the parties to the marriage and between the parties and the state, then there has to be some law that identifies what is a marriage and what is not for the purposes of those laws.

My preference would be to have the broadest definition possible, such as: a marriage exists between people who have declared themselves to be willing to accept that the rights, responsibilities, obligations and special circumstances attached to the state of marriage apply to them, until such time as that declaration is terminated by mutual agreement or court decree (where a mutual agreement has not been possible), with the understanding the the persons involved are all competent to enter into a legal contract and do so of their own free will. (N.B., IANAL and this is an off-the-cuff draft.)

Two men of honour, with a passion for justice and a wide streak of compassion.
Two men of wisdom and learning, deeply educated in the classics of their respective cultural traditions.
Two men of mystery, capable of action, even violence, but preferring whenever possible to try to solve problems through negotiation and understanding.
Two men who travelled widely throughout the Western United States during the 1870s.

Surely fate must have brought Kwai Chang Caine and Paladin together.

I can't be the only person who's ever seen the enormous slash potential in this Kung Fu/Have Gun Will Travel crossover scenario, can I?

And so, November is ended, and I have posted the last two doodles of the month. This has been an interesting experiment for me. It's been a long time - about 35 years, I'd say - since I've been anywhere near this prolific, and while I've enjoyed it, there's no way I can sustain this pace. not that I ever planned on doing so, but.... I've given up a lot of my reading time to do these, and I think I want a different balance.

But I have gained some very positive things from this experiment. First, I've discovered that pretty much no matter what I draw, at least someone will think it's interesting enough to comment on. That's a big one for me. Also, I've discovered that if I just relax and let my pencils play, something will happen - there's always some spark of creative vision, or whatever, that I can tap into if I let myself be in the mood to let it come out to play. That's another big one. And finally, I've found that not only do I enjoy making little pieces of art, I also enjoy showing them to people.

While I can't continue drawing every day, I do want to use this experiment as an impetus to do more artwork than I had been doing in the past. Maybe a couple of pieces a month - and possibly including pieces that are more complex and involve more than a couple of hours of work.

Which leads us to a poll.


[Poll #1307537]


Anyway, thanks for looking, and commenting when the urge to say something struck you. I hope you've enjoyed my month of doodling.

Hokusai's work also includes some incredible waterfalls which are also among my favourite art pieces, so when I started drawing last night, that's what was on my mind. Hence, a waterfall of my own. Yes, it's similar to one I drew earlier this month in composition, but what the heck.

I have been doing the drawing a day quite devotedly, but I forgot to scan, upload and post for the last couple of days - I've been having a very bad couple of days, with some mysterious chemical smells invading the house from somewhere that we can't pin down, and making both my partner and I very, very ill. Which means that my brain takes a vacation and hires the grey matter of a gerbil with senile dementia to run the place while it's gone.


A few days back, I drew a cat on a treestump. Why, I don't know. but here it is.









Then, two days ago (I think) partner purchased some more new coloured pencils for me, because I found the initial set lacking in certain areas of the colour wheel. So the last two drawings have been about playing with my new colours. The red/orange/yellow palette in particular has been considerably expanded on, to my delight.

Another doodle without a purpose other than to explore using colours that aren't all in the same place on the colour wheel.