Random Acts of Observation

Or, why I finally decided to watch The Help and what I thought of it.

I had originally thought that I would not bother watching The Help. I'd read enough reviews to think that the whole thing was pretty problematic in terms of the framing of the generally unvoiced lives of black women within a story about a white woman finding her voice and getting a cool job.

But then I watched the Oscars - one of my little vices - and realised from her speech how proud Oscar winner Octavia Spencer was of her work in the film, and decided to honour her and the other black actors in the cast who had chosen to devote their talents to this less-than-ideal vehicle.

And I am glad that i did, because Spencer, and Oscar nominee Viola Davis did very good work in this film. And it is a film about women's lives and thus passed the Bechdel test with flying colours, always a good thing.

But I still would rather have watched these fine actors in a film about black women working as domestics in the southern US during the early days of the civil rights movement, and their relationships with the white women they worked for and the white children they cared for, without the framing story about a white woman's aspirations.

Not that we don't need more films about women of all races, situations and backgrounds following their dreams and succeeding, because we do. But to frame the story of black women with a story about a white woman who gives them voice, catalyses their actions... nah, we don't need any more of that.

So, the last time I posted, I told y'all about how much my life sucked.

It still sucks. Only much more so.

My general state of health continued to deteriorate during the summer and fall, and between all the things that are wrong with me, like the joint pain and the increasingly intolerable edema and other stuff (which I will address in another post, because it's too complicated to put here), it was kind of getting obvious to both me and my employers that I really just was no longer able to perform my work in a satisfactory fashion. Not so much a quality dip, as not being able to spend enough time sitting up at a computer to actually do my work on time.

So we started taking about the company's Long-term disability plan (LTD) and how because my health conditions are not exactly the normal kind of stuff it's not certain I would qualify but my employers assured me they would to be as supportive as they could be once I reached the point where I simply could not longer work at all.

So that day has finally come. Friday was my last day of work. Now I'm on medical leave for four months until I've waited out the qualifying period for LTD, and then I get to apply and wait and see if they will pay me benefits. But of course, benefits don't come anywhere near covering household expenses. I can also apply for Canada Pension Plan Disability benefits (CPP-D) - which, again, I may not qualify for because my medical situation is so weird - but not before six months have passed.

Even if I do manage to qualify for both, I will still be almost $1,000 a month short of what's needed to pay all the bills (mortgage, taxes, utilities, insurance, food) each month. But... I can't give up the house, because no rental situation is going to give me an environment that is free of toxic stuff and thus safe for me to live in. Any apartment we rent would share walls with other people and their perfumes and stuff would seep in and leave me in a situation that I'm not sure I could tolerate for the full length of time it would take for all that crap to kill me. I mean, we bought this house in the first place because I was getting so very sick from breathing other people's laundry exhaust, soap, perfume, air-fresheners, and so on.

So that sucks. Assuming all goes well and I do qualify for the LTD and the CPP-D, where do I get another grand a month? We have no debt except for the mortgage, so I can't reduce expenses by consolidating debt. We may be able to switch to a variable mortgage, which might lower the interest a bit. Not only am I pretty much not able to work, but the few things I could do - if I tried to do any of them, I would immediately become ineligible for both the LTD and the CPP-D. My partner is my full-time caregiver, he can't work either because he can't leave me alone.

So I really don't know at all how we're going to survive this. There are no relatives who would be realistically able to help (I have no relatives, period, and my partner's relatives are few and in difficult circumstances themselves, for the most part).

So... We're basically fucked. There's enough in savings and inheritance to carry us through the qualifying period (when I am not getting any money from anywhere), and what's left over will carry us through several more years (four or five, depending on various possibilities) IF I qualify for both LTD and CPP-D, and maybe one year if I don't. After that... things look bleak. Really, really bleak.

If anyone has some bright and original ideas, they would be welcome. Just...

Budgeting is not a solution. All we spend money on now, aside from the aforesaid mortgage, taxes, utilities and insurance, is food (which, because one of us has major food sensitivities and neither of us can tolerate chemicals, dyes, preservatives, etc, in our food, pretty much has to be what it is), household necessities (toilet paper, washing soda...) and books. Clothes when the old ones wear out. Replacing things that are broken or dead (we just bought a new TV because the old one is losing its ability to show images that are decipherable in any way whatsoever). We never go out, not even to see a movie. So please don't talk about cutting out non-essentials. We are by nature non-consumers. We don't buy shit we can do without anyway.

But anything else? I would love to hear any creative ideas or sources of funding that might apply to someone living in Toronto, Canada. Because any thought you have might just save my life.

David Gunn, March 10, 1993, Pensakola Florida
George Patterson, August 21, 1993, Mobile, Alabama
John Britton, June 29, 1994, Pensacola, Florida
James Barrett, June 29, 1994, Pensacola, Florida
Shannon Lowney, December 30, 1994, Brookline, Massachusetts
Lee Ann Nichols, December 30, 1994, Brookline, Massachusetts
Robert Sanderson, January 29, 1998, Birmingham, Alabama
Barnett Slepian, October 23, 1998, Amherst, New York
Steven Rogers, July 16, 2001, Melbourne, Australia
George Tiller, May 31, 2009, Witchita, Kansas

These women and men were murdered by anti-abortion terrorists because they offered, supported and defended reproductive choice. In addition, there have been over a dozen attempted murders, hundreds of assaults and hundreds of arsons, bombings and major acts of vandalism, primarily in the U.S., but also in Canada and Australia. In the face of these acts of terror, the people who continue to provide abortion services, and those who protect them, their clients, and their offices and clinics are nothing short of heroes.

Lest the sacrifice of those who have died and the courage and dedication of those who continue to face the threat of violence in order to provide this necessary medical service be in vain…

Support reproductive choice.
The decision to have an abortion is a personal decision between client and doctor.
The state has no place in the uteri of the nation.

A Thunder Bay woman is demanding an explanation after a teacher's aide at her son's school cut his long hair — an action her lawyer says is clearly assault while the Crown insists there are no grounds for charges....

The seven-year-old boy had chin-length hair before the incident last month. His mother said staff at McKellar Park Central Public School were aware her son was letting his hair grow so that he could take part in traditional First Nations dancing.

I've heard more detail on this in TV reports. The boy reported that the teacher's aide took hold of him bodily, placed him on a stool, cut off his bangs, then took him down and made him walk to a mirror and look at what she had done. In what world is that not a physical assault - to say nothing of an act powerfully and revoltingly evocative of the way that Aboriginal children were shorn of their hair when they were taken to residential schools.

Oh, I forgot - the boy is First Nations, and that means it's just fine for a fucking teacher's aide to grab him and do anything he/she wants to him to make him look "acceptable" to white eyes.

TV reports are also saying that the same person has done this before, cutting the hair of an older First Nations boy becasue his hair was too "feminine."

Gah. Not just physical assault, but continuation of cultural genocide - imposing white North American cultural assumptions and standards on Aboriginal people. Forced assimilation all over again.

And all the school had to say was that it was a "regrettable incident." And the Crown says this isn't assault.

Fuck that. I hope the family's lawyer takes this as far as they have to, to get recognition of just what was done to both of these boys (and I wonder how many others at this school, and others, have been treated the same way).

In the comments on the Tor.com post in which Patricia Wrede's book, The Thirteenth Child, is being discussed, Tor user Alo, in comment 196, quotes from a rec.arts.sf.composition post by Ms Wrede, discussion her own (then) work-in-progress:

The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna). I'm not looking for wildly divergent history, because if it goes too far afield I won't get the right feel. Not that it'll be all that similar anyway; no writing plan survives contact with the characters, and it's already starting to morph.

I repeat my subject line:

She said WHAT?

::head explodes::

It seems that, according to Ms. Wrede, at least on the occasion of the quote:

1. The best way to eliminate sterotypes of marginalised people in writing is to eliminate the marginalised people from one's writing?

2. Eliminating whole nations of people with thousands of years of history and rich, diverse cultures when writing alternative history isn't "widely divergent history"?

I know something about being erased from cultural representations of both history and modern society, and about people who are in certain ways like me being presented as often profoundly insulting and disturbing stereotypes when they do appear in cultural narratives - after all, I'm a woman, a queer person, a person with multiple disabilities, both visible and invisible.

And this just makes me sick at heart.

This isn't even a case of someone not thinking about the implications of making such a decision in developing her created world. No, she actually thought about ways in which the indigenous peoples of North America have been portrayed in settler literature, identified what she saw as problems, and deliberately decided to make the indigneous people vanish so she wouldn't have to apply herself to trying to do a better job of representing indigenous peoples that the problematic literature she identifies as the genre she's working in.

I say again:

She said WHAT?

::head explodes::

A platform-spanning discussion of Patricia Wrede's new book, Thirteenth Child, which originated at on tor.com with a review by Jo Walton, is taking place.

The discussion focuses on the ways in which the book, an alternate history fantasy in which First Nations people never arrived in the Americas, leaving the book's analogues for European peoples the luxury of settling in reality the Empty Continent that so much North American literature and popular culture seems to assume was there anyway (thus "vanishing" whole nations of indigenous - i.e., first arrival - peoples).

I have a suggestion for readers of fantasy who want to look at the other side of the Empty Continent trope. First Nations (Cherokee) author Daniel Heath Justice has written a trilogy of fantasy novels from the perspective of a people who have been colonised. It is heavily influenced by his own heritage. I've only read the first volume so far (the other two are sitting on my TBR shelf), but not only did I enjoy it, it made me think. My own review of the first volume can be found in my book journal, here.

Fortunately, I remembered to check my outstanding book orders - I had an open order with some unshipped items from Amazon.ca. I cancelled my order immediately, and made use of the nice little box they provided for comments to explain exactly why I had cancelled and why I would not be ordering from them again while this "adult books" policy is in effect.

Now, of course, I will go find somewhere else to order the cancelled items from, because it's important that the authors don't suffer from our protest actions - many of them are already going to hurt enough when their books don't appear in searches and on bestseller lists - because that's one of the very important ways that authors reach new readers, and that's why this issue is about so much more than just making it harder for us, the readers, to find the books we want to read.

Authors who are writing the kinds of books that we will no longer be able to find from casual searches are going to lose sales if this policy continues, and some of them may not be able to find publishers in the future if their sales numbers fall, and that will make all of us immeasurably poorer.

So - don't just protest this.

If you can, if you have the financial ability to do so, please consider going to your local independent bookseller, or to an online bookseller that's not out to censor books and impoverish authors who are writing "adult" material, and buy one of the books that has been stripped of its sales ranking on Amazon. There's lots of good books to choose from.

The Internets are talking a lot about racism and science fiction and a host of related concerns these days. There’s even a name for it – RaceFail 09 (aka The Cultural Appropriation Debate of Doom 09, because there has to be a pseudonym) – because so much of it has been about, in one way or another, how white fans and writers and editors and publishers are failing to even try to do the right thing when it comes to race.

I haven’t written much about it here or in comments in other posts, because I am wary of perpetuating the trope of the white defender riding to the rescue of the helpless oppressed person of colour. And there are so many powerful voices of colour speaking strongly and clearly and bravely and wisely and passionately and truthfully, they don’t need my help. They are not victims in need of saving, they are the heroes I hope to emulate.

But it’s also true that in many eyes, silence equals consent - with the oppressor, of course, never with the oppressed. If I do not speak, no one is going to assume that my silence means I agree with those strong, wise, brave, true voices of colour.

And so I say this: I do not consent to the silencing of different voices, even when they say what I am afraid to hear. I do not consent to the derailing of discussion on race and power and privilege, even when the discussion demands that I examine myself and find the unacknowledged racism and classism, the internalised sexism and ablism and heteronormativism, all the other influences that come from living in a society built on oppression and exploitation and protection of privilege and othering and dividing those who would resist in order to conquer all.

And I say this, too: I want to live in a world where we all can celebrate the differences of equals, where there are no Others, only different ways of being Us. But I know that’s not the world we live in, so it is incumbent on me to do what I can, in the best way that I can, in spite of all the internalised garbage I carry with me, and the racism of the world around me to try to make that world I want to live in a reality.

Here and now on this battlefield, for this white person who hopes to be a good ally, that means supporting fans and writers and editors and publishers of colour. It means honouring, savouring, learning from the words and thoughts and experiences that fans and writers and editors and publishers of colour have shared in the course of this engagement. It means taking the good that has begun here – the new ventures, the new understandings and awakenings, the new alliances – and building on them.

- - - - - - - - - -

Reading and learning:
The many links of rydra_wong
50books_poc

Supporting:
verb_noire
fight_derailing

Does it really need to be said that one valid response to reading something that you find profoundly angering in exactly the same way as the last fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand times you read it somewhere else, is throwing the book against the wall and writing about why that thing you read, in the book you threw against the wall, and in all the other books that you didn't throw against the wall because you hadn't reached your limit yet, made you so profoundly angry?

And even if someone comes to you and says, "that book you threw against the wall, it's written by someone who wanted to explore those issues that make you angry and try to expose them as what they are," it's perfectly reasonable to say "Just seeing it makes me angry and I don't want to see it, even in the context of trying to expose it for what it is, BECAUSE I ALREADY KNOW WHAT IT IS."

And I say this even though this particular book is one that I enjoyed, and that made me think about some of these things, because I am one of the people who doesn't know enough about those issues and hasn't been hurt by them and I wanted to see how they were dealt with and I had the privilege of knowing that anything that writer wrote about that issue could not hurt me. Plus, it had a lot of other stuff in it that was really interesting to me. So thanks to my privilege on this issue, I could read this book and not want to throw it against the wall.

But, you know, there was once this TV show that I loved. It said some wonderful things about female power, and it was lots of fun to watch. And then this TV show did something that made me profoundly angry in exactly the same way as the last fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand times I read/saw it in other places, and I didn't want to watch that show anymore. Because a lot of people seem to think that rape is such a wonderful dramatic vehicle, and getting raped by a god is even more dramatic, and they can give me all sorts of reasons why this rape was exactly the right thing to have in this TV show. But just because everyone and his metaphorical dog has used rape as a dramatic device, and sometimes they do it to show how nasty rape is and how surviving it can make a woman so strong, that doesn't mean that as a woman who has been raped, I'm not entitled to be profoundly angry and just say no to rape as a character development McGuffin.

And then there was this other TV show that I loved. It said some wonderful things about female power, and it was lots of fun to watch. And then this TV show also did something that made me profoundly angry in exactly the same way as the last fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand times I read/saw it in other places, and I didn't want to watch that show anymore either. Because there's only so many times a queer girl can read/watch things that written by people who think that it's the height of great drama to kill off the lesbians or turn them into insane and evil murderers, until she just doesn't want to see that anymore. Even if some people assure her that it's just because that writer never lets anyone be happy in a relationship, it's not like he's picking on the lesbians. Because lots of stories let straight people have happy endings, but they always kill the lesbians, or drive them mad.

So, yeah, I know something about lacking some kinds of privilege and getting so angry when privileged people use me and people like me in hurtful ways in books and movies and TV shows and cultural stuff in general. And I know that it's the right of anyone in that situation to throw the book against the wall, and write about why it hurt, and be as loud and angry as they want to be, because it is valid to get hurt and angry when someone is standing on your foot and not only won't get off, but tells you that they're standing on your foot so that people will see how bad it is to stand on someone's foot.

And it's the right of anyone in that situation to get even more profoundly angry when people tell you that you can't see that there's a good reason for that person to stand on your foot so people can see what it's like and learn from it because you're too emotional and not a good reader and haven't the critical tools to properly analyse what's happening in this brilliant piece of performance art in which someone is STANDING ON YOUR FOOT AND WON'T GET OFF. Or that you're being manipulative and abusive when you use strong and angry language to tell people that you're tired of people STANDING ON YOUR FOOT AND NOT GETTING OFF and you aren't going to smile, and take it, or maybe ask them politely if they wouldn't mind moving a little further away any more.

And I say this knowing that I may well be standing on someone's foot all unknowing myself, and can only ask that please, if I am, and am so stupid that I don't see it, then I would be grateful if you would tell me so I can try to do better at not standing on people's feet, because I know I don't like having my foot stood on, and I so don't want to stand on anyone else's foot either.


(If you need it, you can find context for this post here.)

I am getting so bloody sick of mainstream North American entertainment deciding that I, as a white person, am so empathy-challenged that I can't possibly identify with a person who is not white.

I assure you it's not true. I've watched dozens of movies (I'd watch more, but they're not all that easy to find) where the characters aren't white, and you know what - I've understood the characters' motivations, I've felt that I could identify with their struggles and their triumphs - in fact, I've enjoyed all those movies just as much as - and sometimes even more than - movies with all-white casts that are supposed to - what? reassure me? make me think "my people" run the universe? protect me from seeing difference?

And I bet you have, too. Even those of you who are also white like me.

So why do things like this keep happening? Who decides that if the source material, which is popular enough that you want to make a movie out of it in the first place, happens to have most or all of the characters be people of colour, that has to be changed for a North American audience?

When are we going to start having real-life casting? When will the people doing their thing in the movies and television shows I watch look like the streets of the city I live on, where there's more than just one black person, one Asian person, and maybe one Aboriginal person at a time?

I've got an idea.

Why don't we decide that for just one year, no movies or TV shows will be made that have white actors in them unless you can "justify" why the person playing the character is white. Let's have people of colour as the default, and only cast white people because it's a major plot point and there's no way to avoid it without making the piece meaningless, or because, well, you have to have one token white person. Who is, of course, either the sidekick or the mentor, and who of course sacrifices hirself heroically to save the non-white hero. Oh, maybe we'll allow two or three big-name white actors to make a movie, just to prove we aren't racist.

Let's see what our most popular forms of entertainment look like to those of us who are white, once we're the ones you hardly ever see. It might actually, you know, teach us something about being the person who's defined as the Other.

There's a couple concerts I've been to that stand out in my memory, decades afterwards.

Isaac Stern at the Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, Ontario - it was the 1983-84 concert season, and I was broke so I got half-price seats, which in that venue were at the back of the hall behind the stage. At the end of the concert, Mr. Stern took his bows, and then announced that since he had been playing all evening with his back to the people seated behind the stage, he thought it was only fair to perform his encores to us, with his back to the main audience. So for the encore, it was like having front-row seats to see one of the world's greatest violinists perform. That was actually a great year for violin concerts in Toronto: Yehudi Menuhin and Itzhak Perlman also performed at Roy Thomson, and so I saw all three of them in the same year.

And going back almost two more decades, to my very first live concert - Simon and Garfunkel around 1966, in Winnipeg - in a school gymnasium. They had three albums out by then - Wednesday Morning 3 A.M., Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, and Sounds of Silence - and I knew every word to every song. Not a bad concert experience to begin with. ;-)

And here are the last two doodles in this series begun a month ago.

Very loosely inspired by one of my favourite pieces of art, Katsushika Hokusai's Mount Fuji Seen Below a Wave at Kanagawa (alternately known as The Great Wave off Kanagawa).

Behold, a swordswoman. I really don't draw people very well. Proportions and realistic postures are problems, and faces are a real battle. Maybe I should draw more human figures, and I'd get better at them. (Wow, what an astounding insight. Not.)

Is anyone getting tired of these yet? Just nine more and I'll have posted a month's worth of drawings.

I rarely draw draw even semi-realistic humanoids, but something a bit strange got into me last night and so we have what might be a character sketch of an elven princess or some other not-quite-human person.

I forgot to post yesterday, so here's what I drew Monday night. I think it's an egg of some kind, possibly a dragon's egg, because what else could it be? ;-)







I drew this last night. It's the first of these doodles that I'm not really happy with. I've been experimenting with using colours that aren't more-or-less monochromatic, and I think I chose the wrong colour for the background of this piece. Maybe I should have gone with yellow/gold instead of red.

Oh well.

A green doodle.

I'm not at all sure where this came from. It started out looking vaguely Celtic, then sort of morphed into something vaguely psychedelic, and then continued to morph into something that might be loosely organic in nature.

I'm not sure where this one came from, but it might be something like a shmoo, or a very large albino Emperor penguin.

I've always enjoyed drawing dragons, even before I started living with one. If you're interested in seeing my very best ever drawing of a dragon, it's online here, and is of course an absolutely 100 percent accurate depiction of my partner au naturel, as it were.

Here's another dragon. I got carried away and made the flame a little too large to fit in the scanner.

OK, this is only one of at least 50 rumours going around about actors who might be in the running to place the Eleventh Doctor, but the first mention in this totally speculative article actually caused me to loudly squee with untrammelled delight at the mere notion of its occurrence.

Chiwetel Ejiofor.

I've been mad about this actor ever since I saw him in Dirty Pretty Things. He was intense in Serenity, totally awesome in Kinky Boots, riveting in Children of Men... need I go on? (I'm still waiting to see some of his latest releases because they're not out on DVD yet.)

Chiwetel Ejiofor as the Doctor. It's a match made in heaven, if he wants the gig.

Yes, Bill Nighy would be fun, and Robert Carlyle would be hot and James Nesbitt would be dark and quirky and Sean Pertwee would be a sentimental favourite, Richard E. Grant or Hugh Grant could be endearing, and both Paterson Joseph and Colin Salmon have the chops for the job, and yes it would be cool to see a the Doctor as a woman, but...

Chiwetel Ejiofor. It's got to be the best casting rumour yet.

This one requires, I think, some explanation. I was watching a tribute to Leonard Cohen on TV last night, and for some reason, when the song "Suzanne" was performed, I had this sudden flash on the line "she is wearing rags and feathers." I usually see Suzanne in terms of Madonna/Magdalen/Stella Maris imagery, but suddenly I could see her dressed in motley as the Holy Fool, and well, once I saw her, she had to be drawn.

My hand was sore last night from the stress of drawing the previous doodle (#7), which was rather time-consuming, so I did something very simple this time around.

This one started out as an aimless exploration of the green palette in my new box of coloured pencils, but then I kind of got into the idea of it being all about leaves. I even have a name for this - "A Fall of Leaves."

The first several doodles in this series were all done using very, very old coloured pencils that I've had hanging around for somewhere between 20 and 30 years. Needless to say, both the wood and the actual coloured pencil stuff inside was very dry and brittle. I'd been having problems with sharpening them, some of the pencils had split and were being held together with tape... they were a mess.

So yesterday glaurung went out and bought me a basic set of brand new artist's pencils, and a set of pastel pencils, which is a medium I haven't worked with since art class in high school. Cool stuff! And I have a booklet of all the colours that weren't in the basic set, so as soon as I decide which ones I want, I can get even more cool coloured pencils with a much broader palette.

So my drawings from here on will be either done with the nifty new artist's pencils (with space-age ergonomic grip, no less) or, once I get the feel of them, the pastel pencils. (unless I decide to do some not too labour intensive pen and ink work for this little experiment, that is)

I was so excited I did two drawings last night.

First, I drew some rocks. A pile of rocks, in fact. I like drawing rocks. I've drawn probably hundreds of rocks over the years, although I've only kept a couple of my rocks. I'm not sure why I like drawing rocks so much, but for some reason, I think they're fun to draw. So here's my latest bunch of rocks.