Random Acts of Observation

I love lists of great books. I realy love lists of great sf books. Tor.com has published a wonderful list by James Nicoll of “100 SF/F books You Should Consider Reading In the New Year.”

It is a great list, full of great books, some of which I have read, some of which I know only by reputation but have often wanted to read. Maybe this year I will.


I’ve starred the books I’ve read from the list. 45 out of 100, with a few that I think I have read but it was very long ago and I’. not sure.

A plus sign indicates the ones I own that are sitting patiently in my TBR list. Yes, I have a very, very long TBR list. A woman’s reach should exceed her grasp, or what’s a heaven for?


*The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (2014)
The Stolen Lake by Joan Aiken (1981)
Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa (2001-2010)
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō by Hitoshi Ashinano (1994-2006)
*The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
Stinz: Charger: The War Stories by Donna Barr (1987)
The Sword and the Satchel by Elizabeth Boyer (1980)
Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue by Rosel George Brown (1968)
*The Mountains of Mourning by Lois McMaster Bujold (1989)
+War for the Oaks by Emma Bull (1987)
*Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler (1980)
*Naamah’s Curse by Jacqueline Carey (2010)
*The Fortunate Fall by Raphael Carter (1996)
*The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (2015)
*Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant (1970)
*The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas (1980)
+Gate of Ivrel by C.J. Cherryh (1976)
*Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho (2015)
Diadem from the Stars by Jo Clayton (1977)
*The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper (1973)
Genpei by Kara Dalkey (2000)
Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard (2010)
The Secret Country by Pamela Dean (1985)
*Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany (1975)
*The Door into Fire by Diane Duane (1979)
On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis (2016)
*Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott (2006)
Enchantress From the Stars by Sylvia Louise Engdahl (1970)
*Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle (1983)
The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss (1997)
A Mask for the General by Lisa Goldstein (1987)
+Slow River by Nicola Griffith (1995)
+Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly (1988)
Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand (1990)
*Ingathering by Zenna Henderson (1995)
The Interior Life by Dorothy Heydt (writing as Katherine Blake, 1990)
*God Stalk by P. C. Hodgell (1982)
*Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson (1998)
*Zero Sum Game by S.L. Huang (2014)
*Blood Price by Tanya Huff (1991)
The Keeper of the Isis Light by Monica Hughes (1980)
God’s War by Kameron Hurley (2011)
+Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta (2014)
*The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (2015)
Cart and Cwidder by Diane Wynne Jones (1975)
*Daughter of Mystery by Heather Rose Jones (2014)
+Hellspark by Janet Kagan (1988)
A Voice Out of Ramah by Lee Killough (1979)
St Ailbe’s Hall by Naomi Kritzer (2004)
*Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz (1970)
*Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner (1987)
*A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (1962)
Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier (2005)
*The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
*Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (2013)
+Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee (Also titled Drinking Saphire Wine, 1979)
*Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (2016)
Wizard of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm (1986)
*Adaptation by Malinda Lo (2012)
*Watchtower by Elizabeth A. Lynn (1979)
*Tea with the Black Dragon by R. A. MacAvoy (1983)
*The Outback Stars by Sandra McDonald (2007)
*China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh (1992)
+Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre (1978)
The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. McKillip (1976)
*Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees (1926)
Pennterra by Judith Moffett (1987)
The ArchAndroid by Janelle Monáe (2010)
*Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore (1969)
+Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2016)
+The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy (1989)
+Vast by Linda Nagata (1998)
*Galactic Derelict by Andre Norton (1959)
*His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik (2006)
+Dragon Sword and Wind Child by Noriko Ogiwara (1993)
Outlaw School by Rebecca Ore (2000)
*Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor (2014)
*Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce (1983)
*Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy (1976)
+Godmother Night by Rachel Pollack (1996)
Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (1859)
My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland (2011)
*The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975)
Stay Crazy by Erika L. Satifka (2016)
The Healer’s War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1988)
Five-Twelfths of Heaven by Melissa Scott (1985)
*Everfair by Nisi Shawl (2016)
*Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
*A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski (1986)
*The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart (1970)
*Up the Walls of the World by James Tiptree, Jr. (1978)
The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner (1996)
The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge (1980)
*All Systems Red by Martha Wells (2017)
The Well-Favored Man by Elizabeth Willey (1993)
Banner of Souls by Liz Williams (2004)
Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson (2012)
*Ariosto by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1980)
+Ooku by Fumi Yoshinaga (2005-present)

Christmas morning has brought me a wealth of wonderful presents.

Thank you so much, to my extended family - Angela, Sadie, Nancy and Mary - for a treasured gift, the ebook version of Susan Cannon Harris’ Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions. Susan’s scholarship touches on so many points of interest for me, and academic presses are so expensive, And, just.... wow, thank you, thank you, thank you.

And much gratitude to my beloved partner, who supports my reading habit with such marvelous gifts of ebooks:

Charlie  Angus,  Children  of  the  Broken  Treaty
Danielle  L.  McGuire,  At  the  Dark  End  of  the  Street
Andrea  Ritchie,  Invisible  No  More:  Police  Violence  Against  Black  Women  and  Women  of  Color
James  Daschuk,  Clearing  the  Plains
Edmund  Metatawabin,  Up  Ghost  River:  A  Chief’s  Journey  Through  the  Turbulent  Waters  of  Native  History
Pamela  Palmater,  Indigenous  Nationhood
Robyn  Maynard,  Policing  Black  Lives
Farah  Mendlesohn,  Spring  Flowering
Linda  Gordon,  The  Second  Coming  of  the  KKK
Samuel  R.  Delany,  Dark  Reflections
Mary  Beard,  Women  &  Power
Helen  Epstein,  Another  Fine  Mess:  America,    Uganda,    and  the  War  on  Terror 
Arthur  J.  Ammann,  Lethal  Decisions:  The  Unnecessary  Deaths  of  Women  and  Children  from  HIV/AIDS
Mindy  Klasky (ed), Nevertheless,  She  Persisted
dequi  kioni-sadiki  (ed),  Look  for  Me  in  the  Whirlwind
Mikki  Kendall  (ed),  Hidden  Youth:  Speculative  Fiction  from  the  Margins  of  History
Angela  Y.  Davis,  Freedom  Is  a  Constant  Struggle
Naomi  Klein,  No  Is  Not  Enough:  Resisting  the  New  Shock  Politics  and  Winning  the  World  We  Need
Keeanga-Yamahtta  Taylor  (ed),  How  We  Get  Free

My medical issues over the past year (yeah, i'll soon be a year since I was diagnosed with hypercalcemia and my life turned into one medical nightmare after another) have severely interfered with my new identity as a Hugo voter. Over the course of last year, I didn't read nearly as many well-recommended works as I'd wanted to. So when January rolled around and nomination season was gearing up, I made lists of the books and short fiction I hadn't read but that sounded really interesting, and tried to push my way through those lists. A few years ago I could have done it easily. This year, I barely read a handful of what I wanted to, though I did read enough, I felt, to make some good nominations in most categories.

And now the finalists have been released and there are many I haven't read yet. I'm working on them, of course, but it's so hard to just focus and read these days.

It's disorienting, like losing one of the core parts of my identity - which I suppose it is, I have no memory of a tine when I did not read, and read extensively and quickly at that. I'm told that no one knows when I learned to read. Like many kids, I would often look at my books even when I wasn't being read to from a very early age, but it was assumed that I was looking at the pictures or making up stories, as kids do. It wasn't until my mother started listening to me muttering things when we were out driving that she realised that - at not yet three years of age - I was reading billboards and window signs. And that at some point, I had actually begun reading for myself, not just following along as she read to me.

So it feels very strange not to be reading very much. As though I'm not myself. I keep expecting the real me, who focuses easily on her chosen reading material and moves through it like a fish in water, to resurface. Maybe she's just taking a time-out, getting used to operating while in constant pain and without much sleep. But I fear more and more that she's gone, and won't be coming back.

I miss her very much.

So, my health is kind of falling apart, even more than before. My trip to the hospital revealed that I have developed parathyroidism, caused by tumours on my parathyroid glands. Surgery is the only treatment.

Problem is transport. While provincial healthcare will cover an emergency ambulance transport, it won't cover something scheduled, like surgery. And because I am heavy and of very limited mobility, I need an ambulance and four people (two crews) to get to the hospital, and private ambulance services are expensive.

And I don't have any extra funds for something like this, and I've researched every personal and organisational angle I can think of. It's a hole in the system - my care is covered if I can get to the hospital, but getting to the hospital isn't covered by anyone.

So, I've started a crowdfunding effort to try and defray the transportation costs. I don't know if anyone out there is able and willing to toss a few pennies in the pot, but if anyone is.... You will have my eternal gratitude.

https://www.gofundme.com/morgandhu

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.

In the past year or two, I've become accustomed to posting on Facebook rather than here. It's easier - or at least, I perceive it as easier. On Facebook, all I need do is post a few lines, or a link to an article or picture I want to share. But there's something about a blog that seems to demand a greater degree of involvement with the text, and I often lack the energy for that. Maintaining my book journal seems to take everything I have.

And then there's the fact that really, not much happens to me except that things get more painful and more difficult to achieve. On Facebook, I mostly post articles dealing with current affairs - issues I feel strongly about. But I'm usually too tired to write extensively and coherently about those issues.

So perhaps I'll just blather on about my odd thoughts, as I'm doing now, and perhaps that will justify my keeping this journal active.

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.

I have a very long and often conflicted relationship with the process of producing visual "art."

Like a lot of people, I started drawing and painting at an early age, but before I had much of a chance to figure out my own relationship to what I was making, other people began characterising what I produced as different from what other kids my age were producing. People started to consider me to be talented or gifted in the area of visual art - a label I was already carrying with respect to scholastic achievement.

The problem for me was that it was fairly easy fulfilling the role of an academically gifted child. There were some very clear guidelines and benchmarks to follow: do a lot of reading, make good marks on tests and essays, things like that.

It was a lot less easy to figure out how to meet people's expectations of being artistically gifted. All I knew was that I liked playing with form and colour - I couldn't figure out what it was that differentiated what I was doing from what other children my age were doing, and so I was never secure in my ability to repeat my previous "successes."

You must understand that it matters very much in all of this that I was an abused child, and that the trigger for the abuse I received was almost always stated by my abuser as my failure to be what I was supposed to be. So as a child, I wasn't all that scared of "earning" punishment for not being as academically successful as I was supposed to be, because I understood how to be that way, and I rarely failed to produce the expected results. But I never understood how to ensure that any visual art I produced would meet the expectations of previous efforts, and so each time I did something in that area, I was terrified that I would fail to meet other people's expectations and would be punished. Yet at the same time, I loved making visual art.

So I began making art secretly. I'd paint or draw and then destroy what I had done. Paradoxically, I would also take art classes in school, and the art I did in public was often displayed as a good example of some class exercise or other. By the time I reached university, I was carrying around a small notebook in which I frequently "doodled" - this being the term I've always preferred to use in relation to what I do, and what I make, as calling it art seems to be tempting people to judge me and my visual productions, and find them lacking. I did everything I could to downplay the importance to me of "doodling," and although by now I wasn't destroying everything I did as I completed it - although I'd often throw drawings out after they'd been around for a while - I did develop the habit of giving almost everything I made away to the first person who saw it and said something nice about it. Slowly I started doodling less and less often, until I'd only make something a couple of times a year, when I felt compelled to make something.

So, after a lifetime of sporadically producing art, never being sure whether it really was art, and always afraid that even if I did manage to make art occasionally, it might not ever be able to duplicate the accomplishment, I have very little record of what I've done. Over the past decade, I've been keeping what I make, largely due to the encouragement of my partner, though I still haven't been making doodles - or art, or whatever it is - very often.

Part of that is because of my disabilities. I can no longer paint with oils because they have become toxic to me, and using waterpaints or doing work with pen and ink requires certain physical flexibility and strength (in terms of the positions I have to hold in order to do that kind of work) that I can no longer achieve without pain. But recently, I've rediscovered coloured pencils, and I'm starting to doodle with them.

Which finally brings me around to the point of this post. Over on tor.com, Pablo Defendini posted a brief note about an analogue to NaNoWriMo, in which people are doing at least one drawing every day during the month of November. I don't have the courage (or maybe it would be hubris, who knows) to formally get involved with the group doing this, but I have decided to commit myself to making one drawing/doodle every day this month, and posting the results in this blog.

Sometimes, when I sit down to make my daily doodle, I'll just do what I usually do, which is make a line on paper and see where it goes. But I do intend to try out some things that are new or different for me, to make myself doodle outside my box, as it were. And yes, one of the reasons I'm doing this in public is because comments are welcome.

I am aware that this was developed for use in a university setting, but it seems to me that the list is very questionable as more than a very blunt instriment indeed, and does not do very well at anything other than, perhaps, differentiating the traditional American middle class nuclear family from anything that is not that.

I illustrate by doing... there's hardly a single question I can respond to without questions and qualifications. The instructions are to bold that which is true, but it doesn't tell me which part of my childhood or youth I'm to consider. Since I went through several changes of class before hitting 18 and/or finishing college, both of which events are mentioned in this list, I'm going to have to discuss what was true for me when.


INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: From What Privileges Do You Have?, based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. (If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.)



1. Father went to college. (That is, my most likely biological father, whom I have never met and who hasn't had any effect on my life experience, and who did not at any time, to my knowledge, contribute to my financial support. My mother's husband, who had a profound effect on my class status for the first few years of my life, did not attend university, but did, I think, attend some community or vocational college. In Canada, in the 1950s, this is a huge difference in class.)

2. Father finished college. (See above. My putative biological father not only finished university, he taught university, which is what he was doing when he got his student, my mother, pregnant. She had to leave school, of course. This was the 50s.)

3. Mother went to college. (See above.)

4. Mother finished college. (Much later, when I was around nine or ten, she completed her BA and her MA. She got her PhD when I was about 16, and got her law degree when I was in my early 20s.)

5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor. (See above. On the part of my biological father, this would have had zero effect on my own class or access to professional class privileges or values while growing up. My mother taught constitutional law later in life after retiring from a long career in the civil service which started when I was 10, after she finished her MA - but that had no effect on my class or access to professional class privileges either, as it happened after we'd pretty much stopped speaking altogether. I have other relatives, but I had little to no contact with most of them, ever, and most of them, I have no idea what their profession or occupation might have been. I was raised for a time by my maternal grandmother, who was completely estranged from her own family. My biological maternal grandfather was an engineer - definitely professional class in the 1920s and 30s, but since my grandparents divorced when my mother was two, he's not a class influence. My grandmother ran a whorehouse during the war - what class would that make her - do you know? I certainly don't. The only one of her husbands I even knew was her last, a farmer who did not complete grade 6. He helped raise me at some points in my life.)

All of these questions assume a stable nuclear family, or at least a family in which one's relatives are ongoing influences. It assumes that you know who your parents are and stayed with them throughout your childhood, that changes in family structure such as divorce or death of a parent did not affect your family's circumstances.

6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers. (By the time I was 11 or 12 and my mother was fully established in the professional class and out from under the debts her husband had dumped on her, yes, I was the same economic class as my teachers.)

7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home. (Yes, even if many of them were second-hand or my mother's textbooks when I was very young. Having a very strong aspiration to complete her own education and move up in class, my mother went to some lengths to provide me with access to the cultural advantages of the class she wanted us to become accustomed to. She did without so that I could have books, when we were poor. She gave me as much money as I wanted to acquire books once we were middle class.)

8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home. (See above. By the time I left home, the walls were covered with books, hers and mine.)

9. Were read children’s books by a parent. (My mother read a lot to me when I was very young, but as I began reading spontaneously when I was about three, she didn't continue this once I could read on my own. She did, however, encourage me to write.)

10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18. (Yes. But (there's always a but)... I had free gym lessons for a while when my mother worked for the YMHC in Montreal. Later, I had more free sports and gym lessons for a while when my mother's husband worked for the YMCA in Saskatoon. I had some free piano lessons courtesy of a friend of mt mother's who was paying for a Conservatory student to come and teach her two daughters - she let me sit in and use their piano for practice. I had some free art lessons when I was young becasue many of my mother's friends were struggling artists and she'd let them come to dinner sometimes. I had free swimming lessons through a community pool. And later, in high school, I had a whole year's worth of private art lessons that I arranged for myself by doing housework and shopping for an artist I'd met through some school program.)

11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18. (See above.)

12. The people in the media who dress and talk like you are portrayed positively. Often people who talk like me are (but more often than not their voices are baritone or tenor or even bass rather than contralto or soprano), but never people who dress and look like me.

13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18. (This really didn't happen in the 60s, unless you were really upper class.)

14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs.([Edit] I neglected to discuss the whole issue of paying for university. I first went to university when I was 16. When I started university, I was still living with my mother, who paid my tuition. The universtiy I attended was located in the city I lived in, so I lived at home and my mother continued to pay all my living costs. However, I dropped out at mid-term, left home and hitchhiked around the continent for a while, having many adventures on little to no money at all before deciding to go live with my grandmother and go back to school. Still estranged from my mother, with my grandmother unable to help me financially, I managed to win a scholarship that covered tuition and room and board (in residence). I got a job working nights in a pizza joint to cover all my other expenses.)

15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs. (See above)

16. Went to a private high school. (For one year. On partial scholarship. My mother's husband lost the money that was supposed to cover the rest of it gambling, so I wasn't welcome back the next year, and they withheld my prize for best student in Form I becasue the bill wasn't paid. I should be glad that they didn't kick me out at half-term.)

17. Went to summer camp. (For one summer. When my mother's husband had a job with a summer camp and staff kids were allowed to attend free.)

18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18. (When I was going to high school, Greek was still taught in some schools. I loved Greek. But after my first year, it was phased out at my school. The Greek teacher, out of the goodness of his heart and for no pay, allowed those of us who wanted to continue to drop in on him to ask questions, run drills with him, do assignments and have them marked, on our own schedules. Does that count?)

19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels. (After my mother joined the professional class, all the time. Before then, in summer, we camped. In winter, we stayed in cheap motels.)

20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18. (The older I was, the more likely this was to be true, but as an only child without any relatives living nearby, during the entire childhood, most of my clothes were either bought new or, more likely, made by my mother.)

21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them. (When I was around 25, my mother gave me her older car when she got a new one. I've never owned a new car in my life. Note how this assumes that one's parents were able to maintain a car.)

22. There was original art in your house when you were a child. (As I mmentioned, many of my mother's friends were struggling artists. Plus, both my mother and I painted. After mother pulled us up into the middle class, she sometimes bought original art from unknown artists whose work she liked.)

23. You and your family lived in a single family house. (Once, for a couple of years, we rented a small house in Saskatoon. Also, my grandmother and her husband lived in a farmhouse in rural Nova Scotia during the times I lived with them. The rest was apartments and flats.)

24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home. (My grandmother's husband owned that farmhouse. My mother has never owned any houses to the best of my knowledge, except for the farmhouse which she inherited and sold when my grandmother died. At 52, I've just bought my first house.)

25. You had your own room as a child. (I was an only child, so this was mostly true. But even so, for a while, I shared a bedroom with my mother, after she divorced but before she paid off the debts. And for a time, when I was quite young, we all lived in a bedsit, my mother, her husband, and me.)

26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18. (Once my mother was well estabvlished as a professional, yes.)

27. Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course. (This was, again, something only for the very upper crust when I was young.)

28. Had your own TV in your room in High School (Yes. A very small, portable, black and white TV.)

29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College. (Hah! I have only just this year, at the age of 52, been able to begin an RRSP, which is the Canadian version of an IRA.)

30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16. (My mother used to fly me home to my grandmother's whenever, for whatever reason, it wasn't possible for her to have me with her. Once I was into my teens and we were middle class, we flew often when vacationing.)

31. Went on a cruise with your family.

32. Went on more than one cruise with your family.

33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up. (When I was young, yes, on free admittance days. When I was older, often, particularly when we travelled.)

34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family. (Since we usually rented, there were for the most part no heating bills, it was included in the rent. I did have a basic idea of how much rent my mother paid and how it compared to rents in other kinds of housing. And of course I knew how much it took to buy a cord of wood for the wood stove at my grandmother's farmhouse.)

One of the assumptions in this list that hits me the hardest when I try to answer, aside from the whole issue of assumptions about family structures, is the assumption that one either gets access to intellectual experience (books, classes, private schools, art, museums, etc.) as a privilege or not at all. What about all the people who managed access, but it wasn't through privilege but through a combination of luck and planning and getting in through the side or even the back door, or even just looking very intently through a window, for some. I wasn't privileged to have access to cultural knowlege, my mother, during my childhood, fought hard and found unconventional ways to get me access. But I always knew I didn't always arrive through the front door, and so, while I have the knowledge, and I now have many of the privileges that knowlege has enabled me to access, I feel differently about it than someone who got those initial experiences as entitlements. I imagine there are a lot of people that got their intellectual privilege the same way.

For more discussion of the unexamined assumptions in this list, check out Elizabeth Bear's journal (matociquala)

Every once in a while, someone I know on the Netz finds a website that does work with Implicit Association testing, and I go and test myself again. I've been doing this for a long time, longer than most, because I used to know via a particular fandom one of the students of the original researchers on this particular methodology and I took a test she had developed for her own research project.

So I have a fairly long history of taking them. I may be testwise by now, but I try to measure that by, whenever I find a new site that tests some new set of implicit associations, finding one of the first tests I ever took and retaking it to see if there's been a change in my results. There hasn't been yet. And I try to approach each new test I take with a clear mind, focused on the task and not on what the results will be.

So today I wandered through my flist and followed some links to the Harvard IAT test site. There were some new tests that I hadn't taken before, and a few that I had, so I took some new ones and retook a couple of them.

As usual, I am bothered by some of my responses.

My responses to one of the new ones I took was perfectly understandable. It turns out that I have a strong automatic preference for fat people over thin people. Seeing as I am fat, and that society is obsessed with thinness to the point of unhealthiness, especially for women, that's likely a good thing. It probably means that while I'm concerned about health issues, at least I think fat people can be good.

I also have always demonstrated a moderate to strong automatic preference for gay people over straight people. Again, being bisexual, I tend to identify with gay people more than I do with straight people, in general terms, so that one makes sense, too.

It also turns out that I do not have an automatic association between men and science, as opposed to women and science, which makes sense because I'm a woman who has always been interested in the sciences and has spend a lot of time thinking about anti-woman stereotypes and assumptions and I think in my time I've managed to get over a lot of them at a pretty deep level.

Here's the stuff that I don't get.

Over the years I've been trying these tests out, I have consistently been told that my responses demonstrate a strong automatic preference for black or dark-skinned people over white or light-skinned people. My responses also apparently indicate that I automatically associate North American Aboriginal people with being American to a much greater extent than I associate whites with being American and that I don't appear to think Asian people are "foreign" compared to white people. I'm apparently neutral in terms of religions - I have pretty much the same pattern of associations with Judaism as I do with other religions. I apparently also have a moderate automatic preference for Arab Muslims over other people. All of these responses are apparently anywhere from somewhat to very uncommon - for instance, my response to the preference test for black people vs. white people is found in about three percent of the American test population.

Here's what bothers me. I am white, raised in a predominantly white environment. While it is true that over the years I have had colleagues, friends and lovers of other races and religious groups, I was, like every other white person in North America (at least) raised in relative privilege and raised to be racist.

So when I look at these results, I wonder, and I worry. Am I unconsciously faking out the tests to reassure myself that I'm "not really" a racist? Have I fetishised people of colour? Or am I just so disgusted by the history of white people’s behaviour in general and American/North Americans in particular that I automatically favour any other group of people in a context where I am thinking about prejudice and race? I'm not sure I understand or trust what may or may not be going on in my head, especially with respect to the responses to race-based tests.

And the literature I’ve found online isn’t much help. Most of it seems to be focused on either reassuring me that I’m not a bad person because my results show bias against minority groups, or arguing that the tests are invalid because they make almost everyone appear biased against minority groups. There’s nothing that I can find about people who appear to be consistently biased against majority groups, even the ones that they are members of.

But there have to be other people like me that have a consistent anti-privilege bias, because that’s what seems to be the connecting thread in all of my responses over the years. This would even explain my response to the religions test – if I was unconsciously faking it, you’d think I would have come out strongly pro-Judaism, but if I’m being anti-privilege, then I’d be expected to get confused with this test, because it’s not comparing responses between two religious groups with unequal privilege in North American, but rather comparing Judaism on one hand and a collection of several other religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and North American Aboriginal spiritual traditions as well as Christianity, on the other hand. And while I’m well-known to be severely critical of Christianity as the privileged religion in North America, I would expect that I’d tend to favour the other religions included as much as I’d favour Judaism.

But I wish I could find more information on how to interpret consistent responses like mine on race-based tests coming from white people. Does it make sense to think what’s going on in my head is an anti-privilege bias? Or am I just trying to justify some unusual manifestation of inherent racist thinking? Or am I overthinking the whole damn thing?

So there’s this meme going around, in which someone posts a list like the one I’m posting here, of 10 things you love that all begin with a specific letter, and if you want to play, you comment on their post and they give you a letter that you’re supposed to use to make your own list of 10 things you love that start with that one specific letter. I read a list created by chlaal, and asked her for a letter, and she gave me the letter V.

So here are 10 things I love that begin with the letter V.

Vampires. I have a great fetishy love for vampires. The myth fascinates me, the idea of the undead who needs the living to survive. It’s all about lusts and dark desires and bitter bargains. I’m particularly attracted to the current cultural project to redeem the vampire – which to my mind heightens the struggle. It’s one thing to have this wonderful villain (at least from the perspective of a human being) that walks the night killing people for their blood in order to survive, this unrepentant clot of cold and dark and hunger and need that stalks the living, but… placing the struggle between need and empathy, light and darkness, living and dying within the mind (and maybe the soul) of one creature makes for fascinating reading.

Vulvas. And what lovely, rich, warm, soft, beautiful, delicious, earthy, lusty, playful, expressive things they are, too.

Vulcans. Well, one Vulcan in particular (yes, I was a Trekkie and I was a Mr. Spock fangirl from day one, and by day one, I mean September of 1966). And all the imagined versions of an alien culture based on logic and reason, which (in these days of scorn toward the “reality-based community” from worshipers of the Thing from the Outer Darkness that Sits in the House and his Canadian acolyte, the Thing that Rules on the Hill) somehow seems ever more attractive, at least in public life.

Vacations. I love vacations. They are times when I can sleep all I want and read books all day and night if it pleases me with no thought to mundane demands.

Vonarburg, Elisabeth. Amazing writer of stunningly thoughtful and lyrical science fiction. If you don’t know who she is, go read something by her today, in French or English. May I recommend Chroniques du pays des mères, published in English as In the Mothers' Land (and in English in Canada as The Maerlande Chronicles.

Violins. There is something about the sound that a violin makes – whether it’s being handled by Isaac Stern or Ashley MacIsaac or anyone in between) that strikes right into my soul and moves it to sing, to pray, to dance, to cry…

Volcanos. One of the great and dramatic reminders we have that no matter how powerful we think ourselves to be, the Earth can destroy us. As perhaps she should, considering what we’ve been doing to her and her other children.

Viridian. There are many shades of the colour green that I like, but viridian is one of my favourites. I love it because it’s the colour of the dark forest, with hints of earth and dark blue waters and all sorts of wonderful things. It has weight and depth and the kind of abiding strength to it that you find in the earth itself.

Vanagas. As in Povilas Vanagas and his spouse and skating partner Margarita Drobiazko. One of the best, most graceful, most expressive, most powerful ice dancing teams I’ve ever seen. Perhaps they weren’t always technically perfect – although at times in their amateur career they came very close – but there was always a sense of both thought and passion in their skating, and they could be wild and blazing, or soft and gentle, and always straight from the soul.

Vangelis. Specifically his score for the movie Chariots of Fire. I could listen to that music all day. In fact, sometimes I have.

Ok. Your turn. If you want one. Ask me for a letter.
Or just comment on the things I listed, if that's more your style.

So several people on my flist have posted about their dreams today. I rarely talk about about my dreams, because they are either very surreal in a way that's only going to be meaningful to me (and these kinds of dreams usually are very meaningful, and I know exactly what they're saying to me) or I dream extended fantasy/sf/adventure novels with no meaning whatsoever except that my subconscious is getting bored with hanging around doing nothing while it waits for me to wake up and feed it more data.

Also, I tend to have very full recall of most of my dreams.

Last night, for instance, I had a dream in which I was two people observing that same sequence of events from two different but crucial perspectives. One of me was the commander of a Roman legion that had gotten lost in the mists somewhere in the countryside of Brittania while out looking for Caledonian incursions past Hadrian's Wall. When the mists clear, they are somewhere that they don't recognize - though the lay of the land seems somewhat familiar, and they hastily make camp. Scouting parties reveal that they have camped near a cluster of strange metal and wooden buildings inhabited by large herds of animals and a small number of strangely attired people. They are confused, frightened, and in full-out Roman legion defense mode, and the commander is deeply concerned that his men are about to be ambushed and slaughtered in some strange Caledonian mind-trick.

My other consciousness in the dream is that of a rather mousy British civil servant whose primary responsibility is to take care of increasing numbers of bewildered and displaced people who have been appearing all over Great Britain from a variety of past eras. His current task - dredge up a small "first contact" party of people who are reasonably fluent in 2nd century Latin to go explain what's going on to the Romans before they get too antsy and conquer the nearby dairy farm. He really, really dislikes all of these people, becasue his former job, before all of this started happening, was much more predictable, and now he never knows what he'll have to deal with, and when.

Misunderstandings, near-fatal decisions, and other foolishness ensues, and unfortunately, I woke up before I learned anything about why all of these time travellers were littering up the British countryside. Maybe that will come tonight - sometimes dreams that I don't finish one night pick up where they left off on the following night.

This is why I have never been inclined to keep a dream journal. I'd never have time to do anything else if I actually wrote down everything that happens in all of my dreams.

How did it get to be March already? I could have sworn it was just yesterday that I heard Christmas carols.

Oh, now I remember, I've been working. I do love my job, don't get me wrong, but sometimes there's just so much of it. I am sometimes amused by the sight of senior project directors fighting to have me working on their projects (I can't take on nearly as many projects as I'm asked to do, and when I tell them I'm booked, they start playing dirty among themselves to get their hands on me), but the amusement value kind of wears off over time when you find out that you said yes to what was scheduled as a week's worth of work and it turns out the size and complexity of the project has been enhanced and now it's going to take two weeks, only you're already booked to be doing something else next week so you try to do two things at once, and then there's a technical problem with the data collection one project and that means more time to fix things, and then the client on the project you did last week comes back and says "This is all wonderful, but we need more of X, which we didn't actually mention needing in the Statement of Work" and someone dumps a proposal for something two months down the line on you and says "we need to change the design to this, please redo the budget and get it to the client this afternoon, I can't because I'm flying to Whitehorse" and so it goes.

There is a downside to being very good at what you do.

There are probably upsides as well, but at the moment I'm having a little trouble remembering what they are.

Another book meme. Oh well, I suppose that things in the "real" world are just so fucking insane that I'm finding more that I enjoy talking about in the world of books than the world of so-called reality. Not that I think what I'm reading in the newspapers is actually reality, but you all surely know more-or-less what I mean.

Taken from chlaal

1) How many books do you have?

chlaal said "I'm amazed by the concept of people actually knowing how many books they have," and I'm going to have to agree with her on that. What also makes this question somewhat difficult to answer is the fact that my partner and I are both omnivorous readers, but even though we both buy books, they’re really all pretty much "ours."

Based on average books per foot of shelving multiplied by approximate feet of shelving, I'd say we have between 2,250 and 2,500 books. And no, in most rooms we can't see very much of the walls, why do you ask?


2) What is the last book you bought?

Actually, the last book I have was bought for me by my partner, but it was from my "wish list" of science fiction and fantasy books (a 5-page list, and growing I might add - how dare these people write more books before I've finished reading the ones they've already written?) - Midnight Harvest, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, one in her very lengthy and entertaining Count Saint-Germain series.

The last books (shopping spree) I bought myself were mostly for my partner's birthday, but since I also intend to read them, I'll list them here.

Islam and Democracy, Fatima Mernissi
Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, Nancy Mairs
A Troubled Guest: Life & Death Stories, Nancy Mairs
Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction & Beyond, Marleen S. Barr
Future: Tense, Gwynne Dyer
Gifts, Ursula K. LeGuin
The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs


3)What is the last book you read?

The last book I finished was Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, by Nancy Mairs. I'm currently reading Corporation by Joel Bakan.


4) Five books that mean a lot to me.

Hmm. The last meme I did listed ten of my favourite books, all of which mean a lot to me. So I'm going to see if I can think of five books that mean a lot to me that weren’t on the previous list.

1. Babel-17 by Samuel Delany. I read this when I was quite young (not yet 10) and every few months I still find myself in a conversation and suddenly realise just how much it influenced me, on everything from my approach to language and poetry to my attitudes toward gender reassignment surgery.

2. Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, by Richard Bach. I've never denied I was a hippie. 'Nuff said.

3. The Glass Bead Game, by Herman Hesse. I gained a lot of insights about spirituality, epistemology, meditation, and the balance of life from thinking about this book.

4. The Dialectic of Sex: Case for Feminist Revolution, by Shulamith Firestone. For some people it was The Feminist Mystique, for some it was The Female Eunuch - and I'm not saying those books didn't affect me profoundly, because they did – but Firestone's book put feminism into a larger context and gave it a burning heart for me. I am the kind of feminist – and very likely the kind of socialist – that I am today because of the place she gave me to start my journey.

5. The Golden Bough, by James Frazier. I tend to see life, language, thought in terms of symbols, parallels, thematic connections. It's a deeply ingrained part of how I think, and I suspect I owe a great deal of that to an early and intensely thorough reading of this book.

So, interestingly enough, this turned out to be, not so much about my favourite books, as about some of the books that shaped who I am.

I don't often do memes, but this one is fun.

From chlaal

Book meme:
1. Choose five of your all time favorite books.
2. Take the first sentence of the first chapter and make a list in your journal.
3. Don't reveal the author or the title of the book.
4. Now everyone try and guess.


The first few are basically for free because they’re so obvious, so I’m going to list ten instead of five. There are a couple that I suspect might be rather obscure, so I’m giving the first two sentences, just to be nice. Oh, and I happen to think that in some cases, the prologue really is the first chapter.


1. Once upon a time when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith.

2. This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history.

3. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

4. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

5. The window of the bus was a dark square against the featureless night. Lea let her eyes focus slowly from their unthinking blur until her face materialized, faint and fragmentary, highlighted by the dim light of the bus interior.

6. Chick with a harp. Her hair was the color of an angry sunset, and it fell to her waist in ripples of copper and red.

7. The river flowed both ways. The current moved from north to south, but the wind usually came from the south, rippling the bronze-green water in the opposite direction.

8. The Khadilh ban-harihn frowned at the disk he had in his hand, annoyed and apprehensive.

9. The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California.

10. I know I was all right on Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual.

A very self-focused meme all about things one has and has not done, taken from rainbow_goddess ...

( For anyone who's interested... )

I am almost at the end of a month-long marathon in terms of work. I have been putting in truly insane hours - in four weeks, I have racked up 50 hours of overtime. I am both mentally and physically exhausted. Fortunately, I have two weeks vacation coming in mid-August, so if I can just stay functional until then, I can recouperate while sitting on the couch watching the Olympics.

The good things about this insane month are:
I have been writing qualitative analysis (my experience is primarily in quantitative analysis) under the guidance of one of the top qualitative reseachers in the country, and am learning a hell of a lot.

If we ever have a slow time at work, I now have 100 accumulated hours of lieu time. Unfortunately, we are only supposed to take lieu time when things are slow, and somehow it seems things are never slow. I'm thinking I'm going to take some lieu days over the next couple of weeks whether it's slow or not.

For years I have sworn that I would not join LiveJournal. I'm already spending way too much time online, between the couple of Usenet newsgroups I hang out in, and the handful of mailing lists I'm subscribed to. But I could only hold out for so long, when my friends keep saying fascinating things in their LJ posts and I have no way to answer them. So, here I am, oaths trailing pitifully in the dust behind me, creeping into LJ and trying to figure out just how it all works.

Well, at least now I have an actual post on my page, instead of that blank slate. Will I post again, or will I just use my new status to flit hither and yon, sprinkling comments into the conversations of others? And does anyone care?

Say tuned to the next exciting adventure of Morgan Dhu in Journaltown.