1. Motorola doesn't want my business.  Notice that I am the person who researched, made the family decision, and bought four Droids less than a month ago.
2. Yesterday, after running a lot of family errands, I announced that I would take some 'me' time and get a manicure on the way home.

This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/905006.html. comment(s) on that entry.

A friendly reminder: this New Years Day the works of W.B. Yeats go into the public domain.

The management requests that you use this knowledge only for good.

But since that makes a good excuse for a linkbacon post, here's some breakfast:

• A usual, the pretty Enceladus picture gets top billing around here. Because, dude -- Enceladus.
  
  
• A long and fascinating account of a sex extortion scandal at a Wisconsin high school. (via ... I forget)
  
  
• Now this is conceptual art that makes me think: invisible man paints himself to blend into the background. Pictures are fascinating and creepy in that good kind of way. (via)
  
  
• Trojan horse detected. (via)
  
  
• The wonders of the Mandelbulb, a 3D version of the Mandelbrot set. Scroll down for the eye-popping renderings. (via)
  
  
• A fascinating stress analysis of Choose Your Own Adventure novels through time. (via)
  
  
• Reasons why you, yes you, should learn to juggle. (via)
  
  
• And what would linkbacon be without the eggs of The Big Picture? Here's their selection of photos from a National Geographic contest. I'm especially fascinated by #17, though #25 makes me laugh.

Mmm -- bacon.

---L.

First, via shrewreader this lovely story.

I've been watching more TV in the evenings when my hands quit on me (sometimes the quit means I can't even hold a book for long); last night I watched Almost Famous, which I thoroughly enjoyed. For those of us young and on the edge of the music scene in 1973, so much of this film resonated with verisimilitude. The tension between journalist and band--truth and seeming--what people want to read and privacy--was handled nicely, though the film lightly skimmed over the issue of fame. It touched on the warped reality of fame, which can trick the unwary into thinking that the rules no long apply. But it skimmed the issue of creativity, and the fact that the white fire is not controllable any more than lightning is, and so the young musicians would try anything—any drug or guru or quick-fix superstition—to tame it.

I watched that because I'm within two eps of finishing ANGEL, fifth season. I am considering not watching the rest, because I strongly suspect that my vision of how it should go will not match how it does (though I know about the very last scene, having been spoiled multiple times, and I had looked forward to that, actually).

There will be spoilers below.

Buffy and Angel are among the better things I've seen on TV, despite some jaw dropping moments. Series TV is written and shot on the run, they have to deal with all kinds of issues that blindside them, and they can blindside themselves, at least as much as one can believe the commentary on episodes. (I've gone back and listened to a lot of these.)

In Buffy, the early days were constrained to monster of the week plots, but more than that, the trappings of Christian mythology (often utterly ripped from context, with a sometimes painful lack of awareness of historical and cultural b.g.) imposed on a secular world, sometimes with risible effect. Later on, when the makers reinvented mystical magic (AKA Handwavium) they had a lot more freedom to get into all types of magic--dimensions--death--souls--within an agnostic framework, with rare glimpses of the possibility of the numinous. (And I note much of the same worldbuilding, even language, when I watched SUPERNATURAL season four, and wondered if Ben Edlund had brought all that over from ANGEL.)

But what really made the two shows great was when the makers could rip free of the constraints of episodic TV, that is contained plots that basically left the viewer roughly where he or she started. Season four was one long continuous arc, which was good--could have been terrific--individual eps were terrific, but overall? I'll get there. The greatness was in the characters, and how they developed and changed, how they began with distinct personalities, often superficial. Their experiences changed them. Take Wesley Wyndham-Price, the British stuffed-shirt, comically incompetent watcher, and compare him to the Wesley working through the night with a apparently calm countenance, but when one of his underlings makes a careless ref to not working on solving Fred's problem, Wesley pulls a pistol from a drawer and shoots the guy in the leg, orders his secretary to report anyone else not on the job, and goes back to work, leaving the guy lying there whimpering in pain. It's not just the violence, but the fact that his aim is so good, that caused me to sit back and whoa.

The blend of comedy with horror, drama with quiet, intense personal moments, all woven into splashy action and supernatural razzle-dazzle, I just love that.

So why am I avoiding the last two eps of Angel? Others might disagree, of course--tastes differ--but where the show dropped the ball most seriously for me was with Cordelia's arc in season four. It's weird, it was almost like a Samson thing was going on . . . almost the episode where Cordy got that horrible haircut that aged her about twenty years, her acting, her lines, became stiff and humorless. It was like a soap opera character had been stuck in the show--she didn't interact with anyone, she just uttered cliches at them. During the fights she mostly stood off to the side--though occasionally she reacted. The romance with Connor was painful to watch, though it was well set up, but the acting, the ridiculous things she said were straight soap. Until then she was one of the best characters, and talk about change! Her highpoint was when she faced down the evil Lilah in a verbal bullet-spray about shoes. (That and her awesome return for the 100th ep.)

So the big reveal is that a monster got inside her and created evil!Cordy. Okay, I could buy that for the evolving storyline, though my pleasure--and my trust--had faltered. Then at the end of "Smile Time" Fred and Wes finally hook up, and I'm utterly back on board. I loved Fred--yeah, she's gorgeous, but within the definitions of TV normal, she's a brown haired, brown eyed, no figure science geek, but everyone loves her--with an interesting spectrum of loves. So what happens? We get yet another monster-inside-the-main female, and this one a drop dead boring cliche. We've already been there with every aspect of Illyria, the story not only stops when her bits are on the screen, they leach the tension out of the insidious battle with Wolfram & Hart from the inside, reminding me that I'm watching a TV show based on a ridiculous premise, and instead of wit versus wit and the moral conflict, scenes are stitched together by a lot of fights in their practice arena while Illyria throws people through walls. Ho hum. Why couldn't Fred have developed mystical superpowers which would strain the relationship, if the makers couldn't deal with a happily ever after? Or why couldn't they launch straight from Fred's death into armegeddon? There's a definite feel of falter after the cast and crew found out the show had been cancelled; the "go to Italy in seach of Buffy" ep had a couple of good lines, but most of it is painful because it feels unmoored.

Well, that kind of speculation is tedious. I'm done with Whedon shows (already seen and loved Firefly, and refuse to have anything to do with Dollhouse) so I think I'll see what Whedon-inspired shows are doing, besides Supernatural. Maybe True Blood next.

For a much longer list of Norton eligible books (at least, those published from October '08 to October '09), check out the SF/Fantasy Cybil nominations. (With thanks to Charlotte's Library for the reminder!)

swan_tower has a fascinating post about how the genre of a book may be as much a matter of what conversations that book is engaged in as anything else.

I began thinking, over there, about whether one could define YA by working out what conversations it's part of, too. Because I do think YA is a genre of its own, and I do think there are things I look for there that I don't look for elsewhere. And so I began ... going on at length, and realized it would perhaps be appropriate to bring my thoughts over here.

Because the thing about YA fantasy is, I've been realizing as I think about this, in addition to being its own thing, it looks in two different directions when for the conversations it holds: towards adult fantasy, and towards YA not-fantasy. YA fantasy, to my reading, is as much descended from Judy Blume as from J.R.R. Tolkien*; and when new YA fantasy books are written, they're engaging with the concerns of writers such as Laurie Halse Anderson and Ellen Wittlinger as much as those of Mercedes Lackey or Ursula K. Le Guin.

This may explain a sort of dissonance I sometimes feel as a YA and middle grade fantasy reader, too. Whether I'm having a conversation about the books I love, either in the children's/YA community or the adult SF/fantasy community, I sometimes have the feeling that something is missing from the conversation, in a different way in each community. And maybe it is, because maybe the full conversation draws on the concerns of both communities and both communities' books, even though outside of YA SF/fantasy, they're not communities that have cause to talk with each other very often.

*For an example of a book that directly engages with both Tolkien and Blume, I keep finding myself thinking of Aprilynne Pike's Wings. In that book, the fairy folk are struggling to protect their sacred land -- and the protagonist learns she's a fairy and part of that struggle when she literally "blossoms" into adolescence, sprouting a flower from her back as fairy folk are wont to do ...

Eric Woolfson, who didn't perform in public and never went on tour, died at 64. He was the songwriter and lead singer for one of my favorite albums. Woolfson, you see, was half of "The Alan Parsons Project", the other half being (duh) Alan Parsons. Before Alan Parsons, Woolfson's biggest hit was "Kung Fu Fighting". (Don't hit me.)

During Alan Parsons, Woolfson wrote all the music and lyrics; he also recorded lead vocals on the demos. Starting with Turn of a Friendly Card, the favorite album I mentioned earlier, he usually sang the lead vocals as well; the's the vocalist on "Time", "Eye in the Sky", and "Don't Answer Me".

Eye in the Sky contains a song cycle  about casino gambling. The opening and closing song of the cycle is anindictment of Las Vegas.

There are unsmiling faces and bright plastic chains
And a wheel in perpetual motion
And they follow the races and pay out the gains
With no show of an outward emotion

And they think it will make their lives easier
For God knows up till now it's been hard
But the game never ends when your whole world depends
On the turn of a friendly card

There's a sign in the desert that lies to the west
Where you can't tell the night from the sunrise
And not all the king's horses and all the king's men
Have prevented the fall of the unwise.

Alan Parsons' Poe album was one of the soundtracks when my friends and I played D&D; Turn of a Friendly Card was my private pleasure.    Thanks, Eric Woolfson.  I hope you laughed all the way to the bank. This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/904674.html. comment(s) on that entry.

I mentioned MANSFIELD PARK AND MUMMIES: Monster Mayhem, Matrimony, Ancient Curses, True Love, and Other Dire Delights a week or two ago.

Unfortunately, the whole story behind this mashup is a desperate attempt to avoid becoming homeless, thanks to a new bank strategy of Screw Those in Trouble. Read this--note the comments, where it's plain this really is a strategy--and if you want to help, order the book--or just talk about it.

MUMMIES is funnier and better written than the zombies and seamonsters mashups. Their advantage is brick and board distribution plus a sizable publicity budget. But word of mouth can be spread by ordinary people.

Vera is not asking for cash--just for a signal boost, or if you know someone who gets a kick out of these mash-ups, consider getting them a copy for the holidays.

The use of "vanilla," in the sense of "ordinary" or "mediocre" dates only to 1972.

(Looked up over bowls of ice cream, during a discussion of how artificial vanillas have led to the malignment of what is actually a quite lovely flavor.)

'Member in my last post when I said about DD "more about her later"? Well, this is the later. She has accepted a position as Humanities Reference Librarian/Research Instructor at her alma mater, Sarah Lawrence, starting Jan. 4. This is a full-time professional position, and she gets her Masters in March, after finishing her classes online. The downside is that she must find an apartment now, while completing this semester's classes and her job at Penn. She's sounding a little stressed on the phone. I wish I could help, but I'd be less than useful, as I know nothing about the NYC/West Chester area, wouldn't know a good neighborhood from a bad, and haven't looked at an apartment in years. So we help with money: paying for the movers, offering to pay for an apartment broker, etc. She'll be home for Christmas, and wants things tidied up by then.

One of the things about my revision-based writing process is that it feels like I chip things away from the story as much as -- sometimes more than -- adding them to the story. Which means as I keep writing, I become more and more aware of the stories I've chosen not to tell. They haunt the story, ghostlike, and sometimes I catch them out of the corner of my eye and feel a twinge of almost-regret, wondering what might have happened had I followed my story down another path.

It's easy, too, during the harder parts of the writing process not to wonder whether those other paths would have been easier, better, more powerful after all. Because they're unwritten, they can be idealized in the way the unruly story one is actually writing cannot. The stories we choose to tell, for me at least, are messier, more imperfect things than the ones we imagine telling and set aside.

But one of the sometimes-hard things about revising is that even so you have to commit, and let those other stories go--free them up to haunt the story in subtle ways, rather than to be told in more direct ones.

A lovely quiet birthday. Mine last: sometimes me and my not-kindred twin don't get around to our tea for two (figuring spectacular patisserie and dozens of silly little parcels) until April.

negothick, bless her, sent a bowl of chocolate.

movingfinger is in town, and brought me a pot of star-white cyclamens, and took me out to dinner at Casablanca. That was spectacular: she had the venison osso bucco with wild mushroom risotto; and I had the duck terrine with pomegranate seeds and the quail with figs. I felt like Trimalchio. They'd boned it, all but the elfin wings and drumsticks, so I didn't have to craunch it up like Gigi at her Aunt Alicia's, and stuffed it with black quinoa, goat cheese, oyster mushrooms, and andouille sausage. She had sweet potato soup and I had a cloud of butternut squash with just a glimmering of maple. Then we both had the chocolate and brandied cherry clafouti, which was well worth the wait.

After which we went to the Cambridge Artists' Cooperative (I got my pleated silk jacket there for Readercon), where she fell for a fabulous hat and got it. (Sueded shearling, greeny bronze, with a deep deep crimson rose.) I fell for a quilt, a glass world drowning in a sea of glass, a wooden stack of books concealing boxes, and a brocaded bluegreen jacket: and got none of them.

However, I had something glorious awaiting me at home: The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Bliss.

Nine

**EDIT Thu Dec 3 23:24:15 UTC 2009 **

Hey Everyone, we are about to run the last alter job that we need to on our database servers. This will effect userpics / scrapbook / vgift images for the next few hours. Have no fear, your images aren't lost, there is just a really intensive process running on the servers which store the information for mogilefs. Thank you for your understanding and all the LJ love...

Hey LJers,

I just wanted to let you all know that we are going to be performing some mogilefs maintenance over the next few days. We will be upgrading our current version to latest stable as well as changing some db config information to better handle the amount of files we are currently hosting. This shouldn't cause a big impact on site stability, but you may see some minor delays with userpic / scrapbook images appearing or other requests associated with our mogilefs. We would love to not have that happen, but unfortunately with some of the steps we need to take we have to cause a delay with images. I figured this was a better solution than taking down all of LiveJournal because well lets face it, we all need our daily LJ fix ;)

Thanks,

Bess Lomax Hawes (yes, the daughter and sister of those Lomaxes) was a folklorist, a folksinger who performed with Woody Guthrie, and a teacher. Those, she considered, were her important achievements.

In 1949 the Progressive Party was brainstorming how to advance their candidate, Walter A. O'Brian, for Mayor of Boston. They noticed that the Metropolitan Transit Authority had recently raised subway fares. The Progressive Party promised to roll back the nickel increase and asked Bess Lomax Hawes and Jacqueline Steiner to write a campaign song.

I think you know where this is going. The team wrote "Charlie on the MTA", a folksong about a man doomed to travel forever on the subway for the lack of a nickel. The Progressive candidate lost; the song, presumably, had served its purpose and was dead. However, the song had a catchy tune and a funny story; it was hard to let go of. It was recorded by Will Holt, but buyers said "We're not advancing a Communist candidate!" and that was that.

In 1959, the Kingston Trio turned Walter O'Brian into the imaginary Charlie George O'Brian, and the song became a nationwide hit. If you're an American over, say, 45, you've probably heard it, sung it at summer camp, or been bombarded with your parents' or Classic Pop's copies of the Kingston Trio recording.

In 2004 the MTA introduced its new automated payment card. They called it the CharlieCard.

Bess Lomax Hawes: may her works, all of them, praise her in the Gates.

This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/904411.html. comment(s) on that entry.

From New Zealand comes the latest issue of Semaphore Newsletter, in which there's a reprint of my December story "And Now Abideth These Three." Last issue they had a reprint from Janni Lee Simner--check out their back issues!

Cloud & Ashes has fan art!


Margaret by *Lieserl on deviantART

Lieserl, the artist, writes: "Margaret is badass. She's the granddaughter of the (goddess of) Moon. Here she is wielding her sky-looking glass and her pack of tarot cards."

Now I want the manga.

Nine

Been reading variations on Tam Lin again, thanks to tamnonlinear's most excellent Tam Lin website. Tam Lin was an early influence on my conceptions of Faerie and fey folk, dating back to when my college roommate loaned me a recording from a Renn Faire she'd been to.

"And pleasant is the fairy land
But, an eerie tale to tell"
--Child #39A

This time my eye caught on all the various things the queen of Faerie transforms Tam Lin into, when Janet (aka Margaret) attempts to rescue him. If one goes through all the Child Ballad variants, there are more types of transformations here than I'd remembered: bear, lion, adder, snake, greyhound, toad, eel, dove, swan, black dog, eagle, ass, wolf, deer, silken string, and, of course, the almost-obligatory hot iron and naked knight.

I cannot tell whether she claims she could have turned him into a tree as well, or merely that she could have killed him painfully:

"I wad hae taen out his heart o flesh,
Put in a heart o tree
--Child #39H (among others)

But then there's this:

"They turned him into a flash of fire,
And then into a naked man;
But she wrapped her mantle him about,
And then she had him won.
--Child #39F

She turned him into a "flash of fire"? How does that work?

One can argue--and some of the variants claim--that the queen of Faerie merely gave Tam Lin the appearance of the things he was transformed into--more believable, perhaps, but I might argue that when you're turning someone into hot iron and silken thread, you've already left most pretense of believability behind. :-)

One does wonder, regardless, about the exact nature of the queen's power. One could imagine a story in which poor Tam Lin was subject to so many transformations that afterwards, each storyteller remembered only a (different) small handful of them.

Happy birthday, papersky and crowleycrow ! The muses must smile on December.

Nine

Fashion is supposed to change, right? Aren't we in the era of instant alteration? Yet clothing fashions seem to be curiously running like watercolors, all blended together. Mostly I am all right with that, especially since I can get away with wearing scruffy stuff thirty years old and no one arrests me for smiting their eyes.

Oh, but why, WHY does this horrible fashion of young men wearing their jeans hanging down below their butts, so they are forced into a prison shuffle, persisting now close on twenty years?

Maybe it's male revenge for a couple of decades of girdles, cone bras and helmet hair.

Me:  Did you pull the books to the edge, or are they double-shelved?
Cleaner:  To the edge.
Me:  My parents swear by double-shelving, the first row on their faces, the second row standing up, so you can see both of them.
Cleaner:  Oh.  That's interesting.  This sort of thing usually skips a generation.
Me, suddenly defensive:  It's not hoarding if you read them over and over!  And we do!
Cleaner: 

Oddly enough, if "this sort of thing" is "reading a lot of books", I'm quite pleased it hasn't skipped a generation, either before me or after.  I do hoard fabric, although I'm working on it.  Books, I don't keep unless either they'd be difficult to replace or  I'm using them, and I use them quite a lot.

The day was *not* enhanced by a misunderstanding between my son and myself as to when the former was going to hide the kitten in his room, leading to a frantic half-hour searching to see if Jareth  had gotten outside.  At the end of which, of course, we discovered that like any sensible cat in a time of stress, he had hidden someplace *he* considered safe and then refused to come when called.  (In this particular case, the place he considered safe was inside a mat that was folded into a triangular prism, which proved quite efficacious in his pursuit of Not Being Seen.)

I am exhausted.  I am also sitting on the floor beside my bed.  You have no idea -- well, most of you have a very good idea based on analogy -- how heroic an achievement this is.
This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/904154.html. comment(s) on that entry.

What's poignant for me is that I've yet to read him. Fool that I am, I was waiting. And now I'll never get to have that conversation with him in the borderland between our woods.

He walks in his ever-autumn. Winter will not come.

Nine

(Cut and pasted this directly from one of my third-draft Thief Eyes letters. Funny how I didn't have to change a word to apply it to the third draft of Faerie Winter as well. Apparently my process really is my process. :-))

Dear Book,

My next book won't be like this, you know.

My next book there won't be any letters to my characters (let alone to you), because the words will all leap from my fingers to the page, and everything will fall into place like magic, and there won't be any time left over for writing letters, to myself or the story or anyone else.

You do realize this, don't you?

Me

P.S. Also, no one will get hurt in my next book. Not like in that one scene we had to write. Or in the three scenes that came after it, either. My next book will be a gentle book. A nice book. I like nice books.

P.P.S. Why are you laughing?

 And thanks for all the well-informed snark over the years.

This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/903820.html. comment(s) on that entry.

 For no particularly good reason, I spent the weekend surfing the Irish clerical child abuse scandal, the related Christian Brothers scandal, and the Legionaries of Christ/Father Maciel scandal.   All of these involved abuse of children; the Legionaries of Christ also involved misuse of funds and cult techniques, including a vow not to speak ill of your superiors.

I am not, never have been, never intend to be, a Catholic.  Nonetheless, when the first abuse scandal broke in Boston, I was genuinely shocked, and the shock hasn't gone away with each subsequent disclosure.  The Church has, in multiple cases, primarily been concerned with protecting itself from scandal, and has subverted justice to do so.  There is citation after citation in the cases I named of the Church, in the person of its bishops, archbishops, and sometimes of Rome, choosing not to pursue people who are doing evil under the cloak of and using the authority of the Church*.  

This shocked me in a way that similar scandals in, for instance,. the Southern Baptists and various other Protestant denominations did not.  There's no good reason for this shock.  Large institutions protect themselves, especially over time as they become well-established.  This is true for corporations, why shouldn't it be true for churches?  (And note that, as in large corporations, there are always whistle-blowers and there are always decent people, quietly doing what they see as right.)

But somehow I saw the Roman Catholic church as particularly holy, as particularly immune to doing evil to protect itself.  I cannot figure out why, most especially considering past histories of corruption.

*  I am referring particularly to these particular scandals here.  I am well aware that the Church also does good in various ways. 
This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/903487.html. comment(s) on that entry.

The world is chill this morning, the blue sky streaked with leftover cloud. Snow is just dusting the tops of the mountains, and the air has a clean-washed smell that makes being awake seem like the very best thing in the world.

Had a California Thanksgiving--driving two hundred miles to eat dinner. At least the car has air conditioning!

What I wanted to point out is that I took along a small zine called Not One of Us (I linked the order form instead of the zine site, which is horrible white print on black, an instant migraine for me)

Not all to my taste--it's bent toward the dark--but a lovely story by Marissa Lingen, a couple of standout poems (Sonya Taaffe and J.C. Runolfson) and a story I just loved--and wish people in SFWA would discover for the Nebula, called "Love in Another Language," by Eugene Mirabelli. I loved that story so much I had to read it three times over.

I'm loving your faerie naming contest entries--you all seriously rock. One female faerie character is (tentatively) named based on your entries. The only male character is (so far) declining to be named at all, and his existence may or may not get edited away. (But male names are still helpful! Maybe he'll want a name after all if I find the right one.)

But ... there's another female faerie character. And the chapter I just finished has ended with one character asking another, "What is her name?"

I still don't know the answer to that question, so there's still time to help out!

I can't say too much about this character (about any of the new characters) without spoilers. But this is someone with power, and it's also someone who's kept her name hidden -- not by chance -- until now. The person who's been asked her name won't reveal it lightly, if she does so at all. (I'll be thinking on her answer to that question tonight!)

I'll be going through all your entries again, and doing some brainstorming of my own. So if you have further thoughts, now's a great time to share them here.

Thanks for joining in and playing along. I'm having fun, and I hope you are, too!

I've donated copies of my first three children's books -- the Phantom Rider trilogy that includes Ghost Horse, The Haunted Trail, and Ghost Vision -- to the kickstart_tu auction.

The Phantom Rider trilogy is out of print and so harder to find than my more recent books. These are the books I learned to write novels from, and they're also books where I shamelessly indulge a love of horse and of the Arizona desert.

The copies are a bit yellowed and have some wear (as any 12-year-old book club paperbacks would), but the words are all still there, and of course I'll sign and personalize them.

Go here to bid on the books.

Or check out the other items up for grabs in the Kickstart Tu auction.

Either way, you'll be supporting a multicultural children's/YA SF and fantasy, and helping to bring some excellent books to kid and teen readers. (Not to mention us adults who still read middle grade and YA and stand to selfishly gain from this as well. :-))

In the "it's always something" department, the appraiser for the refinancing called yesterday announcing that he would be by Tuesday to appraise the house. I had counted on a couple of weeks' delay; apparently this refinancer moves fast. That means that the rest of the holiday weekend, plus an emergency visit from Clutterboy Monday, will be spent making the inside of the house presentable. AIEEE! Thank God Clutterboy had the time available.

Am following the Irish priest-sexual-abuse scandal. It's following what is by now the established pattern, with the hierarchy resisting any investigation as long as possible, then doing what they are forced to do, then announcing that they're sorry, but they won't do it again, so there's really no need for any more investigation. (There have been only two limited-scope investigations, none covering the entire country.) Furthermore as usual, the Vatican has refused to comment; they wouldn't cooperate with the commission's request for information unless it came through diplomatic channels, and the commission refused to go through diplomatic channels because it was "an independent body", making a nice little knot. The Irish Times called my attention to a refinement of which I was not aware, the "mental reservation". I'd be curious to know if the Times is accurately reporting the practice; the canonical (sic) example is of a priest who doesn't want to deal with a parishioner directing the curate to say that "the priest is not at home", with the mental reservation of "to you". Here's a specific case cited by the Times.

A spokesman for the archdiocese put it like this “we never said we co-operated fully”, placing emphasis on the word “fully”, the report commented.

Is anybody on the flist familiar with canon law? Does everybody get to make mental reservations, or just priests? It would seem to offer wide scope: "I didn't steal the communion chalice", with the additional "On Tuesday."

Finally, the New York Times has a somewhat cooler-than-thou ("Does anyone really feel the need to hear “Happy Together” again?" Well, I do) review of a PBS fund-raiser, a compilation of  Ed Sullivan rock performances. The review has a great peroration, though.


This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/903350.html. comment(s) on that entry.

I know it's just an ad for knock-off watches, but the phrase is rather glorious. I am tempted to set a competition: for the best poem or flash fiction on the theme of "submersible moonphase."

Nine

I have continued, bit by bit, to tackle the hard overdue stuff that keeps the household moving forward. I may not be great or even competent at picking up that sock on the floor, but I do take responsibility for negotiating with the insurance company, compiling paperwork, and making appointments.

• Last week, in the middle of a migraine bout, I tried to fix the TiVo unsuccessfully. Monday I mailed the Weaknees people to find out how to return the replacement parts for credit. The Weaknees people said "Oh, if that's the one with the lifetime subscription, if you mail it back we'll waive the restocking fee and recycle the parts." "Recycle" meaning, in human language, "Resell the repaired machine." I thought it over and mailed back, "If you'll cover the additional postage, it's a deal"; a TiVo series 2 weighs 8 pounds. The CS person said "I think we can do that," and mailed me a paid return label. I negotiated! It was scary, and I did it, and it worked! (Assertive people may now feel free to laugh at me.)

   

• Monday I tackled the most urgent overdue task, refinancing the interest-only 5-year variable rate loan into a conventional 30-year fixed-rate. I checked the company bulletin boards for refinancers other people had used, then checked three Websites and contacted two of the people recommended by the company. The best rate I could find for a jumbo conforming loan was 5.125% with $3200 closing costs; I agreed to begin filling out the paperwork.

 

Tuesday the phone rang; the second refinancer had tracked me down using caller ID. She said excitedly that her lender was trying to reach 70% market share (!!!! Now that's a prudent long-range strategy) and was offering 4.875% with no points. The second refinancer, furthermore, charges no closing costs -- she pays them herself. (No, they aren't rolled back into the principal; my assumption is that she simply does a high-volume business.) Having done a teeny-tiny bit of shopping paid off in a quarter point lower interest rate and a $3200 savings. There may well be an even better deal out there somewhere, but this one is quite good enough for me.


Wednesday my husband and I rustled up all the supporting documents  -- interestingly, all we had to provide was proof of income in various forms; they will presumably research for themselves that we own the house in question -- and turned them in. The refinancer said cheerfully that she probably wouldn't call back unless something went wrong, but that assuming our credit rating was over 740 we should be good. This lack of handholding was something various people on the internal bulletin boards had complained about, but it's absolutely fine by me. Given that she has a track record of delivering, I'm happy to let her go perform her magic undisturbed; indeed, the less human contact, the better. I went home, arm-wrestled Equifax until it let me get a free credit report and buy a FICO score, and lay down for a nap with an easy conscience. 

Of course, adult life being what it is, knocking one item off the to-do list merely promotes the rest. Now I'm contemplating having the battered kitchen floor redone and stripping off the adjoining sitting-room carpet; getting in electricians to fix the shocking outlet in our bedroom and put a power strip above the workbench in the garage; and assembling shelves in the garage in order to start getting books out of the house. I also have a high-level design for an Android app that scans barcodes and records which box you put each book in; we'll see if I ever develop the oomph to write it.

P.S.  After all the sturm and drama, the manicure from Talkative Life Story Lady is at least 1/4 chipped off three days later.  Pah.   Am deciding whether it's worth the effort to write her a stern note.  See above re: to-do list.
This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/902947.html. comment(s) on that entry.

 A couple of days ago I was driving home with local public radio on.  A producer at the Herbst theater was talking about her work.  She explained that she had standards, and that one of them was that a lit stage and dark house were essential.  She went on to explain that Barbara Cook had showed up and explained that she needed the house lights up so that she could work with the audience.   The producer proudly explained that she had, after a lot of talking, convinced Cook to work with the house lights off.   The person interviewing her said, "And if you weren't there, you don't realize what a feat of diplomacy that was."

You are dealing with Barbara frelling Cook, one of the greatest living interpreters of American popular song.  Barbara Cook has been performing onstage since the 1950s, first in musicals and later as a solo performer; in her seventies, Cook remains renowned for the excellence of her concerts.  Cook's not demanding the stage be full of artificial fog, or that she be lit with pink heart-shaped follow spots; she's asking that the lighting not make it impossible for her to see the audience.  Cook is asking for work that ,  although tricky, should not be impossible to manage for a good lighting designer -- designers have to deal with stage shows that require audience interaction all the time.

And you know better than she does how to light a Barbara Cook concert, because you are a Producer. 

Pfeh.
This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/902824.html. comment(s) on that entry.

After Brad DeLong pointed to John Keegan's public statements on David Irving, I decided to go read Richard J. Evans's Lying About Hitler, which analyzes Irving's written and spoken work in pitiless detail. I heartily recommend it, both to those interested in how historians actually work and to those who enjoy knife fights.

Briefly, in 1993 Deborah Lipstadt wrote Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, an early book about Holocaust deniers; she called out Irving as one such. In 1998 Irving sued Lipstadt, and her British publisher Penguin, for defamation; he offered to settle with Penguin for 500 pounds and the withdrawal and pulping of the book, while making it clear that he would not withdraw his case against Lipstadt. Penguin, bravely, refused these terms.

The defamation lawsuit of 1998 was Irving's attempt to suppress academic speech: he wanted to force a fellow historian to withdraw her work of history. This point is important because various historians, including Keegan, described the suit as Lipstadt's attempt to suppress Irving's writing, 180 degrees from what actually happened. Lipstadt merely defended herself against Irving; given the constraints of defamation law, she was required to do so by proving Irving to be what she had called him.

After you've read Evans's withering dissection of Irving's research methods, you cannot call Irving a historian; he is at most a controversialist. Irving has a habit of citing only half of important statements [1], of misquoting and mistranslating statements that go against his thesis [2], of ignoring evidence that contradicts him [3], and of misinterpreting context-bound statements as if they applied outside their contexts [4]. After the close of the trial, Irving's reputation as a historian was completely, and appropriately, destroyed.


John Keegan was forced, against his will, to testify for Irving. After the trial concluded, he wrote his take on the proceedings for the Daily Telegraph. Unfortunately, the only online copy of Keegan's article is on Irving's own site; given Irving's habit of eliding text inconvenient to his purpose, this text may well be incomplete. I link to the Google cache for the article.  In this article, Keegan says:
Keegan provides no explanation of why Lipstadt was unreliable on Irving or any other subject. By contrast, Irving's historical work had been under attack by many reputable scholars  since the publication, in 1977, of Hitler's War, which Keegan had called "Irving's greatest achievement... indispensable to anyone seeking to the understand the war in the round". Keegan's fellow-Englishman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, called out one of the linchpins of Irving's argument as self-contradictory. "[He] commented about Irving's claim that Hitler was unaware of the mass murders of Jews carried out by the SS while at the same time intervening to save Jewish lives that: 'One does not veto an action unless one thinks that it is otherwise likely to occur' " Many of the scholarly arguments cited in the Wikipedia article to which I link came up again in the Irving trial. (Much of what I've said here is cited to Wikipedia, simply because Wikipedia is open-source and Dr. Evans's gripping book is not; I've verified much of it, including the four earlier citations, in Evans.)

Keegan "suddenly realized" a position Irving had been stating in print since 1977, a position to which Irving had devoted several books, one of which Keegan had reviewed.

The trial, to which Keegan claims he paid attention, made it clear that Irving's "all-consuming knowledge" was in fact based on ignoring and distorting information inconvenient to him. You cannot accurately call a man an archivist when his business is to misrepresent the data he catalogs.

Here's the crux. All of the proof that Irving in fact distorted the facts, consistently, and based his distorted reasoning on these distorted facts, has sailed right over Keegan's head. Keegan claims that Irving's only fault is in the conclusions he drew from the facts, and refers to his letting his "youthful resentments" bubble up.  (At the time of the trial, Irving was 58, Keegan a mature 64.)  More to the point, there was ample evidence presented at the trial that Irving believed exactly what he said, and had said it repeatedly, both in public and in private.

Here's Keegan's conclusion.

Deborah Lipstadt, the woman whom Irving sued in order to silence, is dull. Nobody wants to read her. Irving is interesting, and if he only learns from this case [learns what? This was a man of 58 who had been denying Hitler's knowledge of the Holocaust since 1977, and the Holocaust itself since the late 1980s], will continue to be worthy of attention.

This essay is shameful. I have no idea why Keegan preferred Irving, a man who made grave, repeated, and deliberate historical errors to which Keegan himself admits ("That did not imply endorsement of Irving's view that Hitler did not "know" about the Holocaust until October 1943. That view was "perverse", I said."), to Deborah Lipstadt, unlike Irving a trained and experienced historian who submitted her work to peer review. It is clear that Keegan did prefer Irving, and continued to do so after the evidence proved him to have backed the wrong horse.

Keegan should be ashamed of himself.

Note: Do not even consider debating  the historical fact of Hitler's murders of Jews, Slavs, Communists, and other 'undesirables' here. This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/902427.html. comment(s) on that entry.

Hope it's a joyous and warm one for all those celebrating same.

Been thinking about Buy Nothing Day -- which if this Friday in North America, Saturday in the rest of the world -- and why I plan to consciously celebrate it again this year.

I have sympathy for those who favor supporting Buy Local Day instead. I have a little less sympathy for those who simply cry out "jobs and the economy require we buy lots," but I'm not completely without sympathy there either. And I can't claim that I'm going to stop buying anything at all from Friday onwards, or even stop buying anything at all I don't need.

But I still think there's value in consciously taking a day off from buying, well, things. Not if one merely puts of a buying binge until the next day -- but if one uses the day to rethink what one buys, what one needs, and what one's consumption patterns are, so that one can buy less and buy more mindfully in the days that follow. I do intend to try to do that.

While businesses need to sell things, an economy based entirely on pressuring too many to buy too much that they have too little need for is already on shaky ground, IMHO. Upping the pressure to do so year after year is not going to fix this.

And the mindless stuff-buying frenzy of Black Friday is disturbing, and is something that we need to take a critical on a regular basis -- along with the ways in which we support it.

Dear Story,

Yes, your worldbuilding is pretty. I'm glad you're proud of it. But that doesn't mean you need to share every last bit of it with your readers.

It's not that I don't love you. It's just ... there's only so much room on the fridge, okay? I can't possibly hang all your pictures there.

Also, we'll talk about chapter 11 later.

Sincerely,

Me

And once again, I'm reminded how many plot problems can be solved by turning people into birds.

Things having been what they is, I needed a break. I signed up for the mobile pedicure van that shows up at work every other week -- you may all pause to glare at the screen before moving on.  I said in the appointment that I was really stressed and wanted a chance to chill out.

What I got was information on all the following:

• The proprietress's unhappiness with her nail technician, whom she had just fired the previous day for failing to pay her station rent, including repeated enumerations of the technician's vices.
• The proprietress's having been up until 3 AM at the hospital with her personal assistant, who had broken a clavicle.
• How much time the previous appointment, posing for photographs to promote the business, had consumed.
• Life histories for all three of the proprietress's dogs, past and current, including tragic deaths.
• The proprietress's infertility and subsequent divorce, twenty years ago.
• The proprietress's having raised her nieces after her sister died young.
• What the proprietress said to her mother on the latter's deathbed.

This flow of information continued after I explained that because we were running late, I needed to begin reading a work-related book.  At least once she said something requiring an answer, then popped up "But you're supposed to be reading, so I won't bother you!"  My toes are moderately shiny, but the proprietress is nowhere near as good at nails as her technician.  Sigh.

I need to hire a New Yorker to give me lessons in I Don't Talk To Anybody face.

This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/902294.html. comment(s) on that entry.

It's going to be odd this year. A month ago, we were all talking about the large number of people expected to be here and where were they all going to sit, whose house, etc. Well, they've been dropping like flies. My dd has decided to stay in Philly and write papers. More news about her later. Brudda has a gig in PA that starts Friday morning, so he's going there. SIL and nevvie are dropping him off at a halfway point on their way up to Canada. Hubby and I are eating at the Nursing Home (which, I am told, puts on a great dinner) as mom can't handle going out. Chicago cousin and her three kids had to cancel as she came down with pneumonia or something equally gross. That leaves 6 at dinner, 8 for the annual walk and dessert. Hubby and I were planning on driving to P-town the day after and walking to Race Point, but the weather's supposed to be yucky, so we've got library passes to the MFA and Gardner. A few laps around the Egyptian exhibit should equal a hike to the end of the Cape, don't you think?

Watched the RSC’s magnificent Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (filmed 1982) and marvelled for the fourth or fifth time at the coup du theatre: at the sheer audacity, complexity, simplicity of it; at the way a London crowd will coalesce, a momentary wall or stagecoach trundling into mist; at the brilliant double triple and quadruple casting, hero overturned as villain, neatly as a string catscradles; at the Gothic glee of it, the shameless innocence, the slakeless energy, the plenitude—Ah, damn, the thing cries out for semicolons. And I wish, yet again, that I could screen it for Jo March.

What book, film, art or music would you give what character? You may delight, amaze, instruct, or counsel. No fair giving Lizzie Bennet Pride and Prejudice. We’d all implode.

Nine

In a linkspam, Brad DeLong destroys John Keegan's recent work. I had read the recent New York Times review that proved Keegan hadn't done his research on the Civil War -- . “The Ohio and its big tributaries, the Cumberland and the Tennessee form a line of moats protecting the central Upper South, while the Mississippi, with which they connect, denies the Union any hope of penetration.” Um.... ever heard of a boat?

It turns out, however, that Keegan is equally unreliable on the location of Bulgaria and that, furthermore, he testified for David Irving in the latter's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt, Lipstadt having called Irving a Holocaust denier.

Keegan: "[Irving] has, in short, many of the qualities of the most creative historians. He is certainly never dull. Prof. Lipstadt, by contrast, seems as dull as only the self-righteously politically correct can be. Few other historians had ever heard of her before this case. Most will not want to hear from her again. Mr. Irving, if he will only learn from this case, has much that is interesting to tell us."

Sigh.

The Times review I linked to is riveting, if you, like me, enjoy watching one scholar cut another to shreds.

This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/902080.html. comment(s) on that entry.

Dear New Character Created Just for This Book,

Well. You are a problem, aren't you?

That is all,

Me

I've been thinking about a sentiment I hear over and over again as I scan the blogosphere, and in face to face conversations with other writers, too.

It's hard to write a book, writers (and some readers) say. People shouldn't be so mean about it. If you can't find something nice to say, you just shouldn't say anything at all.

I grew up with various versions of the "if you can't find something nice to say" rule. As far as I can tell, it was meant for people. No one ever suggested I shouldn't say mean things about a restaurant meal I hated (not uncommon--I was an incredibly picky eater as a child), or that particularly awful shade of institutional green used to paint the school walls, or that particularly frustrating book I happened to be reading.

It never even occurred to me there was a person behind the meal or the paint -- or the book, either -- whose feelings might be hurt if I voiced my thoughts. I wasn't talking to -- or about -- a person at all.

In much the same way a reader -- whether they're a professional reviewer or a casual blogger or someone somewhere in between -- who's writing a negative review isn't tearing into a person (unless their review actually contains a direct personal attack) -- they're tearing into a book.

I do try to mostly focus on the positive when I talk about other writers' books. Even when I decide to talk about something that didn't quite work for me, I try to do so with at least a certain amount of restraint. That's because I'm a writer, talking to and about other writers. Possibly would-be chefs hesitate more than I would to post about that horrid meal they had in last night, too, because they know they're critiquing a meal cooked by one of their peers. (Possibly not--every field has its own standards of professional conduct, after all.)

But readers are under no obligation to think about the writer when they read. If anything, readers have an active right to not think about the writer. This isn't about being mean or not being mean, because being mean is a people thing. This is about every reader having the right to engage with a story whatever way her or she chooses. Engaging with stories is one of the things stories are for.

When I'm deep into a story, whether I'm loving it or hating it, the writer isn't there -- only the story is. How could any of us read freely otherwise? Knowing the writer was looking over my shoulder would have stopped me cold as a teen reader especially -- did I really want Madeleine L'Engle knowing I was lusting after Calvin O'Keefe, or identifying with Meg Murray so strong I sometimes imagined I was her as I walked to school? No, I didn't -- I wanted to interact with the story, not its writer.

And when a book didn't work for me, and I wanted to throw it across the room and rant to all my friends -- I didn't want the writer watching me then, either. I wanted to be left alone to gripe about the story.

The writer's feelings aren't the reader's problem, nor should they be. I think the fact that readers now interact with stories -- and each other -- online and so in public doesn't really change this. Not for readers, anyway -- for writers things do change, because we can see that interaction happening -- but that's our problem, and it's up to us to find ways to make our peace with it. If a particular comment cuts particularly deep, maybe it's best to find another writer to talk to about it -- to make connections to others with whom you can whine about and laugh about and gain perspective on this whole crazy-making business we're in.

But unless they invite you in, leave the readers out of it. Readers have a right to engage with stories, whether they love them or hate them. The best thing writers can do, I think, is to not get in the way of that.

What are we writing for, after all, if not to allow that interaction -- that escape into story, and that arguing with story, too -- to happen?

Dear Author has been deemed not eligible to re-up her membership on account of her negative reviews of romance novels:

... RWA’s actions will not change my conviction that true advocacy requires a conversation among many different — often contrary and conflicting — views. I will never believe that bad books are a necessity about which we must remain quiet, nor will I relinquish my critical views of a genre I love and an industry in which I have taken an active interest.

Yes, yes, and yes.

Readers deserve an environment in which they can talk honestly and with spirit about the books they read, no matter what their take on them. Writers deserve it, too--and need to make their peace with it, regardless.

I've had a rant on my hard drive about the importance of allowing negative reviews for a while now that it may be time to post. It's really about a slightly different matter than this is--because as a writer's organization RWA is looking out for the rights of writers, whether I agree with how they choose to do so (as in their strong stand about Harlequin Horizons) or not (as in this case)--and I think when it comes to negative reviews, it's about the rights of not of writers, but of readers, ultimately.

(Heads off to look through files.)

(Link via jonquil and lnhammer.)

In the space of a week, RWA has moved from taking the genuinely risky and courageous step of confronting Harlequin, a major RWA National supporter, to ... well, let me quote.

That was sent to Jane Litte of Dear Author. Dear Author is one of the most visible and successful romance-review blogs. As a review blog, it posts both positive and very negative reviews. Dear Author's "romfail" thread on Twitter consists of one-line snippets from novels the authors found particularly amusing,. Sample #romfail posts:

• "Emmy flung back her head, rubbing her breasts on his chest, jouncing vigorously on his lap as her channel rippled".
•  "Their bodies were still joined since she refused to release his cock from her ferociously gripping cunt".  
• "after masturbation & showering, Quentin exits the bathroom to find an angry dark skinned young man delivering Kamaria's summons".  "everyone is no color or dark skinned. Because dark skin apparently is an abnormality worth mentioning" 

Dear Author has also criticized RWA's reluctance to acknowledge E-publishing.

Let's get this out of the way. Organizations have the right to choose their members, blah blah blah. RWA has the right to do any damn thing it wants to about membership qualifications.  However, RWA looks profoundly petty by throwing out a well-known critic because she criticized both romances and the organization itself. That's what critics do.  An organization that can't stand criticism is showing itself to be weak.

RWA is infamous for "the cult of Nice".  Early in my membership I was warned by a respected author never to speak ill of a member's book in public, because memories were long.   A critic, by definition, cannot be Nice;  Q.E.D.  It's the inverse of Snacky's Law; RWA is terrorized by those Nice GIrls From High School, where "nice" means "we don't say things like that here."

Dear Stephen Sondheim, always with the mot juste.

You're so nice.
All so nice.
You're not good, you're not bad,
You're just nice.
I'm not good, I'm not nice,
I'm just right. This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/901789.html. comment(s) on that entry.

I wonder what that quiet clergyman's daughter would have thought about all the mash-ups, continuations, and imaginative treatments of her own life. Judging from the sometimes quite wicked wit in her letters, she would probably have laughed.

Anyway, there are three of them I wanted to point out--especially if you know an Austen fan who doesn't mind liberties taken, and the holidays are coming up.

First MANSFIELD PARK AND MUMMIES: Monster Mayhem, Matrimony, Ancient Curses, True Love, and Other Dire Delights, written by Vera Nazarian, who crams a whole lot of mythology in with Austen's text, to hair-raising and crazed results. Werewoves--vamps--mummies--you name it, Mansfield Park gets them. I kept hearing this one read aloud, in suitably Monty Pythonesque voices. If you liked the zombies and the seamonsters, you have to try this one. (And Fanny gets to take action.)

Jane Bites Back, by Michael Thomas Ford. Due out later next month. Unlike the awful Darcy Vampyre book, this one showed evidence that the author was at least familiar with Austen's books, even if the supposed lost Austen novel showed no hint of either period flavor or Austen's style or wit. Maybe it was supposed to be leaden and cliche, which is why it had been rejected over a hundred times. Not quite sure where the writer was going there, unless a commentary on the bad taste of the popular reading public, but that's a tiny portion of an otherwise quite funny book about Jane Austen living in modern times because she is a vampire.

Who turned her, why, and who else got turned makes up part of the plot as Jane Austen enters the literary scene again after a two hundred year hiatus. I really enjoyed it. Looks like the book sets up for a sequel. Wise idea, as I'm certain with "Jane Austen" as a character, plus vampires, this will be an instant best-seller.

James Fairfax, by Adam Campan, I've mentioned before. I love how skillful Austen's text is subtly altered, at first with tiny changes that build to a different perspective on the familiar story. If you look at its Amazon and B&N reviews, you'll note that some homophobic busy bodies made it their business to tromp all around and slam it for daring to mix the "ew gay!" with Austen, though there is no evidence in the slams that anyone actually bothered to read the book. But Deborah J. Ross did read it.

Re Austen, I mentioned elsewhere a vague theory I had. Probably doesn't hold up much but it occurred to me that the relative popularity (or unpopularity) of Austen's heroines has more to do with the popularity of the men they picked than with the women. Fanny's stuffy cousin Edmund being the most boring, and Fanny the most hated; Mr. Knightley being ambivalently regarded because of falling in love with her when she was thirteen, urk, ugh, ew, and Edward being just plain dull. But Darcy and Wentworth gain their heroines major popularity . . . of course Lizzie Bennet is fun and funny, but Fanny Price actually exhibits more sense of humor than Anne Elliott, ethical objection to home theatrics while Sir Thomas is away notwithstanding.

I started off trying to fold this into my linky post, only it truly would have been overflowing then. :-)

swan_tower posts on the importance of female characters having agency. coraa finds Kristin Cashore's Graceling satisfying because it's a fantasy of teenage female agency. I agree with them both. This is one of the reasons I loved Graceling, too. It's one of the reasons I enjoy tammypierce's books--and the Icelandic sagas, for that matter.

I don't require my female characters to be vampire slayers or trained killers -- but I do require them to find ways, whoever they are, to act with agency and not be passive participants in their own lives, at least if I'm supposed to see their story as not-disturbing and not-a-tragedy.^* There are many ways to do this, and not all of them require physical strength. marypearson's The Adoration of Jenna Fox is a great example of a book where a protagonist shows agency in non-physical ways -- the whole book is about Jenna's struggle for agency, in fact.

We don't all have to be warriors. But we all ought to be something other than passive spectators in our own lives.

This is becoming increasingly non-negotiable for me in my fiction. I don't care how the writer gets there, if it's done well -- girls and women and the lives they live are widely and wonderfully varied. But lack of agency in female characters -- especially female protagonist characters -- is increasingly a deal-breaker for me as a reader.

*For a powerful story that explores the tragedy of a female character's lack of agency, I thoroughly enjoyed Rachel Swirsky's Iphigenia story, "A Memory of Wind."

Lots of thinky posts piling up here lately.

Over on SF Novelists writers are discussing gender roles in fiction:

- Marie Brennan on why a woman's place is not in the refrigerator. (Or anyplace else she might die tragically and without agency for no reason other than to spur a man to action.)

- Kate Elliott questions why women are so often only allowed to be strong in fiction when protecting their young. (It's not a bad trope, but need it be the only trope?)

- David Coe asks why male strength so often has to manifest in violence.

nancyboflood and debbyedwardson have a series on thru_the_booth on writing Native American characters:

- Get the Indians Out of the Cupboard

- Indians In The Cupboard? What Were You Thinking? Let Them Out!

- Warriors Caught in the Crossfire

- Now What?

- American Indian and Alaskan Native Children’s Literature - Whose Story?

- Wrapping up Loose Ends

Other odds and ends:

- Karen Healey on YA SFF and the transformations of adolescence.

- Pam Bachorz on why she doesn't plan to quit writing.

- Mette Harrison on why her books are her children.

- Jim Hines on why his books are not his children.

- How to tell someone they sound racist

And one link that is not at all thinky:

Tauntaun sleeping bags!

I'm still thinking about the movie of Where the Wild Things Are. First and foremost, it's not a film of the book but a film that uses the book as a source text for plot and imagery, which are then deeply transformed. It's gorgeous, emotionally intelligent, and refuses to explain things, especially not didactically -- all pluses. And the wonderfully (almost painfully) expressive monsters are technical masterpieces.

But I have to wonder just who the audience for this is -- both intended and practical. Even though it's about learning to cope with pre-pubescent emotions, I can't escape the conviction that it's not a movie for children. So much of what's going on seems to require hindsight to understand. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'm misreading it, but it seems to me that it's really a movie for twentysomethings and those early thirtysomethings who are trying to come to terms with this whole adulthood thing.

Which may in fact be the point of the perfectly timed knock-knock joke.

I think I like it. But as I said, I'm still thinking. Anyone else seen this?

(Heh. Spellcheck wants to change thirtysomethings to tiresome. Oh really?)

---L.

Your human is not a toy. May contain moving parts and independent thoughts. Owner's manual not included. While the typical lifespan of a human is 60-90 years, you accept your human as-is. We will not repair any flaws in craftsmanship. All humans contain flaws in craftsmanship. Should a replacement be required, you must obtain one at your own cost. There is no warranty on your human. We are not responsible for broken hearts, poorly worded bargains, or banishment from the Realm. You are fully responsible for all spells, tithes, transformations, and hastily-made promises. All humans are hastily made. Tears and tantrums possible. Fragile, may break if dropped. Do not let your human operate heavy machinery while under glamour. Results will vary. Do not add water. Do not say we didn't tell you so. Void and prohibited and really you ought to know better. Not valid in Alaska, Hawaii, the continental United States, or anywhere else outside the True Lands.

(Because humans aren't the only ones who could do with a few warnings and protections.)