Kitchen Sink Links

If you haven’t read Kameron Hurley’s post We Have Always Fought: Challenging the “Women, Cattle and Slaves” Narrative, what are you waiting for? Go, now, right now. It’s over on A Dribble of Ink.

Let’s just put it this way: if you think there’s a thing – anything – women didn’t do in the past, you’re wrong.

If you follow me on twitter, you know that I developed a paranoid healthy fear of hippos while visiting my brother-in-law in Kenya. Everyone warned us waaaay more about hippos than lions, buffalo, leopards or rogue lilac-breasted roller birds. So when I saw this I was swallowed by a hippo, on the Guardian, I had to read it. Though this isn’t the way hippos usually get people.

Lilac-breasted-roller-on-stick (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The frozen calm of normalcy bias (io9). Why we’re bad at reacting in emergencies.

Although movies show crowds screaming and panicking, most people move dazedly through normal activities in a crisis. This can be a good thing; researchers find that people who are in this state are docile and can be directed without chaos…

The downside of the bias is the fact that they tend to retard the progress of the 10-15% of people who act appropriately.

A post by E.M. Kokie on how we don’t have words to describe female sexuality. All true, all frustrating, so worth the read.

I was shocked to find a complete lack of language for the female anatomy in all but one of the books I checked, and none at all during an intimate scene. Despite effective and appropriately done intimate scenes, none of these books actually used specific words to refer to the female anatomy below the waist. Almost none of them refer to the obvious reactions these female characters would be having to the scene, and none while the character was actually in the moment.

Continuing the discussion, Malinda Lo’s Sex and YA fiction.

Sometimes I wonder if the concept of awkward YA sex comes not from adolescents but from adults who are looking back on their own experiences and applying an adult lens to those memories.

Some Thoughts about Call the Midwife

Complete with spoilers. You were warned.

I’ve been sick. I’ve been watching a lot of TV.

So Twitter friends told me about Call the Midwife and for the most part I find it fascinating. You don’t get too many TV shoes that focus so exclusively on women’s lives, and while there’s at least one baby born and delivery scene per show, there’s so much more. I particularly like that the main women characters are friends. I know, what a novel idea! Women! Can be friends! On TV, just like in real life. Some of the minor characters have rivalries and are catty, but in about a proportion that’s way more true to life than most depictions of women’s lives.

And the childcare, childbirth, reproductive options and economic situation is fascinating. In a lot of ways, it seems like the 1950s wasn’t that much different from any of the centuries that came before in terms of giving birth (although sanitation and penicillin are no small miracles). In other ways, it’s clearly a time of transition, where old ways and new technology and new ways of thinking are butting up against each other, sometimes clashing and sometimes co-existing. A lot of times I want a running commentary on the science–like we don’t treat pre-eclampsia this way anymore, or we now know that’s a myth, or the fatality rate from TB was such and such.

I’m also constantly wondering how much has been dramatized for the program and how much is based on the memoirs of the Jennifer Worth. I guess that’s what the book is for. I think we often think that our time has a monopoly on certain kinds of social situations, and shows like these make us see that isn’t so. I’m thinking of the white woman who had a one-night stand with a black man and had a black baby in the extremely white London neighborhood. Or the twin sisters living with one man. In a marriage? It’s not exactly clear. Or the sister and brother who possibly have an incestuous relationship that the nuns know about and look the other way.

OTOH three episodes of Call the Midwife really pissed me off. The first is the one with the story involving a white woman’s affair with a black man and subsequently giving birth to a black baby.  CTM is extremely white. I’m willing to give it some leeway for time and place yada yada, while acknowledging this is probably white obliviousness/privilege, both past and present, and laziness on the part of the producers. What I am not willing to forgive is only having black extras for this episode. If, going forward, they had continued to include black extras it wouldn’t have bothered me quite so much. But it is so incredibly egregiously messed up and racist to have one episode with a slightly more diverse cast and then to go back to white, white, white everywhere you look.

OK, crap, the second one totally fell out of my head. Some other time then.

The third is the abortion episode. I was both surprised and not surprised that there was finally an abortion on the show. After all, abortion, illegal or otherwise, is, has been and probably always be a fact of women’s lives, whether the government, the media and men want to acknowledge that or not. It actually wasn’t too terrible–except for the framing. The voiceover at the beginning, older Nurse Lee, says something like I wish that I could say all the women were brave and all the women were happy. And then in opposition to this we get the woman who desperately wants an abortion because she already had 8 children. Basically, CTM is telling me that this woman is not brave. Well f** you, CTM. Any woman who knows that she is at the end of her capacity with 8 children, who knows what she wants and goes after it in spite of the opposition of sanctimonious Nurse Lee, the public health system, social mores and the law IS a hero. And it is definitely not her fault that her only option is a woman without the training or compassion or something to give her a sanitary illegal abortion. Plus the plot didn’t make sense. One minute the woman is in a coma and her children are kissing her good bye, and the next she is miraculously recovered because they got a new flat outside of London and she can gallivant through the fields? How does that work if she was in the hospital? Still, I was happy they didn’t kill her off to punish her for daring to have an abortion.

I hope that they do more abortion episodes in the future. Was there any British equivalent of the Jane Collective?

An update about writing

Hello, interneties!

I haven’t posted often lately, because I’ve been writing! Or rather editing and writing A LOT. I finally rewrote the ending of my novel, after all the dominoes knocked each other down and I had to pick them up one by one and slot them into their spaces. That might be a mixed metaphor, but I have book brain, I can’t help it.

This is a novel I wrote in 2008-9, which I had queried and had rejected. I’d put it away for a while, but after I came back from Viable Paradise 16, I realized how much I loved and believed in the story. And oh yeah, my head was crammed so full of stuff and thinky thoughts that I couldn’t go back to the novel I’d been working on before the workshop. I was a little bit paralyzed by massive information intake. So I picked up my old novel, figuring I had a lot more distance from it and I could play around and try to fix some of the problems my so much wiser and older self was now able to see. And in the process apply some of the stuff I had learned.

I see some of you doing math. Yes, VP is in October, it’s the end of May, and I’ve been working on this for 8 months. I know. I’m slow. But I also DID ALL THE THINGS:

• Cut 10,000 words from the beginning and rewrote it
• Tweaked the magic systems (oh, my achey head and the problems that caused)
• Strengthened conflicts between main characters
• Aged up my MC slightly to make it more firmly YA
• Worked on the pacing to make it a little faster
• Totally re-thought and rewrote the final conflict/resolution/ending
• Cut another 5,000+ words from all over the place

I still have some polishing to do and I have to look at the beginning and ending together now that I have both, but very, very soon I’ll be sending it out to beta readers to see what they think. I’m so excited!

The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson: review

I usually don’t do straight up reviews, but the reviews on Goodreads were making me sad so I wrote one there and I’m copying it here.

From the publisher:

A heart-stopping story of love, death, technology, and art set amid the tropics of a futuristic Brazil.

The lush city of Palmares Tres shimmers with tech and tradition, with screaming gossip casters and practiced politicians. In the midst of this vibrant metropolis, June Costa creates art that’s sure to make her legendary. But her dreams of fame become something more when she meets Enki, the bold new Summer King. The whole city falls in love with him (including June’s best friend, Gil). But June sees more to Enki than amber eyes and a lethal samba. She sees a fellow artist.

Together, June and Enki will stage explosive, dramatic projects that Palmares Tres will never forget. They will add fuel to a growing rebellion against the government’s strict limits on new tech. And June will fall deeply, unfortunately in love with Enki. Because like all Summer Kings before him, Enki is destined to die.

Pulsing with the beat of futuristic Brazil, burning with the passions of its characters, and overflowing with ideas, this fiery novel will leave you eager for more from Alaya Dawn Johnson.

My review:

Five Stars

Wow. Just wow.

If you don’t like your books challenging, this one is not for you.

If you think violence is ok, but teen sex isn’t, this book isn’t for you.

If you want the protagonist to be your best friend, this book isn’t for you.

If you love working for the payoff of an amazing book and writing, if you love characters who grow, if you are sick of violence as plot, if you love reading about future societies that are truly different than our own but reflect the concerns of our today, then read this book. Read, savor every word and experience saudade at the end. (If I understand how to use the word correctly; I don’t speak Portuguese.)

National Poetry Month — Poetry Hit

When I was 16, I was protesting the first Gulf War. I remember walking down a hallway, maybe into the library at school, and catching a glimpse of the bombing of Baghdad and the green tracers like aberrant fireworks in the dark night sky. I had never seen a war on TV before, and it was real in a way that nothing is real anymore after all these years of TV and war and violence on it. There were people under those bombs and because of the TV they were real to me, people like me and my family, who lived around the world in time zone where it was already night.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Also the 10,000 Maniacs performed the poem in the song The Latin One during their Hope Chest tour in 1990.

National Poetry Month — Poetry Hit

April is National Poetry Month in the US. To celebrate, I’m posting some of the poems I loved at 17.

Meeting at Night

BY ROBERT BROWNING

I

The grey sea and the long black land;

And the yellow half-moon large and low;

And the startled little waves that leap

In fiery ringlets from their sleep,

As I gain the cove with pushing prow,

And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

II

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears;

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match,

And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears,

Than the two hearts beating each to each!

Reading Sayer in the 21st Century

Early paperback edition cover (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayer took some adjusting to. I had never read any early mysteries so at first the genre conventions were baffling. (Along with the actual 1930s Britishness of it, as opposed to the fake or “translated” Britishness we often get on this side of the pond.) However, it was also exciting to read something with no knowledge of the conventions and consciously compare and contrast them with the ones I’m familiar with, like pages and pages of dialogue without dialogue tags or physical descriptions. Sometimes it’s a bit of a game to figure out who is speaking and what exactly is going on as they react to action that is not described. And pacing. Holy moly is the pacing different. But that’s to be expected, since everything today is super fast paced. Movies from the 80s seem slow.

As a 21^st Century reader, my biggest problem was Peter Wimsey’s treatment of Harriet Vane. There’s one scene where she’s in prison and he’s promising to prove her innocence but it hasn’t been going well. He takes out his feelings on Harriet Vane until he feels better and she’s red faced and upset. He leaves whistling, I believe. (I’ve returned the book to the library, so I don’t have the exact quote.) And then there’s, to my mind, the ethical question of whether it’s appropriate for Peter to repeatedly ask a woman in jail to marry him, when he’s the only one trying to prove her innocence. But that wasn’t even on anyone’s radar in the 1930s apparently.

I struggled more to get through Have His Carcase. Maybe because I would have liked more Harriet Vane. Maybe I didn’t care as much about the murder victim and didn’t feel like I could figure out the mystery before the author tells me the answer. Maybe it was the pacing. It also seems a less funny book at the beginning, though it gets funnier as it goes along, to the point where I laughed out loud a few times.

And maybe it’s all that plus some of those 1930s attitudes are less than charming.

Harriet Vane: “There might be a few scattered houses on the road, but they would probably belong to fishermen, and ten to one she would find nobody at home but women and children, who would be useless in the emergency.” (p15)

Really? The women farmers and fishermen’s wives, who run the farms and houses while the men are gone, probably logistically a challenging job, who probably work beside their husbands, doing physical tasks Harriet would be hardpressed to do, who are probably tough and pragmatic and used to taking care of emergencies on their own, wouldn’t be much use in an emergency?

And then there are the casual racial and ethnic slurs. And while I don’t think “dago” has been much used since the mid-20^th Century the n-word makes an appearance a few times. Dago was used freely in the book. While it doesn’t have the same visceral impact that current slurs have (no one has ever used it against me, and I’ve never heard anyone called it. I only know it from textbooks, and I probably only remembered it because it was used against my ancestors—but I was already safely considered white by the time I was reading those textbooks), the attitude behind it was shocking. And I don’t think I’ll ever be desensitized to the n-word. It was such a casual othering.