yonmei

04:13 pm: Our Bodies Ourselves
Does anyone know of an equivalent book for boys/young men?

Tags: books are what i read

08:24 am: An unpublished children's book: The Cat and the Bear
Die Katze und der Baer, by das_dingsi.

This is the kind of book - a clear story told without words - that I always liked to get to read aloud, because you tell the child the story in your own words: "And so here are the cat and the bear, and they live together in a little house in the middle of the woods, and look, what story is it that Bear's telling Cat before they go to sleep?" ...and so on. It's a very simple story - two friends discover they've run out of milk and need to go get some more - but as Dingsi says "even someone as big as Bear could be afraid, and someone as small as Cat could be courageous".

It's just really lovely. Try and get it published so I can buy a copy for my newer nephew when he's ready to hear stories about a cat and a bear, OK?

Tags: books are what i read

07:49 am: Orson Scott Card: racist
"Alai was glad to see that these were not the Muslim soldiers of history - few fled from the bullets, and many rushed forward."

Reading Shadow of the Giant, which I got out of the library yesterday (Sandra wants that article comparing Ender's Game to Ender's Shadow written...) and I'm reading it and reflecting that one comparison is Card's 1984ish allegience to an American political ideal of the Enemy - in the original Ender, the Russians were The Enemy, so Card used them: writing the Shadow books, Islam is the Enemy, so although he must deal with Alai, Ender's friend, who in this book he has set up as a (Sunni, presumably) Caliph*, he nonetheless has to make clear that Muslims Are Bad and Islam Is The Enemy. (Card's "of history" is his present time-of-writing early 21st-century world.) There are worse moments in the book than that - but the ugly racism expressed by that one line is so huge that I just had to stop and write it down. Chapter 12, "Allahu Akbar", there's just been an assassination attempt witnessed by these soldiers who ran forward to try to prevent it/capture the assassins, not - as apparently Card expects "Muslim soldiers" would today - running away.

*Actually, so far, I do not see any indication that Card is even aware that there are divisions in Islam which would make selection of a Caliph acceptable to all Islam as problematic as selecting a Pope who would be acceptable as supreme ruler over Mormons and Baptists as well as Catholics and Presbyterians.



Tags: books are what i read, orson scott card, reading empire

06:05 pm: Is that you, Doctor Barry?
Two or three weeks ago, someone contacted me to ask if I could recommend any LGBT historical novels set in Scotland/around Scots. So I pointed him at Iona McGregor's Death Wore a Diadem, and a novel that (I conscientiously admitted) I hadn't read, but looked interesting: James Miranda Barry, by Patricia Duncker, about the famous Doctor Barry who may have been the first woman to qualify as a doctor at a British medical school: we don't know. Neither do we know if she was a lesbian, or he was a trans man, or even if ke was intersexed.

James Barry seems to have come into existence in 1809: that was the year the student James Barry matriculated at Edinburgh University as a "literary and medical student". Barry qualified as an M.D. in 1812, nine years before Elizabeth Blackwell was born, fifty-three years before Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had her name entered on the medical register as qualified to practice medicine in Great Britain, and it was fifty-seven years later that Sophia Jex-Blake finally persuaded Edinburgh University to let her register as a medical student.

Barry then went to London and qualified as a surgeon, evidently with a view to an army career, receiving a commission in 1813. In 1817, Barry became the army Medical Inspector for Cape Town in South Africa, until 1828, during which time the surgeon performed one of the first known successful Caesarean sections: the baby and the mother both survived. After Cape Town, Doctor Barry's career included the West Indies - where John and Doctor Barry met - and Corfu, the Crimea, and Canada. (History of Medicine article - VERY BIG PDF)

Who was John? Described as a "black manservant", John is the only human life companion Barry had. (The film Heaven and Earth, apparently planned for this year, is set in Cape Town in 1825 and invents a heterosexual relationship for Doctor Barry with an English milord, the governor of the colony: Barry is blurbed as "the first woman doctor, who had to masquerade as a man".)

Though known in the army as a "ladies' man", who fought several duels, it's not known - and if we could call James Barry back from the grave to ask and get an answer, I doubt if we'd be any better informed - how we may identify this person in modern categories. James Barry was probably born Margaret Ann Bulkley - a letter from young James Barry to the family solicitor exists, with "Miss Bulkey" written on the reverse of the paper by the solicitor - and Margaret Ann Bulkey probably was allowed by her guardian to dress as a boy in order to take a medical degree - but when and why did Margaret Ann Bulkey decide that James Barry was how she would live and die?

Lesbian? Trans man? Should we even impose these ideas on a person who lived and died before the modern concepts of heterosexuality/homosexuality and transgender were thought of? How would James Barry have identified, if asked - aside from as "Doctor James Barry"? (Well, technically: Doctor Barry died just as these concepts were being thought of.)

Doctor Barry died in London, in 1865, after a successful military and medical career: was buried in Kensal Green with full rank: and then the woman who laid out the body after Barry's death revealed that the corpse had not been a man. (I find from wikipedia that the British Army, with its usual strong feelings about freedom of information, promptly sealed all records for 100 years - normally only practiced with matters affecting the personal embarrassments of the Royal Family or the safety of the realm. Oddly and interestingly, the first historian to look at the sealed records in the 1950s was a woman, Isobel Rae.) There was no autopsy, but apparently the layer-out claimed not only was the body of a woman, there were stretch marks indicating pregnancy.

Doctor Barry was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery: John went home to Jamaica, and no one ever seems to have asked him what he knew. I don't even know if anyone knows or would be able to find a family name for John. Four years later, Sophia Jex-Blake entered Edinburgh University's medical school, under no disguise.

Anyway. And the reason why all this is on my mind: I got a copy of James Miranda Barry in the mail this morning, because the person who'd asked for advice had evidently looked it up on abebooks, found two copies (mine cost a £1) and got one for me, too.




PS: Top Hot Butches

Tags: angry queer, books are what i read, gender, sometimes i love my job

10:27 pm: Regendering books: Understood Betsy & A Dog of Flanders
Understood Betsy, Chapter VII:

Michael made a rush for any way out of his prison, and climbed, like the little practised squirrel that he was, up from one stub to another to the top of the branch. He was still below the edge of the pit there, but Benjamin lay flat down on the snow and held out his hands. Michael took hold hard, and, digging his toes into the snow, slowly wormed his way up to the surface of the ground.

( Read more... )

A Dog of Flanders:

Within sound of the little melancholy clock almost from their birth upward, they had dwelt together, Nello and Patrasche, in the little hut on the edge of the village, with the cathedral spire of Antwerp rising in the north-east, beyond the great green plain of seeding grass and spreading corn that stretched away from them like a tideless, changeless sea.

It was the hut of a very old woman, of a very poor woman--of old Jehan Daas, who in her time had been a soldier, and who remembered the wars that had trampled the country as oxen tread down the furrows, and who had brought from her service nothing except a wound, which had made her a cripple.

( Read more... )

Robert in Bloom

"I was thinking Leonard Hunt was about right when she said, 'A boy is the sweetest thing Goddess ever made.'"

"Why, Mac!" and Robert sat bolt upright with an astonished face–this was such an entirely unexpected sort of remark for the philosopher to make.

Evidently interested in the new discovery, Mac placidly continued, "Do you know, it seems as if I never really saw a boy before, or had any idea what agreeable creatures they could be. I fancy you are a remarkably good specimen, Robert."

( Read more... )

Tags: books are what i read, regendering

06:07 pm: Jeeves & Wooster flashfic: Straight Face
Inspired by dialogue with whatho and mllesatine. Much thanks.

( The private relationship of a gentleman with his gentleman's gentleman )




Tags: books are what i read, fanfic, flashfic, wodehouse

09:36 am: "My job as an artist is to make you squirm"
Via dragovianknight, E. Bear writes:

My job as an artist is to tell you what I see, not what I wish I saw. My job is to tell as much of the truth about the world as my tiny flawed inadequate little brain and art can encompass. And the truth--even the tiny, fragmentary, self-contradictory truths that are all I have to offer--the truth will make you squirm.

From Elizabeth Bear, Chapter 3, Blood and Iron:

( cut for length )

This is enough to make me squirm, but not because it's "the truth": it makes me squirm because it's embarrassingly untrue. If it's what Elizabeth Bear "sees", she was at the movies or watching TV when she "saw" it - the romantic depiction of "the young Master returning home to be greeted by the middle-aged female servant". (It also makes me sure, and sad, that Bear has never been a P. G. Wodehouse fan: even Bertie Wooster understood that the phrase "young Master" can be employed only for comic or teasing effect.)

Later in this essay asserting what kind of Artist she is, Bear says:

If you want somebody to tell you what you want to hear, to hew to a party line, or to spread some kind of gospel, you probably want some other kind of artist. If you want somebody to proselytize an ideology, you definitely want some other kind of artist.

I am not here to comfort you.

Well, Blood and Iron is certainly not comforting - it's irritating and discomfiting to realise that there are still people in the world who think that it's appropriate to pull out "Stout grey-haired McCliche" when they think need arises, complete with obsequious dialogue. (Unless, later in the novel, we discover part of being a werewolf is keeping the local village in terrified submission, and the reason for Morag's obsequiousness was that she knew if she failed to address Keith as "young Master" or if he complained about her service, villagers would die. That doesn't quite make sense either with the way she behaves, but maybe she's suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.)

But Bear's notion that in promoting this kind of character, depicting this kind of relationship, she is not "hewing to a party line", just tells me: she's never tried to think politically about what she writes. About how, for example, a pack of incoming werewolves who buy and restore a Scottish 16th-century manor house near a village, and set about raising cattle and sheep, would fit in with the community. (Are they Catholic werewolves or Protestant werewolves? If Protestants, are they Presbyterian or Episcopalian? If Presbyterian, which branch of the church have they followed?) How would the locals react to the new family at the big house? (And they could be "the new family" for fifty years or more...) If Bear thinks that they could simply move in and be princes of the fiefdom without any backtalk from the locals, she is proselytising an ideology - a very conservative, very comforting kind of ideology to a certain kind of person - the sort of person who believes absolutely in the rightness of the class system, in everyone "knowing their place", and the lower orders showing proper respect to the landowner.

That isn't the kind of artist I want. But it is the kind of artist who would write Morag that way and never notice that she had her own thoughts about Eoghan and Keith MacNeill.

(See also: What is a writer's job? at feministsf.)



Tags: books are what i read, evil american politics, racefail 09, scottish politics, venting

08:31 pm: The Interminable Sharing Knife
I re-read part 3 of The Sharing Knife - the first time I'd re-read it since I bought it: and concluded all over again that Lois McMaster Bujold has something. Not a particularly original thought, true. But I came to the end of Part 2 of TSK with a not-altogether-happy realisation that Bujold had plans for part 3 - and the last few pages of 3, when it was becoming perfectly obvious that there was going to be a part 4, were kind of the same, intensified.

There is no plot. Dag and Spark remain perfectly, perfectly happy. Dag continues to be Lakewalker Superman, acquiring new ground skills every novel. If you haven't read part 3 yet, well, I doubt if this is a spoiler. It's a kind of odyssey through the US after the Fall of the Cities, where everyone is white and everyone is heterosexual and most people live contented, bucolic lives, unless they get taken by malices or bandits. (Is Bujold ever going to explain the extraordinary whiteness of everyone in her world? Granted a totally post-racial America, where no one cares what colour your skin is, I would then assume there would still be a substantial variation... but there isn't.) It's sort of like pre-contact Barrayar without the class system. It wouldn't be anything too unusual in most fantasy writers, but coming from Bujold, who we're aware can be far more complex and subtle, this sunny, all-white, all-het fantasy does seem... weird.

And yet; I still want to read part 4. That's what I mean when I say: she has something.

In other news, I got two more rare eggs today, so now I have cloud egg, sun egg, and floating-on-air egg, besides the two I bred. Give my eggs clicky! Help my baby dragons grow!



Tags: books are what i read, dragon eggs need clicky

07:12 pm: The character list meme
The list of characters





( Copracat asked: Why do birds sing? )

( Copracat asked: Don't you regret betraying her? )

( Magpyr asked: If 3 could go back in time, what is the one thing they would change about their life? )

( Magpyr asked: What is 5's favorite food? )

( Magpyr asked: If 7 were to be a dog, what breed would they be? )

( MuninnHuginn asked: Number 13, what is the length of a piece of string? )

( MuninnHuginn asked: Number 6, was it 'in the greenhouse with the conductors baton' or 'the downstairs loo with a grand piano'? )

( EileenLufkin asked: 2&11: do they fight each other, fight crime, or have hot sex? )

( EileenLufkin asked: Question for number four; 1, 8, and 9; cliff, marry, shag? )

( Ruthi asked: 1 and 7, how do they save the world, and from what? )

( 12, 14, and 15, on finding themselves ignored )

Tags: babylon 5, blake's 7, books are what i read, dr who, highlander, house md, m*a*s*h, macgyver, shakespeare, slash slash slashity slash, star trek

08:36 pm: Jeanette Winterson has no sales rank on Amazon
Amazon.com (I don't know how far Amazon.co.uk is taking part in this) have stripped all "lesbian novels" or "gay novels", of their sales rank.

Because, you see, such novels - if they got anywhere near the bestseller lists, might offend the decent folks.

Links at lexin.

Update: Oh good lord - Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America, by Dr. Nathaniel Frank, has been stripped of its sales rank. "Adult" material, eh?

Open letter at Booksquare. Amazonfail on Twitter.

Petition in protest of Amazon's new anti-queer policy

Tags: amazonfail, angry queer, books are what i read, jeanette winterson, twitter

09:07 pm: Worldcon panels I for one will never propose, and not for their lack of interest, part 1
I am probably going to the Worldcon in Montreal this August. (I say "probably" because I am staring wanly at my finances, and at the state of the world, and wisting that I will miss most of 's visit to Edinburgh, but, you know. I bought a membership! I've said who I won't be on panels with! I've proposed panel topics! I've volunteered! I've emailed Shoshanna!

I haven't booked a catsitter or plane tickets. June for that.

But it occurred to me, while dipping into Fun Home, that a panel that would be fascinating (probably) but I don't think I could ever brave the personal embarrassment of proposing to either of the possible participants:

Alison Bechdel and Samuel R. Delany, discussing what it was like to be a nascent queer writer growing up in a funeral home, with fathers who died before either of them were 20.

(Admittedly, under different circumstances: Bechdel's father died in either accident/suicide, Delany's father died of cancer.)

Current Mood: amused

Tags: bechdel, books are what i read, delany, meta, worldcon

4 lolcat | Purr at me

06:54 pm: When you see this in your f-list, quote Shakespeare...
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.



Tags: books are what i read, meme, poetry, shakespeare

10:17 pm: I went to see Moonacre Manor
There are spoilers for the film and for Elizabeth Goudge's novel The Little White Horse, below.




( one of my favourite books, insanely adapted )

Tags: bloody bloody bloody, books are what i read, elizabeth goudge, films

05:03 pm: Ook: Moonacre
I'm hoping to go to Moonacre tonight. As in Secrets of. It's based on The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge, which was, for about three years about thirty years ago, one of my favourite books in the whole world.

So. Um. I'm kind of nervous, actually.

I hope Miss Heliotrope is as wonderful as she is in the book.


Get your own valentinr

All my dragons have gone flat, so I am removing the post that had them in. :-(

Tags: books are what i read, films, valentines day

10:03 pm: Reading about someone reading the Lymond Chronicles
I managed to read the first four volumes of the Lymond Chronicles, one by one, though I did get two-thirds of the way through Pawn in Frankincense at one point, ran out of time, returned it to the library, and did not read the last third until well over a year later. ( cut for inconsiderable spoilers )

I can't be the only one to find him irritating at best, detestable at worst, can I? I'm sure I'm not the only one to hate Spike, nor to find emo Doctor Ten just annoying?





Tags: books are what i read, doctor who, dragon eggs need clicky, dragons

10:54 pm: Infected by brownbetty
What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicise the ones you started but didn't finish.

( 106 books unread by LibraryThing )

Tags: books are what i read, meme

06:25 pm: Infected by mercurychaos
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions on your LJ.
* Don't dig for your favourite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

"Oh? So you're stupid, are you?"
-from Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett.

...technically speaking, the fifth sentence is just "Oh?"

Is that a sentence, or a phatic noise?

From Corporal Strappi, I think it's just phatic. From Sergeant Jackrum, it would be a sentence.

Tags: books are what i read, discworld, meme

03:38 pm: Shakespeare!
How many plays by Shakespeare can you name?

( I can )

Tags: books are what i read, shakespeare

07:25 pm: The Sarah Palin Meme: Free People Read Freely
In the US, it's Banned Books Week. This is the ALA's list for top 100 Banned/Challenged Books in 2000-2007. "Out of 3,869 challenges reported to or recorded by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, as compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom does not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges. Research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five which go unreported."

And, in the US, the Republican nominee for Vice President is someone who actively tried to have books banned from her local public library: "While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla [1996–2002] she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin's attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day." - Letter About Palin

Usual rules:

If it's bold, I've read it.
If it's italicised, I've read part of it.
If it's underlined, I'd like to read it.
If it's strikethrough, I don't want to read it - but feel strongly that my dislike doesn't mean other people shouldn't be able to make that decision for themselves.

( The ALA's 100 Most-Banned Books List 2000-2007 )

Tags: angry queer, big read, books are what i read, evil american politics, evil awful mondays, harry potter, imagine better, let's all be outcasts together, lists, meme, outcasts should stick together, powerful speech vs. powerless silence

10:57 pm: The character meme: N
1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your IJ.

muninnhuginn gave me N.

( Five fictional people whose names begin with N: Noel Bastable )

( Nancy Blackett )

( Mrs Norris )

( Nikanj )

( Noh Mann )

Tags: arthur ransome, books are what i read, e nesbit, jane austen, meme meme meme, octavia e butler, pat califia