yonmei

12:57 pm: It is a truth not sufficiently acknowledged...
...that no one ever sees themselves as the villain: no one ever thinks of themselves as the bully.

Healthcheck warning: this leads to Kathryn Cramer's website via HideMyURL

In other, more pleasant thoughts, it has occurred to me that there is a lovely meme to be had comparing fandoms to cake.

The manly moustachio'd fandoms of the 1970s and 1980s are chocolate cake, solid and multilayered with thick chocolate frosting and sandwiched with more chocolate.

(The Professionals has an unexpected chocolate-ginger layer that involves Gordon Jackson/Cowley. Bodie and Doyle are chocolate cake even though neither of them have moustaches.)

House is a series of green tea vegan cupcakes with rosewater icing and little silver balls, though attempts keep being made to stir it in a more normal direction.

What is your fandom? What is its representative cake?




(This post wants you to know *bouncing up and down a little* that it was inspired by jekesta's RiptideIsLove multifandom vid, which is all about being in love with a fandom so much you can't really think about any of the rest. Or anything else. Really. It is (the fanvid, not this post) deep and meaningful and clever and funny and cute and full of Avons, or at least one Avon.)

Tags: cake, fannishness, racefail 09, silly memes

02:03 pm: Reasons people may prefer pseudonyms or limited personal disclosure on the Internet
From RaceFail: Once More, with Misdirection

* Because it is a standard identity- and privacy-protection precaution
* Because they have experienced online or offline stalking, harassment, or political or domestic violence
* Because they wish to discuss sexual abuse, sexuality, domestic abuse, assault, politics, health, or mental illness, and do not wish some subset of family, friends, strangers, aquaintances, employers, or potential employers to know about it
* Because they wish to keep their private lives, activities, and tastes separate from their professional lives, employers, or potential employers
* Because they fear threats to their employment or the custody of their children
* Because it's the custom among their Internet cohort
* Because it's no one else's business

I really, really don't want anyone to be able to google on my real name and find Yonmei, or vice versa. I've been very honestly impressed over the last seven months with how decent most people have been - friends, enemies, and random acquaintances - about honouring this preference. Because we only realise how decency ought to be honoured, when we see its absence.

Tags: ***** this fir a kerry oan, ;l, racefail 09

02:08 am: I stayed up to write about the neurobiological survey monkeys
The panel I went to on Sunday morning at Worldcon, where I transcribed Kathryn Cramer's comments and later blogged about it in more detail, was also written up by IzzybelBooks and the_Shoshanna. ide_cyan got recruited onto the panel from the audience.

As we might have expected, Kathryn Cramer also, eventually, wrote up that panel. After, apparently, looking for and reading all of our published accounts, none of which she links to or refers to by name, but which get referenced and dismissed in her post. (The webaddress at which she posted her account of it on 30th August, still live, is www.kathryncramer.com/kathryn_cramer/2009/08/word-for-the-day-opression.html: spelling error in the link is hers.)

Probably her most egregious elision is her claim that "another blogger" (that would be the_shoshanna) called ide_cyan "tongue-tied" - ide_cyan responds to this and to other points in an open letter to Kathryn Cramer, and the_shoshanna points out that wow, the fail just keeps on failing.

The title of Kathryn Cramer's post is "Oppression, Feminism, & Motherhood" and her response (without citing me or quoting it) to my comment that

Kathryn Cramer is by her own account a white woman whose best example of “oppression” is neighbours who think she shouldn't let her nine-year-old son out on his own. And while I'd certainly agree that drive-by parenting is one example of sexist bias – since mothers are the ones attacked in this way, not fathers – it becomes oppression only if Kathryn Cramer's neighbours have the power to get her arrested or evicted – if they have more social power than she does, more ability to kick her around than she does the ability to ignore them and continue parenting her child how she sees fit. Criticism of parenting decisions from social equals does not constitute oppression.

was to claim that:

a group of other audience members, who seemed to be a portion of Fail Fandom, left as a group. According to their blogs this group went off and discussed how appalling it is that I claim to be oppressed because I am a parent and because of where I live.

She goes on to argue that

I seriously doubt that Joanna Russ I know would argue that I and other American mothers are not oppressed. And I wonder by what right self-described feminists discard out-of-hand claims by individual mothers that they suffer oppression.

Is 21st century feminism really feminism at all? If it has abandonded [sic] mothers as such, it has abandoned its task of advocating the liberation of women.

The specific claim that we all four (and others) discarded out of hand was Cramer's assertion that "Living in Westchester is like one step short of living in East Germany - neighbours will call the cops if they see my nine-year-old son walking down the street alone because they don't think I should let him do that."

Examples of American mothers being oppressed: (1) That many health insurance companies do not provide coverage for childbirth in their standard plans. (2) That pregnant women do not receive free pre-natal care or post-partum care or have a legal right to paid and unpaid maternity leave with right to return to work. (3) That paid paternity leave, or paid parental leave which can be split between two parents, isn't even on the realistic wishlist. (4) That while a woman's right to breastfeed her child is legally protected anywhere she has a legal right to be, organisations and individuals feel free to discriminate against and harass women who are breastfeeding in public, and a baby at breast is regarded as more obscene than a soft-porn pic of a barebreasted woman. (5) That childcare is regarded as "women's work", unpaid labour gifted to the economy, and neither regarded highly nor rewarded. (6) That systematically and systemically, anything that "goes wrong" with a child is assumed first of all to be the mother's fault.

I could go on. I probably should. But Cramer didn't mention any of this: she mentioned an example of drive-by parenting that has to be an intensely annoying such example - but is in no way equivalent to being "one step short of living in East Germany" and isn't anywhere near the most acute examples - not only the woman in Montana who was arrested, prosecuted, and convicted of the crime of letting her kids go to the mall without her: more horribly still, the couple in Texas who were arrested, charged, and had their kids taken away from them for the crime of taking photographs of herself breastfeeding her year-old son. But to Cramer the petty annoyance of her neighbours drive-by parenting is "oppression" and that the rest of us are being bad feminists for not agreeing with her.

Update: And actually, you know, the most irritating thing about this? I am totally inclined to be sympathetic to Kathryn Cramer about how her neighbours indulge themselves in drive-by parenting and how she wants her son to be a free-range kid. I think drive-by parenting is really, really annoying (speaking as a sometime childminder) and I think the modern ideal of children kept in a hermetically sealed environment not allowed unsupervised access to the outside world is going to be perceived as child abuse in the 22nd century, much as we now perceive the 19th-century habit of pacifying babies with opium and gin. But oppression is not neighbours sniping about your parenting skills. Having the police called (in circumstances where that evidently doesn't mean getting arrested and ending up in handcuffs, in a cell, in court, or deported) is doubtless a bloody nuisance, but it is nowhere near East Germany, and it is trivialising the real experience of women, far nearer in time and place, for whom having the police called is not just a bloody nuisance, but a threat of losing children, home, job, and the right to remain in the US, to argue that her privileged experience is the same as theirs and in dismissing her privilege we dismiss their oppression.

Update again (18th September):

K Tempest Bradford responds to Kathryn Cramer's response - and to her taking it down: Help, Help, I'm Bein' Oppressed and The Predictable Flounce. (If you're here via links from either of those posts, welcome! Sit down wherever you can find space and have a cup of tea. Ginger biscuits?)

Update the third: link to screencap of the post now deleted.



Tags: fannish snark, i am a feminist, joanna russ, racefail 09

02:30 pm: At the Worldcon: Day Four, morning
I am writing this at the same tiny hut-cafe in the Park St Louis where I ate tea on Tuesday evening: I will soon be having lunch, buckwheat crepe with tomato and cheese and a glass of freshly-pressed orange juice.

It's Tuesday again. The con's over. It was a major experience – worth the £120 I paid for membership: this and my days in Montreal were worth the £600 I paid for the flight. This Saturday I shall be wandering around the farmer's market again, this time next week I'll be back at work: but for these past days I was in another world. How do you put a price on intellectual experience?

( Sunday morning )

Sunday afternoon was something I was really looking forward to, because there was a trifecta of panels all related to each other – I was on the last panel (Writing Gender Issues), I had originally been invited to be on the middle panel (Rainbow Futures), and I was fascinated by the first panel (Human Reproductive Variants). But, it's quarter past two: I should finish up, post this, and take my freshly-charged battery out with my camera to go on photographing Vieux-Montreal. Or rather, be damned to “should”: I want to!

PS: Went in, paid ($9.08 for my crepe and orange juice) and while the woman was sorting out change for my $50, I tipped $2. Then when she handed me my change, I tossed the 2c in the change bowl, and she said "Merci" in a way that made me wonder if she'd noticed me tipping $2. Oh dear. Okay. I was back at my B&B to collect my camera battery and post this before it dawned on me that given I'm not likely to be back, it doesn't really matter if she knows I tipped $2.02 or thinks I only tipped 2c...



Tags: i am a feminist, racefail 09, worldcon

12:13 pm: Marked and unmarked: other thoughts
Connie Willis to me (I was invisibly at the back of the audience) "I think you have a major misconception about how writers work" and went on to explain to me that a writer gets an idea for a story because something comes alive for them - as I myself sometimes put it, "something clicks". The story is there - you can write it or refuse to write it, but the essential elements are by that time a given.

My question had been born out of the thought, sitting at the back of the room, listening to four North American voices from people I could not see (none of whose books I was familiar with, though of course I had heard of Sterling and of Willis as writers) why these four North Americans, when they were talking about "writing history" were all talking about British/European history. (One of them clarified, when I asked why they were writing in the histories of continents not their own, that he also writes Japanese history).

Backing up a day, when I was at the Writing Gender Issues panel, I said that I thought I had been invited to be on it because I am a lesbian who writes m/m slash stories: I habitually and regularly write people whose gender is not my own. And of course (even sometimes by other slash fans) I'm asked why. Why do I, a lesbian, want to write about two men and their relationship?

I could answer, as Connie Willis answered me, that this is because the ideas for stories that click for me are pretty much always fanfic about two men in a sexual/sexually charged relationship. Or I could answer, as (I think it was Sterling) answered me, "Because that's what we're taught in school" (because our cultural values are such that writing about that topic is just easy/obvious - we're taught to value men - we're taught to value British/European history - )

And with that response, things clicked for me, and I walked over to Cafe Momus for lunch and to find a computer to post this thought, which relates to the Werewolves of Brigadoon thing too:

For North Americans, at least for white North Americans, writing about British/European history by preference to their own is unmarked. "Medieval England" is an unmarked period for North Americans to be interested in, to research, to write novels about, but writing novels in the same time period in North America would be a marked choice - it would put you outside the circle, to acknowledge that period as part of American history.

Whereas for me, a lesbian writing m/m slash stories, I think it partly confuses people so much (and I have had to explain it/think about it so much that I think in all honesty it's Connie Willis who has a major misconception about "how writers work", not me: I think I've thought about it a lot more than she has) because it mixes things up: what is marked? What is unmarked? I am a lesbian writing: I write about gay male relationships: I am a woman writing about men: I am a fan writing fanfic.

I have had a splendid con, and there is still the Are Fans Slans? panel with Kate Nepvau and Patrick Nielsen Hayden to go. Hee.

(I may sneak out if Kate isn't on it: but oh boy, do I ever want to watch this cage match!)

Tags: connie willis, i write fanfic, racefail 09, worldcon

12:21 pm: Kathryn Cramer on "Minorities in a Large Field"
There was a panel at 10am this morning called "X, Why? Minorities in a Large Field or the Majority in our own?" which was blurbed as "Joanna Russ said in 1983: 'But remember, one can't get minority work into the canon by pretending it's about the same things or uses the same techniques as majority work." Does this mean we should think of feminist SF (or that written by gay or black people) as a separate field? How much should minority-advocacy SF speak to people who aren't part of the minority?"

I circled the panel on my first pass through the programme on Wednesday evening, and only noticed when I came to read the list of panellists yesterday that one of them was Kathryn Cramer. She was not on the panel in the first draft, still available online: Kate Nepveu was, but refused to be on it when Kathryn Cramer was invited. (We know this because the_shoshanna overheard Cramer saying so as she came in.)

I came in five minutes late, having had a discussion with ide_cyan about whether either of us was going, and Ide promised to restrain me.

I will write more coherently about this later, but here are some of things Kathryn Cramer said (based on scribbled notes made at the time):
---
Everything after this except what's in brackets is based on my notes of what Cramer said: I've put it in "quotes" where I'm giving pretty much a transcription (though it may not be exact) and without quotes where I'm summarising.
---
"Do we have to play the game of the publisher? What if you're going to write for someone who isn't the publisher's idea of the average SF fan?"

Australian writers mix fantasy/SF/Horror in a way that "sounds wrong" to an American audience.

"Getting into a Years Best anthology it's an advantage to be a minority because you have a different voice" but a novel publication is a different matter "What colour central character ends up on the cover?"

Betsy Mitchell - "her husband's black" - has done most to promote black writers in New York publishing.

Samuel R. Delany wrote an essay on racism in science-fiction where he pointed out that he and Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson are grouped together on panels at cons as if they have something in common.

[izzybelbooks pointed out that Delany had noted there were only panels on race at Readercon when Delany was going to be there. ]

"Many people are oppressed in many different ways"

Pulp fiction magazines sold hugely in Harlem in the 1930s - we don't know how many of the early pulp writers were not white because there was a huge concealment of ethnicity and gender in early pulp fiction magazines,

"What's supposed to happen with a character on the cover is that the cover should be a correct representation of the content"

(izzybelbooks pointed out that the panel was supposed to be about what gets into the canon, and how it gets into the canon)

"The Hugo voters are a collective" - the quality of awards is much higher from award-giving committees than from a democratic representation.

(Some conversation about paperback distribution, which Cramer had earlier said was not economically viable, and reference to e-books: the_shoshanna whispered Verbe Noire to me.)

E-books are going in the direction of a central distribution system - Amazonfic and Kindle.

"I want to return the discussion to the word Oppression" (she had earlier invited ide_cyan to join her and Henry Melton on the panel) "How does oppression work?"

"I also experience oppression in different ways"

(The following, I swear, is a word-for-word EXACT QUOTE)

"Living in Westchester is like one step short of living in East Germany - neighbours will call the cops if they see my nine-year-old son walking down the street alone because they don't think I should let him do that."

Tags: racefail 09, worldcon

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

09:09 am: Whee!
Hugo nominees are listed.

Most of them, as usual, are people I don't read/haven't read, but there under Fan Artists is Sue Mason, who I'll vote for any day of the year as Best Fan Artist. Yay.

(Also, I will tactically vote against Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Kathryn Cramer if anyone can give me a tactical voting target. If not, I'll just hope someone else wins and follow my usual practice of not voting in most sections of the Hugo list given that I rarely have any clear preference.)

Tags: racefail 09, worldcon

10:41 am: Weather
I keep planning to leave the house - even if only briefly to sprinkle coffee grounds in the garden - and then it is pelting down again.

Hail, heavy rain, hail. Also wind. Lots of wind.

I came home yesterday evening to find the sheets and such I had left on the line soaked through, and put them in the washing machine hoping that the rain would have rained itself out by tomorrow and I could hang them back on the line. No. (The most effective way of keeping my bedding clean of dust/dust mites: wash at 60+ temperatures (which kills the dust mites) and then hang them outside to dry. Hanging them from the pulley in the kitchen is fine, but not as effective.)

Hail. I want to go out.

I just discovered (yesterday) that I have a card that gives me a free cup of brewed coffee from Starbucks, one a day every day till 21st April, any time after 2pm. So I exercised it on the nearest Starbucks, and ... well, confirmed yet again that I don't really like Starbucks brewed coffee. Still. It was caffeine, and I was nearly falling asleep.

I had an awkward and painful discussion of RaceFail 09 with autopope and feorag, in which nobody's mind got changed, though I did manage to express my discomfort at various things that had got said by them. So, well.

Hey, it's snowing!

Okay, that's it, I'm going out.



Update: I sprinkled coffee grounds while it was still snowing a bit, and came back in to have a bowl of porridge with fresh raspberries, and now the sun is shining and I am going properly out.

Well, once I finish my coffee. I have an idea for two communities to start: one about Dragon Mountain, which is where all the dragons I am breeding live, and yours could too, if you like: and other about 50 books by writers who are people of colour (there's one on livejournal, and aside from anything else, it would encourage me to read more books for the first time as opposed to always re-reading...I think.)

Tags: racefail 09, weather

10:55 pm: Verb Noire: new small press is hopeful


(Update: this is very cool. I just donated 1% of what they figured they needed as startup money (it worked out to just over £12 in real money) and when I reload the page, I get to see my contribution added to the amount.)

Also looking for readers and story submissions.



Tags: powerful speech vs. powerless silence, racefail 09

01:11 pm: The politics of indifference
"Indifference doesn’t result from hostility: it derives from being so comfortably in the majority that you never have to think that a minority have different needs. Hostility enters when the majority find themselves questioned, as of right, by the minority." -me, October 2007

And that, I think, pretty much explains RaceFail 2009 (summary). FWIW. HTH. HAND.

Tags: racefail 09

09:31 am: Happiness is a clean shirt...
I finished posting to feministsf blog this morning, and pulled on one of the shirts that had been hanging in the kitchen for the past 48 hours... to find that when I burned the chilli-garlic for my kasha, the smell had percolated into the fabric of the shirt, and if I didn't want to go round all day smelling like a rather tasty meal, I needed to put this shirt in the wash and find one that hadn't been hanging up to dry recently.



Tags: just my life really, racefail 09

12:01 am: One Minute Past Midnight
It's Friday, 12:01 am. And I wanted to say something about this. Except I'm staring at it still with a fascinated eye wondering where to begin. Or where to end.

I don't even like Elizabeth Bear's books, what I've seen of them. afrai has more.

Tags: elizabeth bear, outcasts should stick together, racefail 09