scribblingwoman

April Fools

MoorishGirl links to a story at Locus Online about a new, mandatory National Book Club, linked to the Patriot Act (Nothing like Canada Reads!). Click on the other stories, which are even better: "Hugo Awards Renamed" to shut out Connie Willis, and "Heinlein, Dick, Bradbury and Others To Become Imaginary", which begins,

The Science Fiction Writers of America's Nomenclature Committee has issued its long-awaited final report on the status of obsolete science fiction — stories overtaken by current events. Many in and outside of SFWA have come to question whether texts originally written in the '40s, '50s and '60s but set in the '80s, '90s and '00s ought still to be considered SF. ... The Committee is recommending that a new genre be created for all science fiction formerly set in the future, to be called Imaginary Fiction, or IF. If this recommendation is approved, all science fiction set prior to 2005 will re-genred as IF.

Re-genred. Yeah, I like that.

More Superman

Superman: Red Son is a limited series in DC Comics’ ElseWorlds line of stories that take existing characters and place them into alternative scenarios. What if, when a baby, Superman had landed in the Ukraine rather than the U.S.?

Here is an interview in which Mark Miller, the series writer, makes his point clear:

Superman: Red Son is an Orwellian examination of what happens when the balance of power tilts in the world and one country finds itself the only world superpower....

Wait a minute, he's not talking about the Ukraine ...

[Links from Maud Newton].

Did you know...?

Sure, it's April Fool's Day, but it's also Captain Regents Day (in San Marino), Commemoration of the battle of Näfels (in Switzerland), Cyprus National Day, Republic Day (in Iran), and Youth Day (in Benin).

April 1 is also the birthday of Lon Chaney (1883), and it marks the deaths of Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1204 and Max Ernst in 1976, and the formation of Weight Watchers in 1946.

Info. from Earth Calendar and Today In History, via That Rabbit Girl.

I love engravings,

and so does the author of the beautiful Giornale Nuovo (link from Long story; short pier).

Femme Noir

On-line comic, via Plep.

Take a midnight stroll down the rain-slick streets of Port Nocturne, where the acrid scent of gunpowder hangs in the air like cheap perfume, where every dark alley comes to a dead end, and justice is ... blonde.

This woman is a real role model.

Tiptree Award, 2003

The winner of the James Tiptree, Jr., Award — "an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender" — for 2003 is Matt Ruff for Set This House In Order: A Romance Of Souls.

News from the FEMINISTSF listserv.

Rebus, continued

Just to conclude the crabby-assed — sorry, arsed — comments I made earlier about Ian Rankin's latest: I finished the book the next day, and while I (obviously) found it a page-turner, I was finally dissatisfied. Rankin's writing, this time around, lacks its usual subtlety. And all the pop-music references are getting tedious. Worse, he verges into sentiment with the heavy handed allustions to Rebus as a "knight in tarnished armour." And the ending is inexcusable. The ending of the average episode of Walker, Texas Ranger has more credibilty. If it turns out, as I suspect, that Rankin is leading up to some May-September grotesquerie between the frequently soused Rebus and the equally anti-social Siobhan — unless it ends almost as soon as it starts and ruins their working relationship forever — I may have to gouge my eyes out. So let's hope he has more sense.

The Little Professor commented on my earlier post, and mentioned that Rankin is winding up the series. I hadn't heard this, but Rebus must be nearing retirement age, surely.

If I haven't put you completely off, click the image for the amazon.ca link.

Since I'm on a Comics kick,

here is a link, via Bookslut, to a very slick site featuring Superman shilling for AmEx.

Why not Wonder Woman?

Some saint has digitalized and posted Action Comics No. 1 (June 1938).
(via Boing Boing.)

(Not very chivalrous, was he?)

Kids on the internet

Liz Lawley at mamamusings writes about negotiating between trust and safety when one's children use the internet. Tracy Kennedy at Netwoman and Fiona Romeo pick up the discussion. Romeo writes about

facilitating a type of parental involvement that leaves space for children's privacy. Much of our recent work has been directed towards learning where the boundaries lie: when does parental monitoring cross the line from being something that makes children feel looked-after and safe, to something that feels like having their pockets searched? This is a very difficult balance to strike, and I think we need to learn from some of the ways parents mediate their children’s contacts and communications in everyday – mostly offline – life.

This sounds commonsensical. Of course, many parents don't manage very well off-line, either. But is the internet substantially different from the rest of life? Do we need to invent new modes of parenting for new technologies? Is our job as parents qualitatively different from that of previous generations? I am inclined to think that it is, but not just because of something as relatively clear-cut as the internet, or more specifically, danger on the internet. Sure, that's part of it, along with globalization, global warming, advanced monopoly capitalism ... the twenty-first century, in fact. We have to find new ways of parenting in so many ways.

Addendum (1:44pm):

Here is a barely-there image of a drawing Harry G. Peter did for Wonder Woman comics: it depicts a little boy shaking his fist at a retreating man and saying, "Scared o'me, huh?" while Wonder Woman twirls her lasso in the background. It is meant to indicate my idealized protective relationship with my child. The question is, I suppose, what does the lasso represent? More than software.

Ian Rankin, A Question of Blood

Half-way through; started last night as a treat to myself after three days of migraine hell. (Yes, I know I have to mark your papers, students from 3621. And I will.) I've read all the Rebus series, and they're the only detective/mystery novels that I still read. The story this time around is prosaically topical — ex-SAS soldier goes psycho and shoots up a school — and the writing seems off. I mean, "Now, on the M74 south of Glasgow, [the windshield wipers] were flying to and fro like Roadrunner's legs in the cartoon" (125). Or, "Her eyes were the same colour as the clouds which had obscured Arthur's Seat earlier that morning" (130). And, there is too much explication, too much awkward filler. The book is part of a successful franchise, moving along on the accumulated steam of its predecessors, but there is not much here that would draw in new readers. Rankin is not that old, yet with this novel he — and Rebus — have grown curmudgeonly.

Boy, there is no reviewer so cranky as a betrayed reviewer.

Wonder women

Posted by George H. Williams: "From Catherine Rodriguez, who organized the SHARP panels at this year's ASECS, I learned that eighteenth-century authors Fanny Burney and Hannah More made appearances in Wonder Woman comics as 'wonder women of history.'"

I would LOVE to see those issues.

Cross-posted to writingwomen.

Just saw "FEMILIAR,"

"a feminist textile/mixed media installation" by an artist named WhiteFeather, at the Saint John Arts Centre (show ends March 29). Interesting; an old-style feminist production, including two pieces which list menstrual blood — and one, uterine blood — among the fixins. But I liked it, unregenerate second-waver as I am¹, particularly the hair pie (what it says) and the matrimonial bedsheets, a triptych of sheets with embellished slashes in the centres which reminded me of nothing so much as the series of scenes in Salmon Rushdie's Shame (1983) in which the protagonist, a doctor, is introduced to his soon-to-be wife in a series of consultations, piece by piece through a hole in a sheet.²

It is a powerful show, that reveals the earthy, organic, and binding nature of the over-determined "feminine." Anyone who is able to catch it in the next two days is encouraged to do so.

Apparently there will be further information about WhiteFeather sometime next month, on the CBC Artspots site.

¹ I hadn't really thought of myself in this way until very recently, when taking part in an exchange at feministe about whether or not Germaine Greer is a disgrace to feminism. Part of me — a small part, inside — writhes and twists and wants to say, "Come on, guys, The Female Eunuch; cut her some slack." But I digress.

² It was not a successful marriage, in case you were wondering.

Picturing women

A link via Blog Sisters: Picturing Women, a site that "explores how women are figured, fashioned, turned into portraits, and told about in words and pictorial narrative."

Cross-posted to writingwomen.

Haven't had a Barbie post in awhile

so here is a cool site, The Distorted Barbie. Paintings, thoughtful commentary, and links. Mattel tried to shut them down in 1997, but the site is still up.

The Distorted Barbie is on detritus.net, "dedicated to recycled culture."

After two days of a wicked migraine

I noted this link on theme funerals, from Stephany Aulenback at Maud Newton, with much interest. I can't decide between the Aquarium (so peaceful) or the New Orleans Jazz Funeral (after all, I won't be able to hear it).

Looking good about now

jill/txt points towards grading software. That's right. Why should students be the only ones who can cheat?

Your kung fu is most impressive

Ping-pong. Go here. Really.

From jill/txt.

Noam Chomsky has started a blog

here.

Link from Crooked Timber.

Memory

Boing Boing links to a story about various technological "external memories," none quite as elegant as the idea of cyber-punk implants, but getting there. I was just going to note it, but then read this beautiful poem at Watermark, and the two seemed somehow to go together. Or not.

journals, notebooks, diaries, poems

laying the mind out
on a white sheet
sometimes in modest bedclothes

sometimes naked
flabby and flatulent
sometimes in a dark shroud

look at it there
pennies on the eyes
breasts nuzzling the armpits

waiting to be washed

I think that the technology will take awhile.

Talk about lapsed

To follow up on the story of the mouth-shaped urinals that caused such consternation earlier this month, Boing Boing links to a photo of nun-shaped urinals.

It has always struck me how often nuns become the stand-ins for people's general dissatisfaction with the Catholic church. Funny, that.

Just a matter of time

Just overheard an ad for a new medication for "erectile disfunction" (otherwise known as getting older) that managed to make that scary list of possible side effects read at the end into a recommendation: "While rare, if erections last longer than four hours, seek medical attention." Just so.

Now if they could just cure migraines. I was home in bed with my ice packs all day. Crap.

Darker Bury St Edmunds

Plep links to the Manor House Museum in Bury St Edmunds, home to a fine collection of interest to the student of horology (clocks, to the rest of us), as well as some stunning costumes and textiles. But Bury St Edmunds is also the site of Moyse's Hall Museum, where can be found macabre artifacts to do with the notorious Red Barn murders in 1827.

I am planning a trip this summer, and I know where I will go first.

Breathe deeply

and then sneeze. Some pretty pictures of illustrated MSS and books at wood s lot: be sure to check out the memento mori.

You will be missed

The Invisible Adjunct just announced that she is winding up the blog; she is leaving academe. Words fail; we needed — we need — to hear what she, and all her commentators, had to say.

Honestly

Was just reading Clive Thompson's article, "The Honesty Virus," in The New York Times Magazine (21/3/04), available on-line here. He cites a study that indicates that people are more honest on-line than either in person or on the phone, because, as he blogged at collision detection, "we know that online, it's easy to get busted; our words are usually being saved and recorded. The online world is tough on liars, because machines don't forget." He does go on to mention the lack of inhibition many feel on-line, but the gist of his argument seems to be that we are only honest because we have to be. While the idea of the internet as "the unlikely conscience of the world" is intriguing, it is depressing to think that it may only be so because of fear of exposure. But surely all the pseudonymous bloggers, who if Thompson is correct could say what they like, shield their identities to enable honesty. I don't think I feel the impulse to reveal or be truthful because I may get busted later; I think it stems from the anonymity of the fingers on the keyboard. But that may just be a lack of forethought.

Back to normal

Zombies Push Jesus from Top of North American Box Office.

(Link from I Know What I Know.)

Famed throughout the Alpha Quadrent

The alert (or extremely bored) among my readers may have noted the new blurb from Qov added to the kudos for this site (only some of which are taken out of context) at the bottom of the sidebar. Qov has a Klingon-language blog called bo logh, and she commented on my daring posting of my Klingon haiku. I'm so glad she did; not only did she translate the poems into Klingon, but she translated them back into English (check out the comments to my original post). She then contacted me to tell me that she was writing an entry on the poems for her own blog, which she posted earlier today. (It is very disconcerting to see phrases such as "bo logh Ho'mo' Miriam Jones, «chongqu'!» maq 'ej loS bommeyDaj ngo' 'agh.") She thoughtfully sent me an English translation of her post, which I include below the fold.

This whole exchange has been fascinating. And in at least one case — I much prefer "writhing" to "rustling" in the first poem — the exercise has improved on the originals. I had always admired the dedication of those who learnt Klingon, but I now have a new level of appreciation of it as a language — albeit a synthetic one — with its own structures. (Here is a previous entry from Languagehat on the subject. In English.)

Motherhood

There was a thread at Crooked Timber a couple of days ago that picked up on a post from Laura at Apt. 11D about The Mommy Myth, by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, in which she wrote, "

One of the pressures (there are others) on the work of the previous generation of feminists comes from child experts, not Dr. Laura. Attachment parenting and Baby Mozart are pressuring women to leave the work force and forcing feminists to think up new solutions.

She doesn't have comments on her blog, but there were a number of interesting comments at Crooked Timber, most of them rejecting child experts and their books. As I said there, I would make a clear distinction between the attachment parenting advocated by the Sears, and Penelope Leach.

This is the second on-line conversation about child-rearing that I have backed away from. Defensiveness, in part, probably. But also, this is one of the few subjects that ... well, it's not academic.

Anyway, Jessa Crispin at Bookslut has a succinctly worded link to a Salon article about Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life by Daphne de Marneffe, apparently about, in part at least, the joys of staying at home and parenting. I haven't read it and likely won't, though I am intrigued by the title and would be more than interested in a meditation on maternal desire; perhaps I will have to write my own. But the shouldas, the oughtas, explicit or merely implied ...

It's a conspiracy.

Addendum (24/3/04): Jessa Crispin links to another article on Daphne de Marneffe, and then appeals to someone to "write a decent book about childlessness."

Owlet vocabulary

It's been so long since I've done any linguistics, and even if I could remember the notations I doubt I could reproduce them on this keyboard. But I can say that I am in awe of his Nibs' ability to introduce the most amazingly drawn-out diphthongs whenever he encounters a vowel. He loves vowels; he chews them and rolls them over his tongue; consonants are trickier, but he is game to try.

"a-mah-no" = "tomorrow"
"meeeew-zik kwaass" = "music class"
"Saad-yi" = "Sally"
"paaar-di" = "party"
"So fuuuuddy" = "That's funny"
"happy bird-ay" = "happy birthday" (also "candle"; "flame")
"Oowl-lix" = "Alex"

Addendum (23/3/04): How could I forget "Boom-ba" for "Grandpa"? And upon reflection, "happy bird-ay" is more "appy dird-day."

Second day of Spring

Here are some shots taken from our back porch on March 21, the second day of Spring, looking south,

and north.

I'm afraid I'm with Joseph Duemer on this one.

Addendum (8:32pm): From Plep: how to build a snowman.

Passages

Two links from an interesting blog I stumbled across called consumptive.org: "art, photography, and the uncanny":

18/3/04: photographs of recycled paper. Much more exciting than it sounds. (Scroll down to bottom of page.)

27/2/04: Time lapse photography: a woman aging 69 years, smiling throughout.

Gendered comments

So far, no comments on Netwoman's post about comments and gender. Under what circumstances ought one to delete a comment? Are comments from men treated differently from comments by women?

Addendum (22/3/04): feministe picks up the thread and describes how an overtly feminist site can become a lightening rod.

Detritus

A new category.

And here are three new links:

Photos of those hokey church signs that make you wince — such as "God is at the end of your rope" — via Long story; short pier;

and two photographers' sites: Modern Ruins by Philip Buehler, and Robert Wogan's documentation of the industrial past, both via Plep.

Heart of Darkness

wood s lot links to In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885–1960. Students of English 1200: here is some context for our reading last week, and next week as well.