Chrononautic Log

July 30, 2006

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July 28, 2006

Yes, they finally finished putting the French and German subtitles on it this week. So:

1. Biggest disappointment: In Curse of the Black Pearl, Jack Sparrow was a fascinating character. In Dead Man’s Chest, Jack Sparrow is a dull and cowardly clown.
2. Most pleasant surprise: Return of [ex-]Commodore Norrington. (Jack Davenport would make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.)
3. Second most pleasant surprise: Orlando Bloom seems to be developing some gravitas.
4. Most pleasant non-surprise: Keira Knightley in drag, with a rapier in one hand and a cutlass in the other.
5. Second most pleasant non-surprise: Stellan Skarsgård as William Turner Sr.
6. Oddest odd thing: Distinct downplaying of piratey goodness in favor of generic action sequences, despite appearance of word Pirates in film title.
7. Most irritating odd thing: Widely reviled cannibal islander sequence could have been completely excised from movie with no negative consequences for plot, and possible positive consequences for pacing.
8. Second most irritating odd thing: Destruction of second cage conveniently removing all non-white crewmembers.
9. Biggest relief: Having read indifferent reviews before seeing movie, setting expectations appropriately.
10. Biggest fear: Pirates 3 :: Pirates 2 as Return of the Jedi :: Empire Strikes back.
11. Why I would have been willing to see Pirates 3 immediately anyway: See 2 through 5.

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July 26, 2006

Update: Something tells me that nobody is going to want to talk about anything but what I say about superheroes.

Maybe I can’t make it to Susan’s birthday party, but at least I can answer a few questions. (This will all be on the test, so pay attention!)

1. Robots or superheroes?

   It pains me to say this, but . . . robots.

   I’m too much the postmodernist now not to want to turn things over to see what crawls in the shade of their dark undersides. (My enjoyment of too many fantasy stories, for instance, is now marred by the antidemocratic subtext of any story that involves placing the “rightful” king on the throne.)

   And as much as I enjoy the four-color craziness of the Golden Age and applaud the bright-eyed enthusiasm of Siegel and Schuster, I can’t forget that “superheroes” also means Steve Ditko and Frank Miller and Mike Grell. It’s Mr. A and Rorschach and Women in Refrigerators Syndrome.

   It’s the underlying assumption that civil society is a failure, that to be a suspect is to be a criminal, that “extraordinary rendition” is the only road to justice. It’s an ugly world and it’s not the world I live in.

   If it was just that some superheroes were written that way, that would be one thing, but as it is, I think it’s the only way superheroes actually make sense, and guys like Ditko and Miller and Grell are just more up-front about it.

   I haven’t yet found an inescapable ruinous subtext for robots, so: robots.

2. What did you like best about Oxford?

   The sense of history, I think. Not just that the university was anywhere up to nine hundred years old, but that when I worked on the papers for my courses on colonial Indian history, I did it in a building constructed in the 1880s as a training center for the Indian Civil Service. And that I was preceded at the the college I attended by both John le Carré and Dr. Seuss.

   (Plus, getting my master’s from a world-class university finally erased the shame of the grades I got my junior year of high school.)

3. The Arbitrary Fortune Fairy gives you five thousand dollars, but you have to spend it in the next 72 hours. What do you spend it on?

   If I’d responded to this in a timely manner, the answer to this would have been obvious: fly to Vegas for the aforementioned birthday party.

   As it is, the answer would probably still involve plane tickets in some way, but possibly also more prosaic things, like buying a television. Or maybe I'd fly to Florida for a long weekend, get myself a motorcycle license, and spend whatever was left on a used Ducati.

   (Still, I’d be regretting Vegas.)

4. I’m not a fan of those “if you could live in any past time or place” questions, so I’m not going to ask that. But I am going to ask this: if you could bring the dominant clothing style from any past time or place back into fashion, what would it be?

   I won’t presume to speak for women’s fashion (though, in passing, I’ll note that I’m partial to the Twenties and Thirties), but for men’s, it would be some era in which hats were worn and suits had waistcoats and more than three buttons. Like, say, this one.

5. Which author, living or dead, would you most like to be favorably compared to?

   John le Carré. Particularly, John le Carré any time from Tinker, Tailor to A Perfect Spy, but I’d settle for the John le Carré of any era.

Extra credit

Almost two and a half years ago, Gwenda asked me five questions, too. I wrote three answers, got stuck, and never posted any of them. So, long overdue:

1. If you could be any font, which would you be and why?

   Caslon. Classic but not antiquarian, elegant but understated; deceptively readable, but capable of cloaking with apparent respectability the most radical sentiments.

2. Why zeppelins?

   It’s a class thing, I think — that nostalgia for an age in which air travel was a luxury available only to the leisured wealthy is of a piece, I'm sure, with the nostalgia for ocean liners, railways, Edwardian shooting parties. For more proximate causes, Michael Moorcock and his Oswald Bastable stories (which, it should be noted, make airships into instrument of colonial liberation struggle and anarchist revolution) and then to Hayao Miyazaki, with his floating castles and ominous flying battleships and daring air pirates.

3. What thing/person/situation that you’ve encountered in a foreign country struck you as strangest at the time?

   Coming out of the Bahnhof Lichtenberg onto the streets of East Berlin after a week and a half in the then-Soviet Union, starving and culture-shocked, only to hear the familiar melody of “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega.

4. Did you have access to a well-stocked library, home or outside-the-home, as a kid? If so, what was it like? If not, what kind of books did you generally have access to?

   Oh, yeah. I grew up in a house (well, several houses, in sequence) full of books. History, archaeology, classics, mysteries, SF, contemporary fiction and gonzo journalism, architecture, cartoons, you name it.

5. What is the most lost you’ve ever been?

   You know, I don't get lost much. Or maybe I do, but I don't realize that's what it is. But the most disoriented I've been was boarding a Tokyo subway and finding on it a map that bore no apparent relation to the one I was familiar with. It took me quite some panicked moments to figure out that they did actually connect up in a couple of places, and what I was seeing was not the map of Bizarro Tokyo but of the interlocking private system that takes over some of the lines as in the southern suburbs.

Figure 1. Me as a font.

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July 25, 2006

My mother and her partner just took a road trip down to New Mexico to check out an Earthship: a passively-heated and -cooled, semi-subterranean off-the-grid house made largely out of used tires, glass bottles, and other recycled materials. You can see some photos here.

Figure 1. The bridge.

In the current hemisphere-wide heat wave, a life underground is starting to look pretty attractive . . .

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If you rewind to the beginning of the slideshow you’ll see some very Iain Banks pictures of Hoover Dam; or if you go forward a little you can see photos of the very same café where Kelly and I frantically tried to finish our Rio Hondo stories while Gavin watched the footie.

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July 24, 2006

Via William Gibson, Neomarxisme, a fascinating English-language blog about contemporary Japan. Some brief samples:

Politics:

Last Friday night, I saw a tiny left-wing demonstration in Shibuya, but the thing about people power is that the cast and crew actually show their faces, walk the walk as they talk the talk. And there were handicap people! And women! These ultra-nationalists hide behind machines, like Darth Vader. They could all be remote-controlled from some central base in Yamanashi, and we would never know.

Sorry to keep writing about the yakuza and the right-wing, but I keep running into them week after week. I guess I should just cower in fear like a good boy. God didn't make right-wing soundtrucks so we would question their impact on the political process. Unlike the rest of the world, trucks in Japan run on wa, not gasoline, so it is quite rude to be too inquisitive about the internal combustion process.

— Right-Wing Parad(is)e

Pop culture:

One of the key presuppositions of this blog is, "For the last five years, Japanese mainstream pop culture has gotten progressively more boring and less stimulating," to which many answer:

1. Yes! The innovation and spark of the 90s is gone!
2. No! Your head is stuck in the past and you are missing the stunning glory of today!
3. No! You are deluded and have no idea what is actually going on!
4. No! You are looking in the wrong fields. Culture is not just music and street fashion!
5. No! You are a hater!

Every month or so, I start toying with ideas 2-5 and ask my Japanese friends to fill me in on everything I am missing. They never come up with much of anything: they either shrug in resigned apathy or call me later on my cellphone to announce that they are so bored with things that they don’t leave the house and I have been talking to thin air the entire time.

— Now I Understand Why Contemporary Japanese Pop Culture is at a Nadir

Politics, pop culture, and porn:

Even during the “Sex Boom” of the 80s, female university students still held a strong position in the collective libido, but now they were on late-night TV, bouncing around in bikinis and skimpy outfits. Following soon after that, the Onyanko Club lowered the bar by shifting desires to average-looking high school girls singing suggestive songs. A decade later in the mid-90s, the enjokousai (compensated dating) boom revealed to the public that old men would pay a lot of cash to have sex with middle school girls.

Sociologists and critics have proffered a lot of explanations over the years for the falling age of Japanese men’s sexual preferences, most notably that rising educational opportunities for women increased their intellectual maturity above the level desired by most Japanese men. In order to procure mental inferiors, men had to keep slinking down the food chain. . . .

So, now we have arrived upon the symbol of our own post-post-modern era — Saaya Irie — the busty twelve year-old slowly becoming a household name.

. . . The appreciation of most porn in Japan essentially comes from a type of misogyny — a belief in a cosmic order that determines women to be objects formed for the sole mission of male pleasure. The same graying bigwigs who prevented the birth control pill from gaining legal status in Japan for thirty years are the ones who would gnaw off an arm before any government body takes away their rights to paid sex and dirty videos. The powers-that-be would have no tiff with Saaya Irie.

— What to do about Saaya Irie?

Well worth checking out, whether you’re a Japanophile (I’m looking at you, Barzak!), an ex-Japanophile, or just an armchair cultural anthropologist.

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From the newly discovered Science + Professor + Woman = Me: “Maybe We Need A Phrasebook?”: women’s experiences with being mistaken for non-professors.

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Q: What grade are you in?

A: 21st.

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Q: Will you give this to Professor X?

A1: No . . . (pause for effect) You just gave it to her.

A2: Sure! (Takes it from them, and in an exaggerated fashion, hands it from her left hand to your right.) Done!

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Q: So they had to hire a woman . . ?

A1: Yeah, they needed somebody to make up for the fact that they hired you.

A2: It was inevitable. Eventually they were bound to run out of mediocre men, and now the qualified women are finally getting a chance.

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Q: So you’re doing a Ph.D.? Couldn't you find anyone to marry you?

A1: Nope, they just don’t make wives like they used to.

A2: I’ve already been married 6 times. I'm taking a break.

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July 22, 2006

Please go out and write brilliant stories and win a metric truckload of awards. Not because you need to or even because you want to; just do it for me, okay?

Not like it’ll stop the professional jackasses from dissing you. But, of the professional jackasses, maybe it’ll make the ones who take those Lucite blocks and Lovecraft heads and shiny rocketships seriously shut up and go away.

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July 21, 2006

You laughed at the guidelines!

You swooned over the cover art!

You trembled at the Table of Contents!

You chortled over the index!

Now TWENTY EPICS itself can be yours!

Figure 1. You need this book.

Available direct from the printer, via Amazon, and even, so we hear, at your local bookstore. (If your local bookstore is one particular bookstore in Connecticut, anyway, or so we hear, though frankly we’re a little bit confused about this.) (Update: And it's New Jersey anyway. Sorry, all those little New England states look alike to this California boy.)

Now, on to the party! First, my beautiful and brilliant co-editor Dr. G has a few words to say over at her place.

Next, to whet your appetite, several of our fabulous authors have each written a bit about their stories and where those stories came from:

• Christopher Barzak, “The Creation of Birds”
• Paul Berger, “The Muse of Empires Lost”
• Alan DeNiro, “Have You Any Wool”
• Marcus Ewert, “Choose Your Own Epic Adventure”
• Jon Hansen, “The Book of Ant”
• Mary Robinette Kowal, “Bound Man”
• Yoon Ha Lee, “Hopscotch”
• Meghan McCarron, “The Rider”
• Sandra McDonald, “Life Sentence”
• Rachel McGonagill, “The End of the Road for Hybeth and Grinar”
• Jack Mierzwa, “A Short History of the Miraculous Flight to Punt”
• Tim Pratt, “Cup and Table”
• Benjamin Rosenbaum, “A Siege of Cranes”
• David Schwartz, “Five Hundred and Forty Doors”
• Zoe Selengut, “Smitten”

And some other partygoers have chimed in:

• Avi Bar Ze’ev
• Hannah
• Haddayr Copley-Woods
• Chris Gerrib
• Jed Hartman
• Matt Kressel
• Lauren McLaughlin
• Karen Meisner
• Mary Anne Mohanraj
• Jackie M.
• E.C. Myers
• Kyle N.
• Sarah P.
• Robert Burke Richardson
• John Scalzi
• Heather Shaw
• James Trimarco
• Greg van Eekhout
• Rob “aphrael” West (also here)

The offer of free beer still stands, by the way.

Further updates from across the Internet throughout the day, if I can sneak out between meetings.

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From a link in a Cosmic Variance comment thread comes the BBC’s Your sex i.d. profile.

My score, on a scale from 100% “female” to 100% “male”?

Zero. Of course, nobody who’s posted about it on CV has gotten anything other than zero or fifty.

It’s like a long and involved LJ quiz, only it doesn’t generate a fancy block of HTML for you to blog. Therefore, this ugly list (below the cut, ’cause it’s ugly.

Update: Via Anna FDD, this much shorter QuizFarm version. Anna’s comment “I have yet to find somebody who scored something other than ‘Either’.” (In honor of which I’ve renamed this post.)

(Continued)

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July 20, 2006

I feel like I should save this for Armistice Day, but it’s just too good.

The Germans loudly proclaimed to the rest of the world that if anyone sought to cast the shadow of dishonour upon their unspotted eagle-banner they would unsheathe the sword their fathers had bequeathed to them and would gird on the shining armour fashioned for them by Thor, the God of War, and, with the words of Luther on their lips, under the auspices of the God of the Germans, would ”let loose” . . . upon an effete Europe and so secure a place in the sun. The rest of the world, with Great Britain at its head, replied that in the event of certain unfortunate eventualities, certain other unfortunate eventualities might eventuate.

— Ford Madox Ford

(Who was half English and half German, and likely knew whereof he spoke.)

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July 19, 2006

Would it have hurt Matthew Stadler, in his review of “Police Beat,” to actually give us the name of the actor playing the protagonist? Or any other information about him?

Maybe it’s not actually racism, but it looks like it, and it’s a damn stupid thing for a movie reviewer to do. Brian Miller, over at Mr. Stadler’s competition, seems to have no such blind spot.

(The gentleman’s name, by the way, is Pape Sidy Niang. He played for Senegal in the Junior World Cup once upon a time, and “Police Beat” is apparently his first film.)

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Q. What’s your response to people who say you rely too much on your own experience and should take scientific hypotheses less personally?

A. They should learn that scientific hypotheses require evidence.

— Stanford neurobiologist Ben (née Barbara), Barres, on the Steven Pinker approach to dealing with sexism in the sciences

(NYT. Via both Cosmic Variance and Kameron, so you know it’s full of feminist sciencey goodness.)

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Update: The comment thread to this follow-up article on Cosmic Variance contains some of the most depressingly stupid and defensive bullshit I’ve read on the web. (And some brave attempts to deal with it. But depressing.)

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July 17, 2006

I think it’s a shame that Sleater-Kinney are breaking up, too, but, um, do we have to read it as a symbol of the death of feminism?

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July 12, 2006

TWENTY EPICS Internet launch party tomorrow! That’s tomorrow, this Thursday, Bastille Eve, July 13th. There will be party favors and also free beer.* You don’t even have to read the book to attend! Just let people know it’s available (direct, via Amazon, and, one hopes and presumes, via the fine corporate behemoths at Ingram Book Group): Forty-seven cubic inches of story by twenty of the best writers in the business, complete with maps, an index, and a gorgeous cover. Spread the word, and drop me a comment here so I can link back to you.

Figure 1. All this and free beer!

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* The offer of free beer is for real, but you’ll have to come to Switzerland to get it. Or catch me next time I’m in the States.

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I’m getting a little tired of hearing that nothing happens in mainstream fiction. I just drive-by posted this at Bear’s aesthetics discussion, but . . . well, I’ll let somebody else take it.

McKee

Nothing happens in the real world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day! There’s genocide and war and corruption! Every fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else! Every fucking day someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love! People lose it, for Christ’s sake! A child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! Someone goes hungry! Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman! If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know much about life! And why the fuck are you taking up my precious two hours with your movie? I don’t have any use for it! I don't have any bloody use for it!

— Charlie Kaufman, Adaptation

My buddy Andy’s imitation of this is better, but you get the idea.

All kinds of things happen in mainstream fiction. All kinds of things happen in real life. And if you write genre fiction without knowing that, you’re going to write genre fiction in which nothing happens except what proceeds directly from your genre conceit. It may sell. It may even win an award or two. But it’s going to bore me just as much as the lit-fic you haven’t read bores you.

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July 8, 2006

I’ve now seen two completely unrelated sources refer to Chewie Ejiofor’s character from Serenity as a “bounty hunter.” What’s up with that? ’Cause clearly not true.

Can’t they tell two black guys apart?

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July 7, 2006

If you haven’t read Flytrap #5 yet, you should.

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Viz., this exhibit at the Miraikan, Odaiba, Tokyo. (Big photo here, from Angus Graham, who is also responsible for diagnosing our alarming “tube gap.” Via Boing Boing.)

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July 5, 2006

Mr. Schwartz has a very thought-provoking post about possible fundamental differences between the short story and the novel. Go read it.

(And then go buy that Ditty Bops album!)

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July 4, 2006

I don’t care! I’ve got the new Ditty Bops album! God bless you, Steve Jobs!

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Update: These girls were born to cover “Bye Bye Love.”

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July 3, 2006

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Pursue some happiness for me, y’all. Preferably involving fireworks. And impromptu reenactments of the Battle of Saratoga.

Like Meghan says: eat hot dogs and light shit on fire.

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(This started as an email response to Jackie M. [Hi, Jackie! I’ll finish the email soon, promise.] Then it got longer. Then I had to put some more stuff in ’cause I was writing to a larger audience. Anyway:)

Let me start by saying that I’m not even going to talk about whether trying to get published in the Big Three SF magazines is a worthwhile endeavor. I think that’s been adequately covered elsewhere. (And besides, everyone knows, or should know, that the answer is it depends.)

I’ve been watching the August 18th thing kind of bemusedly from the sidelines, particularly the negative responses to it. If the claim that I’ve heard several times is true that F&SF’s published gender balance roughly tracks submissions, then, ceteris paribus, this is exactly the sort of thing that ought to work (where “work” is defined as “get more stories by women into F&SF.”) In any case it should provide some interesting data, the interpretation of which will give us something new to fight over.

(Whether having your gender balance track submissions is good enough, and whether you have a responsibility to try to do something about your submission gender balance, are separate questions that if I was buying more than twenty stories every couple of years would definitely keep me up at night.)

(Also, discussions of this sort of thing tend to degenerate into some really stupid arguments about “good” stories and “bad“ stories, just as discussions of workplace affirmative action tend to degenerate into some really stupid arguments about good and bad candidates.)

What I wonder is, what it would take to get guys complaining (do they?) about women, on a percentage-published vs. percentage-of-submissions basis, being two or three times as likely to get published in Strange Horizons as men.

I actually don’t read anywhere near enough F&SF — award winners (sometimes), stories by friends (sometimes), stories by famous people (sometimes) if they happen to be in the same issue as an award winner or a story by a friend — to know what sort of stories GvG buys —

(Hey, I was going to subscribe to the major mags while I was over here, as an alternative to spending too much money ordering books from overseas. Maybe I should do that right now. Okay, F&SF done, Asimov’s done . . . do I dare subscribe to Analog? Rrrrr . . . chickening out. Should get me some Interzone, though.)

— anyway, where was I? Yes. It’s no mystery to me that SH publishes more stories by women than men, because without making any assertions about any particular story or any particular writer or any particular editorial buying decision, I have some idea what sorts of stories SH buys, what sorts of stories tend to be written by women and what sorts tend to be written by men, and when you add those vectors up they all point in more or less the same direction. And it wouldn't surprise me if something similar was happening in F&SF.

What I wonder is, is editorial bias the only thing that needs to be dealt with? I mean, if it could be demonstrated that an editor was in fact gender-blind, would the publication skew — whether it’s a factor of pure submission skew, or of the sort of stories the editor publishes, or some combination — still in itself be a problem?

I don’t expect anyone to try the gender-blind submissions experiment soon, by the way, because it would be a lot of work, and the last thing an understaffed magazine wants when dealing with the slush pile is more work. (Though with its highly automated submission-tracking process, SH is probably best place to do it.) (Not that I’m suggesting that, kids.) And I wonder what there is to be done absent that. Is not having enough data really the issue? All more data will tell us is that for a given market one gender does or dosn’t have some probably-not-overwhelming advantage or disadvantage over the other.

Which is the sort of thing we authors like to know. It makes us feel better when we know we’re being treated fairly, it makes us feel better to have somebody to blame when we know we’re being treated unfairly.

But is how we feel really the problem?

I don’t like the kind of world that gets created when a culture (whether large or whether just the culture of a magazine) is dominated by one gender.

— Matt Cheney

Yes. Exactly. Never mind the writers. We get enough attention. How — whether there’s editorial bias at work or not — is this hurting the readers? And what’s to be done about it?

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