Chrononautic Log: wiscon

September 3, 2006

. . . not necessarily in that order.

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Update (Sun. 9/3) Y’all who posted your original comments in indisputably public places, if any of you would prefer not to have any more attention drawn to them, I can take those down too.

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Just so y’all know, I’m on Central European Time and I’ll be going to sleep in short order, so while, as previously noted, I’m happy to take quotes down at the original poster’s request, this will probably not happen instantly.

Update (Sat. 9/2): Okay, it’s 12:30AM CET (3:30PM Pacific time); I really am going to sleep now. (Don’t be surprised if I don’t have time tomorrow to read every flame you leave this [North American] evening. But I’ll do my best.)

A quick roundup of some of the discussion arising from the recent unpleasantness, divided into three categories:

• Typical
• Depressing
• Encouraging

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Updated: Fixed internal links, added second post from Bear.

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Updated: Added context at Ms. Datlow’s request.

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Updated: Removed Beth Bernobich quote at her request, and added a pointer to the good work she and Jim Hines are doing at bellwether_talk.

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Updated: Removed Raymond E. Feist quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed William Sanders quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed Vera Nazarian quote at her request.

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Updated: Removed Jane Yolen quote at her request.

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Updated: Added link from Shalanna Collins quote to her comments below.

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Updated: Removed Jack Skillingstead quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed Harry Turtledove quote at his request.

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Note: I’ve made public, here, excerpts from several posts from what is technically a private newsgroup, albeit one open to hundreds if not thousands of readers. I didn’t do this lightly. If anyone I’ve quoted would prefer not to stand behind those words in public I will be happy to remove them. Likewise, if my quotation misrepresents what you said, I apologize, and will be happy to fix it if you let me know.

Those of you who think something should be done about this may be interested to know that my access to the SFWA forums has been suspended.

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Typical:

• William Sanders:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Shalanna Collins:

  I think I know what a "GROPE" would look like, and I didn't SEE any naughty patting, touching, squeezing (oops, invoking the Journey song there for a moment.) Nevertheless, a very contrite apology was publicly posted all over the net. ... This was just a momentary tweak, not assault or murder or what-have-you, for goodness' sake. I don't condone sexism or hassling women/men by touching them, but seriously, this isn't some big ponderous Sin.

  (Ellison forums, 2006/08/31)

  Ed.: Ms. Collins doesn’t condone sexism or hassling women/men by touching them — except, apparently, when it’s perpetrated by a famous author. She also seems to be somewhat confused about the meaning of “contrite,” and possibly “apology.”

  Update: Ms. Collins has commented here.

Depressing:

• Beth Bernobich

  Text removed at original poster’s request. I didn’t mean to imply that I thought Beth approved, at all, of what Harlan did, and I’m sorry I gave that impression. I simply found one parenthetical remark she made to be deeply depressing. Beth is on the side of the angels, as you can see at the bellwether_talk LJ community she and Jim Hines have set up to discuss the problem of sexism in the SF community.

• Raymond E. Feist

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Vera Nazarian

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Ellen Datlow (Updated)

  I was offline for a day or two after the con and then when I got back I discovered this whole brouhaha over Harlan's baby schtick -and that's what it was. A schtick of Harlan acting like a baby. Thus, he went up to the mike when Connie called him up -- he put the mike (a round one) into his mouth, swallowing it like a lollipop, Connie took it gently out of his mouth and wiped it off. He gurgled -- like a baby -- and then grabbed her breast like a baby and she smacked his hand off. A few seconds later she kissed him.... Cmon people. Please put this into perspective. It was NOT sexual assault. It was a joke/schtick gone a bit over the top. I was not offended as a woman watching this. I thought it was silly (but yes, I admit I personally thought the schtick funny). I also know that Connie and Harlan have a history of ribbing each other. I've seen it in the past. So please keep the incident in context and calm down.

  (Ellison forums, 2006/08/30)

  Ed.: Ellen, you grew up with these people. You’ve had time to get used to the way they behave and come to terms with it. We haven’t. And I don’t think we should have to.

• Jack Skillingstead:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

Encouraging:

• Ed Champion:

  It’s one thing to goof around at a party — when the people know the other people involved and a little bit of this kind of nonsense sometimes occurs.

  But when a woman goes up on stage and cannot be respected as a writer, particularly a writer who’s as great as Connie Willis, when she must be groped and demeaned as a sex object in front of an audience, then the time has come to re-evaluate the merits of the organization that hosts the awards ceremony, as well as the has-been "legends" who go up to claim and present awards.

  (“Harlan Ellison: The Norman Mailer of Speculative Fiction,” 2006/08/28)

• Gavin Grant:

  Worldcon: sorry, the eejit has put you on the spot and a public statement is needed.

  What’s up with these dirty old men? They’re taking all the fun out of being in the genre and not inspiring anyone with anything but horror and the urge to vomit and throw out their books.

  (“Harlan Ellison: eejit,” 2006/08/28)

• Alan DeNiro:

  It makes me wonder — how must a woman just entering the field feel about this? Younger female readers? What could they possibly think about this? Could they possiblly think anything good about SF/F? As a field? A community?

  (“Down the Rabbit Hole,” 2006/08/28)

• Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

  Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis on stage at the Hugos wasn't funny and it wasn't okay. ... [T]he basic message of Ellison's tit-grab is this: "Remember, you may think you have standing, status, and normal, everyday adult dignity, but we can take it back at any time. ... You can be the most honored female writer in modern science fiction. We can still demean you, if we feel like it, and at random intervals, just to keep you in line, we will."

  It's not okay. It's not funny. It wasn't a blow against bourgeois pieties or political correctness. It was just pathetic and nasty and sad and most of us didn't want to watch it. It's another thing that's going to stop.

  (“LAcon IV,” 2006/08/28)

• Ben Rosenbaum:

  Here's the context: it seems that a lot of men — particularly, to hear women my age tell it, older, powerful men — in science fiction feel like women's bodies are fair game. Whether it's for a gag, a thrill, or a "sit down and shut the fuck up, bitch", this kind of thing goes on beyond the Hugo stage. A lot.

  As it does in the wider world. A friend of mine who attended the Hugos had just been tit-grabbed by a stranger riding by on a bicycle in the street outside the Hugos the night before. Just for a minute of fun, because she was a woman, he brought her to tears of rage. For her, you grabbing Connie — and Connie's first horrified reaction before she covered beautifully and went on with the show — was the same damn thing, and the message was: you're not safe anywhere.

  . . . Mind, I'm not worried about Connie. For one thing, Connie's no victim, and for another, that's between you and her.

  No, I'm talking about the atmosphere in science fiction. We applauded a sexual assault at the Hugos, and now the web is full of folks saying "what's the big deal? get over it". I don't think I need to tell you that that is fucked up.

  Ed.: At time of press, Mr. Rosenbaum’s open letter has as yet gone unanswered except by one Mr. Goldberg, whose plaintive “What more do you guys want?” is undermined by his less than perceptive “Harlan has apologized profusely.”

  (“What I Told Harlan Ellison,” 2006/08/28)

• Elizabeth Bear:

  It's not just the tit-grab. It's also poking Rachel in the stomach uninvited.

  When I say "This is so not okay," I mean the pattern of treating women as if their personal space is not sovereign.

  Rachel and Connie are both strong women, and more than capable of standing up to Harlan. They get to decide how they want to respond to a given incident directed at them. (And both seem to have.) But I think, as a community, we need to say "This type of behavior is beyond the pale and will not be tolerated."

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/29)

• Zoë Selengut:

  ...for fuck's sake, this is not just another "being a jerk" incident. ... It's a whole universe away from mere snottiness, drama-queenage, or provocative whatever. This is disgustingly sexist behavior, and it is not okay to class rank sexism under the jerk umbrella, as if it's something we'd all do if we lacked social graces and let our id take control. Being a rude and abrasive person is one thing, and treating women's bodies like public property is another.... It drives me nuts to see this classed in the same category as other amusing Ellison anecdotes (I admit, I do find a lot of them amusing, or did.) It's not. the same. thing.

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/29)

• Jane Yolen:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Susan Marie Groppi:

  I think a lot of people might be misunderstanding the outrage here — it's not just about what happened to Connie at the Hugos. It's about what's been happening to women in this community for a long time now. Pretty much every woman I know has a story of being on the wrong end of exactly that kind of inappropriate behavior. Taken individually, each incident is just a thing you brush off and move past, in the aggregate they add up to a big goddamn mess.

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/30)

• Harry Turtledove:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Meghan McCarron:

  And will this be the only time we talk about behaviors like this? And will we just talk about the most visible, shocking examples, or will we dig down into why their is an environment in our genre and at our conventions where this seems acceptable? ... I've seen variations of 'dirty old man' thrown around a lot in these discussions, but when those dirty old men are gone, I'm not exactly confident that women in the genre will no longer be treated in ways designed to make them feel like objects.

  (“On Harlangate, briefly,” 2006/08/31)

• Elizabeth Bear:

  What we are witnessing is the dying convulsion of a certain kind of privilege. And as in any case where somebody is having an unfair advantage taken away, many of the ones who have come to rely on that advantage are pretty upset about it, and are going to be bitter about lost dominance.

  It may take about a hundred years to change society. But no matter how angry many of us are that men will still attempt to assert social and sexual dominance over women in a crude and obvious fashion, the fact of the matter is that a sea-change is underway. And every time somebody says "Hey, that is not okay," and other people back him or her up, we get a little closer to equality.

  (“What we are witnessing,” 2006/09/01)

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For my own part: This is just not cool. It’s not “not cool if” (as in, not cool if Connie wasn't in on the gag); it’s not “not cool because” (as in, not cool because Harlan has a history of bad behavior); it’s just fundamentally not cool.

And the fact that so many people have rushed to defend it, or minimize it, or attack the people who’ve called bullshit on it, says more about the unreconstructed state of our field than the original incident.

And that is what’s gotta change.

Comments (195)

August 24, 2006

Spread it around:

Girls and Science: Call for Proposals

The Feminist Press, in collaboration with The National Science Foundation, is exploring new ways to get girls and young women interested in science. While there are many library resources featuring biographies of women scientists that are suitable for school reports, these are rarely the books that girls seek out themselves to read for pleasure. What would a book, or series of books, about science that girls really want to read look like? That is the question we want to answer.

You’ll find several requests for specific proposals at our website. One calls for scientific detective stories based on the life, research, and discoveries of real women scientists. Another calls for stories featuring real young women—aspiring gymnasts, ice skaters, actors, dancers--using a knowledge of science to help them become really good at what they do. A third recognizes how popular Manga and graphic novels are with girls, and asks for imaginative new collaborations between Manga writers and artists to create adventures about girls who use real science to accomplish their goals. If any of these three book ideas interest you, please check out our website (www.feministpress.org) for more information about deadline and how to submit proposals.

But we do not want to limit our exploration. If you are a writer and have an idea for a book or series of books that is guaranteed to get girls excited about science, we want to hear from you. You may want to create a girl detective series featuring a set of friends—from geeks to sports nuts to mechanical geniuses—each with a knowledge of science that helps in solving crimes. You may want to create a story about a shy girl who goes on field trips with her favorite aunt, a forensic anthropologist, and helps to solve problems as she learns to think like a Dr. Bones. You may want to tell the story of a young science fiction writer who needs to study different fields of science in order to create her adventures. Whatever your vision, if you can write like a dream and can create works that are guaranteed to instill a curiosity about science in girls and young women, send us your proposals. We want to hear from you.

All proposals will be reviewed. Several proposals will be offered standard contracts.

Publisher: The Feminist Press at City University of New York as part of a National Science Foundation grant. (see feministpress.org)

Deadline: October 31, 2006

Format: Proposals should describe the project, the plot, characters, and length. No more than ten pages please.

How to submit: Electronic submission (word doc) to fhowe@gc.cuny.edu with the subject line "Girls and Science." Please include in the body of your email your address, phone number, email address and a short bio. Please also attach a brief sample of your writing (about five pages), and a resume that includes information about publications.

(Via Cocktail Party Physics.)

Comments (0)

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.

Comments (0)

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.

Comments (0)

July 21, 2006

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)

Comments (7)

July 19, 2006

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.)

Comments (8)

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?

Comments (0)

May 30, 2006

My con report:

So there’s this kid, and he’s surrounded by candy, all his favorite kinds of candy. The kid is not eating the candy. Instead the kid is crying. The kid is crying because if he eats any one piece of candy, that means that at that moment, he’s not eating all the other pieces of candy.

In case there’s anyone I didn’t tell this to already, that was my weekend.

Also: I just dreamed that we all met up for a sort of PartyAtMyHouseCon in, I think it was supposed to be Kinshasa? And not a good neighborhood in Kinshasa. And even though it wasn’t the real Kinshasa, and even though I really want to see all you guys again, it didn’t seem like a very good idea. So, somewhere else, okay?

Plane to Dallas in four hours. Plane to Zürich forty minutes after it lands in Dallas. Ugh. Condolences to everyone who had plane trouble yesterday; I’ll try to get my fair share in today.

I’d settle for either a rocket car or a zeppelin, you know?

Missing you already —

— David aka Scary Editor Moles

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* Named for a Terry Pratchett character in, mm, think it was The Wee Free Men.

Comments (2)

May 27, 2006

I keep forgetting that convention days are three times as long as ordinary days, because you work at them every moment of your waking life.

And yet even though this afternoon is yesterday morning and yesterday is practically last week, Tuesday is still looming like it was tomorrow.

Comments (0)

May 25, 2006

Courtesy of Mr. Ruff, I finally discovered Ka-Ping Yee’s Regender website. It is cracktacular. It is da bomb.

First, for humor value:

Promise Keepers’ Core Values

Promise Keepers is a Christ-centered organization dedicated to introducing women to Jessica Christ as their Savior and Lady; and then helping them to grow as Christians. This is mainly accomplished through our Seven Promises and our women's conference ministry. Millions of women have participated since 1990 when PK first began. . . .

Our Vision:

“Women Transformed Worldwide”

Our Mission:

“Promise Keepers is dedicated to igniting and uniting women to be passionate followers of Jessica Christ through the effective communication of the 7 Promises.”

Our Statement of Frank:

• Summary Document

• Full Document with Scripture References

Promise Keepers is not a membership organization. Women and men of Goddess are welcome to participate in our ministries and join our mailing lists; but are only promise keepers to the degree that they individually live out their testimonies among those who know them.

Second, for thought-provokage:

Chain gang: Fans of Joyce Norma’s novels about the planet Gor create virtual and real-life worlds in which men are slaves.

“Every organism has its place in nature. That of man is at the foot of woman,” Tarl Cabot thinks while training her slave boy in “Beasts of Gor.” “Beasts” is Book 12 in the venerable and controversial “Gor” series of 25 science fiction novels written by Joyce Norma (the pseudonym of a philosophy professor at a respected university in New York). . . .

In Gor’s violent, low-tech society, women are Women and men are slaves. This, the novels say — and say and say and say again — is the proper and rightful state of things because it is in consonance with the true evolved nature of the sexes. . . .

There are free men on Gor — treasured fathers, brothers, sons and “Free Companions” to free women — but they generally sequester themselves with their children at home behind high walls. Their freedom, such as it is, is precarious. They are always subject to being kidnapped by a rival city-state’s raiders — or even outlaws of their own city — and forced into slavery. . . .

In spite of the books’ reputation as female-centric erotic literature, there are, surprisingly, no really explicit sexual passages, and several of the books are written from a male point of view, tracing the characters’ acceptance of the “paradox of the collar,” that is, the “inner liberation” men find in a life of utter obedience to a masterful woman. . . .

Whatever its narrative shortcomings, Norma’s politically incorrect world was once enormously popular. Hundreds of thousands of copies of her books were sold, and they were translated into several languages. Gradually, though, her work fell out of favor — some say it was spurned by gutless publishers and distributors in spite of audience demand — and it is largely out of print.

It’s software, so, naturally, it’s not perfect. It runs into trouble with compound nouns (it’s not able to figure out Tarnswoman of Gor, for instance; not that you can really blame it), its handling of names is very clever but sometimes unintentionally amusing (the Promise Keepers site, for instance, offers “Our Statement of Frank”), and of course it can’t disentangle and rewrite complex societal cues.

But reading its first draft of “Planet of the Amazon Men” was pretty surreal. I may have to clean that up and post it.

Comments (2)

May 17, 2006

The highlight of my first WisCon was seeing John Kessel’s daughter crown Matt Ruff with the Tiptree tiara. I told Susan, I think it was, I’m gonna get me one of those. Or words to that effect. And I went off and in less than six months — lightning speed! — ripped out a little story called “Planet of the Amazon Women,” which I then sold to Strange Horizons.

It didn’t win me a tiara, of course. But! Today Elizabeth Bear points me to that very Matt Ruff’s web site, whereon he has posted the Tiptree long list.

Which is getting pretty close for a first try, I think.

Thanks again to Jed and Susan at SH for some fantastic editing, and to the Fairwood writers’ group for some fantastic workshopping.

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P.S. Also, congratulate Meghan McCarron, if you haven’t already, for making the list with the hilarious and touching “Close to You.” To which, take note, there will be a kind-of-sort-of prequel in Twenty Epics.

Comments (2)

May 16, 2006

I wrote a so-so paper on Indian women’s education when I was in grad school, but nobody told me that one of its pioneers also wrote science fiction, dammit.

Viz: Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, “Sultana’s Dream.” Originally published in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, Madras, 1905.

I became very curious to know where the men were. I met more than a hundred women while walking there, but not a single man.

“Where are the men?” I asked her.

“In their proper places, where they ought to be.”

“Pray let me know what you mean by ‘their proper places’.”

“O, I see my mistake, you cannot know our customs, as you were never here before. We shut our men indoors.”

“Just as we are kept in the zenana?”

“Exactly so.”

“How funny,” I burst into a laugh. Sister Sara laughed too.

“But dear Sultana, how unfair it is to shut in the harmless women and let loose the men.”

“Why? It is not safe for us to come out of the zenana, as we are naturally weak.”

“Yes, it is not safe so long as there are men about the streets, nor is it so when a wild animal enters a marketplace.”

“Of course not.”

“Suppose, some lunatics escape from the asylum and begin to do all sorts of mischief to men, horses and other creatures; in that case what will your countrymen do?”

“They will try to capture them and put them back into their asylum.”

“Thank you! And you do not think it wise to keep sane people inside an asylum and let loose the insane?”

“Of course not!” said I laughing lightly.

“As a matter of fact, in your country this very thing is done! Men, who do or at least are capable of doing no end of mischief, are let loose and the innocent women, shut up in the zenana! How can you trust those untrained men out of doors?”

(Via The Valve.)

Comments (0)

May 14, 2006

Anyone going to be driving up from Chicago on Wednesday (in time for the Meghan / Justine / Bear / KJF / Nalo Hopkinson panel at the Center for the Humanities) and driving back Monday?

If not, I’ll rent a car. (In which case, anyone need a lift?)

Comments (3)

May 8, 2006

Anybody going to WisCon should read Belle’s latest CT post as a warm-up.

Comments (2)

May 6, 2006

No, I mean really WTF. Belle’s WTFs don’t begin to cover it.

Comments (0)

January 12, 2006

The Wiscon panel survey is out, and the World’s Most Narcissistic Panelist has metastasized — two panels on sex education and redefining American masculinity, one on masturbation and redefining American masculinity, one on childrearing and redefining American masculinity, one on the evils of patriarchal religion and redefining American masculinity, one on singlehandedly stopping war through redefining American masculinity . . . there might have been more, but I lost count.

I have a dream . . . a dream that some day we can approach these issues intelligently, instead of asking loaded questions that presuppose their own answers . . . a dream that some day we won’t see the same canned stories from one panelist’s day job trotted out as the answer to every evil under the sun . . . a dream that some day the moderators will moderate, instead of using the panels as a form of self-affirming group therapy . . .

With your help, we can achieve that dream.

If you’re going, you’ve probably already got an email from Betsy Lundsten in your inbox, with a link to the survey. Please click it. Please stop the madness.

Comments (30)

October 12, 2005

So: Trying to put together a guerilla Twenty Epics reading for World Fantasy. Problem: Venue. Ideas, so far:

• Michelangelo’s coffee shop: Advantages: No friction with hotel or with concom. Disadvantages: No alcohol. Might need permission.
• Hotel room: Advantages: Easy to do. Disadvantages: Crowded, less convenient for audience, could generate noise complaints.
• Second-floor conference room hijacking: Advantages: Convenient for audience. Disadvantages: Could collide with official programming.
• Party coup d’etat: Advantages: Cheeky, beer-friendly. Disadvantages: Staging an event in the middle of someone else’s event always confusing. Don’t know if there are any good target parties.
• Hotel lobby invasion: Advantages: Cheeky, public. Disadvantages: Hotel might get irritated if we start handing out free beer.

Other thoughts?

Comments (12)

August 11, 2005

Things I learned on the way to Scotland:

• JFK is the worst airport.
• Changing clothes in an airplane toilet takes longer than you think. But it sure beats the alternative.
• St. Pancras Station is always under construction.
• Shane Warne is one hell of a bowler. (His new hair plugs look pretty good, too.)
• On the train, when you close your eyes for a short nap, and wake up in love with the girl pushing the coffee trolley, it’s ’cause you’re jet-lagged.

Things I learned in Scotland:

• It’s not just London that at 5:30 in the morning looks like the set of 28 Days Later. (I blame the tower blocks.)
• Best UK con custom e-var: Free drinks for every panelist in the Green Room before each panel. We need to import this one, guys.
• Irn-Bru tastes better than you’d think.
• Scotch doesn’t kill germs. Tequila kills germs. (Thanks, Gwenda!)
• You can get away with bringing overheads to a panel, if they’re good overheads.
• It’s still possible to have a good panel about slipstream, even if infernokrusher only comes up once or twice. (Thanks, Hal!)
• I should have listened to everybody who told me to read Paul Park’s A Princess of Roumania.
• Ben and I, in combination, are too loud. (Yeah, I know I should have known this one already.)
• Christopher Rowe really is a genius.

Things I learned on the way back from Scotland:

• JFK is the worst airport.
• However, it has the nicest immigration officers.
• And the beer’s not bad, either.

But:

• WisCon is still the Best Con.

Comments (14)

June 15, 2005

. . . is what I would think we should call ourselves if we were a performance troupe and not just some folks who like to dress up and hit things.

But, anyway, as long as we’re just some folks, ever since Lisa showed me a few tricks at last year’s WFC, I’ve been feeling envious of these friends of mine who are learning how to kill people with their bare hands and not just with a thirty-inch razor blade. And ever since Wiscon I’ve been feeling unusually motivated about all sorts of stuff (though not the damn planetary romance, which is why I was whining about time travel yesterday afternoon — I was working on the gonzo space opera when I shouldn’t have been). So yesterday I finally got around to checking out Shorinji Kempo Seattle, and next week I’ll be starting lessons. Further bulletins as events warrant.

But in the mean time, thanks to Greg and Jenn for agreeing to kick my ass if I didn’t do this.

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Update (15 June ’05): So, I went last night and it was a blast. The people were friendly and patient. The warm-up exercises were challenging without being brutal. The footwork and the actual punching and kicking and stuff were confusing at first, but by the end of practice I think I was starting to get the hang of it. (And an eleven-year-old girl told me I was doing pretty well for a beginner, so it must be true.) I could easily have gone on for another hour.

The hardest thing for me, personally, is probably going to be learning to sit crosslegged without falling over.

Comments (8)

June 4, 2005

Update: Added Alan and Susan.

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So, at some point the Flickr police may decide that I am actually a photographer and not, say, a plagiarist or a graphic designer or an illustrator or a pornographer, but in the interests of instant gratification (mine, that is):

Figure 1. Alan DeNiro: Island of sanity in an ocean of madness

Figure 1. Susan Marie Groppi knows more than you do

Figure 1. Benjamin Rosenbaum rocks the house with “99 Luftballons”

Figure 1. Christopher Rowe in a Landscape Between Drinks

Figure 1. David Schwartz (with someone else’s drink)

Figure 1. After the music. From left to right: Susan, Matt, David, Darja, Meghan, Ben, Alan

Figure 1. Meghan McCarron reads from “Close to You”

Figure 1. Susan and Matt imitating, respectively, Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock

Click, as they say, to enlarge. More to come as I have time to suck them from the camera. I tried to get as many Twenty Epics authors as I could, but I failed to photograph the mysterious and elusive Yoon Ha Lee. (Which is too bad, because on at least one of the occasions I missed she was wearing a gorgeous outfit.) I will have to get quicker on the digital-camera draw.

[wiscon]

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Due to a packing error, it looks as though I’ll be carrying my laptop back to Seattle in its natural state; so it occurs to me that I ought to get this into the Google caches and the Wayback Machine before I go, for posterity.

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Update: Added slogan, courtesy of Mike Ford.

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Notes toward an Infernokrusher manifesto

Slipstream, ultimately, is just a wussy term. We should be drawing names less from wishy-washy words (slip, stream) and more from monster trucks (krusher, inferno).

— Meghan McCarron

Literary excellence through superior horsepower.

— John M. Ford

Catch phrases

• Explosion is the new transgression. Demolition is the new deconstruction. — Benjamin Rosenbaum
• How far is the distance between infernos and krushing? — an Infernokrusher koan by Dora Goss
• Instead of “Well, where are we slipping? Are we beaver-like dam builders, or just clumsy waders?” we can now ask “Are we glad things are on fire? Do we like to Krush?” — Meghan McCarron
• More than the death of the Reader, Infernokrusher prizes the sudden, violent dismemberment of the Reader
• Monster truck fiction — ‘soft infernokrusher’ — rolls across genre boundaries . . . and krushes them
• Infernokrusher fiction explodes stagnant genre conventions, e.g., that it’s not okay to have all your characters run over by a monster truck in what would seem to be the middle of the story
• Infernokrusher is a violently anti-materialist movement, regardless of the materials involved
• While other attitudes to art yearn to communicate truths, to move people, to challenge, or to entertain, infernokrusher art wants to blow stuff up
• It is important to note that an infernokrusher sensibility does not require literal infernos or crushing
• Core Infernokrusher fiction would never forget to fill up the tank. — Karen Meisner

Redefinitions, subgenres, philosophemes

• slipstream -> proto-infernokrusher fiction
• slipstream : infernokrusher :: uniformitarianism : catastrophism
• Elemental truth in infernokrusher fiction: Nature crushes stuff too
• Religious truth in infernokrusher fiction: God likes to blow stuff up
• Innocence in infernokrusher fiction: e.g., eight year olds natural krushers
• The ultimate ambition of infernokrusher art is to blow up the world
• Heretical spinoff: slow infernokrusher fiction
• Important subgenre or trope in feminist infernokrusher fiction: blowing up Barbie
• Infernokrusher critiquing involves burning manuscripts and melting them to slag (the more positive reviews are more explosive)
• Resolved: Hot pink — color of infernokrushing

Pieces, presses, publications, organizations

• Ignitrix: (1) a goth, feminist Infernokrusher ’zine (2) sobriquet applied to Meghan McCarron as coiner of the term “infernokrusher”
• Thrown Down A Well Still Burning: a moody, “soft infernokrusher’ poetry ’zine
• Burning Hammer Review: Academic “soft infernokrusher” journal, probably from the University of Pittsburgh
• Burn Ward: Dispatches From The Infernokrusher Frontier: an anthology of Infernokrusher criticism
• Monster Truck Press
• Twelve Ton Press
• Megaton Press
• Swan Inferno!!!!!: the canonical Infernokrusher Ballet
• Blowtorch!: the canonical Infernokrusher Broadway musical
• Hammer and Napalm: Infernokrusher eating club at Princeton
• McSweeney’s #27 — the Infernokrusher Issue: comes soaked in gasoline, with a match

Deviations and faux-infernokrusher tropes:

• infernoes/krushing only as metaphor
• infernoes/krushing as resolution rather than violent irruption — trappings, but lacks sensibility

The infernokrusher coat of arms

• Monster truck, in flagrante, rampant
• Motto: Da ogne bocca dirompea co’ denti un peccatore

The first Infernokrusher poem

I blew up the plums
that were in the icebox
and which you were probably saving for breakfast
forgive me
I like fire

— Dora Goss

[wiscon]

Comments (67)

June 2, 2005

Karen Meisner is the winner! (I’ll put it in the mail this weekend, Karen.)

I could swear I posted this from Madison, but I must have spaced on hitting the “Save” button: I will send, at no cost to the recipient, my surplus* copy of Justine Larbalestier’s excellent The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction to the first person who promises to use its power only for good.

* I can really only read one copy at a time. And now I have a signed one.

Comments (6)

June 1, 2005

At some point my co-workers are going to notice that I’ve been back at work for five hours and all I’ve done is surf the blogosphere trying to prolong my WisCon experience.

Comments (6)

The inimitable Mr. D.S. provides the quintessential and definitive chronicle of this year’s PlausFab-Wisconsin.

[wiscon]

Comments (0)

May 29, 2005

Figure 1. From left to right: Campbell finalist Elizabeth Bear, duel referee (and Hugo finalist) Benjamin Rosenbaum, Campbell finalist David Moles

In order that all participants should be able to keep their dignity, the duel was naturally fought with cream pies.

(There’s a very high-resolution version for you Wiscon copyfight Campbell Award Osh Kosh B’Gosh whipped cream bukkake fetishists, too. Or Locus.)

[wiscon]

Comments (7)

May 28, 2005

I wasn’t going to do this, but I just want to note that we’re fifteen minutes into this panel and the alleged moderator is still talking. The other panelists have been allowed to say, literally, no more than their names. Ah, moderation.

Update: 10:20. Still talking.

Update: 10:27 — Okay, Ben’s getting to talk now.

Update: 10:35— I wish I could type half as fast as Ben can talk. At least I can capture this book recommendation: Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, Dan Kindlon & Michael Thompson.

“Even inside feminist discourse, there’s often this thing about protecting women — this baseline idea that women are fragile. It’s interesting to me that it’s a relatively radical thing to talk about men being fragile.”

Update: 10:37 — Ian’s turn: “I have never actually seen ‘friends with benefits’ lumped with domestic violence before.” “Whenever I run across things like ‘all X are Y’ I start to itch.” “I’m a member of the SM community in Seattle, I see a lot of things that are really concerning, I talk to the people involved and they’ve negotiated whatever they need to negotiate . . . in that community, the idea of consent is really important — if you’re doing something and the neighbors call the cops, and you need to explain something, you really need to have that stuff worked out ahead of time.” “Men, taken as a group, act violently towards everybody — of course, as a person of color, I think white people, taken as a group, act violently towards everybody.” “I certainly think that boys and men are a good place to start in terms of avoiding rape . . . [But] I don’t think that useful, nuanced conversations about privilege can happen while only talking about one privilege at a time.”

Update: 10:46 — Joe is channeling Anne Harris, suggesting talking about the cultural construction of maleness. “One of the ways I think of my work is translating radical feminism to males.” “How do we teach that explicit consent is hot, and not ‘not hot.’”

Update: 10:47 — Mary Anne: “I’m interested in the next generation of the problem. I’ve mostly dated sensitive New Age guys. They’re really well trained, they’re inculcated with this. They’re really paranoid, really scared that anything they might do that’s the least bit pushy might be rape, or lead to rape . . . I’d like to hear the panel address that, and also, this question of . . . it feels to me like feminism has appropriated a lot of the traditional male virtues, such as strength, the ability to take care of yourself, the ability to take care of others. I think that’s great. But at the same time I wonder what men are left with. How are the sensitive new age guys defining themselves, how do they navigate that?”

Ben: “Going from a perspective of ‘what’s to work on?’ to this perfect prince — and how frustrating this was for her — how my inability to stand up for myself is what led to the end of the relationship . . . This story’s also the story of a series of women taking me in hand and going, um, no . . . Okay, I need to make people do what I want . . . then you renounce that power, and you’re left with no power, and that's not really very interesting for anybody . . . It has a lot to do with trusting the power of the other person, that I need to be neither dominant nor protective . . . that I didn't need to give in just because I needed to be gallant.”

Mary Anne: “The problem with gallant is that it assumes power in the same way.”

Ian: “The standard sort of redneck white guy response to feminism: They’re taking my power away — is correct. That’s something that needs to be kept in the forefront — there needs to be a conversation about empowerment rather than over-powerment. Without that, there’s not going to be buy-in . . . there’s not going to be movement, or there’s only going to be movement among us sensitive new age guys . . . or those of us who like getting laid enough to hang out where women are empowered enough that we can get laid a lot . . . . In order to be empowered, people need to be able to say yes and they need to be able to say no. ‘Not right now’ can mean not right now, and not never . . . it can mean ‘Ask me later’ and not ‘Not you, not ever.’ Freedom is the ability to choose, and anything less isn’t the world I want to live in.”

Joe: “Nice guys haven’t reproduced . . . The boys in the world I go into do not see options for masculinity.”

Update: 11:03 — Ben: There’s an easy heuristic to tell if you’re asking in a way that people can say no — they sometimes say no.

Ian: “Men are expected to make the first move . . . and that’s a power disadvantage. I never make the first move, and that's a stance I’ve taken — of course it helps that I’m good looking. I don’t know if my standard would work for everybody. For most people . . . the real situation is, if I want to get laid, I have to make the first move, I have to risk rejection — and everybody really likes to risk rejection. . . . Feelings are facts. Remedial sex education problematizes anger. Sometimes anger is a problem, somtimes anger means someone has violated your boundaries. It’s not always a case of ‘I feel afraid, but I can’t feel afraid, because I’m a boy, I have to feel angry because anger is a safe emotion.’”

Ben: “There’s this thing, whether it’s cultural or biological, boys like things to be loud and fast and go boom . . . There’s a distinction between two kinds of violence, and they're conflated. As a kid, I was never very violent . . . then as an adult I started playing rugby, and I really liked hitting people . . . you really need to distinguish between violence ‘overriding someone’s boundaries without consent’ and the dictionary definition . . . you look at the dictionary definition of violence and a lot of it’s about being loud and sudden.”

Ian: “There need to be many models — there needs to be a continutity of models.”

Ben: “It’s interesting that women can talk much more easily about whether and when and how they like or don’t like sex. With men . . . if you’re not able to say no to something, you’re not really able to say yes either. There’s so much at stake for men. Men’s attention is often not so much on having sex as on having done her.”

Update: 11:20 — Audience member: “It is much harder to take hold of someone’s hand than it is to make a pass at them.”

[wiscon]

Comments (4)

June 1, 2004

Still feeling a bit fragmented.

I was quite taken with Madison. I don’t know if I’d have felt the same way if it had been February or August; but still, this bears thinking about.

Mostly what I remember is alternating naps with stimulating intellectual conversations. There are worse ways to spend a weekend.

I have this vague idea that maybe I ought to post, or have posted, an hour-by-hour con report, but I’m having trouble concentrating that hard. I apologize.

Also, I’d like to apologize to everyone who wasn’t there for not trying, or not successfully trying, to drag you there.

Also, I’d like to apologize to everyone who was there that I didn’t get to say goodbye to before rushing off to sit in the airport for three hours.

Also, I want a Tiptree Award.

WisCon. It is the best con.

Comments (18)

May 29, 2004

And here’s me without my hat nor my umbrella. Actually it’s only 50° now. On the Doppler radar I can see a rainstorm the size of Michigan; on the satellite it’s clouds from the Rockies to the Appalachians, except for a bit of Iowa and a bit of West Texas. Damn it, it was bloody beautiful out here yesterday.

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Update: Memo to self: The idea of — rain or no rain, hat or no hat, umbrella or no umbrella — taking a brisk turn around the Capitol Square Farmer’s Market, amusing though it may seem at first, will cease entirely to seem amusing just about at the point where it’s no better to go back than to go forward.

The current temperature has dropped to 45°, and the predicted high is now 66°.

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May 26, 2004

In twenty-four hours I should be in Wisconsin. See you there.

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