I linked to these a couple years ago when they were published, but the magazine’s website seems to be down. So, here they are in a blog entry. Happy Halloween (in a couple days)!

i.

Gwennie the good-hearted ghoul
did her best to avoid being cruel.
She offered to mate
with the men that she ate
and then let them drown in their drool.

ii.

Nanette the near-sighted ghost
was frequently witnessed to boast
that her spectral sneer
froze mortals with fear.
In fact, she was haunting a post.

iii.

Maureen the malingering mummy
felt aches in her kidneys and tummy.
“I feel pale and drawn,
but my organs are gone!
So why do I still feel so crummy?”

Said her doctor: “In matters of health,
the issue’s not absence, but wealth.
You’ve got too much time
to moan, groan and whine.
You’re too wrapped up in yourself.”

My brief, light-hearted fantasy story “Great, Golden Wings” is available on Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Check it out, if you like. I’m told it will also be available in audio soon.

Lady Percivalia watched the young cinematographist’s hands as he set up his equipment. They were narrow and graceful, dusted with pale-colored hair. His limber fingers moved rapidly as he angled his screens and adjusted his projectors.

Beside Lady Percivalia, the Lady Harrah gave a dramatic sigh. She sank back in her chair, fluttering her lashes, her face arrayed to look attractively ill. Lady Harrah was well-known for feigning such attacks of faintness. They’d won her the attentions of several young men who, while not known for their intelligence, were smart enough to seize the opportunity for getting close to a distressed young woman with a heaving bosom. Unfortunately, Lady Harrah’s best efforts had failed to make any impression on the cinematographist.

Lady Harrah enjoyed a miraculous recovery from her faint. She leaned over to Lady Percivalia. “Watch this,” she whispered. “I’ll get his attention.”

She unpinned a dragonet brooch that adorned her ruffled bodice and tapped its head. The intricate gold carving blinked into a semblance of life. It stretched like a waking cat and flew brightly into the air, a whir of jeweled wings. It caught the cinematographist’s sleeve in its jaws and tugged politely.

Sorry for the delay in this week’s dollhouse episode. I’ve been a bit busy, and this was a solid episode. Not so world-changing that I had to spend the next three days searching for superlatives, or so incompetent that I was instantly driven to rant. Just solid. I think in some ways it proves that Dollhouse can have solid Engagement of the week episodes, so I was wrong last week.

So for those who haven’t been following dollhouse ratings from the edge of your seats – the news has been all over the place. The episodes were appalling, they were better but still awful, Fox was going to pull it, Fox was committed to making and airing all 13 episodes, Fox had confirmed airdates for the next 5 episodes

Well four days or so after that good news Fox has announced that they’re not airing Dollhouse during sweeps, but instead they’re airing double episodes through December. This means I’m going to be in withdrawl all through November, and also I’m grumpy. If anyone out there has a Nielson box, the offer is still on for a very small bribe.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m looking for non-fiction about Mars, or possibly fiction that’s as educational as non-fiction. Please leave your suggestions!

A few choice quotes

What he was accused of is not only considered rape because she was underage, and not only because he gave her drugs and alcohol to set it up, but also because he did it while she was saying no and telling him to stop.

There’s nothing ambiguous about that.

That is an account of a rape.

And

This plea bargain was set up by the family and their attorneys because they saw no other way to protect this girl from a trial that would take away her anonymity and subject her to an endless media frenzy. They did not set up that plea bargain because they had any doubts about being able to prove her original charges. They set up the plea bargain because they saw a system that could not adequately protect this child, so they felt that they had no other choice but to compromise and settle for something less than justice.

In the way he always does, Jay lays things out incredibly clearly, and absolutely demolishes every single objection from Polanski’s supporters.

Basically, what it comes down to is that Jay Smooth is a badass and Roman Polanski is a jackass.

Oh, sorry, I meant rapist.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people

Reprinted from Therinth, a burn ward RN.

Having spent the past twelve hours hanging out with a bipolar person in their full blown manic state, i’d like to make a few comments. And i’m making this post public, unlike most of them here.

(Perhaps them being manic wore off on me some, because i can’t get to sleep without saying some of these things.)

I watched the first 30 mins of the first episode of House for this season. Let me list the ways this show is wrong: House attacks another pt, and is still bunked with that pt, and not moved to the violent psych ward with people who are manic with a side of stabby. They give House haldol. Haldol by mouth is like the unicorn. NO ONE HAS EVER SEEN IT. If someone’s fighting you, you think you’re going to stick your finger in their mouth to give them a pill where they can bite you, and/or spit out the pills, or cheek them? No. Haldol is an IV/IM drug. House’s manic buddy, who helps him out, is mildly plausible as a character, until he starts…helping House out. Rhyming, yes, too much energy, yes. Annoying? Hell yes. Responsible enough to help someone else follow through on a plot? Oh hell no.

And also, the time he’s cuffed, no one is in the room with him, that’s UNLIKELY, given restraint laws these days, and when he’s in solitary…for reals? That room is *that* white? No fucking way. Not a single stain of shit, piss or blood? Unnnnnnnnnnlikely, my friends.

House is usually enjoyable enough that i can suspend my disbelief. But if i’m going to keep watching, the next hour had better have him have his ass back in the hospital, where i can merely smirk at the thought of doctors hanging IV meds.

So, while i’m babysitting this patient, stopping him from picking off all of his dressings with continual reorintation and redirection, what plays in the background? That new medical show, Three Rivers.

Gah. I didn’t pay attention to the whole thing. I didn’t have to. What i heard was enough. The part where someone who doesn’t have insurance (and isn’t even an American?) needs a transplant. The doctor smugly tells some secondary character that, “You’ll find a way…” implying that somewhere there’s a loophole big enough to drive that truck through. I’m sure by the end of the episode it happened — someone reached up their rectum, and found a quarter of a million dollars that they didn’t know was there to fund the operation.

I hazard a guess that this is what is wrong with America’s interpretation of their current healthcare system. Perhaps, not having recently been ill, or having always been well monied, you’ve never pondered what typical medical care is like, or how much it all might cost, were you without insurance. You think it’s all like it looks on TV. And even if the worst does come to pass, and you’ve blown through one liver and need a new one, well, surely someone will break some rules for you, too.

No.

You lose your job, find out you need coverage for cancer-car-wreck-diabetes-your baby-can’t-breathe the next day?

You’re fucked. (Unless you pay into Cobra’s outrageous system. And when that runs out? Still fucked.)

You never had a job with health insurance?

Way fucked.

While i’m so very damn proud of my profession, i believe we cannot continue to go honorably on. Not when the real deal is that people are denied care every day because of situations they cannot control. Even if they could control them — they shouldn’t be denied.

There’s no Dr House or Grey’s Anatomy blowhard who is going to come down from on high to save you on your worst day, no matter how much TV you have viewed.

You’re one job away from losing it all, or going bankrupt to pay for it. Not only you, but your children, your parents, your neighbors. (All you people who are getting by on Medicare, get off my fucking lawn unless you see the irony in the care that you receive.)

We need a public option. We needed it yesterday. We sure as hell need it tomorrow.

Please, if there’s anyone you can talk to about this, do so. Get the word out. We are all in this together, honest to fucking god, as humans on this planet, as Americans, as people who at the very least should have the wisdom and self preservation to hope their nannies and dishwashers won’t have untreated TB.

I have conservative friends who argue that it’s unfair of the left to paint them all as a bunch of tea-party-attending, Glen-Beck-listening yahoos. They argue that conservatism has a rich intellectual foundation, and that by cherry picking their worst-sounding supporters, we willfully ignore the writers today who uphold that intellectual foundation.

Writers like the folks at The National Review.

Writers like John Derbyshire¹.

Why do I bring this up? Well, its just that as Faiz Shakir points out over at Think Progress, John Derbyshire went on Alan Colmes’ radio show yesterday and took a stand against female suffrage.

DERBYSHIRE: Among the hopes that I do not realistically nurse is the hope that female suffrage will be repealed. But I’ll say this – if it were to be, I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep.

COLMES: We’d be a better country if women didn’t vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Probably. Don’t you think so?

COLMES: No, I do not think so whatsoever.

DERBYSHIRE: Come on Alan. Come clean here [laughing].

COLMES: We would be a better country? John Derbyshire making the statement, we would be a better country if women did not vote.

DERBYSHIRE: Yeah, probably.

Okay, so that’s bad enough, but Alan Colmes, rightly gobsmacked by this, next asked

COLMES: What’s next, you want to bring back slavery?

DERBYSHIRE: No. No, I’m in favor of freedom, personally.

COLMES: But women shouldn’t have the freedom to vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Well, they didn’t and we got on along ok.

He goes on to argue against The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Of course.

Anyhow, all this illustrates two things for me.

First, it really perfectly encapsulates the strange sort of doublethink you see in conservative political philosophy all the time.

“We believe in individualism! (Just so long as you don’t have sex in ways we disapprove of.)”

“We believe in freedom! (As long as people who disagree with us are not allowed to vote.)”

“We believe in free speech! (But people who criticize the (Republican) president should watch their goddamn mouths.)”

You see this a lot in discussions about economics, where the argument is that government intervention and collective solutions are illegitimate (not just wrong, mind you), no matter how much of the electorate is in favor of them. You see it in the faux-troversies about President Obama’s legitimacy. You see it in Glenn Beck’s rhetoric about how ‘real Americans’ are opposed to President Obama, despite him having won the presidency by an overwhelming majority ². You see it in the analysis we hear every election about how “if it weren’t for the African-American vote, Democrats would be a permanent minority party³ ”

The central idea is this: If you disagree with them, you ought not be allowed to participate in the democratic process in the first place. I contrast this with the way the liberal ACLU operates, fighting for the free speech rights of white supremacists and the religious rights of fundamentalists, both groups who are not (to put it mildly) their ‘core constituency’.

‘Rights for all,’ versus ‘rights for the people who agree with me.’ That’s the difference.

Hell, John Derbyshire makes no bones about it! He says outright, “The conservative case against [female suffrage] is that women lean hard to the left.” That’s not an argument. That’s thuggery.

Anyhow, that’s the first thing I took from it.

The second thing I took away is that when people talk about the rich intellectual tradition of Conservatism, it’s guys like John Derbyshire they’re talking about, so … jeez … maybe they mean something different by ‘intellectual?’

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people

1. Who, as Andrew Sullivan ably documents, continues to believe that gay people are all child molesters. Or at least enough where we shouldn’t let them around our children, best to be safe, etc, etc, etc. (back)
2. And the Democrats having won both houses! (back)
3. Hey look, here’s an example or two from a while back. (back)

From a neurologist’s blog:

Dear President Obama,

I’m writing to you for the first time.

I don’t want this to be a political blog. There are plenty of other sites for that. But we now face a national crisis of such serious proportions that it dwarfs other issues, such as global warming, health care, and middle-east peace. It now threatens the very fabric of our society, and directly affects every citizen. And I can remain silent no longer.

It’s still September, and every store near me ALREADY HAS THEIR CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS UP!

I have nothing against the holidays, Mr. President. Peace on Earth and all that stuff. But moving them up as if they were being held in another time-zone or alternate universe is getting out-of-hand. As far as I know, Christmas hasn’t budged in my lifetime. And treating every day like it was Christmas (like the stores seem to want me to do) is not helping.

The well-respected Nick documentary program, The Fairly Oddparents, has carefully researched what would happen if Christmas were held every day (Episode 107, air date 12-12-01 I have kids, OKAY!). Their conclusion? It would be catastrophic.

More.

This panel should be very interesting and, given what’s been going on in Iran and the new protests that took place there yesterday, I think it’s a good time to learn more about Iranian culture. If you’re in NY, I hope you’ll come.

THE PHILOCTETES CENTER FOR THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF IMAGINATION
at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute
(EDWARD NERSESSIAN AND FRANCIS LEVY, DIRECTORS)

invites you to a Poetry Reading & Discussion
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 7:00pm
at
The Philoctetes Center
247 East 82nd Street
(Phone: 646-422-0544; email: info@philoctetes.org)

This event is free and open to the public.

Persian Poetry: Origins, Translations, and Influences

This reading and discussion among five distinguished Persian poets and translators will begin by touching on the two-thousand year history of poetry in Iran. Panelists will highlight the significance of such classical masters as Sa’di, Hafez, Rumi, and Omar Khayyam, as well as contemporary Iranian poets like Nima Youshij and Forough Farrokhzad. Special attention will be given to what often gets lost in English translation. The poets will consider how their understanding of Persian verse and culture, from its origins in Iran, influences the poetry they and others write in English.

Iraj Anvar is the translator and editor of Jalal al Din Rumi’s Divani-I Shams-I Tabriz: Forty Eight Ghazals of Rumi. He has been a leader of the New York Ava Ensemble, which is dedicated to promoting traditional Persian music and performing classical Persian poetry.

Here’s what I want: A program which will keep track of both my twitter feed and my facebook feed, with pop-up notifications to let me know when one of my friends posts something new. And that pop-up should have useful information, along the lines of “Kip just tweeted: Blah blah blah blabbity blah blah…”

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be such a program out there. At least, not one I’ve found.

Twhirl: Perfect, except it doesn’t cover Feedbook. But since my sister, aunt, brother-in-law, high school buddy, and several others I know use Feedbook and not Twitter, I really want Feedbook included.

bDule: The pop-ups notifications are worthless. It says “1 New Message For Barry Deutsch,” but doesn’t tell me who the message is from, let alone what the message contains. I don’t want to have to stop drawing in Photoshop and open up a different program to see what the message is. If I was willing to do that, I could just use my browser and visit twitter and facebook directly. The whole point, for me, is to keep track of what my friends are up to without interrupting my work.

Tweetdeck has the same problem as bDule. Which is a shame, because if they only had good pop-up info, they’d be the best two programs I’ve tried.

Add Seesmic to the list of good programs with useless notifications. (Apparently having a notification that says something useful is more difficult to do than I’d imagined.)

AlertThingy has the best name, and comes the closest to being what I want. But it’s programming feels a bit clunkly compared to others; for example, there’s no obvious way to get it to show me tweets directed to me from people I’m not watching. The biggest problem is the flickering. AlertThingy’s pop-ups flicker, and — worse — when AlertThingy is running, Photoshop’s menus and “crawling ants” flicker. If I kept this program, I’d eventually be forced to gouge out my eyes in self-defense.

Guess I’ll try Digsby next, although it does a lot more than I’m looking for, which means it might be a memory hog. Feedalizr is another possibility, as is Peoplebrowsr. And Skimmer.

If anyone has a suggested program for me, please post it in the comments.

UPDATE: Tried Feedalizr. Although it claims to be connected to the Facebook account, I don’t see any Facebook updates. Nor does there seem to be any way to see replies sent to me by people I don’t follow. So I guess I’ll try another program.

UPDATE THE SECOND: We have a winner! Digsby turns out to have pretty much everything I want. And because it doesn’t use Adobe Air (or whatever that’s called), it uses less memory than almost all the other programs do.

I just finished reading The Man in the White Sharksin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World, by Lucette Lagnado, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal whom we have invited to read as part of Nassau Community College’s Literature, Live! reading series, sponsored by The Creative Writing Project (CWP). A memoir that is at once a love letter to her father, Leon, and also her mother, Edith, as well as to the city of Cairo and its way of life in the days of King Farouk, The Man in the White Sharksin Suit chronicles the difficulties Lagnado’s family faced as they navigated the often tortuous path they were forced to travel from the privileged life they enjoyed in Egypt to the difficult and, especially for her father, often humiliating existence that life as exiles forced them into. The book has a lot to say about the arrogance with which European and American Jews–as individuals and as workers in agencies that were supposed to help families such as Lagnado’s–treated their Mizrachi coreligionists, who fled or were forced to leave their home countries in the years following Israel’s founding; and when she tells the story of Sylvia Kirschner, the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA) caseworker assigned to the Lagnado family, and how Kirschner refused to find any compromise between her progressive values relating to women and Lagnado’s father’s deeply patriarchal old world values, it is hard not to sympathize with Leon. Not because there is anything defensible in his desire completely to rule the lives of the women in his family, but because Lagnado makes it so clear that Sylvia Kirschner’s intolerance only served to accelerate the unraveling of the Lagnado family by encouraging the independence of Lagando’s older sister Suzette. I’m not suggesting that Suzette should have allowed herself to remain firmly held in place beneath her father’s patriarchal thumb, but surely there were gentler ways of introducing Leon and Suzette to the greater independence of women in the United States than Kirschner’s dismissal of and disrespect for the values Leon had brought with him from an older generation in a far more traditional part of the world.

There are many other moments in this memoir that are worthy of note–the Italian Catholic friend Lagnado found and lost because of a housing dispute between their parents and the neighborhood’s antisemitic response to that dispute; the contrast Lagnado draws between her experience being treated for Hodgkin’s disease by a private physician in New York City and her father’s dismal treatment at the Jewish Home and Hospital, and then at Mt. Sinai Hospital, in the last years of his life (and each of these contrasted with the medical treatment the family had been able to command when they lived in Egypt, and Leon could summon the best doctors in Cairo to look after him and his family); Lagnado’s meeting with the woman whose father-in-law and uncle had negotiated the purchase of the Lagnado family home when Leon finally, reluctantly, realized he and his family could no longer remain in Egypt–but what struck me most as I read this book was how much it hinted at things I didn’t know about Mizrachi Jews. Leon’s family was from Aleppo, in Syria, and Lagnado’s discussion of that culture’s family traditions left me frustrated that I had never learned about them when I was in Hebrew School, or later when I was in yeshiva, and it was hammered into us that kol yisrael arevim zeh lazeh, all Jews are responsible for each other. That lofty sentiment notwithstanding, the curriculum we were taught certainly made it seem like the only Jews in the world, or at least the only Jews in the world that mattered, were those of European, and especially eastern European, descent.

It’s not that I didn’t know Mizrachi Jews existed, and I certainly cannot blame my contemporary ignorance on the faulty education of my youth. After all, nothing has stopped me from educating myself other than the way I have set the priorities of my life (and it’s entirely possible that I would not have picked Lagnado’s book up except that the CWP has chosen to invite her), but so much of my early Jewish education was focused on Israel–the need for Israel, the value of Israel, the struggle to found Israel–that it’s surprising I remember no attention being paid to the fact that, after Israel’s independence was declared in 1948, nearly a million Mizrachi Jews were either forced to leave their countries or chose to leave because the conditions there had become untenable. Surely learning about Israel ought to have meant learning something about the culture of the millions of Mizrachi Jews who chose to settle there. Equally surprising to me is that nowhere in Lagnado’s memoir is Israel mentioned except as either a primary cause of the problems the Jews of Egypt were starting to have after 1948 or as one the places where the Jews of Egypt could go that would accept them without fail. Lagnado does not laud Israel as the Jewish homeland, nor is there any sense from her book that the Jews of Egypt saw Israel in that way at all; even when she talks about the Egyptian Jews who chose to go to Israel, she presents the choice as matter-of-fact, even as desperate, not as one that might contain within it some small part of the hope with which the European Zionists clearly embraced the idea of a Jewish homeland there.

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, however, is a memoir, not a history. I am sure that there were Mizrachi Jews who embraced the founding of Israel as fervently and hopefully as the European Zionists did. More, I am sure that the feeling I had after reading Lagnado’s book, that the Jews of Egypt were far better off in Egypt than in any of the places to which they fled, has more to do with the privileged life her family lived there than with the reality of the lives of all Egyptian Jews. I am fully aware, in other words, that the story of the Mizrachi Jews is, has got to be, far more complex than anything I could learn from reading Lagnado’s memoir; and yet reading the book, especially the chapter called “The Last Days of Tarboosh,” brought me back to a translation conference panel I was on with Ammiel Alcalay and Sami Chetrit, a Mizrachi Jew (Moroccan, if I remember correctly). During his talk Chetrit spoke of how–and I am paraphrasing here; I wish I could remember his exact words–the European Zionist Jews colonized the Mizrachi Jews, replacing the Mizrachi narrative with the European Jewish narrative, even to the point of usurping the language(s) Mizrachi Jews had been speaking for centuries, if not millenia, before Israel was founded. (I am not sure if this was a reference to the European-based revival of Hebrew as the Jewish national language or to some other conflict over language.) His statements surprised me in much the same way that reading Lagnado’s books did, because they hinted at a story I did not know, that felt like I should have known it.

Like Lagnado, Chetrit obviously has a perspective, and a bias, and I am in no way informed enough to judge the accuracy of what he said. What I can say is that any Jewish education worth its salt should have as one of its goals making its students that informed, or at least teaching them that they should feel responsible for informing themselves; and that most certainly is not the Jewish education I received. Indeed, the Jewish education I received rendered both Chetrit’s perspective and Lagnado’s story entirely invisible, and it did so not only in the interest of making Israel central to Jewish-American identity, but also to establishing the Zionist narrative of the founding of Israel as the universal Jewish narrative of the founding of Israel. Stories like Chetrit’s and Lagnado’s demonstrate that such universality is a myth. Confronting that myth is important not because it calls into question Israel’s right to exist (it makes me angry that I feel I even have to say that) but because coming to terms with the full complexity of the narrative of Israel’s founding is the only way I know to come to terms with the fact that I, as a Jew–and maybe this applies to concerned people who aren’t Jewish as well–cannot not take a position regarding Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

(I’ve written more about this issue in the series I wrote called What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel. The link will take you to part 4 of the series; there is a list of the other posts in the series at the bottom of that post.)

Lucette Lagnado’s reading at Nassau Community College is scheduled for March 2010, date and time to be announced. For more information, please visit the Creative Writing Project website.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

Consider this an open thread.

I read aloud a short story for Podcastle: “Hall of Mirrors” by Bruce Holland Rogers. It’s a funny piece, and only about 14 minutes long.

This is the third story I’ve read for Podcastle. Previously, I’ve read “On The Banks of the River of Heaven,” by Richard Parks, and “Gordon, the Self-Made Cat,” by Peter Beagle.

Podcastle is edited by Rachel Swirsky, who in her secret identity as Mandolin is a blogger and moderator here at “Alas.”

Strange Horizons is an online magazine that publishes short stories, poetry, art, and articles. Part of their mission is to increase diversity in the publishing sphere, which includes getting work out there by women, people of color, and people on the LGBTQQI spectrum.

They’ve published The Angry Black Woman and they’ve published Nojojojo. They publish other kick-ass people who you should read, too.

Strange Horizons is in the middle of its annual fund drive so that it can continue offering excellent free fiction to the public. They’re struggling a bit this year — they’ve just reached $1,500 of their $7,000 goal. John Scalzi has stepped into the ring to offer matching donations up to $500 if you donate before midnight today.

I’ve thrown in $20. I hope you’ll consider donating, too, if you have the means. And whether or not you donate, I hope you enjoy the excellent, mind-bending fiction in their archives.

Link to the Strange Horizons fund drive.

I think this speaks for itself. Note: I have replaced the YouTube version with the version from NBC’s website.

In the history of publishing, it hasn’t been uncommon for publishers to take books about black characters and white-wash them by depicting the characters on the covers as white. The example I was most familiar with as a kid was Dawn by Octavia Butler. On the cover of the old paperback my parents had, we see the events of the book depicted as a skinny, naked blonde white woman being sealed into some kind of pod. Of course, the main character of the book is a black woman named Lilith whose race and sex are pivotal to the way that the other characters interact with her.

Dawn was first published in 1987 (which I just looked up on Wikipedia; I’d thought the book was from the 70s). While there are always stories about how cover art misrepresents the contents of books — sometimes in blatantly racist or sexist ways — I’d thought that kind of blatant miscasting of black characters as white ones was over.

It’s true that publishers seem to believe that audiences won’t buy books with black people on the covers, especially when those books are YA. The grounding for these beliefs is tenuous — something which I’d heard before, but which is confirmed here by the author of the book, Justin Larbelestier, and discussed in comments by Tor editor, Patrick Neilsen Hayden. Publishers have used a number of techniques to avoid putting black people on the covers of their books. Books featuring black characters may show a silhoette on the cover, or an abstract painting, or some other kind of image that intentionally keeps the characters out of view. Of course this erasure is terribly problematic. But while it exists on the same spectrum of behaviors as replacing black characters with white images, the latter is so much more blatant and corrupt that I find it really shocking that Larbelestier’s publisher felt comfortable pulling these shenanigans.

Larbelestier has written in detail about what happened, and I recommend you take a look at it. Here are some excerpts.

On the difference between how the book is read in Australia (where it was published without a face on the cover, which Larbelestier says she prefers), and how it’s being read in the US:

No one in Australia has written to ask me if Micah is really black.

No one in Australia has said that they will not be buying Liar because “my teens would find the cover insulting.”

Both responses are heart breaking.

On the claim that books without black covers won’t sell:

Every year at every publishing house, intentionally and unintentionally, there are white-washed covers. Since I’ve told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don’t sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won’t take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can’t give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA—they’re exiled to the Urban Fiction section—and many bookshops simply don’t stock them at all. How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white? Why would she pick up Liar when it has a cover that so explicitly excludes her?

The notion that “black books” don’t sell is pervasive at every level of publishing. Yet I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them4 Until that happens more often we can’t know if it’s true that white people won’t buy books about people of colour. All we can say is that poorly publicised books with “black covers” don’t sell. The same is usually true of poorly publicised books with “white covers.”

On how white-washing in the publishing industry is peculiarly retrograde:

Are the big publishing houses really only in the business of selling books to white people? That’s not a very sustainable model if true. Certainly the music industry has found that to be the case. Walk into a music store, online or offline, and compare the number of black faces you see on the covers there as opposed to what you see in most book stores. Doesn’t seem to affect white people buying music. The music industry stopped insisting on white washing decades ago. Talented artists like Fats Domino no longer needs Pat Boone to cover genius songs like “Ain’t That a Shame” in order to break into the white hit parade. (And ain’t that song title ironic?)

And on actions that readers might consider taking to support work by, about, and showing people of color:

When was the last time you bought a book with a person of colour on the front cover or asked your library to order one for you? If you were upset by the US cover of Liar go buy one right now. I’d like to recommend Coe Booth’s Kendra which is one of the best books I’ve read this year. Waiting on my to be read pile is Shine, Coconut Moon by Neesha Meminger, which has been strongly recommended to me by many people.

I’ll add some more recommendations. Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson, Fudoki by Kij Johnson, and the anthologiesSo Long, Been Dreaming edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Dark Matter edited by Sheree R. Thomas.

Myself, I just pre-ordered The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (The Inheritance Kingdom) by N. K. Jemisin whose posts come to Alas through Angry Black Woman where she writes as Nojojojo (although I have to say that while the cover seems to be depicting a black woman, her face is in shadow and mostly hidden)*. I also ordered Racing the Dark by Alaya Dawn Johnson.

Bloomsbury: you’ve done something really contemptible. I hope you’ll republish the book with a better cover.

I’ll even buy it if you do.

–

*In comments, Nojojojo points out that the face depicted on the cover represents a character without a specific race or sex. I apologize for my assumption. So, while purchasing her book doesn’t count as purchasing a book with a non-white character on the cover, I’m still looking forward to reading it when it comes out.

A number of people are discussing the art on the covers of one of (if not the) most successful remaining genre magazines, Realms of Fantasy.

K. Tempest Bradford contends that the covers show “plenty of boobs. Fish-girl boobs and nipple-less boobs and snake-woman boobs and boobs and more boobs.” Jim Hines adds that he’s “tired of my genre worshipping at the Altar of the Big Breasts.”

As often happens, this controversy gelled at a particular instant over a particular image, and there are a lot of behind-the-scenes politics about changes in the management at RoF. Without getting into all of that, I wanted to share some links to some websites that this discussion reminded me of. They provide some pretty compelling evidence about how men and women are portrayed differently in fantasy art.

First off, we start with some pages from a book about how to draw women and men in comics. There’s a lot of traditional sexism here. Check it out, just because some of it’s pretty facially ludicrous.

Then there’s the turn-around where an intelligent artist took the same images and showed how sexist they are by switching the sexes of the figures. It’s all pretty strange looking, since we don’t often see confidently over-muscled women, and arched-back pouting men. But it gets more remarkable toward the end, in the section on how to draw sexy poses. We’re so used to seeing women in those sexualized poses that they seem almost unremarkable and generic — but when we put a man in the same poses, it becomes really clear that no one ever really stands like that.

Finally, there are a bunch of scattered illustrations of male superheroes in poses that female superheroes are shown in all the time. These really show how silly the poses are in the first place.

Anyway, I thought all these links were really neat when I saw them in the first place. I was happy to be reminded of them, and I wanted to share. Enjoy!

*

P.S. I said that I didn’t want to get into all the controversy about the specific RoF cover that has been the flashpoint for all this, but I do want to say — while the image is sexualized, there are some really nice things about it, including some very palpable textures, and an interesting color palette. I’m sure it must suck for the artist who painted that image to have it being discussed as the nadir of fantasy art and I really don’t think it is. The female is in a pose I find sexualized, and her breasts are large and gravity-defying, but compared to a lot of fantasy art and even past Realms of Fantasy covers, it’s a pretty unremarkable piece on the objectification front. That doesn’t mean that the piece can’t or shouldn’t be considered in the context of a large number of illustrations of naked women that contributes to a broader context of how women are represented in fantasy art, fantasy fiction, and art in general — but I do think it’s unfortunate (if inevitable) that this piece bears the brunt of the frustration just because of the particular moment when it was published. Despite the fact that I can criticize the art (hell, I can criticize anything), I would probably be pleased if that picture were an illustration of one of my stories, particularly if the story itself had sexual undertones.

Two days ago, I received a letter from Milkweed Editions rejecting my second book of poems, which is called All That Struggled In You Not To Drown. In explaining his decision, the editor wrote, “Although I recognize here an original and compelling persona, I felt that the preponderance of first-person poems with an autobiographical slant limited the potential appeal.” In other words, if I understand him correctly, he thinks that the first-person narratives dominating the book will make it hard both to sell and to get a decent level of critical attention. Whether or not that is true, his perception of the manuscript is accurate–it is made up almost entirely of first-person narratives–and, given that accuracy, if he cannot find within his own aesthetic sense and/or his sense of where poetry is these days and/or his sense of the market enough enthusiasm for publishing my book, I think his rejection is a fair and reasonable one. It’s also ironic, because CavanKerry Press, publisher of my first book of poems, The Silence Of Men, rejected All That Struggled In You Not To Drown because there was not enough of an autobiographical slant. “I’ve seen this a lot,” CKP’s publisher told me. “A poet whose first book is deeply personal will often write a second book that is just the opposite. You’ve written a good book; it’s just too impersonal for our list.” This rejection (more irony here) also seems to me to have been fair and reasonable. For while All That Struggled In You Not To Drown is, to me, deeply personal and autobiographical, it possesses and explores those characteristics differently than The Silence Of Men does, and if CKP’s list is slanted towards the kinds of poems that are in The Silence Of Men, then it makes sense that CKP would also reject my second book.

I have a lot of respect for the work that small press editors and publishers do, not just because it is so often un- or underpaid work–which it is, and which is something that any writer who deals with them needs to understand and appreciate–but also because publishing books requires a commitment to understanding, articulating and either implicitly or explicitly defending one’s own aesthetic sense in a highly saturated and competitive marketplace. Especially when it comes to poetry. Sometimes it seems to me that everyone and her or his aunt or uncle in the United States thinks that he or she is a poet whose work the world absolutely must have between the covers of a book or burned onto a CD or DVD. More to the point–at least in my experience–more than a few of the people who think this way haven’t read (or at least write like they haven’t read) a single book of contemporary poetry. To be a small press editor and/or publisher in this kind of environment is to submit oneself to a mind-numbing onslaught of language, which takes a level of commitment that most literary people I know, including myself, cannot and will not make; and that commitment ought to command our respect, even when it means that a given publisher decides not to publish a book we have written.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I think anyone who wants to write poetry should write poetry. The impulse towards poetic expression is a powerful one; witness the way people turn to poetry in times of difficulty, from personal tragedies like the death of a loved one to national tragedies like the September 11th attacks. Moreover, the good that poetry does for the people who write it, and for the people who read it, whatever kind of poetry it is, is not something that can be measured by either the dollars and cents that a publisher commits to putting a book out or the unpaid hours that the poet sweats through trying to make her or his lines bespeak the particular experience he or she wants to communicate. Still, there is a difference–actually, there are probably many differences–between being someone who writes poems and someone who wants to publish books of poetry, not the least of which is that once you decide you want to publish books of poetry, you have made the decision to treat your work as a commodity. You have entered, whether you like it or not, the world of (usually very small) business; and so I have to confess that the letter from Milkweed Editions is one I should never have received. Instead, I should have written to them and withdrawn All That Struggled In You Not To Drown from consideration because a third press had already agreed to publish it.

I didn’t contact Milkweed because I’d allowed my record-keeping to become sloppy and so I’d actually forgotten I’d submitted the book to them; and so I am relieved that Milkweed rejected my book, since it means I do not have to deal with the awkwardness of having to choose between two very fine publishers. The world of small presses is not like the world of commercial publishers, where the bidding war that can result from having more than one editor eager to publish your book can be a very good thing. There is not enough money in the small press world to make such a bidding war possible. I may have only a verbal commitment from the press that has accepted All That Struggled In You Not To Drown–which is why I am not naming that press in this post; our agreement will not be official until I have a contract, and a lot can happen between a handshake and a contract–but precisely because of the aesthetic and other kinds of un- or underpaid editorial commitments I was talking about above, the verbal commitment I have with this press means something to me, and so it is a commitment that I want, all else being equal, to honor. If all goes according to plan, I will be very proud to publish my book with this press, as I would have been proud to publish with Milkweed, or with CavanKerry Press. But here’s the final irony: The press that accepted my book did so for precisely the reasons that Milkweed rejected it, because of “the preponderance of first-person poems with an autobiographical slant,” which the editor feels will help to garner All That Struggled In You Not To Drown some serious critical attention, while at the same time making the book something that people will want to buy. Go figure.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Why Ithaca edition? Because I’m in Ithaca visiting family.

This is an open thread; post what you like, for as long as you like, with whomever you like. Self-linking makes the sun shine, flowers grow, children laugh, etc.

1. Above: An image left on Israel’s barrier wall by the graffiti artist Banksy. Awesome. Via Shalom Rav, who has a couple more examples.
2. An article about Ezra Nawi, a gay pacifist Jewish Israeli of Iraqi decent activist for Palestinian rights, who may shortly be in jail over disputed charges of assaulting an Israeli police officer. (Via.) And check out supportezra.net.
3. Vancouver feminists open “no trans women allowed” pharmacy. Aaaargh.
4. Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel riot to protest child being taken away from alleged abusive mother.
5. Internalized racism and “third culture kids” (autobiographical essay).
6. I’m not hanging noodles on your ear (and other intriguing idioms from around the world)
7. Book recommendation: Exercises designed for fat women (with a stay healthy, not a lose weight, perspective).
8. When it comes to gay marriage, why is Meghan McCain so much more eloquent than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama?
9. Lying about the hate crime bill: “A danger to religious freedom.” (And see as well Box Turtle Bulletin’s earlier installment in this series, “There are 30 sexual orientations.“
10. How Global Warming Will Destabilize Pakistan and India
11. Ron Wyden’s Free Choice Act — an essential part of health care reform. Let’s hope it actually makes it through.
12. Lawyer asks judge to order opposing lawyer to wear nicer shoes. No, really.
13. A 72-year longitudinal study of 268 Harvard men. I wish they had done a more diverse group, but still: This is very cool stuff.
14. It’s way too early to call the stimulus a failure.