The first book I ever read by Howard Zinn was SNCC: The New Abolitionists. I’ve read a lot of his writing since then, and I think it’s his most powerful book.

Howard Zinn wrote an essay The Optimism of Uncertainty. He argued that history should give us hope, not because it guaranteed that the powerless would win (it really doesn’t), but because it showed extraordinary, unpredictable change is possible. The Civil Rights Movement, particularly SNCC, is an example of the unpredictability of hope. On the 1st of February 1960, Ezell A. Blair Jr., David Richmond, Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain, sat down at the counter of their local Woolworth’s and refused to be served. Nobody could have predicted what would grow out of that action.

There have been so many attempts to hide the history of collective resistance, including the reduction of the the freedom movement SNCC was part of to someone sitting down on a bus and someone else giving a great speech. Howard Zinn wrote history like it mattered, because he wanted to cultivate the hope that history brings.

I recently blitzed through a number of short stories so that I could finalize the short story portion of my Nebula ballot. I wanted to post about the ones I decided to nominate, and also some of the other excellent ones I encountered in my reading. I hope people will check out these stories, possibly for award consideration, but mostly because they’re cool.

I have a post up at Ecstatic Days explaining my methodology for creating a reading list, and a few other points about what went into creating my list of nominees and recommendations.

Here are the nominees and recommendations themselves.

My short story nominations
“Bridesicle” by Will McIntosh, Asimov’s Science Fiction
“Remembrance is Something Like a House” by Will Ludwigsen, Interfictions 2
“The Mermaids Singing Each to Each” by Cat Rambo, Clarkesworld
“The Godfall’s Chemsong” by Jeremiah Tolbert, Interzone
“Non-Zero Probabilities” by N. K. Jemisin, Clarkesworld

Highly Recommended Stories
“Tio Gilberto and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts” by Benjamin Francisco, Realms of Fantasy*
“Nine Sundays in a Row” by Kris Dikeman, Strange Horizons**
“Reading by Numbers” by Aidan Doyle, Fantasy Magazine
“Spar” by Kij Johnson, Clarkesworld
“Marsh Gods” by Ann Leckie, Strange Horizons**
“Superhero Girl” by Jessica Lee, Fantasy Magazine**

Recommended Stories
“Turning the Apples” by Tina Connolly, Strange Horizons
“The Score” by Alaya Dawn Johnson, Interfictions 2
“A Song to Greet the Sun” by Alaya Dawn Johnson, Fantasy Magazine
“Endangered Camp” by Ann Leckie, Clockwork Phoenix 2
“…That Has Such People In It” by Jennifer Pelland, Apex Digest
“Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut” by Cat Rambo, Strange Horizons
“Water Museum” by Nisi Shawl, Filter House
“The Moon Over Tokyo through Leaves in the Fall” by Jerome Stueart, Fantasy Magazine
“Light on the Water” by Genevieve Valentine, Fantasy Magazine
“Bespoke” by Genevieve Valentine, Strange Horizons
“The Olverung” by Steven Woodworth, Realms of Fantasy**

Tiptree Nominated Stories
I also nominated three of these stories for the Tiptree — “The Mermaids Singing Each to Each” by Cat Rambo (Clarkesworld), “Godfall’s Chemsong” by Jeremiah Tolbert (Interzone), and “A Song to Greet the Sun” by Alaya Dawn Johnson (Fantasy Magazine)

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*This story would have been one of my five nominees except for the conflict of interest created by its appearance on PodCastle during my tenure as editor.
**These stories also appeared in PodCastle during my tenure as editor.

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“The Mathematics of Faith” by Jonathan Wood, Beneath Ceaseless Skies — deleted from a previous version of this list because it is a novelette.

I am looking for a recommendation of a book or article that will give me background on what the situation was like for gay women in the decade or so before Stonewall. Non-fiction preferred to fiction, but I’m happy with material that’s available online and material that isn’t.

New post at Big Other:

I am writing some Mad Hatter-March Hare slash, which I fully intend to parade past every respectable magazine I can find when I finish. Among the delights of this project, of which there are many, I have been having an excellent time looking up bizarre old-fashioned misconceptions, sifting through internet answers to why ravens resemble writing desks, and delving into the delightfully ridiculous depths of Victorian slang.

My dear nug, would you like to tip the velvet? Cram your arbor vitae down the red tunnel, perhaps, or go to bedfordshire with a wagtail where you can bury your whore’s pipe and your tiddle-diddles between cupid’s kettle drums before shoving Nebuchadnezzer through the roundmouth — unless you’re piss-proud. If you’re kinky, play the brother starling. Mandrakes might prefer to play the back gammon or visit the red tunnel. If you’re a dark cully, then you deserve the flap dragon — and keep your gaying instrument well away from me.

Now, I am willing to entertain the suggestion that this is faked or poorly researched — but I really don’t mind if it is. For I have been thoroughly entertained.

Comment over there.

Elsewhere, Nancy Lebovitz wrote:

I’ve been into Ayn Rand (details if you like about what I do and don’t agree with from her)[1], and how I still don’t see the emotional stench that’s obvious to a lot of people from her writing… [1]She’s the only writer I can think of who put a woman character in charge of a huge piece of infrastructure– one that was part of the larger society. Signy Mallory (captain of a big spaceship) doesn’t have the same emotional effect, I’d say.

I replied:

…the only writer? can you qualify that in some way (timespan, political writings only, etc) because, er, if you’re somehow suggesting no other writer has ever done this, that’s a very strange claim.

Suggestions of other depictions welcome here.

A new post at Big Other, where I’ve recently joined as a blogger:

Over on his own blog, Jeff Vandermeer adds another dimension to the conversation by adding that women face particular challenges toward establishing a home life that will facilitate their writing careers. One difficulty is what feminists often call the second shift, wherein working wives and mothers put in a full day at the office and then come home to put in a second shift doing chores at home. Data suggests that women tend to spend a lot more time on this than men do, even in households where partners report they have an equal division of labor. Even if labor is divided equally, women are more likely to be held responsible for an unclean house, and so they’re often under more pressure.

…There are any number of ways that systemic sexism interferes with women’s careers, but one of the most direct is time. Time spent on housework is time not spent on writing. Time spent on hair and clothes and makeup is time not spent on writing. If women put in more of this time (and overall in America, they do), then that’s fewer woman-hours that are available for writing stories. When we start to address unequal representation in magazines, it’s important to ask questions on the editorial level, the content level, the submissions level, and so on — but it’s also important to interrogate the gendered ways in which sexism blocks opportunities for writing to occur in the first place.

The rest of the entry — and comments — over there.

Quoted for brilliance:

It wasn’t the end of the problems with Daly. For starters: Daly hated on trans people something fierce. This has been sort of lightly mentioned and hinted at elsewhere, but I have to tell you this in plain language: MARY. DALY. HATED. TRANS. PEOPLE. Particularly trans women. She intimated, at times, that they were part of a plot to eliminate “real” women, and to assign “men” all “authentic” female functions. She also said that they were like whites putting on blackface (yeah: Lorde might have been right, about the whole appropriating-other-people’s-oppression thing?) and implied that they should have bodily violence done to them, or at least should be physically intimidated, by “real” feminists, so that they could not enter the feminist movement or feminist space. Let’s not be coy, here: no matter whether she believed this for her entire life, no matter whether she privately got over it later, she published it, without apparently ever publishing a retraction, as far as I can tell. This is hate. This is privilege. This, right here, is the face of the oppressor.

And I’m not saying this to defile Mary Daly’s grave. I’m not saying it because I get a dirty little thrill out of tarnishing the legacy of a fallen feminist. I’m not saying it because I want to start a fight. I’m saying it because, for much of my young life, Mary Daly was my favorite feminist author, meaning that I believed this shit, too. There are still women who believe this, and these women often call themselves “radical feminists.” Because queer-bashing and misogyny are just so fucking threatening to the Patriarchy, apparently. I believed it, because Mary Daly published it, and I believed in her. And, let me tell you, I have worked like Hell Itself to get over that, and to get over the privilege that allowed me to place such emphasis on my own oppression that I could go around blithely oppressing other folks because clearly I had won the Whose Suffering Is Most Important game, and to be an actual functioning ally. Some encouragement from Mary Daly – some retraction, some statement of accountability – would have helped. It would have slapped me out of this unbelievably gross way of thinking with one blow, rather than making me go through life hurting people and being an asshole and having to receive many, many less powerful slaps until I got my shit straight.

Daly and I were both Catholics, at one point, so I know both of us understand the power of Confession – not the version handed out by the church, where you say it and apologize for it and have all your guilt magically wiped away by the hand of God, but the version that actually works in the real live world, where you admit to being wrong and you take your consequences like a grown woman and you do your acts of contrition and your assigned penance, for the rest of your life, by living with those consequences and not repeating the actions that caused them in the first place. People might forgive you; they might not. The point is to value doing the right thing, for the sake of the right thing, more than you value your own personal comfort.

I’m exerpting this from the rest of the essay because I think this will be an important dialogue for feminists to have, and to continue to have, until the particular forms of transphobia which are fostered by the radical feminist movement die a long-awaited death. Mary Daly’s passing provides fodder for this conversation — a starting point — but it’s not really the core of what needs discussing.

Feminism is, still, used as a tool of oppression against trans people. Those who perpetuate this violence toward fellow human beings should feel ashamed. If they, like Mary Daly, have an investment in the imagery of the church — they should confess and repent. If they, like me, have no such investment, then they should apologize and stop hurting other people immediately.

Also, rest in peace Mary Daly and thank you for the good work you’ve done, but that’s just a footnote to this conversation.

Read Sady’s whole post here.

More spheres floated in this room, dozens of them. They were fantastically varied—of all shapes and sizes and colors—turning slowly and drifting through the air. They seemed to be nothing more than a child’s toys, until I looked closely at one and saw clouds swirling over its surface.

Sieh hovered near as I wandered among his toys, his expression somewhere between anxiety and pride. The yellow ball had taken up position near the center fo the room; all the other balls revolved around it.

“They’re pretty, aren’t they?” he asked me, while I stared at a tiny red marble. A great cloud mass—a storm?—devoured the nearer hemisphere. I tore my eyes from it to look at Sieh. He bounced on his toes, impatient for my answer. “It’s a good collection.”

Trickster, trickster, stole the sun for a prank. And apparently because it was pretty. The Three had borne many children before their falling-out. Sieh was immeasurably old, another of the Arameri’s deadly weapons, and yet I could not bring myself to dash the shy hope I saw in his eyes.

“They’re all beautiful,” I agreed.

It was when I reached this passage, on page ten of N. K. Jemisin’s debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (forthcoming from Orbit Books in 2010), that I fell in love. Read the rest of this entry »

Edited because of privacy issues.

According to one of my students, in a paper he wrote meant to talk about the different approaches to history in Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men and Island, edited by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, China has historically been infused with a “racial ideology of male masculinity” and that is why so many “Chinese Americans believe in racial inequality.” I wish I could quote the entire two sentences for you; they are truly precious. It’s not just the poor quality of this writing per se that gets to me, though, it’s that phrases like “racial ideology of male masculinity” appear all over the essays I have been getting from far too many of the students in the literature class I have been teaching–as if the students were choosing one word from column A, two from column B, etc. in order to come up with a sentence that sounds so intellectually profound that I won’t notice it doesn’t really mean anything. It is depressing and debilitating when the papers handed in by my freshman composition students are, in many ways, better written than the ones handed in by the students in an advanced literature class.

There’s really not much in this Karoli post that I disagree with. Is Joe Lieberman odious? Yes. Should the Democrats strip him of everything, up to and including his jowls? Yes. Is there a good way to work around him? No. Has he effectively killed the public option and/or a Medicare buy-in, at least for this session? Yes. He has.

But does that mean health care reform, even without such an option, should simply be killed dead? No, it does not.

As Karoli points out, even after the public option is killed dead, the health care plan still ends banning people based on pre-existing conditions. It still provides significant subsidies. It still will mean the difference between millions of Americans being insured and uninsured, and that will save tens of thousands of lives a year. Is it perfect? Hell, no. Would it be better with a public option or Medicare buy-in? Hell, yes. But you pass the bill with the system of government you have, not the system of government you want, and for good or ill, the American system of government is designed specifically to kill big, sweeping changes, to whittle bills down into small, incremental, piecemeal steps.

This is, incidentally, the biggest problem with the liberal opprobrium aimed at Obama. (Reid — well, he’s another story, and I’ll talk about him at another time.) Barack Obama is the President of the United States, not the Prime Minister. He commands large majorities in both houses, but those majorities are fractious, and have grown up under the American system in which each legislator is a free agent, whose votes are up for grabs on every bill.

Yes, the Republicans are moving away from that to perfect parliamentary lockstep — we know, we know. But the Republicans were not much more unified when they held Congress, and were forced to actually govern. Remember how the Bush Administration muscled through Social Security privatization right after the 2004 election? You don’t? Right, because it didn’t happen. Without Democratic support for privatization in some form — support that was non-existent save, maybe, for Joe Lieberman — the Republicans in Congress were so disorganized, so fractious, so disunited, that they couldn’t even get a bill through the House. Had it made it to the Senate, it would assuredly have died, as the Democrats — who held more than 40 seats — would have filibustered it to death.

The last major piece of domestic legislation the GOP got through Congress was Medicare Part D in 2003 — which only passed because the Republicans were willing to play major games in both houses to get the bill over the top, going so far as to hold the roll open in the House for two and a half hours in order to wheedle for the final votes for passage.

The GOP got no major bills through congress in the last five years of the Bush presidency. For all the vaunted unanimity among the Republicans, Bush Administration efforts on everything from Social Security to immigration reform failed, due to a lack of party support.

So while it’s both tempting and true to complain that the health care bill has been whittled down to less than half a loaf, and maybe down to a single slice, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that said single slice contains more health care reform than has passed since Medicare itself was enacted. And that even in its very watered-down form, it will save lives and save families from penury. This is not a minor accomplishment. As Nate Silver notes, the public option was always a long-shot in the Senate, but keeping the focus on that still managed to allow a pretty decent bill to get to the brink of passage.

Bill Clinton couldn’t get get a bill this far. Jimmy Carter couldn’t get it done. Lyndon Johnson, Jack Kennedy, and Harry S Truman couldn’t get it done. No great Democratic majority leader ever muscled health care reform through the Senate. And until Nancy Pelosi, no Democratic speaker ever had shepherded health care reform through the House.

Quite simply, this watered down, attenuated, imperfect, tenth-of-a-loaf bill still represents one of the greatest legislative triumphs by either party since the Great Society programs passed under Johnson. And while it will need to be improved in the future, it will establish the baseline from which all future discussions begin: Every American deserves health insurance, and no American should be denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions. Once that is enshrined in law, changes will only make coverage more robust. Just as Medicare once failed to cover prescription drugs, just as Social Security once failed to cover large swathes of workers, so too will this bill need to be improved. But there will be nothing to improve if we fail to pass this now, and there will be no chance at improving it if, in our pique at imperfection, Democrats choose to allow the same forces that have been trying to kill this bill to gain ground in Congress. Imperfect isn’t fun. It’s frustrating and annoying and it means we have to endure Joe Lieberman. But it’s better than a perfect bill that doesn’t pass. Better by far.

Yasmin Nair, guest blogging at Dakshina, examines the connection between art and social justice with a skeptical eye, suggesting that the connections are not as straightforward as naive writers often want to believe. She also looks at how the idea of writing as a social justice project feeds into the undervaluing of writing-as-labor:

The notion that the production of art is separate from the nitty-gritty of art as labor. While I would never blame artists themselves for their woes in terms of getting paid, the truth is that many of us have a hard time seeing ourselves as laborers who ought to be fairly compensated. Most of us have been trained to think our work is sacrosanct, that our work is not labor, that it is above petty commerce, and that we must make art only for nobler causes. When you add on the patina of social justice, many of us are reluctant to or unable to negotiate with those who are supposed to pay us, in part because we do care about the issues and the people affected by them. And, in part, because, frankly, too many of us have assimilated a deeply privatized notion that our art is so profound that it can and should directly effect social change – monetary value be damned. The result, as Andrew Ross puts it in a seminal essay, “The Mental Labor Problem,” is that “…the new profile of the artist as a social-service worker is coming to supplant the autonomous avant-garde innovator as a fundable type, increasingly sponsored through local arts agencies.” In the case of the Artivist Coalition events, artists were deployed as semi-mystical healers, responsible for shining a light on matters that should be the purview of social workers and politicians.

Which is, of course, interesting in terms of the pay rate flap, as another one of those excuses which comes up for the fact that writers are not compensated for their labor is that art is unlike real work and should be done for love not money. (I note that the problematic form of this argument is not “I write for love” but “I write for love, and that’s pure, but you are tainted because you write for money.” We once had someone write into podcastle that if we accepted their submission, they would refuse payment, because they didn’t believe that writers should get paid. This is certainly a decision they were entitled to make for themselves, but the indictment of all payment-seeking writers is problematic. Why should love and money be mutually exclusive reasons?) Nair goes on to say:

writing is profoundly devalued to the point where it is seen as work without labor – anyone can write, the argument goes. Just build a website, and pound away.

To be clear, I think it is always a good thing if people want to write more. The problem is that the apparent democratization of writing today comes along with a profound devaluing of its worth as labor that ought to be fairly compensated. Take, for example, the notion of the “citizen journalist.” Someone once had the bright idea that all it takes for a robust and civil society is to turn a group of citizens, armed with little more than basic web access and digital cameras and the ability to pound keys, to make society accountable for its ills. In return, they usually get little more than a free byline. So, what the term “citizen journalist” should really refer to is “unpaid schmuck who will work for free in hopes of a byline.” I also happen to be a professional journalist. I once covered an event and got some exclusive photos as well. When I returned home to file the story, I found that a local website had already “reported” on it. The citizen journalist in question had simply cut and pasted a press release from one of the organizing groups, without even acknowledging that the words were taken verbatim from the document. A reader who assumed that the reporter actually talked to people at the event was unlikely to see the inherent bias in the article. As as activist who has written a fair number of press releases, I know that they are always written ahead of time, regardless of what might actually transpire at an event, and about the careful crafting and messaging that goes into projecting events as spectacular successes. Without important information about the source of the material being divulged to the reader, the “citizen journalist” was able to pass off a cut-and-paste job as journalism. In the end, this is what brings down the quality as well as the expectations of what good journalism should be and it makes the work of journalists look like something that requires no effort and, hence, something that can be done for free or very little.

Let me be fair: I am also a blogger, and that work is entirely for free (a fact that escapes the notice of irate readers who summarily call for my “firing” by editors who are themselves making just enough to keep the sites up and running). I understand the value of producing work that might entice and create a reader base for my writing. But all of this goes on in a social and political environment where people assume that it is not only okay to underpay writers, but that writers should, if worth their salt, be willing to be exploited…

The situation is hardly helped by the fact that artists like me are expected to function without the basics like health care and that, as a freelance writer, I cannot seek unemployment. I have sprained the same knee twice in two years, leading to a drastic reduction in my earnings. Intrepid journalism is hard or impossible if you have to ask a fast-trotting subject at a political rally to please slow down so that you can keep up with them. I live with the knowledge that a slightly more serious accident could wipe me out. I do various gigs around town to make what I can and I try to carve out chunks of that most precious commodity, the drug of choice for writers: Time…

Most people unacquainted with the reality of a writing life cannot grasp the fact that while writing is not taxing in the same way as hard physical labor, it is draining, and not something you do on the fly… For writers, our work is not our reward; the amount paid for our work is the just reward.

I’ve cut a great deal of the connective tissue to try to highlight some of the article’s main points, particularly as they relate to artists who may or may not also think of themselves as activists. (I do consider myself to have an activistic purpose with some of my work, but obviously not all SFF writers do or should — it’s good for the field to have writers with varying motivations.) Her article also approaches the topic from the point of view of artists who are trying to make a living from their work, which again is a connection between her and me, though obviously not all artists are seeking to make a living off of writing and I do not mean to imply that all artists should be.

But ultimately, whether or not it’s also a hobby, writing is also work. It deserves respect as labor. Nair’s analysis of writing-as-exploited-labor is thought-provoking. It does concentrate on certain manifestations of writing, but that’s because she’s writing out of her own experiences, and the article is more interesting for that.

Go to Dakshina to read Nair’s whole article.

Alaya Dawn Johnson’s debut novel, Racing the Dark, was released in 2007 by Agate Bolden. The epic fantasy is the first in the Spirit Binders series.

Racing the Dark begins when thirteen-year-old Lana is initiated as a diver who seeks and finds Mandagah jewels, a profession that provides her island’s main commercial export and is also religiously significant. The jewels Lana finds during her initiation mark her as chosen by the spirits, but Lana hides this fact so she can attempt to have a normal life.

The island archipelago where Lana lives is in turmoil — her home island is suffering from environmental changes that seem to be caused by the great spirits (including water, fire, wind and death) which are struggling against their bindings. When the Mandagah fish become endangered, Lana’s family flees their home, looking for work on the inner islands. Lana becomes ill from hard labor and poor diet, forcing her mother to promise her as an apprentice to a witch in order to get money to pay for a cure.

The novel follows Lana through the major periods of her life, as she learns magic from the witch, takes on the spirit of death, meets the spirit of wind, and falls in love with the spirit of water. We leave her abruptly in the middle of the climax, paving the way for the sequel.

As I contemplated what to say about this novel, I came across a review by Niall Harrison of Alaya Dawn Johnson’s short story, “Far & Deep,” which appeared this year in Interzone.

“This is how you trail a novel,” writes Harrison. “‘Far & Deep’ shares a setting with, but is not extracted from (or is sufficiently well-adapted to stand apart from), Johnson’s Spirit Binders novels.”

He goes on to say:

“Far & Deep” is not as firmly controlled as I wanted it to be; the stabs of emotion that punctuate the predominantly cool narrative tilt, a little too often, a little too close to melodrama for my taste. I don’t think the revelation of the world and the mystery are quite geared correctly; we don’t always learn about the possibility of a thing and the significance of a thing in the smoothest progression…

All this is to carp, however. They are little criticisms. The busyness of the story — the many details of setting, the deft character portraits, a sense of events with forward momentum — the basic shape of it all — carries you over such details, on a first reading, and leaves you looking forward to Johnson’s next tale.

While I don’t feel that the momentum of Racing the Dark carries the reader over its flaws on first reading, the rest of Harrison’s review is spot on for my impressions of the novel. Racing the Dark is a flawed text, but a rich one, full of minor faults and major successes.
Read the rest of this entry »

I was happily writing along when all of a sudden Pandora turned up a musician I’d never heard before and I fell in love.

I almost never find musicians I love, but Gabriel Kahane is amazing. He’s sort of like Stephen Sondheim and Jason Robert Brown (who, I just learned by looking him up, apparently has a seriously gorgeous Jewish nose) presented as vaguely pop* music.

His instrumentation is stunning and I love the complex melodies. I almost didn’t pay attention to his lyrics until I happened upon his epic aria about the plight of a man who cannot find a roommate because of his compulsion to put ice cubes down people’s shirts.

I have a compulsion to put ice cubes down people’s shirts. As my roommate, you will likely bear the brunt of this problem. Don’t ask me why I do this. Why do I do this? Why do I do this? Years of therapy hasn’t helped. Hasn’t helped. Hasn’t heeeeeelped.

Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii always have ice cubes on hand. Don’t think you can simply get rid of all the ice trays in the apartment. All the ice trays! All the ice trays!

Trust me, I have tried this. I will only buy more! I will only buy more! I will ooooooooooooooonly buuuuuuuuy moooooooore!

Really — gorgeous music *and* humor? I swoon for this music.

You, too, can listen for free online.

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*Note: my definition of “pop” means “written for enjoyment as individual songs.” As opposed to “part of a musical.” When I was in college, I complained over and over again to my friend Tim Jones-Yelvington that I couldn’t get into songs that weren’t part of a story. I thought my problem was unique until Tim’s boyfriend — a lyricist and playwright studying at NYU — revealed he had the same problem. I’ve gotten over it since, by dint of musicians like Poe (whose album Haunted is a musical response to her brother’s amazing experimental novel House of Leaves) and the Dresden Dolls (whose song “Coin-Operated Boy” is a perfect science fiction short story in three minutes).

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ETA: Why did I not previously notice that this song is on an album called “Craigslistleider?” That’s seriously fucking brilliant. So, for instance, another song in the cycle is “I have one pair of slightly used assless chaps in size 42. Will trade for spiderman comics. Will trade for spiderman comics. Will trade for spiderman comics or equivalent.” Set to disjunctively serious music. Awesome.

College friend Tim Jones-Yelvington has recently published a pair of stories about the fictional seduction of gay celebrities diver Matt Mitcham and singer Adam Lambert.

His narrator is a gay sociologist who keeps a blog record of his seductions, in a contemporary take on the epistolary format. “My research methodology: I have sex with gay celebrities and write about it,” his character writes.

I’ve been stimulated by tete-a-tetes with David Hyde Pierce. I’ve appreciated Ian McKellan’s oral generosity. In my crowning achievement, I orchestrated a three-way with The Amazing Race’s Reichen Lehmukl and Queer as Folk’s Robert Gant, the most difficult part of which was getting them in the same room. The rest took care of itself. …who knew their fetishes were so compatible?

Much ink has been spilled on the cult of celebrity. Some say celebrities are role models. We look to them for lessons on how to (or how not to) live. This hero worship, so the story goes, is compounded for Queers, who grow up without examples for how to be ourselves.

But this doesn’t explain why some of us, especially those of us who have long outgrown the need for role models and have recognized gay identity as a cultural construct, a regulatory fiction, are still obsessed with famous gay people. Fascinated with asking “are they or aren’t they,” with wondering what they do and with whom, and with wondering whether they’d do it with us.

What does it mean to be showered with interviews, book deals, speaking engagements on college campuses, to be considered some sort of expert, an authority, to be vested with authority, not only because you call yourself gay, but because people also know you from Adam? What does it mean to be famous and gay?

In his blog, Perverse Adult, Tim explores what it’s like to be the gay author of gay-themed fiction about the meaning of gay celebrity. Identities overlap in not entirely predictable ways.

As Tim wrote his story of sexual obsession with Adam Lambert, he writes that he became obsessed himself. “When I say I became obsessed with Adam Lambert as I wrote, I’m not exaggerating. Within about a month, he became the third most played artist on my last.fm profile, a profile I’ve kept for over three years. I really did create an Adam Lambert “mii” on my Wii, and one night a month or two ago, my partner was playing a flight simulator game, and our Wii stuck my Adam Lambert mii in a two-seater airplane with him, and for a moment I was legit jealous… of my partner. I was like, “Bitch, step back from my Adam Lambert mii.” I’ve got all the parts picked out for my Adam Lambert Halloween costume. I actually went online and ordered the same eye liner Adam Lambert says is his favorite. I’m probably incriminating myself more than I really want to here.”

Tim’s blog features famous photographs of Adam Lambert, paired with photographs of Tim dressed like him, imitating him, mimicking the glimmer in his eyes. Tim identifies with his character in more ways than this — recently, Tim was banned from Kevin Spacey’s twitter account after proposing to meet him in London with chains for a kinky sexual encounter. (Interestingly, Nathan Fillon seems untroubled by similar overtures.)

The stories play with weaving metafiction, too. The main character claims to be writing his blog real-time, reporting on conversations as he’s having them, but also altering those conversations so that the reader has little perception of the fictional “reality”. When his friend annoys him, he tells her:

“Just for that,” I said, “I’m putting you in my blog. I’ll cast you as your worst nightmare, the sarcastic black best friend who has no life of her own, but exists solely to advance the white protagonist’s dramatic action. And just to ensure you’re as subaltern as possible, I’ll make you a dyke.”

And sure enough, at this very moment, Sophia is landing Grade A pussy, which she will spend the night devouring with aplomb.

“Toldja so,” I say aloud (I really did. Just now, out loud).

Where’s the line between reality and fiction? Where does real life identity intersect with fictional identity? What’s the line between the mask of celebrity and the personal life of the individual behind it? Where does the celebrity identity intersect with the personal one? If sex is one of our most personal and private moments, does it slip past the mask of celebrity? But then again, isn’t sex also about projection?

These stories ponder what the sex lives of celebrities are like based on their public personas. The narrator wonders whether Matt Mitcham will fuck like a diver: “I imagine Matt Mitcham as a power bottom. I will lie on my back, and he will straddle me, pull me into him as effortlessly as he enters the water, with minimal splash. Then he will make love to me from the inside out, active and open.” Adam Lambert, on the other hand, is “an adept engineer of others’ responses,” so the narrator wonders “So how does one play the player? Perhaps Adam Lambert craves a sparring partner, an opponent equal to his calculations. Or perhaps I’ll convince him I’ve been successfully played, have become, like countless television viewers, putty in his hands. Becoming putty, it occurs to me, might be kind of hot.”

In the end, the sex scenes themselves are coy, leaving the stories to center on the concepts of gayness, celebrity, image and projection. These are questions without answers. Or, at least, questions whose answers won’t come simply.

The sex scene with Matt Mitcham exemplifies the way that true private identities are never available to the public.

Maybe in bed Matt Mitcham was exactly like I said he would be, a power bottom. Or maybe he spun me around and took me from behind, quick and forceful. Maybe he wanted oral only, or maybe he’s the type of person that gets off on something else entirely, like watching another man spread grapes across the kitchen floor and squash them between his toes. I bet you’d like to know more. I bet you’d like to hear about the size and shape of his anatomy, what he can accomplish with his tongue ring, and what he sounds like when he comes.

Maybe this time, I don’t feel like sharing.

In the end, the sex scene is always offstage. What we see of celebrities is always their public face, by definition. It’s the face they’re wearing in public.

These stories accomplish more than I’ve discussed here, including subtle character development of the narrator, despite their brevity and epistolary format. Tim says he’ll be writing more. I look forward to more insight into the serious, complicated issues of identity — sexual and otherwise — that this series raises. Read Seducing Matt Mitcham and Seducing Adam Lambert.

In my blurb for Cat Rambo’s new collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight (Paper Golem Press, 2009), I wrote that reading her stories is like “reading the literature from worlds that don’t exist. She writes as that world’s Dickens, its Calvino, its Fredrick Douglass, its E. B. White. Rather than merely relaying the events of other realities, as some fantasy and science fiction writers might, at her best Cat Rambo acts as a literary interpreter. Within these imagined fictions — sometimes disjunctive and metaphysical, sometimes lucid and deceptively simple — there are embedded many new ways for looking at the history and social realities of our own world. Dying little girls may not be carried away by winged pigs, but what does it mean that we want so badly to believe that they might be? Cat Rambo’s fiction invites these questions, but the ultimate interpretation is left for the reader to ponder, and to answer if she can.”

I attended Clarion West with Cat Rambo in 2005 and have been a devoted fan of her work ever since. I’ve published her work on PodCastle – Magnificent Pigs; Dead Girl’s Wedding March; “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones,” the Manticore Said; Foam on the Water; In Order to Conserve; and the upcoming Narrative of a Beast’s Life, scheduled for January 19th. Paper Golem Press sent me an ARC of this book so that I could review its contents for possible publication in PodCastle, and so that I could blurb it, both of which I was more than happy to do.

Cat’s stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld Magazine, and… everywhere. Once she burst onto the scene as a professional writer after Clarion West, she seemed to appear simultaneously in all magazines at once, as if she were at the center of some sort of physics-defying quantum phenomenon from a Star Trek movie.

Rambo’s collection features twenty fantasy stories, including a number of originals. Publisher’s Weekly calls Cat’s collection a “two-sided coin,” indicating that there are both excellent and weak stories in the collection. The reviewer seems to have taken against Cat’s fantasy world, Tabat, which has been developed over the course of stories, role playing games, and as-yet-unpublished novels. The reviewer says that these stories are full of “predictable genre tropes that fall flat.” I disagree with Publisher’s Weekly on the specifics — in my opinion, “Narrative of a Beast’s Life” is the strongest story in the collection, while “Eagle-Haunted Lake Sammamish” is one of the weaker ones — but the reviewer’s broader point is supportable. Rambo’s collection is sometimes uneven, as is perhaps inevitable in a collection of twenty stories.

It’s not that I don’t love this collection. When Cat’s stories are at their best, they’re more than good — they’re emotional, triumphant, beautifully rendered and profound. Her best stories are among the best published anywhere in the industry. This collection is well-worth purchasing for the strength and beauty of stories like “Heart in a Box,” “Sugar,” “Rare Pears and Greengages,” and “The Dead Girl’s Wedding March.”

The best stories in the collection are “’I’ll Gnaw Your Bones,’ the Manticore Said” and “The Narrative of a Beast’s Life,” both set in Cat’s Tabat. “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones,” originally published at Clarkesworld here, uses its fantasy setting to contemplate issues of personhood, eugenics, and everyday cruelty. The reader watches a sympathetic narrator commit an act that would be (rightly) condemned as evil in today’s society – but which is normal to Tabatians, just as it was normal in our culture for decades.

One of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of fantasy and science fiction writers is the ability to place familiar things in an unfamiliar setting and, thereby, force readers to reexamine them. Take this metaphor – I used to live in Santa Cruz, California, where I was constantly surrounded by redwoods. At first, I paid attention to every detail of them – the beauty of the red trunks stretching upward, the light shifting through the needles, the smell of bark and soil. But as I lived among the trees, they became part of the background of my existence. It wasn’t until I left for a while and came back to visit that I rediscovered them – unfamiliarity allowed me to regard each branch and gnarl anew.

Cat’s stories create a similar kind of disjunction when they recast slavery and eugenics in a fantasy setting. Her “Narrative of a Beast’s Life” is a fantasy mirror of the slave narratives which were written and published by escaped slaves before the civil war and then used by abolitionists as tools for converting Northerners to their cause. Much contemporary African American fiction plays on slave narratives in some way – for instance, Jones’s Known World and Morrison’s Beloved have both been described as taking on the project of re-imagining the lost histories of people who could not tell their stories. Rambo’s re-imagining of American slavery adds to this discourse in a different way, by altering the slave narrative subtly to create a new perspective for analyzing the original.

Of course, “Narrative of a Beast’s Life” also brings the slave narrative form to readers who may never have read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in which case it has the potential to mirror the purpose of the original work by simply recreating a slave’s eye view of slavery (a thing which, until very recently, was not considered particularly important). Slave narratives are interesting in their own right, as well as being politically and historically invaluable, and Rambo’s homage is well-written and full of lush detail.

The publisher’s weekly reviewer appears to be one of those people who’s never read Douglass. In light of their complaint that the story is “long-winded… without a trace of tension or intrigue” one must wonder what kind of threats would count as tension. Slavery and beating don’t. Neither do castration and lobotomy, apparently. What does? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been guest posting at Jeff VanderMeer’s blog, Ecstatic Days. I haven’t reposted everything I’ve put up there over here, so here are some links to my guest entries:

Bad Credits Will Not Get You Published.

You do not need to publish in crappy venues in order to get a publication credit that will make the editors of better venues look at your work.

There’s this terrible, oft-repeated canard that editors won’t take you seriously if you don’t have any credits. It’s not true! Many editors have spoken in numerous locations about their desire to find new authors…

In fact, sometimes putting a crappy credit in your cover letter will have the opposite of the intended effect.

Weird (and awesome) link! Green porno

lo and behold, wikipedia presents to me (via Isabella Rosselini and the Sundance Channel) the most wonderful of all possible gifts. Green porno.

I gape. Isabella Rosselini is vamping it up in a beige body suit with painted nipples, pretending to be a snail.

Self-promoting like a self-promoter.

“A Memory of Wind” tells the story of the sacrifice at Aulis from Iphigenia’s perspective. Traditionally, her voice has been ignored; the original Greek tragedy, Iphigenia at Aulis, concentrates on the pain of her father, Agamemnon, as he decides whether or not to have his daughter killed so that he can go to war. I began writing “A Memory of Wind” several years ago, after seeing a feminist reinterpretation of the tale in which Clytemnestra (Iphigenia’s mother) was given her turn as protagonist. I wondered whether Iphigenia would ever get her chance to speak.

I dropped a poem into one of Jeff Fecke’s recent threads. Barry said I should promote it to a post of its own, so here it is. Given the contents, consider this an open thread. ;)

Ode to a derailed thread
by Rachel Swirsky

Topic, oh topic, where have you gone?
Out the front door, across the front lawn…

Topic, oh topic, I miss you so.
Over land, over sea, over sand, over snow…

Topic, oh topic, I know we ignored you.
But topic, oh topic, I swear we adored you.

Far past the sun and the moon and the stars
Toward the black holes, nebulae and quasars…

Topic, oh topic, our future seems black.
Topic, oh topic, please won’t you come back?

Where the vacuum is cold and there’s nothing around.
Nothing, no nothing. I’ll never be found.

When Hallmark lured David Ellis Dickerson to a Kansas City interview, they offered him a potential starting salary of $27,000. After interviewing him in person, they upped their offer to $32,000. “To this day,” writes Dickerson, “I am convinced that in person, I am $5,000 more charming than I am on paper.” (p 49)

I suspect this motivates the choice to promote Dickerson’s new book, House of Cards: Love, Faith, and Other Social Expressions (Riverhead Books, 2009), with a series of videos called Greeting Card Emergency. Dickerson’s audience provides him with a decidedly un-Hallmark-like greeting card scenario, such as breaking a friend’s toilet or letting your snake eat someone else’s hamster. Dickerson then documents the process of creating a suitable card.

This promotion seems to be working. I’ve seen Greeting Card Emergencies reposted on a number of well-trafficked blogs and the videos inspired me to purchase Dickerson’s book.

House of Cards is a memoir of Dickerson’s experience with the Hallmark card company, documenting the period of time between when Dickerson first hears about nearby Hallmark interviews through the time when he decides to leave Hallmark for the presumably greener, warmer, and more licentious pastures of a Ph.D. program in Florida. Along the way, the book also documents Dickerson’s journey from fundamentalism to atheism.

There are three major reasons to recommend this book:

1) David Ellis Dickerson may be more charming in person, but he’s charming on paper, too. The memoir’s light, easy writing style makes for a fast and fun read.

2) The memoir provides an intriguing (if not wholly satisfying) case study about how a fundamentalist upbringing affects a twenty-something who has lost his faith. At the beginning of the memoir, twenty-seven-year-old Dickerson has already converted to Catholicism, become liberal, and started supporting feminism and gay rights. However, he still feels that he and his fiancée must avoid sex until marriage, a conviction that shifts during the course of the book until, after the pair break up, twenty-eight-year-old Dickerson is left trying to lose his virginity approximately a decade after most of his peers.

3)It’s a great deal of fun to read about Dickerson’s work process and word play. The memoir is peppered with his silly poetry, including a love poem about free popcorn:

The popcorn that thou givest unto me
Bringeth emotions I can scarcely utter.
For thou art like this popcorn that I see:
Lively and fresh, though thou contain’st less butter.
And in the carbonated beverage, too,
Which, like the popcorn, thou bestow’st for free,
Though it consist of Brown Dye Number Two,
In it, I see thy hair, and think on thee.
My Pepsi tab would founder many banks.
I can’t repay you; please accept my thanks.

(p 18)

In chapter nine (How to Write a Card), Dickerson details the process of taking a Hallmark card category, brainstorming ideas for it, and proposing a suitable card (which editors subsequently reject or accept). He explains common card types, including cards that come with attachments like paper clips and golf tees, and cards that include pop-ups. This witty, informational sequence gives what the reader has been craving throughout the book.

The memoir suffers some flaws. The first three chapters read like an unnecessarily long build-up: It’s unclear why the book begins before Dickerson even interviews with Hallmark instead of with his Kansas City interview or his first day as a new-hire. The book is called House of Cards; we’re here to read about Hallmark.

Even at Hallmark, the text lacks focus. It gives too little information about work process and too much about petty work woes. It’s not that the latter can’t be interesting grist for a memoir, but here they’re often rendered in long narrative sequences that could be summed up faster. Work events begin to feel repetitive. Worse, they take up space that might have been devoted to Dickerson’s evolving spirituality. After all, there’s more to the journey away from fundamentalism than sex.

From a feminist perspective, the text is mixed. There’s a lovely rant on page 135 defending female humorists, but in the same chapter Dickerson theorizes that women leave Hallmark’s humor department because they can’t handle the boss’s relative masculinity. It’s possible that Dickerson has evidence for this theory which didn’t make it into the text; however, given the available information, Dickerson comes across as condescending. Perhaps women leave because being the only female in that work environment is intolerable. Perhaps they leave because the boss acts sexist in ways that aren’t apparent when there are only male coworkers. Perhaps Dickerson should just ask the women involved?

Other scenes are similarly fraught. For instance, Dickerson’s fiancée is depicted as sex-averse, but this is never satisfactorily explored. From the details in the text, the fiancée appears to be suffering from some sort of sexual trauma*, but the narrative ignores that in order to focus on how angry Dickerson feels when she refuses to fulfill his romantic fantasies, such as a shared bath by candlelight. Perhaps Dickerson decided not to explore his fiancée’s perspective in more depth because he didn’t want to violate her privacy. This is a respectable reason, but the text still feels incomplete.

Of the many scenes discussing Dickerson’s sexuality, the most compelling is a flashback to his early twenties when he was still convinced masturbation was sinful. He discovered that voyeurism gave him an excuse to see women’s bodies “by accident” and thus without guilt. For this feminist reader, at least, the scene was extremely powerful because one identifies with Dickerson’s need to navigate his sexuality within his repressive culture. At the same time, one recognizes that this is an example of how otherwise reasonable, pro-feminist men contribute to the rape culture.

Despite its flaws, House of Cards is an entertaining, engaging read full of whimsical word play. Dickerson’s memoir may not meet every possible literary expectation – what does? – but it’s fun to listen to the man talk, even on paper.

–

*I might have read her as asexual except for a scene in which she reacted defensively to Dickerson’s attempts to touch her shoulders while she washed dishes. This read to me as a post-traumatic reaction; others’ interpretations may differ. In any case, the absence of any attempt on the part of the text to understand her sex-averse behavior – whatever its cause – was a noticeable lack.

Okay, so this may be a cheap shot … wait, no. Strike that. It is a cheap shot, but it’s also awesome.

Okay, seriously, Palin is a joke, and her supporters are laughably ignorant. It hardly needs saying, and isn’t some huge revelation.

That being said, it does point to a larger problem though, that there is great appeal in the modern political climate for oversimplification of issues, and for the idea that there are simple solutions to complicated problems. The appeal of this worldview is twofold.

First, of course, if there are easy solutions, then hey, we’re not that bad off! Drill, baby drill! Ignore the complications and context! Just do it! It’s easy!

Second, if there are easy solutions and your political opponents are not taking them, but are instead insisting on complicated trade-offs between competing values … well, it becomes much easier to believe that they’re not just mistaken but actually malevolent.

I think this POV is poison to democracy. It exists across the political spectrum, and (of course) there have been times historically when it concentrated on the left, but I think modern day it’s fair to say that it’s far more concentrated on the right.

It’s what lay behind tarring Al Gore and John Kerry as ‘eggheads.’ It’s what lead ‘policy wonk’ to become something of a slur, rather than the compliment it ought to be. It’s what lead pundits to wonder if Barack Obama might just be too smart for his own good¹. It’s the reason Glen ‘oligarhy’ Beck has a job. This surging anti-intellectualism, as I said, isn’t exactly new, but that doesn’t stop it from being worrisome.

EDIT: Steve Benen makes some great points on this very topic here, while riffing off of Ross Douthat’s recent column.

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

1. Well, that and racism, I mean. (back)