Race and Reliability in Children of the Night

In the collection I have, the Children of the Night follows closely behind Dig Me No Grave. As far as I'm concerned it's one of the best stories in the book, and I believe it's a great deal more effective in scaring our generation than it was in scaring Howard's.

The Gutenberg Project has the full text of this story online, it's about 14 pages long if you want to take a few minutes so you can follow my thoughts. I must caution you, though, this is a horror story, and a good one. So it will make you uncomfortable. Also, a stronger than the standard 30s racism applies, consider this your trigger warning. And yes, I will give you thoughts on it below.

There are spoilers after the space, of course.

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Freaky, huh?

Let's start with the small stuff first, we have a bunch of white men discussing race and ancient cults. They're having are argument over the shapes of people's heads. This leads into discussing the gobs and gobs of books on the wall, which leads into discussing ancient cults and the sleepytime mutterings of someone else's roommate who-may-have-not-been-completely-white-not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-that.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have Nerds.

There are three pairs of characters at the start, and the first pair--Taverel and Clements--are effectively ciphers. They're there to argue points that didn't fit the four more substantial characters.

The dialogue tells us a lot about the second pair. We learn that if Conrad had been a teenager in the 90s he would be buying clothes at Hot Topic and trying to replicate Glen Danzig's library in his bedroom. But he's a grown man in the 1930s, so instead he's gathered a group of nerds to awe with his collection of really weird, potentially dangerous forbidden tomes and ancient artifacts. This really doesn't contradict my impression of him from Dig Me No Grave. It only serves to reinforce that he has more curiosity than sense.

We learn that Professor Kirowan is a professor, and a skeptic, and he gets pretty irritable if you try to tell him you know more about the shape of people's heads than he does. He is still casually racist towards Asian people. He does, however, admit to not knowing all the answers. He won't allow that YOU know them instead, but he does allow that he's not omniscient. This doesn't actually contradict DMNG either, especially as Kirowan was more forcefully skeptical in that story when he was creeped out. Judging by that impression, he believed Conrad's hypothesis but a) didn't want to let anyone think he'd believe such a thing, b) didn't want the others believing such a thing, or c) was trying to convince himself he didn't believe such a thing. Really, the only new information about Kirowan is that the snapping and shouting at Conrad in the last story wasn't necessarily because he was scared, but because he's irritable.

The last pair gets fleshed out in the narration, directly and indirectly. Through narrator John O'Donnel we learn that Ketrick is a mild-mannered introvert who comes off as a cold fish but may or may not secretly have a sensitive nature. He isn't sure about Ketrick's nature, as he's concentrated so much on tracing Ketrick's Welsh bloodline because the man just doesn't look white enough to him. It's bothered O'Donnel enough that he's actually discussed it with a Professor at the university, and concluded that there must be some Asian somewhere in the blood. Yes, benefit of the doubt suggests that this could have come up in a class discussion involving both Ketrick and O'Donnel and genetics, but I can't shake the image of O'Donnel crouching and running around campus, whispering in the ears of blond-haired and blue-eyed faculty "He just doesn't look Welsh. Something's off about the eyes." Why can't I shake that image? Because three paragraphs about Ketrick's pedigree suggests the narrator might be just a tad preoccupied with it.

Of course, this being John fucking Conrad's house the conversation has to lead to some sort of trouble and it comes from a little flint hammer that is carelessly passed to the one guy who doesn't look completely white. And here's where the 30s horror story pattern breaks. From even what O'Donnel can see, the hammer itself twists in of Ketrick's hand and forces him to knock O'Donnel on the head. Ketrick doesn't suddenly turn murderous on holding it. He doesn't reveal himself to be a big bad villain out to kill O'Donnel all along. He innocently swings the thing and finds his arm wrenched in the wrong direction.

The story's even open for the interpretation that O'Donnel's past-life flashback may have been brought on by the combination of him and the hammer, not Ketrick and the hammer.

Either way, O'Donnel wakes not as a nerd in her nerd friend's study, but as a badass warrior from a race of badass warriors. But as Aryara he's allowed his five friends to be slaughtered by the "Children of the Night" who have creepy yellow eyes and look like little trolls. As readers we're treated to a few pages of violence, bloodlust, angst, tribalism and barbaric vengeance before O'Donnel returns to his five living friends in the present day.

And what could be more natural--after returning from a past-life in which you allowed your five closest friends to die-- than to immediately try to kill one of your five closest friends in the present time?

I suspect that may be one of the things about this story that drive home the insanity of the protagonist. In Howard's horror stories there is a lot of shuffling back and forth between lives, and a lot of people-who-aren't-white-enough-for-the-narrator being bad guys, and a lot of actions that thinking person would consider signs of insanity. There's narrative justification for those actions usually. Usually Howard does make the guy-who's-not-white the bad guy. The past life shifts in other stories have obvious parallels (see People of the Dark, where three people who have met in a past life meet again and get to redo a disastrous encounter in a modern setting). Howard's narrators are usually reliable and their impressions are backed up by the actions of the other characters.

John O'Donnel's impressions are not backed up here. Ketrick performs no actions that justify the narrator's suspicion. The one point that WOULD justify the suspicion, the swinging of the hammer, is blamed on the hammer and not Ketrick. The parallel of the scenes even falls short of O'Donnel's impression, because the past-life friends were all killed by an outside attack--it wasn't four of them betrayed by the fifth who happened to be bad. All five were victims.

When O'Donnel comes out of his fugue, he reads Ketrick's regret as insincere based on his eyes. Ketrick's eyes are the trait that makes O'Donnel suspicious, and we have nothing besides them to suggest that he's insincere, and we have everything about O'Donnel's past life experience to suggest he wouldn't be rational when dealing with Ketrick.

It's obvious the man is an innocent, and O'Donnel is irrational.

I can't say for sure that Howard didn't mean for his protagonist to be heroic, and maybe I just get the imrpession because I'm commuting from Lovecraft-land where unreliable and insane narrators are the norm but O'Donnel strikes me as the bad guy in the piece. If Howard had intended for him to be heroic, he fucked up. And this writer specializes in making characters I would not like in real life seem pretty heroic, so I'm not inclined to think he fucked this up. I can only conclude we're supposed to see O'Donnel as having gone completely bugfuck insane and the racism in the narrative was there on purpose to back this up.

In that vein, I can't imagine Howard had anywhere close to an idea how terrifying reading an insane, unreliable narrator rant about the regality of the Aryan race would be to future generations. Not in 1931. This story must have more effect now than it did back then.

But the scariest element in this story isn't the Naziesque rantings. It's how easy the break was. Here O'Donnel may have been a bit preoccupied with his one particular friend, but otherwise he was just at the normal level of clueless racism for his generation. Then he gets hit with the hammer and has a very strong hallucination/past-life memory (depending I suppose on whether you ask Conrad or Kirowan exactly what happened to him) and suddenly he's plotting the death of a completely innocent person because that guy doesn't look like he's from a pure Saxon bloodline. Suddenly a seemingly harmless casual prejudice that could have been nursed without adversely affecting the rest of the world turns into a violent psychosis.

Think of the last time you thought something along the lines of "I can't change his mind but he'd never do anything to actually hurt someone" and then just try to tell me this story is not fucking horrifying.

Picture it, 1930, a long and wicked life comes to an end...

Dig Me No Grave is the first story in the anthology that features the Conrad and Kirowan group, and the only finished one that teams Conrad and Kirowan together. The Conrad and Kirowan stories are on the surface more like HP Lovecraft stories than Robert E Howard stories. They are set in the 1930s, in a bleak dark world that hides unnameable horrors behind the veneer of normality. There's a really big difference between these two and the average Lovecraft hero, though. First, Conrad and Kirowan stories tend to center around two friends working together rather than a lone man fighting madness. Second, both Conrad and Kirowan have experiences that would end with them in the insane asylum if Lovecraft was writing, but they come out of it relatively sane.

There's only somewhere between 4 and 7 of these stories. 3 are debatable (two with unnamed narrators, one with a Michael Kirowan), and I'm puzzled enough by the "Is John Kirowan the narrator of The Black Stone?" question that I'm going to the trouble of rereading the stories we know for sure that he's in for comparison to the three that are iffy. Now, I make no promises about blogging every step of this quest, but I figure it might help to put what I've gleaned from the first story out on the web in the hopes that other Howard fans might find it and praise my brilliance have something to add. Spoilers follow.

The plot is pretty simple. You know the saying that a friend will help you move, but a good friend will help you move a body? Well, John Conrad is a good enough friend that he will move your body in the precise manner laid out in a letter you give to him ten years prior to your death, as well as perform the creepy just-before-dawn occult ritual you describe in that letter. John Kirowan is an even better friend, because he will help Conrad do this at oh-god-its-fucking-dark-thirty in the morning at your creepy fucking house even though he's really scared and doesn't seem to like you very much.

The characters--despite serving the exact same story role if paired up with O'Donnel in later stories--contrast and work pretty well together in this story. The story starts with Conrad waking Kirowan up in the middle of the fucking night, agitated and upset. Right away, we have Conrad as the guy who finds trouble and Kirowan as the guy he goes to when he's realized there might be trouble. In the first conversation this gets confirmed because Conrad has an interest in the occult, the really dark and crazy parts of it, so he seeks out people like John Grimlan and befriends them. Kirowan doesn't seem to have much of an interest in the occult--beyond happening to know an awful lot about it for a guy who claims that "such talk is foolish" and there's a hoax going on--but he is loyal enough to do stupid things for the sake of another loyal and stupid man.

You get the impression early on that--even with a friend he's willing to help with dark occult rituals--Kirowan is putting up a logical exterior to cover the mentality of a believer. He denounces the supernatural as ridiculous even after he gives the exposition, but gets increasingly anxious about what Conrad's asking him to do even before the asking is over. He gets so tense he loses his composure more than one, yelling at Conrad, or just plain shouting in frustration. Throughout the story he is scared shitless, but he denies anything supernatural loudly and forcefully until the shit hits the fan and there is just no other explanation for it.

But--unlike rational Lovecraft heroes--Kirowan starts out either half-believing in--or more likely fully believing in and just outwardly lying about--this stuff to begin with so the discovery that there's something to it doesn't utterly break his brain. It just scares him and his stupid, loyal friend (I swear, Conrad is walking awesome in Dwellers in the Tomb but here he's just so damned dumb--his saving grace is that he KNOWS he's doing something really dumb) out of the house.

The story's set in 1930, and I believe it's meant to be while both these men are relatively young. In the other stories these are very brave and experienced men. But the setup for this is that Conrad goes through with something that is very obviously designed cause a potentially world-shattering disaster, a mistake I don't see the Dwellers in the Tomb version of the character making. Kirowan seems a bit smarter, going along with this, but he seems utterly unshakable in Haunter of the Ring and here he is definitely very shakable. This may be chalked up to O'Donnel narrating the other two stories. Through his eyes these men are practically made of iron, but this is a story where they can be a bit more human. Kirowan narrates, and he might just Conrad well enough to be able to tell he's really freaked out and made a huge mistake.

But even with that in mind, this story seems like a story about courage failing. Conrad sets up the ritual but needs moral support to go through with it--he establishes through his own dialogue that this is behavior caused by fear and not intelligence. ("It was understood, I suppose," he whispered, "that I should go through with this ghastly matter alone; but I had not the moral courage, and now I'm glad I had not.") When the Fourth Character--"the Oriental" as Kirowan calls him (I'm not going to, call me a white liberal baby for it if you want) because he remembers yellow eyes and a yellow robe and a vague impression of Asianness but can't actually remember what the guy looks like--arrives and takes over, they are both frightened into submission by his mere presence. In the end, they run screaming from the house.

Don't get me wrong, these characters are far from cowardly. On the flip side of moral courage, Conrad keeps a promise that could very well have gotten him torn to pieces by demons. Kirowan braves the same fate for Conrad's sake. There is serious facing of death and uncertainty and the unspeakable, just there isn't much punching of death and uncertainty and the unspeakable. I don't even mean literal punching, just the attitude that you're willing to punch death in the face. That attitude seemed to be there in some of the other stories, it's not here. I have to conclude this was pretty early on for them.

Aside from that, I get the impression Kirowan may be a little psychic. He's having nightmares when Conrad finds him and he gets nauseous when he sees the Fourth Character. That might be an idea Howard threw away, or just horror writing atmosphere. He is especially perceptive, though, he hears the monster not long after they enter the house, he notices things like the pattern on the robes, and he is pretty adept at reading Conrad's moods. I suspect Conrad considers him the friend who knows what to say to him when he's worried, and that's why he came to him to begin with.

Criticizing Old Stuff

I imagine some of you think that losing access to regular comics has given me no rage at sexism in fiction to write about, but you couldn't be more wrong.  There's a well of idiocy and assumption out there.  Going through my unread books pile these few months I've found myself with the impulse to throw a book down it on more than one occasion.

The problem with blogging those thoughts is that when I read fiction I go for classic action/adventure whenever possible.  I like to dig around the roots of genre fiction, see where all our geek traditions started.  As an adventure fan, it's very rewarding.   As a human being with a 21st Century consciousness, not so much.

And the thing is that complaining about racism and sexism in old stories seems pretty unfair because the stories are well... old.  They're a product of the culture at the time so there will be lots of race and gender issues there.  Any complaint gets the defense that "Hey, it was written in the 30s.  He didn't know better."  And I suppose that defense would be all well and good if not for the fact that this stuff keeps popping up in modern fiction because modern fiction is built on the roots of the classics, and some of those roots are just plain rotten.

Yesterday I finished reading The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard.  Awesome stuff adventure-wise.  Howard writes a lot of stuff in Lovecraft's setting, only his characters don't just crumple and tear at their hair.  His characters shoot, punch, stab and try to destroy the nameless/unspeakable/unfathomable/mind-shattering/shambling/shuffling horror that is summoned from the pit.   In a Lovecraft story, the main character is most likely to observe the dark rites of the evil cult, gaze in terror at the summoned creature as it destroys the entire cult and narrowly escape to pen a fearful narrative.  In a Howard story, the main character makes a mad dash for the altar and smashes the idol, maybe taking a few shots at the cultists with whatever weapon is at hand.  It's like adventure-horror.  The heroes of both authors get their worldviews shaken to the core, but Howard's tend to hold it together long enough to act heroic while Lovecraft's fall apart.  (I'm excluding Randolph Carter here, or at least Dream-Cycle Randolph Carter.)

On the flipside, you can't even discern sexism in Lovecraft for the lack of women and romance in his stories.  (Really, the sexism is in the almost complete absence of women but that's easier to ignore than having one show up and be an idiot.)  Howard, though, tries to add a little romance as well as adventure to the horror mix and ends up with the helpless damsel more often than not.  I know, I know Howard created the protoype story for Red Sonja but I haven't seen that one yet.  Almost uniformly he recycled the same stock female love interest or sister in each story in this book that called for a white female character.

I say more often than not rather than all of the time, and specify white female character because there were three female villains in the whole anthology.  Two of these villains are black women.  Guess how many black women are in the book.

One of them (in The Dead Remember) is even named Jezebel.  (And honestly, in that story I'm on her side.  That guy was a dick and he deserved what he got.)

The other is in Black Canaan.  Black Canaan is a story which should be printed out with the racist parts circled in red and annotated in the margins (this will need wide margins).  It should then be distributed, along with Hills of the Dead (and I say that as someone who dearly loves Solomon Kane) and the complete works of the aforementioned HP Lovecraft, in writer's courses as an example of what to avoid subconciously putting into your story.

By far the best stories of the entire collection are the ones that fall into the Conrad and Kirowan group.  These are stories starring one or more members of a group of semi-occultist friends centered around John or James Conrad (I am utterly convinced that the reference to James was meant to be the regular Conrad and no one will every convince me otherwise) or Professor John Kirowan.  (I may gush completely about those two characters after I've reread the stories a couple times, but I absolutely adore them and was devasted to find that one of the fragments at the end of the book was a short story starring both of them called The House that he stopped writing right after they got to the house.)  They tend to be narrated by either Kirowan or a guy named O'Donnel.  It was always easy to tell when O'Donnel was the narrator because not only did he drop racist ideas, he dropped metaracist plothooks like mentioning that this guy they know who is obviously going to be the bad guy doesn't look all that white to him.  (This is also how you can tell really early on someone's going to be the bad guy.)

Don't get me wrong, not every black or brown person in the entire story collection is bad.  Howard does seem to have been a pioneer of the offensively obsequious minority pulp sidekick.  There's also a number of insubstantial innocent bystander characters of color.   But it happens enough that when O'Donnel says "He looks Oriental to me" then you know who the antagonist is going to be.

That said, Children of the Night is a brilliant and chilling account of racism gone completely batshit, even if all of the characters present are white.

Anyway, these thoughts and others crossed my mind in more orderly ways as I made my way through this book.  Ultimately, every criticism has been applied again and again to more modern stories, and that's why there are so unbelievably easy to see in Howard's stories.  Because this is the problem at the roots.

But the author--along with the whole Lovecraft circle--is long gone.  We've gotten past that level of racism and sexism in our genre fiction.  It's so recognizeable as to be embarassing, right?

Well, we're not past it.  Contemporary stories are built on the tropes set down by guys like Howard and Lovecraft.  Racism is coded into the archetypes genre writers pick from.  I don't think it needs to be there forever, though.  By looking back at the 30s and 40s tales and seeing what they did right and what they did wrong, we can refine the genre and change it.  We can see the threads that are good, the stuff that is awesome and how it can still be that way without copying the bullshit as well.  But if we ignore it and put it up to a "product of the times" that 21st Century writers are already beyond, we end up copying and reproducing the shit like the Jezebel archetype or the obsequious Afghani sidekick or the 'Conjer man' without even realizing it.

See, even if you think its unfair to judge a classic by contemporary standards, there's still a usefulness in there.  It's not only exercising the old analysis muscles on past works, it's catching problems in future works before they happen.  Thinking critically about the stories that inspire us will force us to think critically about our own stories.

And ideally, thinking critically about the fictional world will translate to thinking critically about the real world.  And that's the ultimate goal, isn't it?

If you're not here to read me talking about me, move along please.

I've pruned the social media tree enough to have the energy to post on WFA again. I ended up deleting several weeks worth of bloglines posts, and my livejournal. I had starting using my livejournal friendslist as a quick linkfarm rather than add everything to bloglines. While I was doing that I discovered that the friendslock feature gave me a convenient place to gripe about things I didn't want to bicker with trolls over, and gripe about politics or work. I've long avoided blogging politics and work on this blog, but livejournal's friendslock gives a false sense of privacy that I slipped into. It was quick, it was easy, and it wouldn't get back to anyone I didn't want it to.

Well, as long as I didn't gripe about family it wouldn't get back to anyone I didn't want it to. I discovered a leak in this area early on when I tried to vent healthily and it resulted in a member of my family dropping me from the "on speaking terms" list for a short time. Never zeroed in on who the leak exactly was, but the incident itself was not worth digging too deeply into it. That incident was, however, a good reminder that the sense of privacy was a false one. Not only did everyone on your filter have to be trustworthy, you also had to go through a few coding hoops to keep your locked entries from manifesting on feed aggregators and search engines. Plus there's the whole matter of livejournal's changes recently, which let advertisers scan your locked stuff to decide what ads to put there. And--to use a completely random example--if I don't want my sister to discover that I was actually really fucking upset about the matter of the daffodils last Thanksgiving, for example, and that I was lying when I told her it was no big deal then it might be awkward if she sees the ads on my page are for florists and turkey farms lately.

Really, you may as well just blog without locking. And if I'm blogging without locking, what's the fucking point of livejournal? I like the Blogger and Wordpress interfaces better. I have Bloglines--in which I can divide the feeds into manageable folders rather than one stupid feedlist and which allows me to pin and mark read or unread. I like reading some people's locked posts, but not so much that I really need to stick around.

And there was one other result of the under-friendslock writing. I was becoming more reluctant to write about the little things in public. Because it was less of a hassle to just lock them and gripe within my little group than to go out with sword in hand and hack my way through hordes of trolls. Which had two effects, the first being I became a more cowardly writer, the second being I became a less adept reasoner. When you don't fight trolls, your reason and with dull. When your reason and wit are dull, you become reluctant to fight trolls. It's not so much a circle as an ever-lowering spiral staircase to the depths of stupidity and isolation.

And who the hell needs that?

So I dumped the livejournal, made a cute little "This is where you can find me elsewhere" and meant to never return.  I kept the account open for comments, but figured since it was already something I'd let lapse I wouldn't be tempted to return.

But I neglected one thing: Newsarama.

In the past, when I saw a particularly annoying comment on that site that I wanted to gripe about but not engage (because engagement would lead to a quick release of temper in many cases, and I'd been kindly asked to keep it under control on that site) I would gripe on livejournal and not have to engage the person.

And in the past, when a poster that I wanted to support or at least give a fair chance to said something that encouraged the introduction of the heel of my palm to the top of my forehead I would go under livejournal, vent, and keep a pleasant face.

This seemed to be a necessity as I was doing When Fangirls Attack and needed an outlet but didn't want to jump the gun. As things tend to spiral, I grew to rely more on livejournal and less on the main blog as that outlet, until things that desperately needed to be said in public were only said in private, and of course that private was not as private as it seemed at the time. This spiral also led to stupidity and isolation.

So, on the whole, closing the livejournal seemed to be the best thing to do. And as I had neglected the journal during my residency in the Gray Realm I figured I could keep the account without being tempted to write on it.

But again, Newsarama. In my distress this weekend at my apparent replacement, I asked the head of the blog if he was planning to bring in a feminist blogger. He responded that he had two. My relief was tempered only by the realization that I very probably should have heard of Sarah Jaffe before this, but hadn't. I don't like that sort of thing. I may not be the best blogger in the community, I may not have the widest audience but I always took a pride in knowing my way around the place. This was a new person, but one who had been writing about women in comics that I hadn't seen before.  I do not like this strange feeling of being the second or third person to notice new people.

So I tracked down the posts from both bloggers and found several WFAble items had already been posted.

And yes, this new person has already caused me to shift uncomfortably in my seat. (Smart, strong, sexy women as badass as the men? Nothing else you'd want to add to that, perhaps? Even a little "despite the difficulties" or "despite the criticisms"?) And perhaps shift uncomfortably over email. Still, the criticism was unfair. Plenty of perfectly rational women enjoy Frank Miller. I really liked Frank Miller's comics until I realized he was using the same creepy older-macho-man-gets-together-with-young-female-sex-worker plot over and over and over again. After that, his work lost of its charm.  The movie is visually fascinating. Lots of violence, that's fun. And this was just a happy nostalgic post on a site that encouraged positivity.   I wouldn't have blinked twice seeing it on a familiar writer's blog.   Well, I might've blinked twice if one of the major Girl-wonder.org columnists had said it, not because I would feel she just lost feminist cred but because because the mood on that site is so consistantly anti-Miller that I'd have to believe anything positive was sarcasm or mind control.

Now before I go on you need to know that the point of this post was never to criticize the new blogger on Newsarama. This post is entirely about me and my problems. That's what you're here for, I'm just including a free side of Newsarama-nitpickin' with the main meal of my introspection. (And enjoy this meal, because my tortured writerly soul is a seasonal item on the menu, available for limited time only.)

As unfair as it was, I had this little twitch when I read it.  And then when I read this post from her co-blogger (another person I haven't heard of.  This bothers me.  How far out of the loop am I?), and the resulting comment nitpicking. And then I read this post, referring to the previous post, and the resulting comment discussion. And then I introduced Mr. Palm to Mr. Face again.

THAT is when the urge to complain about the whole lot of them--bloggers and commenters--on my livejournal, in private, set in. And then I thought to myself-- well, why? What am I afraid of? Looking bitter? Everyone knows I'm bitter. It's one of the defining characteristics of my writing.

I narrowed my eyes at my livejournal profile, stewed in irritation for a few moments and realized something.   Livejournal and Blogger both support OpenID.  Perhaps I could free myself from the shackles of self-absorption in the living hell of eternal navelgazing. Perhaps I could climb that spiral staircase out of stupidity and isolation. Perhaps I could just delete the freaking livejournal account.

So I did. And I have thirty days to avoid using it, and then it can never come back. And then maybe I'll get my sharpness back.

And then maybe--just maybe--I'll be able to read a post by an unfamiliar blogger that irks me just slightly without turning the whole matter into a personal journey of self-discovery that leads to a fourteen hundred word essay on the true meaning of Blogging.

December 8th, 2008.

You should all know by now that I've left my writing job at Blog@Newsarama.  Not much behind it, really.  JK Parkin was leaving and I didn't feel like explaining to a new editor that holding me to a deadline or a predictable posting schedule was a threat to national security.  I took the opportunity to bow out gracefully and start pruning away the other responsibilities that are making me an overwhelmed/overworked/overstressed lump of misery.

I do admit to missing the massive soapbox and the ability to brag about being paid to write.

The new blog posts too much to really keep up with, so I didn't really pay attention to it even when I got an email linking this post as indicative of Blog@'s new direction. Then I got another email linking the same post, so I figured it might be worth looking over.

I had the strangest reaction, too.  It wasn't anger or disgust. See, it was posted on Friday, which was theoretically when my own feature was posted.  It was posted in a rambling stream-of-consciousness manner.  Every sentence in the first paragraph started with "and" or "so."  I admit it's conceited of me to think they might try to replace based on my writing style rather than my role, but that's almost certainly what it looked like.  And the substance of the post screamed the opposite of any word I had ever posted on that entire website.  To hell with humility and perspective, the only two words in my mind at this point were "Bizarro Ragnell."

So at the same time my feminist heart fell to the floor with the impact of what I'd been replaced with, my ego swelled to four times its natural size.  But alas, I have a brain and it does have some sense of perspective.  This was just a fucking weird coincidence.

My ego deflated to a healthy size again, I picked my heart from the floor and placed it back on the bookshelf next to Jim Butcher's Blood Rites where it belongs.  (I keep my rage tucked between the covers of Chronicles of the Lensmen if anyone's curious.  Gives it a good charge.)  I then sat down, expressed the acceptable amount of human sympathy for the poor saps who are now stuck with the Blog@Newsarama audience and outlined just what was wrong with that particular post.  I refrained from asking Mr. Brownfield if he'd ever read my column while I was at the blog.  I've always had a sneaking suspicion no one did, and this is no time for that sort of idea to be confirmed.  I just told myself I was done with preaching to Newsarama after that comment and went back to the daunting task of organizing and reviving my crumbling life so I could get back to writing something someone might actually read.  Then the author of the article responded:

Thanks guys for the feedback. I appreciate the words and that anyone even takes the time out to read anything I write. Thank you. As for the not respecting women statement, I have nothing but the utmost respect for women. A gay friend of mine read this same article and mentioned that the same statement could relate to him as easily as it could a women. And the lesbian statement came from Terry Moore writing Strangers In Paradise ( a wonderful book that I highly recommend to anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of reading it) in which, hey, there were lesbian assassins as well as a whole world of crazy crazy goodness.

And yes, I do tend to put my foot in my mouth more often than not but the comparison to porn was only just that, a thought or idea meant to convey an image in the mind of the reader. Not at attempt to downgrade women.

My mom, my sister, my nieces and my aunts all read my blogs, and works, and the majority of my friends, as well as readership (not to mention the main, Calie Liddle, character of the Wonderland series that I write) are female as well and while something’s I might say might seem uncoth or less that civilized, I’d rather it be me coming out rather than everything else you see on the internet that goes through this strange policitical filter of not wanting to write something that everyone will not find offensive.

For those of us who can't sigh over the internet when I see something like this, there's Twitter.

There's also painstaking replies that barely scratch the surface of the column but are still long enough to be put in moderation forever:

Raven -- Okay, I've got nothing against you, man, and I can tell you mean very well but there's two really wrong things with that comment. I don't really have the time/energy to get into the details right now but you did two very big groan-worthy things in that second-to-the-last paragraph.

The "Some of my best friends are women and they aren't offended" thing is incredibly problematic for a few dozen reasons, but the biggest one is this: I don't know these friends and family of yours, I just know what I read in your article. I can only judge based on my knowledge and experience. So can the rest of the commenters here and many of us were given a poor impression by your post and the accompanying imagery.

The other issue is saying that people who carefully watch what they say are just politically-motivated and not merely thoughtful people. I don't know of a nice way to put this, so here it is: That's pretty much dodging responsibility for thinking. Look, writing is communication. What you communicated was that women aren't worth the time it takes to phrase and frame your piece--a piece that seems designed to try and SELL a product--in a manner that at least won't actively offend them.

Maybe to you that's a bogus "political filter" but all writing is political. LIFE is political because human beings are insanely social creatures. We have a billion little tiny rules that we observe in our interactions with each other. There's a reason for that. Because our lives depend on the support of other humans, we've developed a system of rules based on gaining and keeping that support, as well as fettering out who can be trusted to give that support and who that support is worth giving to. What rules are followed and what rules are discarded TELL us what other people consider a priority, and what might be result if we invest our time our efforts or our money in this person. This piece on a professional blog written by a man in a professional capacity is like a neon sign flashing "This guy's product will not appeal to you!"

Example of that political filter? My first impulse was to write "This guy will spend your money on strippers!" but I didn't want to risk earning your emnity for the sake of a cheap laugh when I'm trying to convince you of my point of view.

But there's a more serious, more disturbing implication in that paragraph. And I'm going to qualify it by saying I don't have anything against you personally, and I don't dislike your comics but I'm going to bring it up. It's worth the risk of your emnity so that I can get you to think it over: You seem to be saying you dropped those early thoughts and wrote this because it was a truer representation of your personality than a more measured piece. Well, if people react badly to your true personality after you've dropped the filter, can you really defend yourself by blaming the filter that keeps people from seeing that?

Even pared down I still wrote way more than I'm comfortable in someone else's column, but I still probably just miss the soapbox. On the bright side, I'm writing again.

Haze

So over the past few months or year, or two years because every time I look back I seem to have written less and less of substance than I thought I had I've sunk into a doughy lump of unfocused laziness. I haven't sat down to write. I've thought of some reasonably entertaining posts, but like the old Doug Stone song I was too busy enjoying the feeling of of creative juices filling my head to pour them onto the page. The time passed, and I didn't write, no matter how energized I was.

When I wasn't thinking of something analytical or enjoyable or humorous I was sinking into an ever-deepening pit of depression. I say depression rather than misery because I haven't been miserable. I've been unmotivated. I've been uninspired. I've lost interest in the hobby I used to spend hours perfecting. I'd lost the will to write. It's a down feeling, a form of depression where everything seem gray and uninteresting. Whenever I sat down to put my thoughts into words a haze to rival the thick fog outside my morning window settled in and I'd look for other things to distract me. I've walked around the village, I've obsessed over American politics, I've watched the entire series of Futurama, Arrested Development, Maude, and Scrubs, I've viewed movies I hadn't seen in years, I've surfed the internet randomly, I've been lost in several German cities and villages, I've sampled the wide array of dirty movies available in cyberspace purely scientific purposes for that one, I assure you, I've gotten to know new people, I've annoyed the living shit out of Kalinara over instant messenger, I've attacked the ever-growing pile of unread books in my living, I've dumped my heart and soul into the neglected paperwork of my new workcenter, I've eaten European food, I've baked, I've cooked, I've taken so many baths that I legitimately fear I'll grow gills, I've learnt about the gods of my ancestors, I've raged at coworkers for parking in places people aren't fucking allowed to park would it kill them to fucking walk a few extra feet?!, I've taken pictures of Germany, I've driven around the countryside... I haven't made it up to Uppsala to visit the temple yet but I've managed to do a lot to distract myself.

All meaningless frivolities. Not an ounce of substance in the whole pile. Because whenever one of these activities--the large or the small made me feel the slightest bit of real emotion I started to write about that emotion in my head. And I fully intended to act on that, and actually write down these thoughts once I reached my computer. Then when I turned on the damned thing I lost the motivation. It drained from me, leaving me as a lump of formless, functionless--my god someone's gotten into the vocabulary shed and set loose my prized collection of adjectives!--goo sitting in a bathtub trying to will myself to pick up that half-read book of Robert E. Howard stories on the windowsill.

Or heaven help me I've written it and it's turned from something witty and clever to a muddled mass of bleakness, so I don't publish it.

I'm not the sort of person who labors under the misconception that only she feels this way. This is not the first time that this dear god I do not want to use ennui to describe it that is so fucking pretentious I could crawl under my kitchen table and die ennui has set in. It certainly won't be the last.

In the past when I've felt this intense lack intensity I've pounded out a rambling stream of consciousness post and put it up on my blog. Thereafter this gelatinous apathy clears up and there's once again room for the rage that blends with my venomous blood in the darkened chamber of my heart to produce that thick, vicious hatred that I gleefully spread upon the internet. And that leftover goth melodrama from my wasted teenaged years still soothes my soul whenever I fling it onto the page.

There's a problem, though. See, I live for your comments. I crave your attention, your adulation, your animosity. I don't like your pity, though. It rubs me the wrong way. It's uncomfortable. Give me a pack of snarling misogynistic wolves beating down the front door, a thousand trolls at my back gate--I'll face each and every one enthusiastically and come out of the fray laughing with their blood on my teeth but send a candy-striper and I'll be hiding in the basement with the lights off until she goes away. It's awkward and I shouldn't have to deal with it. But whenever I do one of these depressed stream-of-consciousness posts it never fails-- I get sympathy comments from those of you more readily suited to living in human society than I am.

I don't like those so I stopped writing the depressed posts. That was wrong of me, because now that I've taken such a long break I'm not sure I'll be able to shake it properly and get my anger-fueled writing energy back.


Usually about now the post peters off, because even I fear I sound too unhinged when I let my uncensored thoughts free to roam cyberspace and I get too nervous to continue. Though I'd lay money down that not a single one of you sound saner inside your own heads, and if you do think you sound sane in there you need to get yourself checked out because that's not normal. Sadly, I'm never sure how to stem the tide of stream of consciousness writing so I just turn off the faucet.

A bit cranky lately.

I've been having a dry streak writingwise, as evidenced by the nearly dead state of this blog.  But there are moments, moments when I cheer up.  Moments when I lift my head to peer out from my subterranean lair.  Moments when I feel the world is worth living in, that it doesn't deserve to be destroyed in a hellish clash of fire and ice.  Moments when figure that yes, humanity is a species worth continuing.   Moments when I feel that there's a spark of nobility buried deep within the soul of every person on the planet no matter how small and petty they may seem.  Moments when I feel like setting my pen to paper in praise of all creation!

And in these moments I need only check my bloglines for those thoughts to clear right up.

More on the endless irritation of my existence later.

19 Nov

Rogue returns to X-men?

Damn, now I'm thinking about picking up the series again. They would wait until I'm out of the country to do this.

On a more serious note.

Most eveyrone knows this by now, but if you missed it there's an update on Carla:

“The good news is both Carla and Lance’s conditions have stabilized and they are both expected to recover,” he said, “although they will both be hospitalized for awhile.”

He adds that, unfortunately, their home was completely destroyed in the fire. “We are in the process of setting up a fund to help them out, and I will let you know as soon as we have it ready to go,” he said.

The Montecito fire department has announced the establishment of a fund to help Carla and Lance. Donations may be sent to:

The Lance and Carla Burn Fund
Santa Barbara Bank and Trust
1483 East Valley Road
Montecito, CA 93108-1248

Lea has advice on what to give.

Confession

I killed the Blue Beetle.

It wasn't my intention. It wasn't premeditated. It was murder by omission. I killed him because he slipped my mind.

I had intended to send for comics once I'd settled into my new home but time just slipped away from me and I never meant to just let it go on for weeks and then months without a new pamphlett. But when I got here life moved so fast and I had a backlog of regular books I caught up on, and I had a new job to learn and a new place to explore and the time just slipped away. You know how it is. And there was always trades through Amazon.com and the mail and I could get back issues. Surely the book was safe. But I was wrong, it dipped below the cancellation line shortly after I crossed the ocean and Jaime paid a heavy price for my shameful neglect.

It may sound melodramatic, but I killed this book. Yes, yes I did. And I must take the blame for this, not because I didn't buy something that didn't interest me or that I didn't buy something I didn't want or that I didn't buy something that I couldn't afford but that I didn't buy something that did interest me, that I did want and that I could afford.

Of course, I didn't do it alone. I had accomplices in this crime. I wonder how many of my accomplices were out there. And I wonder why they didn't buy.

I wonder how many of my accomplices simply found life in the way of their reading habits, as I did.

I wonder how many of my accomplices wanted a fun, playful book with a sympathetic hero who passed this on the stands because it wasn't starring a familiar character.

I wonder how many of my accomplices wanted a fun playful book but passed this by because they thought a hispanic teenaged replacement for Ted Kord was a gimmick and would die quickly.

I wonder how many of my accomplices would have adored this book but were hoping it would fail so that Kord would be resurrected.

I wonder how many of my accomplices read scans of this book online, complained that their favorite series wasn't so lighthearted anymore and then passed by this book on the shelves in favor of the very book they complained about.

I wonder how many of my accomplices wanted DC to publish more books like this, but were angry and irritated at the state of other books in the DC line and so they passed on this as part of a boycott. A way to punish an editor who changed things a bit too much.

I wonder how many of my accomplices dropped it because of the Spanish-language issue and some political misgivings about it.

I wonder how many of my accomplices read scans of this book and chuckled and made notes to themselves to buy it next trip to the shop but just never got around to it.

I wonder how many of them are sorry to see the book go. I wonder how many of them will discover it in trades or backissues years down the road and will wonder why this book isn't being published still.

Oh well, we'll survive. This isn't the first book I've killed. This isn't the first book I've read that's been killed. It isn't even the best book I've killed. It certainly won't be the last or probably even the most lamented. Still, I have to wonder if I had bought my copy, if the people who showed some curiosity had bought their copies, if the people who complained about their favorites getting too dark had skipped a month and bought their copy and if the people who were boycotting the company had bought their copies how things would be different at the moment in not just Blue Beetle, but in other books put out by DC.

Sad news about Carla Hoffman (Carla from Blog@Newsarama and Snap Judgments) and her husband Lance.

22nd FSF Carnival

I am a week behind, but between my job and German small-town internet access I think I'm doing fairly well.  The Sainted Nathan Lilly over at SpaceWesterns has made a 3-part carnival for all of you, and here I am a week late in linking to it.

Here's all three parts, ladies and gentlemen:


SpaceWesterns.com Sideshow › 22nd Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction – Part I

SpaceWesterns.com Sideshow › 22nd Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction – Part II

SpaceWesterns.com Sideshow › 22nd Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction – Part III

Enjoy them, and once again I apologize for the delay.  If anyone is willing to deal with waiting on me and host the 23rd Carnival, email me please.

Ragnell finally has her "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THIS PLACE?!" moment.

When I told my friends that I was moving to Germany I got the near-universal response that I'd need to learn to be on time for once.   "Germans are sticklers about puncuality" everyone from my boss to my aunt claimed, and I would have to be on the dot for once in my life if I was going to fit in with the culture.

What a load of bullshit.

Germans are not always on time.  Germans are always on lunch.

Okay, I'm generalizing too much there.  I haven't been to all of Germany.  Maybe the legendary timeliness came from somewhere near Berlin, or Munich or somewhere further away from the border.  Maybe it's a different Germany in the Eifel region.  Maybe it's the proximity to France.  Maybe there's something in the water.  Maybe there's something in the land itself, something lazy and drowsy that seeps up from the roots of the grass and emanates from the trees.  I've been told that this region used to be the setting of wars and political strife reaching back to Roman times (Trier was the capital of the freaking Empire for a bit) and leading up to World War II  (seriously, in the neighboring village to mine you can see grooves in the archways that were made by Patton's tanks).  Maybe the land itself just got sick of all the activity and it made a conscious decision to lull all these pesky humans into a constant state of midday relaxation.

Maybe the people have always been this way.  Maybe they figure "We didn't rush our meal to take care of Constantine, we're not rushing it for you".  It's not that people are rude, or unreliable.  Everyone is very nice and polite.  Just..  slow.   And you don't want to rush them because it's rude so you sit there and tap your foot and smile and look like a complete spaz for several minutes waiting on them.  Maybe there's some Lovecraftian turtle-race beneath the hills that's been hiding among the Germans and that's who I've been dealing with all this time.

Maybe it's just the wine.

Whatever it is, if you're going to the Rhinelamd-Pfalz state in Germany bear in mind it takes two weeks and a very fast car to get anything accomplished--and you can't do anything before 10 or after 6.  And don't even think about running around between the hours of 11 and 4 because the entire state seems to be closed.

And the weirdest thing is that things do get done.  If you manage by the grace of heaven to catch a tailor or a mechanic (you can try calling ahead, but appointments are theoretical here) and you leave them your uniform or your car overnight it will be finished (usually not too much later than they said it would be), even superbly finished in some places.

But I have no clue when they manage to do this work because they are always closed for the night, or until 10, or for lunch.  (This is especially annoying for those of us who work our way into an early grave American hours.)  Closing for lunch.  Good god, who can do that? 

I'm sorry, I though I was all for cultural acceptance but I've found my line.  I will never be able to approve of the attitude Germans take towards lunch.  Lunch is not supposed to be this way.  Lunch is no time to take a break and relax.  Lunch is time to get all of the stuff that you couldn't leave work to do done.  Lunch is to be taken in shifts so that someone is there to take care of all the lunchtakers who come in while they have a break from the office.  You don't just close up the whole fucking country for four hours a day so people can eat!  That would be insane.

And who the hell closes on every federal holiday?

And I'm sure Germans consider this sort of behavior healthy or something, but when the hell am I supposed to get anything done?

As someone who spent the last 8 years of her life eating lunch in her car as she shuttled around supposedly lazy southwestern cities accomplishing all the little things one needs to accomplish in order to be a functioning adult this is way too much of an adjustment to make.  I can't deal with lunch here.  They actually sit down while they eat. My life is piling up while the rest of this country eats.  I need a ticket for any US Timezone and I need it sent to me yesterday.

Wow

And in the realm of "every character is someone's favorite" I spent several hours talking King Arthur with a guy who said Tristan was his favorite knight.

But we bonded over hating that asshole Lancelot.

Why didn't any of you tell me to read this one earlier?

I have the perfect bathtub in my apartment here.  The one in Oklahoma was too small, and boxed into the wall so that you were extra-cramped.  But this one?  Perfect length to stretch out in, with open space for my head on one side.  It's not too big, not like a swimming pool, but it is just right to sit and read in.  And that's pretty much waht I've been doing since I got this apartment so far from the places with English-language comics are sold with the not entirely reliable internet service.

I've been making my way through the trade paperbacks that I bought while I was in the US and never got around to reading.  There's some stuff that was recommended by various people over the years (often the comic book store clerk), some of what I like to call "Fan research" (traded collections I bought because they were affecting the current storyline in books I was reading), books that have a writer/artist/character I am guaranteed to love, curiosity buys ("Hmm, everyone talks about how awesome this writer was, and here he is on a character I've never gotten into but am kind of interested in..."), and impulse buys based on genre.  Now, these have piled up for various reasons voer the years.  Sometimes I am not in te mood to read that genre anymore when I get home.  Sometimes I bought it knowing I wouldn't read it right away, but wanted to someday.  Sometimes I have every intentiopn of reading it, but it comes out the same week as Green Lantern or something that completely takes over my mindset for several months.

So today I come across The Tomb (Christina Weir, Nunzio Defillippis, Christopher Mitten).  Now, I bought this book over a year ago when I was looking for horror stories and I set it on a pile without thinking twice about it.  Ad now I feel very bad about that, because this is a story that I have wanted to read for years.  I was a big Indiana Jones fan as a kid.  Not in the "ooh, isn't he handsome and heroic" fan way that little girls are assumed to be (though oddly I've yet to meet a girl who was a fan of that sort of thing because she wanted to be the girlfriend in the story) but in a "that looks like the coolest way to live Mom can I be an archaeologist when I grow up, huh Mom huh Mom?!" way.

Utlimately, though, it was the adventure aspect and not the old things aspect that attracted me to the story, and Mom was spared the tuition payments as I shunned a lifetime of digging up ancient sites and meticulously cataloguing shards of terra cotta pottery.  To be honest, I've shunned a real life of adventure as well (I ended up going for a regimented, structured job that didn't require much actual thought, because thinking is hard) but I still fucking love adventure stories.

And I still fucking love adventure stories that involve dealing with the remnants of ancient civilizations.  It's why I'm such a reader of crackpot literature.

Anyway, as a kid I wanted an adventurer archaeologist who was a girl.  I really badly did, and honestly Lara Croft just didn't cut it for me.  Yeah, the <I>Tomb Raider</i> movie was fun at points, and so is the game but there's a cold two-dimensional aspect to the character that I think comes from ramping up her sex appeal to the detriment of warmth and humanity.  She never really won my interest.  Although I do like the character design (yes, even with the giant boobs--omeone women are built topheavy), there's something in her face that is just off.  Something artificial, though as she's a video game character and Harrison Ford was an actual living human being, I might be being a bit unfair here.  Still, Lara Croft just seems too robotic for me as a character.

This Jessica Parrish character, though?  She's got the warmth and humanity.  Not warmth as in Sue Richards maternal warmth, this is a college professor with the professional woman toughness vibe.  She's actually described as outwardly cold by the narrator (who also repeatedly describes her as strong, which would make me wince except the character's actions back up the narrator's impressions), but there's heart behind that coldness.  She's not a femmebot, she's a person.  The character rings true as a person.  Something no Croft story I've seen or read has managed.

So we have a short adventure/horror story set in the modern day about people who stole from old tombs and really shouldn't have, narrated by a crackpot tabloid journalist and starring a heroic female character.

So what I want to know is--are there more stories about this one?

And now, a brief moment to lament my exile.

The further I get from tech school the more exhausting I find formal school to be.  I had a five-day computer course last week (not counting spending all fucking day at the place on Saturday while those morons set up the network so they could do the test.  Something they could've done--I don't know--Friday afternoon while we were all studying our books?!) and it really kicked my ass.  Today, I get to work and get moved from my comfortable expected duty to another classroom.  Yeesh.

I think not getting my weekly dose of comics is getting to me.  I get them by mail and hearsay over the internet.  It's not the same.  I miss the talking  Only one other comic geek in the office, and he only keeps track of Marvel through Wikipedia.  And beyond Marvel continuity, he's not much for comics conversation.   I can blog, but I'm even farther off timezone from all of you tan before so there's no realtime reaction.

I think I was addicted to Wednesday.   It wasn't just reading the comics that was relieving the stress.  It was the whole local comic shop experience!  The real life social aspect of being a geek was just as important to my mental well being as the stimulation to my imagination.  It was vital.  Some weeks Wednesday afternoon was the only time I saw a humand being who wasn't a coworker.  I relished it.  I'm going through withdrawal here.

Every week I'd drive to the shop that afternoon no matter what's happened--tornados, snowstorms, elections--nothing could stop me!  I'd rush in and Chris would have my stack in his hands along with some of his recommendations.  Chris had the best taste in art.  I'd spend anywhere from a few minutes to several hours chatting with a couple of certified geeks about writers and artists, politics, and who last slept with Nightwing.  We'd resolve the personal problems of our favorite superheroes, come up with surefire plans that would make comics popular again, determine the best way to write a strong female character, and save the country from its leaders before we each wlked out with our little pamphletts of four-color joy.

I miss that.

Call for Submissions: 22nd Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans

Where: Space Westerns: Sideshow (Announcement)
When: November 2nd
How Long Until Submissions Close: Until October 28th
Who: Nathen E. Lilly submissions2018[AT]spacewesterns[DOT]com or the submission form
What: Women in Space Westerns

The 22nd Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction will be hosted on the SpaceWesterns.com Sideshow. Our specific topic suggestion: Women in Space Westerns. Send submissions (blogged between May 3rd, 2008 and October 28th, 2008) to Nathan E. Lilly. Additional submission information is available on the submissions page.

What is a Space Western? A simple definition: Western genre themes in Outer-space. Often, if the protagonist of the story could accurately be described as a Space Cowboy, then you’ve got a Space Western. A more serious definition is fiction that explores the effect that the frontiers of outer-space have on the human condition.

Space Westerns in film and television include (but are not limited to): Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Captain Video and the Video Rangers, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Alien, Galaxy Rangers, Sabre rider and the Star Sheriffs, Marshal Bravestar, Space Hunter, Earth 2, Babylon 5, Farscape, Trigun, Outlaw Star, Cowboy Bebop, Firefly/Serenity, Coyote Ragtime Show, Gun X Sword. Additional works in various other formats can be found at the (Nearly) Complete List of Space Westerns. If you have any questions about why a specific work was included, please feel free to contact me.

Female characters in Space Westerns include (but are not limited to): Wilma Deering, Dale Arden, Nurse Chapel, Lt. Uhura, Yeoman Rand, Princess Leia, Queen Amidala, Ellen Ripley, Lt. Athena, Medtech Cassiopeia, Serina, Cassiopeia, Devon Adaire, D’lenn, Faye Valentine, Radical Ed, Zoe Washburne, Inarra Sera, Kaylee Frye, River Tam, Wendy Garrett, Laura Roslin, Lt. Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, Lt. Sharon “Boomer” Valerii, Six.

Women writers of Space Westerns include (but are not limited to): C.L. Moore, Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, and Jane Espenson.

The long hiatus is my own fault. I've made a sudden move across the ocean and am still settling down. Forgive the five-month break between issues. --R.

Had a good day today

My god, what an amazing day.

Myt schedule was tight because I got enrolled in some weird class for work that doens't really have much to do with my day to day job. I was a bit late, but I (unlike the poor guy next to me) ended up with a working computer. And despite the class being about equipment and protocols I haven't seen for six years, I didn't have any problems with the material. It's been a really good refresher, actually.

In addition to the class that left very little flexibility for the day's schedule, I had a shitload of errands to do. I got each one that I set my mind to done. My new car passed the safety inspection, which enabled me to get it registered. I am now fully mobile without worries.

I managed to get this done and have a chance to stop for lunch.

In the post office I had mail waiting for me. All good stuff. My JSA Presents: Green Lantern. My absentee ballot. The latest issue of Weird Tales.

I took a wrong turn on the way back to the village and ended up finding a route that is actually going to be really useful in the future.

I made it to my landlady's office after work with two minutes to spare before her assistant left, and so was able to pay my rent by the due date.

I swung by the department store in the walkplatz to see if they still had that decorative metal table and chairs I wanted for my balcony, and they did. And I had cash leftover from the rent for it.

And it folded enough to fit nicely in my hatchback. (Yeah, my new car is a hatchback. And last week I managed to snag an automatic at a reasonable price -- so I own it.)

The bakery had a chocolate and cherry layer cake that I took a chance on and absolutely loved. That I got to eat while sitting outside on my balcony in my new chair.

I took another wrong turn, and found another potentially useful route for when I'm running errands. I also found a flower shop.

After a full day in high heels, my feet didn't hurt. My ankle should be good enough to run for real on. (I sprained it at the beginning of the month.)

I got home with plenty of time for my reading assignment and a relaxing bath.

I took a picture of my with my filled out ballot on a whim, and it turned out to be a pretty kickass Evil Red Riding Hood image. (Original and mood-altered.)

It was the perfect temperature all day, not too cold for my outfit and not too hot.

And while I heard the usual ravens cawing throughout the day (ravens are more common than pigeons here), I also heard something I hadn't noticed in this part of Germany before. Songbirds. I hadn't heard songbirds here yet.

And more amazingly than anything else, today Republicans and Democrats got together and in a rare show of sensibility went "You want us to give HOW MUCH to WHOM?!?!"

Elected officials actually looked at each other and agreed that yes, yes things were bad. Yes we had some rough times ahead. But no, we weren't going to panic and make things worse by giving money to a bunch of guys who are being investigated for fraud.  No, we're going to ride it until we come up with a plan that has a snowball's chance of working.

They presented a unified front in favor of common sense and against fear tactics.

That's fucking amazing.

That's seriously something you write home about.

And they listened to the voters, who even more amazingly went "Wait a minute... these guys piddled away the few hundred billion dollars they had on their OWN. Are sure this is a wise investment for OUR money?"

The infamous mob was the voice of reason.

That's fucking astounding.

Now Wall Street is panicking and plummeting.

That's not so surprising.

Don't get me wrong, I know there's bad stuff coming. I firmly believe there's already a depression (it's only now that the rich people noticed it), and it's going to get worse. It could be worse than 1929. Hell, in a few years I might even be camped out in DC with a sign demanding back pay. (Hopefully no one'll release a modern-day MacArthur on us.)

But today? I'm happy. I had good day personally. I had a good day professionally. Congress didn't panic. They didn't go for the quick fix that was guaranteed to backfire and screw us over. There was genuine bipartisan action to stop, collect their thoughts, and try to come up with a sane way to fix things rather than make the dollar worse less than the paper it's printed on.

We--as a people--can officially face a guaranteed period of hardship and still keep our heads.

That--more than any campaign speech or promise--that actually restores a lot of my faith in the government. That restores much of my faith in my fellow countrymen.

Of Damsels and Dragons and Downtime

Preface: I'm not writing this in promise of a blogwar. There is a good chance the blogger in question won't ever see it. (There's a better chance she will, though.)

This is just a confession, a post I'm writing to get my thoughts together and get all this misery off my chest so I can look forward to the week with a clear head. And maybe--just maybe--it will help me shake this bout of writer's block.

I've no doubt that if you look at the history of this blog and deep enough you'll find more than one letter implying that I'm tired of writing and think I might leave the blogosphere for good. Most bloggers write one eventually. And unless its one of the rare "I'm losing computer access for several years because I lost my job/joined the peace corps/got shipped to Iraq/married into an Amish family" those posters usually come back after they get a few days rest/the commenters shower them with love and attention/someone manages to piss them off.

There's nothing inherently wrong with these posts, although they are tiresome. Personally I feel disgusted with myself whenever I start writing them, but its vital to understand that part of blogging is venting and everyone needs to vent such feelings every once in a while.

Had I told myself that several months ago, I may never have let so much updating time lapse.

In case I've misled you, this isn't one of those posts.


This is a "Why I actually stopped writing" post, and to be honest it has to do with another blogger, one who writes a number of "I might leave because no one appreciates me" posts.

I'm referring, of course, to the aptly named Occasional Superheroine.

And I just broke an unwritten rule of mine by mentioning her.

The tension between Valerie D'Orazio and I is old news. Somehow I'm reluctant to admit that she'd long annoyed me with what struck me as an empty and superficial writing style, but she was initially harmless so I kept from mentioning it. A lot of people annoy me at times, it passes. Some of the people I count as my favorite writers started off annoying me, and some of the people I used to read religiously I can now barely read for WFA links because I find their style so infuriating. It was clashing personality shit, no reason to fuss or fight. That is, no reason until Val went up against a number of the brightest writers in the blogosphere over a little known piece of shit called How to Make Money Like a Porn Star. I was irritated with what seemed to me to be an uneven reviewing standard on Val's part. I posted about this, and within a week Occasional Superheroine was erased from the Internet.

There are moments, behind closed doors and among friends I brag about this. At the time I was horrified. I hadn't wanted her to pack up and leave. I'm not sure what I'd wanted, perhaps for her to back out of the fight and admit she was wrong about at least one of the two books. I was siding with personal friends in the matter and I had pulled out my most devastating attack without really considering the end result. I was also incredibly annoyed that one of my posts now had dead links. The horror and irritation passed, though, because if there is one admirable trait about Valerie D'Orazio it's her resiliency.

She came back--while I was thankfully preoccupied with some work or personal matter--with the infamous Goodbye to Comics series.

And here's the real confession. I was deeply and astoundingly unimpressed with that series.

As I've said before, I find Val's writing style to be empty, superficial, and generally annoying. When I attempted to read "Goodbye to Comics", I found it hadn't improved. There are still a number of posts from that period I've only gotten halfway through. Life was too short and they were already linked on When Fangirls Attack.

That--in itself--is not a personal knock against the writer. No doubt people look at my blog and find me long-winded and pretentious. And I've had more than a few Grammarians reprimand my careless handling of a fragile language. I honestly don't know why some of you read through the crap I spit out.

(I know for a fact that many commenters don't read through the crap I spill onto this blog.)

But still, my delicate pride was always bolstered by the fact that people would actually read, comment, and engage me in conversation.

Some of those same people were now touting the all but unreadable "Goodbye to Comics" as a masterpiece. That was a blow to my pride.

And before long, Valerie D'Orazio--a writer I found untalented and uninteresting and only marginally feminist--was being touted as one of the best feminist writers in the blogosphere.

And I carefully, and with great difficulty read through the posts I was linking. I was unable to see what was so impressive. I strongly suspect she only gathered a fanbase because she said what disgruntled 90s fans already believed to be true about Dan Didio, and her status as a former insider lent credibility to the those beliefs.

This was all irksome for several reasons:

1) As I've already said, people who liked my writing also liked hers. That suggested an uncomfortable similarity. So my faith in my own talent was shaken by my certainly in Val's lack of talent. Either people weren't reading my posts, or I was churning out far shittier thoughts than I previously realized.

2) Over the past few years, I've linked Val alongside some of the most brilliant women I've had the good fortune to read (and, in some cases, meet). Time and time again I see Val linked rather than Cheryl Lynn Eaton, Karen Healey, Avalon's Willow, Rachel Edidin or any number of much, much smarter women than Val. I see points brought up and passed around the blogosphere for days or weeks before they pop up and Val's site, and then I see some random bozo saying they found this out at Occasional Superheroine. When WFA was at its most active, I had people drop by my comments, send me email links, and IM me with links to Val saying "Have you seen this yet" when I myself had posted on that very subject earlier that week.

3) Tying into the point above, Val is the safe feminist. One of the bloggers in my "Must Read" folder had a brilliant post somewhere (that I forgot to bookmark, and can't find now!), on how her writing was too radical to ever get her a job writing for a major venue (like Newsarama, or CBR, or writing an actual comic). Because she pointed out dangerous, uncomfortable things that made the rest of us think about our assumptions, and feel guilty about our place in the world.

See, that's what I consider good writing--brave writing. The stuff that forces the reader out of his/her comfort zone. The stuff that makes them think critically about their place in the world, even if it is ultimately to disagree with the writer. I don't consider an article of mine to be any good unless I am lying awake in my bed the night before it publishes wondering if John's going to kick me off Blog@Newsarama because I finally crossed the line this time.

(Now great writing? That's the stuff that forces the writer out of his/her comfort zone.)

Val's writing doesn't do that. She lets people feel angry at the big faceless corporation but okay about themselves. Okay about what they buy. She won't let a writer or an artist she dislikes get away with sexism.

But I've yet to see her criticize a writer she likes. I've yet to see her take her audience to new territory.

I may be being too hard on her here. People have different degrees of openness to this stuff, and I guess her people aren't ready for the intensive self-examination or the academics. Thing is, I consider myself a training feminist. I softball you guys. I write 101-level stuff, stuff that's open and accessible enough for the crowd at Newsarama. I'm not dealing with the advanced theories and experiences here. I write in simplified ideas and I don't think Val examines social issues in the depth they require.

So its irritating to see women who look at this stuff in real depth--women who really know what the fuck they are talking about--passed over for someone so superficial.

4) She stopped reading my stuff when we had a falling out. She took my links off her blogroll. Whenever that happens, and it has, I get pathetically hurt and surprised. I figure if someone is worth reading for whatever reason, you keep reading whether you personally get along with them or not. It's a personal slight.

(As a side note to this one, I've had a few run-ins with Laura Hudson over at Myriad Issues, and she still links me when I write something she finds worth reading. I appreciate that, and she has my respect for it no matter what we're at odds about.)

5) She just plain offends my sense of justice. I was raised by a conservative woman. I have some conservative values deeply ingrained in my psyche, and one of them is a belief--against all evidence--that we are living in a meritocracy. That rewards are given to who they should be given to. That good writers get acclaim. That bad writers get obscurity. That honorable people are seen as honorable and respected. That manipulative people are seen for their behavior and villified. I know this is not how reality actually works. But when I see evidence of how things are and it contrasts with my view of how things should be I feel an unmistakable sense of rage and disgust.

I'm going to state my personal opinion of Valerie D'Orazio here. I don't like her. I think she's manipulative. The infamous Beatrix Kyle letter from early WFA days? It has been attributed to her. The earliest fight involved her double-standards of review when it came to her friends. Her famous memoir was fictionalized and tailored to match prevailing public opinion perfectly. The final falling out between Occasional Superheroine and When Fangirls Attack involved her playing the victim for her White Knight commenters, casting me as the venomous Wyrm threatening a damsel in distress.

I'm blunt. I'm downright mean at times. And by god, I have a lot of venom in my heart just waiting to be poured out through my keyboard. My best writing is soaked in hatred and rage. I know all of this. But I make a genuinely Herculean effort to put that aside and be fair in my dealings. And because of that effort, and because I know I'm susceptible to being painted as a bully, it bothers me so much when someone manages to make me into the bad guy.

I can forgive a lot. I have gotten angry and forgiven a lot without mentioning it on this blog. I can't forgive being cast as the bully, not when I've made every attempt to be as kind and even-handed as fucking possible to someone. I've never forgiven Val for that. And I've never forgiven her readers for buying into that.

And--coming from a conservative mindset--I've never forgiven the Universe for allowing such behavior to go unpunished.

And the thing about those 5 points is, I'm not alone. I'm not naming names, but there have been anti-Val whispers in the between places for a while. A lot of people just plain dislike her. Feel the same way about her I do. But nobody wants to get into That Fight. (Except Chris Sims, of course. But he lives for this stuff.) And neither did I.

So I let these feelings--some of which were pre-existing but were triggered by this woman, some of which were brought on entirely by her--fester at the bottom of my heart everytime I read Occasional Superheroine. And of course--being me--I read the damned blog everyday. Because--being me--if I didn't people were going to link me. And--being me--I couldn't stand missing the potential links. I'm a completist with WFA just like I am with Green Lantern and Wonder Woman. (All those times I dropped Green Lantern? I hunted down back issues, oh yes.) It's stupid, but it's a comic book fan thing.

And once bitten, twice shy I avoided confronting her. I'm susceptible to being painted as the bully and she's managed to get me with that brush before. (She and a number of other bloggers had a little Ragnell hatefest over it when she dropped WFA from her blogroll). I'm no damsel in distress, I'm a dragon and the white knights who read Val know it. Calling her out wasn't worth the headache of dealing with them.

But the more I read Val, and the more I see her linked and referenced as a serious stop when it comes to feminist comics commentary, the more I lose faith in my own writing.

Because if that's the standard I'm meeting when I get praised, and if the truly good writers are being ignored--then what's the point? What's the point of writing?

So instead of writing or even collecting for WFA I plunge myself with wild abandon into things that are not writing. I keep rereading Captain America, and Starman because it is made of joy and goodness. And I've finally found Simonson's Thor. I'm really up to date on the Presidential Election, and I've been twittering my brains out on politics.

But I haven't written anything that I'd consider good in a while. Nothing that keeps me up at night. I've written a million earthshattering posts in my head, but when I sit down to write the words flutter away.

And I've been chatting, and reading your blogs, and talking in newsgroups. And all the time I keep wondering why no one ever says this stuff about Val.

I enjoyed watching her fight with the race bloggers, of course. But I didn't participate. And they fought on their home ground They didn't go to her place of power. They didn't say anything to her they couldn't say to me. No one pointed out during those fights was that her area of supposed expertise--white women's issues--was not any place where she was strong either. She was just repeating smarter women in a softer safer tone. She was pandering to disgruntled DC fans. She wasn't even a good writer to begin with! She was a privileged white woman writing about something she knew nothing about there, nothing different from the other privileged white female bloggers in the community--except that there are much better bloggers than her making less mistakes when covering race.

And maybe it's racism on my part that I was waiting on a member of the white female blogosphere to call out Val rather than counting the utter lack of legitimacy she has among FOCs as calling her out.

Either way--even with the idiocy on race issues--she still gets cited by people in the industry. She still gets to write Tyrone in Cloak and Dagger (which I'm sure will be a horror to behold).

Then came Val's most recent open letter demanding the love and attention of her commenters. She thinks she's a serious writer. She really thinks she's a serious writer. And to that end, she's denigrating people who are inherently fun writers, joyful writers. And she's denigrating the serious bloggers who are willing to be fun and joyful.

And I suspect she's taking potshots at Melissa again.

And it was seeing Sally be the one to stop and call her on it that really pushed me over the edge. I adore Sally, but she's not the one you expect to call out someone like Val. She's not supposed to be the one who tells off people like Val.

And then it occurs to me, maybe I'm supposed to be the one who tells off people like Val.

Maybe I'm supposed the Villainess here. Maybe I'm the Big Bad Wolf. The Dragon of the Blogosphere who torches the White Knights. I'm the one who's supposed to look at someone like "Goodbye to Comics" and exclaim "Buy your Empress some damned clothes!!"

Why the hell am I waiting for David and Pedro and Willow to pounce on her where she's weak when I've got her where she lives? Why do I have this idiotic policy that Val's off limits whenever she says something stupid? Why am I not pointing out when she's being a fucking idiot?

Maybe it's not the widespread legitimacy she has that drives me crazy, but rather my own silence on the matter. Maybe her being mentioned in Comic Foundry would bother me less if I'd said publicly that I thought she was vapid and useless beforehand.

Maybe there's a reason I'm me, a reason I'm mean, and I'm just not able to write when I hold it in. Maybe holding it in just makes things so much worse. Maybe I should just embrace my inner bully and go ahead and be the bad guy every now and then. You all might hate me for it, but I'll be more comfortable.

We all have our parts to play. If Val's the damsel, and Sims is the jester, then I'm the dragon. I'll be better off facing it.

Now, I can't promise this realization means I'll be writing more often. (Or that any of my feminists readers will read me after I called Val an idiot.) Maybe I'm wrong and the block came from something else.

Blogging Elsewhere

I feel accomplished.

I might get back to substantial writing on this blog again eventually.

I would read this comic.

From Chris Sims' Twitter:

Project Merle Thunder is the project to give Merle Haggard sole possession of Mjolnir. We'll see who gets on his fightin' side NOW

My Day

Before I begin this anecdote I have two requests.

1)  I'd like for my father to stop reading for long enough to set up a webcam.  I want him to record his reaction to this post for me.

2)  I want the first person (and that includes you, Dad) to make a woman driver joke to be on the next flight to Europe so that I can personally beat him/her over the head repeatedly with a German cuckoo clock.

Why the special requests?  Because today I learned to drive a car with a manual transmission.

It started with my leaving my cellphone at work.  Being that my cellphone is my major way of anyone getting ahold of me, I needed to get it.  Unfortunately, I only noticed it was missing from my purse on Saturday morning when most of the people I know in this country are hung over.  Also, I was tired of scamming, begging and bumming rides from eveyrone at work.  The lack of transportation was getting to me, and it even went so far as to make getting regular transportation even more difficult to obtain.  The problem was compounded by my antisocial nature.  I wanted to see some of Germany--Hel, I just wanted to see a movie--but not if it meant I had to talk to people.

So I got out my little book, borrowed a neighbors telephone and called the rental place.  I'd have a week of independance if nothing else.  They set me up that afternoon with some temporary transportation, that could get me to work, to the store, to the movie theater, and most importantly, to the used car lot.  The day would have all worked out perfectly but for one slight problem.  That being the manual transmission.  But I was prepared for that, sort of.

I'd read about it on the internet.

And I got a... briefing from the car rental guy.

Nevertheless, when I got into the car and tested it out, I found I couldn't move in reverse to get out of the parking spot.  I did everything as I'd been told, I didn't panic when the car started moving when I released the clutch.  I shifted the gearshift towards the R, but it wouldn't go backwards.  So I glanced around the partking lot, and accosted some random guy as he was exiting his car.

"Hey, you drive manual?"

"Yeah."

"Umm.. help?"

He nodded and came over, said he knew exactly the problem.  "European gearshift.  You have to shove it all the way over until it clicks, then up."

I did so.  The car still stubbornly insisted on moving forward.  This wouldn't have been a problem, if not for the other car parked in front of it.  The car I was getting just a bit closer to each time I tried to move.  So I had the random stranger sit in the car and try it himself.

(Dad, you had better be filming your reaction to this story.)

And what do you know, it wasn't my fault.  He couldn't get it go backwards either.  We had no choice but to go forward past the other car (we had enough room between the bumpers to slip a few pieces of paper by) and sure enough, as soon as we cleared the other car and switched drivers again the damned reverse started working.

No, I didn't back into anything.  But I swear, I put it in the exact same position each fucking time.

Still, I was doing fairly well.  Within a half hour, I got it moving around the parking lot smoothly--after stalling a few dozen times in the first 20 minutes--and felt comfortable enough to go to the street to get to work and look for my phone.  The street was an uphill street.  And of course, the damnable thing stalled at the top.  And of course, the next car--an ugly boxy yellow thing--pulls right up behind me.

So here I am, still adjusting to the clutch and the slight rocking backwards because the parking lot didn't have enough hills to get used to that, and a line forms.  The woman in the yellow car behind me couldn't back up due to the black car that was right behind her, and I couldn't get any further up the hill.  She was fortunately very amused by the situation.  She and her entire line of cars eventually passed me.  Then another line formed, this one smart enough to back away.

After providing a total of 20 minutes entertainment to the base population, a pedestrian stopped to help me figure out the right combination of accelerator and clutch motion (he advised thinking of it as a teetertotter).  I didn't have another problem until work, where I discovered that my phone was not left at the office.

But don't worry, I think I know where it is.

I focused on my next errand, because by heaven's frosty gate I was going to get something accomplished this day.  The building for the next errand happened to be up a large hill.  But I wasn't worried, I'd discovered the secret to hills.  I wasn't quite sure about the speed limit, but I'd discovered the secret to hills.

Well, I thought I had.  I was still getting used to the clutch, though, so I stalled when I got up the hill and tried to turn into the parking lot.  So I restarted the engine, and stalled again.  I got a bit frustrated with it, particularly the car's desire to slip backwards on the hill as I tried to get it to start forward.  Took maybe ten minutes to park because of that.  But after that I ran smoothly around base, from the store to the other store, to the first store when the other store told me they didn't have what I wanted.  I obtained some potentially valuable advice about diesel engines at the last stop.  Sure, I overshot the movie time, I'm afraid.  But I remembered the way home.

The shine on remembering the way home was dulled when I stalled twice on the way home.  Both times entering traffic circles, which just sucks because there is someone moving in a little circle in front of you and invariably there is someone behind you.  That just makes recovering from the stall worse because there's suddenly this sense of urgency.

To top off the day, I stalled entering my freaking driveway, because guess who lives on the side of an uphill road! (And some jackass blasted his horn at me, which is illegal withing city limits, and startled me into releasing the clutch too soon as stalling a second time while I was trying to recovering from the first stall!)

But all in all it was a fairly productive day.  I'm now confident I can get to work and back (though I'm not touching the autobahn yet, I don't care what stupid souvenirs people want from other parts of Germany), and I've expanded my options for permanent transportation.  (There aren't many automatics for sale where I'm at, so this is a big thing.)  For this I'd like to thank my AWOL cellphone, my three impromptu teachers, the road-gods of Germany, and the cops who pointed and laughed as I banged my head against the steering wheel in frustration.

(And Dad?  Upload the video to Youtube, so I can watch it at my leisure.)

Tales from the Chatroom

Kalinara's been reading back issues of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos today, and has treated me to a running commentary on the plot.

This includes her opinion on Nick's love interest Pamela.

An excerpt:

Kalinara (12:16:06 AM): Oh no, he's buying her a ring

Kalinara (12:16:09 AM): She's going to die.

Kalinara (12:16:10 AM): ...

Kalinara (12:16:12 AM): YAY

Then how can you call them good guys?

Lebovitz's Limit: Do the good guys torture? (Via)