Andy H.

Androgynous histories

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 23:54:33 GMT

It's difficult to do archaeology on your own former self, like studying an ancient settlement people have continually lived on and built over. I have some memories of the people I used to be, but they're partial, selective, and already in the context of the narratives that are explanatory to me now. Things that didn't matter to me, that contradicted me, that I didn't realize, are all elided. Without external landmarks with which to orient myself -- public records, intersubjective corroboration, things I wrote down at the time -- it would be close to impossible to check or complicate these memories, but even with those things available there is so much in my relationship to them I have to guess at, what I was unable to acknowledge or articulate at the time, or just forgot.

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February novel-reading, and the advice shy men get

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 18:54:02 GMT

Jo Walton, Among Others

...is fantastic, but what to say about it? It comes the closest of any book not Gaudy Night to being in the same genre as Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, with which, as long-time readers may recall, I am somewhat obsessed. Do you like explorations of wounded people learning unorthodox ways to thrive, or girls who read a lot coming of age and finding community, or people coping with the world after they've saved it? How about subtle and deniable magic? This is a book for people who respond to those things, though I wouldn't rule out others.

I posted about this xkcd on my facebook, but it feels more like a weblog entry so I'm going to reproduce it here. Seeing it again the other day I was struck by what a familiar narrative it is, and I've been thinking about what that says about the kind of sexual advice that's given to men.

( So then I go on about that for a while. )

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December/January novel-reading

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 20:50:43 GMT

Okay, step one: make this post. The two books a month thing is looking remarkably consistent.

E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Samuel R. Delany, Tales of Nevèrÿon

Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
N. K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms

I read The Graveyard Book to Aidan (Joanne's nine-year old) at bedtimes, which I usually don't count, but I read all the text and felt engaged enough that this time I will.

I haven't talked about the kids much (heck, I haven't talked about Joanne much). That sort of direct exposition is not the usual function of this weblog; I've been more likely historically to write ostensibly as though my readers already knew, and try to buoy you along with incluing. But that felt like a more feasible strategy five years ago when I was writing several times a month than it does now, when my writing about anything other than books is, shall we say, somewhat more erratic. So: Aidan is 9, dark-haired, freckled, probably slightly hearing-impaired and given to shout. Justin is 4, blond, warier, likes food best when he can combine it in mad scientific ways. They are enormous for their ages. (Pictorial reference from the summer, when they were shorter.) Both have huge and complex personalities but this will hopefully do as a reference point for future inclues.

That was meant to be scene-setting for a longer meditation, but I don't know when I'll get a chance to write that so I should probably just post what I've got.

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November novel-reading

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 07:53:43 GMT

Most of the month has passed and is past, but that's all the more reason to get on with posting about the last one.

Sean Stewart, Mockingbird
Lois McMaster Bujold, CryoBurn
Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand (reread)

Little reports:

CryoBurn has the worst of Bujold's titles (much worse in my estimation than it would be without wiki-style BumpyCaps), but it is one of her better books -- not one of her best, but good enough that I am satisfied with it, as the first new novel in one of my favourite series since I started reading it in 2003.

Astute readers may notice that Stars in My Pocket is the only novel assigned in my class that I reread in full as it came around, in addition to reading it in preparation. This was necessary because I wrote my long paper on it, but it would have been even for the class conversations, because the book is so ambitious and dense with detail.

(I want to talk more about my class, and how it went, and I'm not sure that I will, but I'm marking my intention here in hopes that it will galvanize me regardless.)

This is all a bit vague and fragmentary because I am tired. I am writing in bed in a small, aging farmhouse in Ontario somewhere which belongs to Joanne's grandmother, typing on the internet because it's the future; we flew into Ottawa around the solstice to see her family, and drove out here for Christmas proper. (Her parents, with startling generosity, gave me several science fiction novels and a tiny video camera.) It's my first time hanging out in the part of my country home to more than half of its inhabitants (I'd slept in Toronto once and eaten dinner in Windsor another time, but on neither occasion really stopped to look around), but due to an illusion of scale -- the city I usually live in being more densely populated than anywhere I've stopped -- I have been able to avoid being provincially overawed. I am more daunted by the more local culture shock, the polite, slippery mass of family tradition not my own (but maybe it will become mine).

I am here because Joanne and I agreed after the summer that we didn't want to spend weeks at a time apart from one another ever again in the foreseeable future, which I guess is one of the more active definitions of family. She is in arm's reach of me instead of time zones away, chortling and exclaiming over a non-fiction book. She just told me about Skara Brae, a ruin in Scotland of a 5000-year-old settlement where they had locking doors and sophisticated furniture. I am always excited by places like this, where we have the gross physical record of civilization but no direct linguistic record. It expands the historically possible.

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October novel-reading (he said, somewhere else)

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 23:47:13 GMT

I've been uncomfortably aware for a while that people who visit my livejournal without being logged in are subjected to garish, obtrusive banner ads all up and down the right side. Recently, even when I am logged in, livejournal is sometimes trying to make me view ads when I try to visit other people's content. I find both of these things unpleasant and embarrassing. I've also been aware, peripherally, of another blogging service using the same engine with no ads and an excellent reputation, so I'm now writing primarily at http://garran.dreamwidth.org ; I'm still mirroring on livejournal, but you may want to update links or what-have-you.

Book!

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

...which was about 200 pages and took me a month and a half to get through. The person who lent it to me swears it was not a deliberate attempt at sabotage.

The main difficulty is that it's written almost completely in a barely penetrable visual dialect, or actually rather an imaginary post-apocalyptic offshoot of English. Here's an example paragraph from early in the book:

"Dad and me we jus come off forage rota and back on jobbing that day. The hoal we ben working we ben on it 24 days. Which Ive never liket 12 its a judgd men number innit and this ben 2 of them. Wed pernear cleart out down to the chalk and hevvy mucking it ben. Nothing lef in the hoal only sortit thru muck and the smel of it and some girt big rottin iron thing some kynd of machine it wer you cudnt tel what it wer."

I've never even finished Huckleberry Finn; this didn't at any point stop being hard work for me to translate, and irritating, like somebody singing deliberately off-key. (Joanne, who is dyslexic, looked over the first page and reported that she hardly noticed the difference.) I would have probably stopped early except that it had been recommended by Karen, whose judgement I respect, and I have a bit of a weakness for stories about post-apocalyptic attempts at community. The story itself was odd but kind of compelling, brutal and thoughtful and wry, and it was interesting the tension between the narrator, who seems to be trying to present himself philosophically but straightforwardly, and the fog of language keeping his story obscure and treacherous.

I've been slacking off a bit teaching my class, because it turns out that I can -- if I come in with not a great deal prepared there will still be a lot of interesting conversation. This is awesome, but I'm trying to prepare more anyway. We weathered Heinlein with a general enthusiastic political horror, received a guest presentation that transformed a lot of our theoretical thinking about genre and gender (I remain vague because I believe the presenter intends to publish), and wrote our first papers, worked out and instituted what seems promising to be a successful marking scheme. My impression is that most of the short papers are about LeGuin; the longer, I suspect, will be dominated by Tiptree and Delany (the former of whom people have been vocally very impressed by, the latter of whose fiction we're just now embarking on), which is an outcome I'd be very pleased with.

It's November. Maybe I'll have a birthday party.

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