Some dogs like snow

There's an interesting story in last week's  Strange Horizons.  It's sort of one of those it didn't really need to be genre except to make the twist work, but I'd probably be hypocritical to critique others for that...  Good anyway.

I'm currently reading a Steampunkish novel, All Men Of Genius by Lev AC Rosen.  I say steampunkish because it seems to be more about trappings, but maybe that's core genre, I dunno.  I picked it up because my college alumni mag made a big deal about it.  Then Strange Horizons reviewed it favorably this week.  I'm not as impressed.

I think I need a keyboard and to finish the book to explain why, but I have this question, which also occurred to me while reading Richard Morgan's Thirteen, though that was much meatier:  Why is it that when men write novels with a romance as the main structure, no one ever refers to or complains about the novel as more a romance novel than SFF? 

Here, the romance is the point, it's based on a romance of Shakespeare as well as a Wilde play, the steam is mostly trappings- they drive the story ostensibly but this is not necessary except to appeal to that set of readers (from within the genre, from the author photo).  So why isn't it getting slagged for being too lite, as similar female-authored novels do?

As the gay people are also mostly setting and props.  But more later.

Freeze frame

You know the phrase ' built like a fridge?'  I do in fact feel like a compact refrigeration unit standing all bundled up on the light rail platform, which today is a wind tunnel.

Sunday I ran 9 miles for the first time, making it the Best.9-mile.Ever.  That was my inner mantra as the last couple miles sagged on long after the sun sank past the horizon.  I got some good shots of downtown Mpls the St. Paul side of Mississippi and the Lake st bridge.

I got about half of the stuff on my long-weekend list done but made some good and mouth-burning Ma Po tofu and other tasty foods to make up for my sloth.  The blogosphere really made cooking a whole new world.  Not being limited by one's (or the library's) collection of cookbooks is very nice.  The funny stories attached to recipes add a lot of flavor too.

I am mostly done with The Sub, and it's still engrossing and wickedly funny.  Taking a detour into Sara Schulman's History of the US before finishing the Halberstam and queer theory anthology though.  Will get around to discussing those eventually...

Theoretical doubts

I am often mulling questions about the use of so-called 'queer' (used to mean so many object and subject positionings) characters or specifically lesbian (often a quite compressed and narrowed version, focused on love or sex objects and not a larger expressive and communicative culture or community) characters in speculative fiction. 

There is something about the oft-vaunted proliferation of straight writers producing such characters in 'normal' (i.e. saleable to a 'wider audience') genre works as well as queer authors producing works read and championed by a 'wider' audience that I continue to find disturbing without being able to easily identify the exact nature and source of my misgivings.  I go back and forth: just curmudgeonly, or is there something there?

Reading a ton of '90s and early millenial queer and feminist theory has recently stoked these musings.  An article on 90s male dance films provoked this post, mostly so I could park these quotes somewhere I would remember them... but...

There's something here about the need to go beyond simply opposing obvious homophobia, promoting 'positive' images in 'reclaiming' traditional narratives, and creating more product that is consumable, to push towards a clearer understanding of the uses to which gay men, lesbians, and gender-transgressive people have been historically and are now (in some ways differently, in some ways similarly) used in the service of maintaining either or both heteronormativity or heteroprivilege:

"[11] The term 'queer' lacks definite character. It has been described as 'contra-, non-, or anti-straight' (Doty, xv) and as 'an in-your-face-rejection of the proper response to heteronormativity, a version of acting up' (Hennessy, 967). I am not completely satisfied with these ways of thinking about the term queer, for they tend to reinforce the opposition between the queer and the heteronormative, whereas I am not convinced that these terms are oppositional (Weber). For this reason, I tend to think of queer in much the same way that Barthes thinks of the plural, as 'that which confuses meaning, the norm, normativity' (Sade, 109), which is different to standing against the norm or normativity. This is an important difference, because what I think these contemporary male dance films demonstrate is that, paradoxically, heteronormative masculinity is secured in and through queer dance performances."

"[12] In very different ways, each of these films challenges the common sense notion that what is 'normal' and what is 'queer' are opposites --however those terms are inscribed in specific contexts. Homosexuality does not only make heterosexuality possible as an opposite to it. Heterosexuality happens in homosexual, non-straight, and queer spaces. Indeed, contemporary heterosexuality (and, more broadly, heteronormativity) seems to require a passing in, if not a passing through, queer spaces in order to establish itself as 'normal' and 'dominant'. The result is a variety of heteronormative masculinities (as well as queer masculinities). Yet however varied these masculinities are, they all share debts to queerness in their construction --not merely by opposing it (or, for queer masculinities, by embracing it), but by passing through it."

and, after explaining the greater, covertly queered context of the Swan Lake ending of Billy Elliot, which I had forgotten about in the Broadway musical version, hmm...

"All of this is reminiscent of Teresa de Lauretis' observation about lesbian representations, that because 'conventions of seeing, and the relations of desire and meaning in spectatorship [remain] partially anchored or contained by a frame of visibility that is still heterosexual,' it is extremely difficult to alter the 'standard vision, the frame of reference of visibility, of what can be seen' (33, 35; emphasis in original)."

-from Genders 37 2003, " 'Oi. Dancing Boy!' Masculinity, Sexuality, and Youth in Billy Elliot," by Cynthia Weber  article 

Anyway, that's what's on my mind this MLK day weekend, along with excitement at hearing "Pariah" is in theaters on the coast, which means eventually we may get to see it here in flyover country.  And perhaps celebrating Anita B... er, a certain faux-Minnesotan hatah's recent lack of support where it counted.

Quote of the day

"If you're having a good time in high school you have to stop and wonder. It's like turning over the Death card in the tarot deck."

-G.B. Jones, of Fifth Column, indie queercore film, Tom-style art, and J.D.'s fame, in an interview with FC at  Punk rock academy 

Wow

This just sums it up: Lesbian Hairstyles .

The Sub by Thomas Disch

Is turning into an obsessive git'erdone read.  As this old NYT review said:

"What begins as a story of domestic upheaval and run-of-the-mill violence soon morphs into something much stranger, eventually encompassing witchcraft, shamanism and incest. The unquiet soul of Diana's dead father haunts the Turney homestead, and his malignant presence prompts Diana to realize she's a witch with the power to transform people into the animals that best suit their personalities. Her father's vengeful spirit promises her she'll kill everyone she ever loved, a threat Diana brushes off. Soon, though, she's off on a spree of mayhem and violence that seems destined to fulfill her dead father's prophecy, but not before she uses her Circe-like powers to turn a number of locals into pigs."

The reviewer thought it was all too much, but the humor is at the right pitch and it helps if you've lived in Minnesota or the Northland.  We read about this sort of cabin fever family saga mayhem in the Strib every day...

This quote from a Guardian (UK)  obituary makes me think of the Queer Art of Failure, the Judith Halberstam book I am also reading:

Disch's novel Camp Concentration... "won some plaudits but no honours from the science-fiction community, which from the first could not tolerate Disch's corrosive disdain for the technocentric uplift typical of "normal" science fiction, and for anything that seemed to him to pander to the immaturity of most genre fiction."  Except for that last part - Halberstam's book is intersting in part because it takes children's animated films quite (but not too) seriously.  Spongebob!

Still reading Halberstam

In between some new fiction.  I am reading some interviews and listened to a meaty podcast interview about The Queer Art of Failure, from The Critical Lede. 

A nice quote on her earlier work/topic of female masculinity (which swype wants to render as ' nativity,' yikes):

"Unlike a theorist like Butler who sees categories as perpetually suspect, I embrace categorization as a way of creating places for acts, identities and modes of being which otherwise remain unnamable. I also think that the proliferation of categories offers an alternative to the mundane humanist claim that categories inhibit the unique self and creates boxes for an otherwise indomitable spirit. People who don't think they inhabit categories usually benefit from not naming their location. I try to offer some new names for formerly uninhabitable locations.  In fact, my inspiration for taxonomizing comes from Eve Sedgwick's introduction to Epistemology of the Closet where she offers up a list of ways that people could map sexualities and desires. Her list refuses the banality of the homo-hetero binary and suggests that we are limited not simply by the law but by a failure of the imagination."

-Judith Halberstam from an interview by Annamarie Jagose in Genders 29 (1999).

I have some vague ideas forming about how this is all relevant to SFF, but cogitation is a process...

Short fiction

 There's an interesting story in Strange Horizons this week: MonitorBot and the King of Pop by Jessica Barber.  Not the most original fake science or political premises but well executed.

Someone recommended this as a 2011 best story, and it's very good indeed:

 Charlie Jane Anders, 6 months 3 days .

Anyway...

Hometown proud...

Not.

Spike Lee is apparently making a biopic about Mayor Marion Barry starring Eddie Murphy.  Wow.

I'm not a woman, I'm a hatchet

Yes, I am reading Judy Grahn. 

"Our point was not to be men; our point was to be butch and get away with it. We always kept something back: a high-pitched voice, a slant of the head, or a limpness of hand gestures, something that was clearly labeled female. I believe our statement was "Here is another way of being a woman," not "Here is a woman trying to be taken for a man." (Another Mother Tongue 31)"

I'm not a girl

    I'm a hatchet

I'm not a hole

    I'm a whole mountain

I'm not a fool

    I'm a survivor

I'm not a pearl

    I'm the Atlantic Ocean

I'm not a good lay

    I'm a straight razor

look at me as if you had never seen a woman before

I have red, red hands and much bitterness (WCW, 25)

she has taken a woman lover

whatever can we say

She walks around all day

quietly, but underneath it

she's electric;

angry energy inside a passive form.

The common woman is as common

as a thunderstorm. (WCW)

"My reading of Grahn is centered in her concept of "the common woman," a figure that, like the vampire, encompasses the queer feminine as aporia and the "phallic" woman's self-reflected gaze at the monstrous "other," her double. The term lesbian as metaphor for this "crossing" of Woman as sign and the woman as creator, is based in lesbian theory, which recently has focused on a destabilized or provisional identity for political purposes, removed from a destructive or simply "tired" binary paradigm." - Billie Maciunas

 More. 

Awesome

 Lesbian gamers can rejoice.   Or not.  I just like the graphics.

Our rain/snow dampened New Year's Eve a bit.  Luckily we got to pick up Wonder Dog, who ate a ton of dark chocolate thanks to some misunderstandings about her capabilities in the search and retrieval department, from the emergency vet before it got really bad- the rain was just turning into big gobs of wet cotton.  The photos I took look kind of Van Gogh.

The hail part near midnight sounded like reindeer running on the roof.  I wasn't gonna stay up, but managed to usher in 2012.  Happy New Year...