Dissecting Embassytown

I'm not always a fan of Adam Roberts' fiction or reviews, but he often makes very interesting points.  This analysis of China Mieiville's Embassytown helps explain to me why I liked it despite its ridiculous excesses and why  Christopher Priest's diatribe felt both right on about the larger situation and unfair to the book at the same time:

Roberts on the Clarkes.  

The part about how it seems like a novel about science fiction novels rings true.

However, as Scalzi said, to paraphrase, if Embassytown is Mieiville slacking, we should all slack so well...

A Girl Like Her, the movie

I dragged the GF to more movies in the Mpls St Paul International Film Festival over the weekend.  The first was short (40 minutes) but really packed a feminist punch.

 A Girl Like Her played the oral stories of women who were forced to stay in homes for unwed mothers and have their babies, then sign them over for adoption, often without seeing or holding the baby at all, prior to the convergence of Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, the pill, and, last but hardly least Title IX.  And the Second Wave feminist movement, though that was not the focus here. 

The audience for this movie is clearly your average Joe and Jane, since the length and format is geared for a hopeful future broadcast release.  However, I found this movie both unexpectedly informative, despite having read a whole book on the subject several years ago, and emotionally devastating, despite, you know, the butch facade.

I have a direct link to the subject matter, admittedly.  The family link between white blonde girl me and my 2 years younger brother, who is African American, is the sea change in social mores and laws that made blonde babies scarce and African American children a possible option for white liberals, until the questions were raised about Best Interest of the Child with that.

But as much as I knew about the individual pieces that went into creating the situation where a "dorm room accident" like myself might end up in adoption, and I knew about the 9-month enforced stays in homes for unwed mothers, I had not put two and two together in the way this movie does.

The way the oral stories are told over stock footage from 40s and 50s propaganda films and TV ads is very powerful in creating a sense of the coerciveness of the culture as well as laws and the central role families played in reinforcing and reproducing the coercion.  In light of the desire of some to return to those good old days... this is a very timely movie.  (There's an older book as well.)

Things I had not considered in this light were the effect of Title IX in ending the ability of school and universities to expel pregnant women (without expelling the fathers) or the effect this had on even the grooviest feminist with a supportive boyfriend and family due to this.  The way this movie interrogates the concept of choice pre-1972 is a needed correction to the flabbiness of the way we (who were not there, or who were sheltered from certain facts of life) are often led to look back on the period from the 40s thru 60s. 

Well worth making the effort to see or bring to your town...

Headline of the week

At least as far as legal tabloids:  "9th Circuit Narrows Computer Fraud Law, Protecting Lying Homely People and Web-Surfing Workers." 

All in one  case, yes.

Another ABA Tech Journal article fretted that lawyers/ office workers don't talk any more.  I think it depends on your setting, rank in a firm, and area of practice.  Part of being a peon in a large organization without management skillz is noone deigns to talk to you, they're too busy with their rainmaking and rattle shaking and stuff...  But, this is funny:

"...A senior partner at a Boston law firm told her about a typical scene in his office. Associates lay out their laptops, iPods and multiple phones, and put on their earphones. “Big ones. Like pilots,” the partner said. “They turn their desks into cockpits.”

"... Turkle calls for digital-free zones at home and a possible change at work. “Employees asked for casual Fridays; perhaps managers should introduce conversational Thursdays." ..."

Drawings From the Gulag

By D.S. Baldaev, born in 1925 in Ulan-Ude, Buryatiya, Russia.  He was sent to an orphanage for children of political prisoners and then, after serving in WW II, was ordered to work as a warden in Kresty prison.  He drew the tattoos of criminals, which the NKVD realized was useful and let him continue.  So he was sent all over the USSR to witness the scenes collected in this book. His dedication to accuracy is pretty stunning.

"Girls and women, stay away from the lesbians!  Someone is waiting for you at home."  This drawing would be funny, as in campy humor, like old propaganda often is, but in the context of the horrors shown on pretty much every other page, not here. 

And one can imagine what it was actually like to be a lesbian in the Gulag from the rest.  Koblui/butches or not.

It's amazing what lengths he went to in order to document what he had seen, without flinching, with the possible repercussions.

I hadn't realized the scientists working on cybernetics - pre-computers - in the 50s were arrested and tortured, mocked by propaganda as advocating the replacement of humans with robots.

A Couple Good Books

I finally got around to reading The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, a Finnish writer living in the UK. I was lazy about it because people made it sound like it had a lot of difficult science in it and the author has a physics degree. It sounded daunting, although the short story I'd read by him, last year's award-winning “Elegy For A Young Elk,” was readable and more fantasyish in writing style.

The Quantum Thief was very readable after the first part, which was not difficult from the science but more from the writing style. I had trouble figuring out how the 'game' it involved worked. After that point, the book read a lot more like Steampunk with an alien planet setting. Very gadgety, clocks, capes, watches and all.

It earned the hype, mostly. (There was a lot of hype. I'm not sure this is the Great White Hope of hard science fiction.) I wasn't in awe of his story- and world-building powers by the end, like I often am with Alistair Reynolds for instance, but I enjoyed the read.

I'm not sure whether I want to follow the series – will have to see what the blurbs say about which characters it follows and whether the plots sound interesting. The characters in The Quantum Thief weren't very likeable, but that didn't matter for it as a standalone. It fit the plot.

The quantum physics part wasn't as integral and interesting as, say, in Spin State by Chris Moriarty, but the detective story angle of much of the plot kept things moving, with some pretty unexpected twists and turns.

Before that, I read Elizabeth Hand's sequel to Generation Loss, which I liked a lot despite how grim it got. The sequel, Available Dark, is equally death-obsessed and macabre, but not gratuitously. Death metal, vinyl collecting, and photography, what more could one want... except stark Norway and Iceland settings.

The protagonist, Cass, is a photographer and aging New York punk with a lingering habit. She has a believable enough mix of good and bad qualities to allow her to make the bad choices needed to get her into deep trouble, to provide jeopardy. I like her despite myself, since writing aging punk characters in SFF is like pandering to aging SFF-loving punx like me. The mystery plot also kept me guessing, and stayed surprising.

Now I'm on to The Businessman by Thomas Disch, which I took awhile to get to but have been plowing through quickly now that I started. His wit is truly wicked, and some of his language just hits the mark where something plainer, used to make the same observations, would not have the same effect.

Volodya!

We went to see the Russian movie "Elena" last night at the Mpls St Pl International Film Festival.  It was very tense instead of coming off as melodramatic, despite the soap operaish plot.  The director let you wait and spin out all the possible scenarios that could happen next, just long enough to make it suspenseful, even though nothing was really a surprise.  Interesting.

The waterfront is really beautiful at night.

Have I mentioned

that Newsweek bugs me?  Why they're sending it to me is a mystery. 

I'm reading a book that just got to the part about the emergence of feminist agitation from within the New Left back in the late 60's, and... yeah.

Tulips

My friend's dad is the Johnny Appleseed of tulip bulbs.  Voila.

Hadrian's Gate

The new apartment complex we don't need in Standish-Longfellow, based on the vacancy rate...  Very interesting use of a minimal, odd-shaped lot though.

Last works

An interesting collection of last works:  Endpiece.  Eva Hesse, Keith Haring, Max Ernst, and more.

I am immersed in Elizabeth Hand's sequel to Generation Loss, Available Light.  It really moves.  If you can hack death metal, Weegee, and Norse sacrificial mythology in the seedy underbelly of Iceland, I highly recommend it.  It's a good companion to Sontag's twin works on photography, as well.  Putting the theory into action. 

I haven't been willing to read or view The Girl Who series, being tired of certain overused thrillerish trappings, but they might share turf, I dunno.  Hand is very readable, that I can vouch for...

Crazy flowers

Don't they know it's going to frost?