between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Kate Elliott (kateelliott), "Looking for women in historically-based fantasy worlds."

...[W]omen found ways to accomplish plenty of “things” big and small, personal and political. Maybe they did it behind a screen, or around the corner, or in the back room or in a parlor, or ran the brewery they inherited from a deceased husband, but they did all kinds of stuff that was either never noticed or was elided from historical accounts. So much of our view of what women “did” in the past is mediated through accounts written by men who either didn’t see women or were so convinced (yes, I’m looking at you, Aristotle, but you are but one among many) that women were an inferior creature that what they wrote was not only biased but selectively blind. Even now, in “modern” day, so much is mediated by our assumptions about what “doing” means and by our prejudices and misconceptions about the past.

Foz Meadows, "The Problem of R. Scott Bakker."

Or, to put it another way, Bakker writes:

-for an exclusively male audience,
-in the male gaze,
-using sexualised evil commited by men against women,
-in pornographic detail,
-in the apparent belief that rape is an inevitable part of male psychology,
-with the deliberate aim of omitting strong female characters

and doesn’t understand why feminist readers characterise him as sexist and misogynistic; or, at the absolute least, not feminist. Indeed, the idea that writing positively both for and about women is integral to being a feminist writer seems never to have occurred to him.

And interesting juxtaposition on my reading list this morning, don't you think?

Came up in conversation today: the part that luck plays in our teachers, and our experience of learning.

Two people, same school, three years apart. One feeling that her education pushed in the direction of being "little wifey," sufficiently well-rounded to complement a man, at least one of whose teachers found her intimidating. The other did not find her education universally challenging, but never felt that it diminished her.

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Also, I have made a fool of myself for the internet's entertainment on the Skiffy and Fanty Show podcast. Go forth and throw rotten fruit.

jennygadget asks: What's at the core of the (fantasy) genre?.

What would you consider “core genre?” Both in terms of definition and representative titles?

(the genre of the book in question is fantasy, but really I'm more curious how people define any genre - especially the kinds of stories that are "central" vs. along the edges, so answer as your whims take you)

Does this term even make any sense to you?

I'm not all that sure. I think it's more of a line of descent and sprawling family tree, myself. But it's an interesting question. (I like those.)

ObDisclaimer: I'm writing this post from a position of relative privilege and I know it. /ObDisclaimer.

Yesterday, riding the train to town, I noticed something that perhaps should be obvious. It is this: body-language and culture are linked on a very basic level. I noticed this because Ireland is still mostly made of pale people, and yesterday three nice code-switching bilingual melanin-rich teenagers in headscarves, together with a child of about ten, got on the train and sat opposite me.

The town I live in is 40% non-native Irish, some of whom have been here long enough to be naturalised citizens. But the nice Polish people and the nice various different African people have various different body-language cues and cues of facial expression that my lizard-brain reacts to as not from around here, and I have to consciously step on the instinctive suspicion of those funny foreigners. (It does this with people from certain cultural areas of Dublin, i.e. the wealthy parts, and Americans, too. Non-archaeologist Americans, at least. The lizard-brain is a suspicious organ.)

I hadn't realised it was subliminal body-language and facial expression more than phenotypal difference (yes, there are differences of phenotype among pale Europeans, which such insular parochial sorts as we Irish notice) until these nice teenagers got on, codeswitching between (I think) a dialect of French and Hiberno-English, and my lizard-brain said My people! They come from here!

Which got me thinking about body-language cues and their relationship to culture. Which is something I should have noticed before, because I have friends from all over. But the body-language of geeky emotional intimacy among my history-and-otherwise-geek peers - philia, not eros - is a lot more tactile than Irish culture at large, it seems to me. So when I went to Greece, where people touch your arm all the time to get your attention, and where there is hugging of all kinds between men and so on and so forth, I didn't really parse it properly as cultural rather than individual difference.

Anyway. It was an interesting realisation.

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An intriguing paper on why tornados and hailstorms are less frequent on weekends in the US tornado belt via jlake.

Worth a look.

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I think I am going to go see Ghost Protocol tonight, because I want to watch some shit blow up. Also, my brain is growing back, but it's still not up to actual work. Foolish meatpuppet. Needing rest, of all things!

Everybody's afraid of something.

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This week, I'm more afraid than usual. Leading, yesterday, I had the bone-deep conviction I was going to fall and break bones, if not my neck. I could feel it, every time I reached for a clip. My stomach and my shoulders were too tight, my arms too loose, my hands not steady or certain enough, my foot placement more tentative than usual.

I'll improve, with practice. I'm even thinking I might be prepared to try leading on of the gentler 6As in a week or two. Eventually, I'll get over the conviction that my incompetence will doom me, because already I'm growing more competent, and growing into sureness of my competence. Physically, I feel more sure and powerful than I've ever been. Physically.

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I don't know if you heard about our drastic April budget, or the fact that the Irish economy is projected to contract by eight percent more in the next twelve months. I don't know if you've heard that the unemployment rate is already at ten percent of adult able population.

I am not sanguine about my prospects of self-sufficiency in the near-to-medium future. It's a good time to be a student parasite on the body politic; a bad time to be looking for work, or funding.

It's not a good time to do poorly.

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I'm reading Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and thinking about history, and perspective, and language, and bad things happening to unobjectionable people. I have an assignment to write for my class on Jewish Diasporas, about the treatment of aspects of Jewish Diaspora identity by the author, and I am thinking about the extent of my ignorance, and about being the child of an incredibly parochial society, and about the moral standing of academics to examine and pronounce upon the lived experience of people yet living or not very long dead.

And about whether this is more or less problematic than that of the academics who examine and pronounce upon the lived experience of people dead for hundreds of years.

We are always looking through a funhouse mirror, at ourselves, and at the Other. Even when we deny that there is an Other, when we claim we think of people, not objects, or statistics, or dusty theoretical models.

Literature is especially slippery that way. It gets under your skin, and itches.

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I don't know if you've ever been asked to sit down with part of the New Testament, give your own exegesis, and also sketch out how it's been interpreted by others over the centuries. I find it opaque, and baffling, and frustrating. The letter of Paul to the Romans, chapter 11, is my present nemesis, and all I can think, reading it, is that Paul wanted very desperately to believe.

He's an angry, shouty, arrogant, occasionally patronising little saint. His justifications for what he believes are elaborate, contradictory, and occasionally confused, and he makes reference to the previous Jewish writings with very little concern for context. And yet, I would like him so much better if so many people today did not take him so seriously as an Apostle of the One True Revealed Religion, if they did not refuse to see him in his context, and the context of his times.

For Paul is very much a product of Second Temple Judaism. Far more than he's a 'Christian' as we understand the term, he's a Judaean, a product of a particular class and time in the history of Yahwistic monotheism, and the apocalyptic 'apocrypha' associated with it in the first century CE. Reinterpreting the previous writings out of context was a perfectly valid act for him, and the expectation that the world was in or entering its final period perfectly understandable. Paul did not think it would be long before "the full number of the Gentiles is gathered" and "all Israel will be saved". 1 Thessalonians gives the impression he expects it within his lifetime.

It annoys me, then, when the scholarly commentaries I have to read are uniformly Christian in their presuppositions, no matter how hard they try to maintain their objectivity and academic thoroughness. But I suppose it is only to be expected: the history of early Christianity, and Biblical scholarship, undoubtedly attracts Christians.

I wonder where all the godless atheists, like me, who do biblical studies end up?

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Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

I don't really remember much of Dune - I think I may have read it when I was twelve, but I tend to ascribe a lot of books whose individual when I can't recall to that year* - but the litany against fear sticks out in my memory: the test scene made an impression.

I come back to my fear, again and again, as - you might say - a dog returneth to his vomit. It's very familiar to me by now, if never comfortable.

Fear is real. Fear is key. Fear is a friend. Fear is what drives success. Fear is a devil. Fear is a lie.

I'm afraid of uncertainty. I'm afraid of discomfort. I'm afraid this comfortable tissue-tower of compromise and security that makes up my life will one day shatter. I'm afraid it's my fault. I'm afraid I'm unlucky. I'm afraid I'm just lucky enough.

I'm afraid it's all quite baffling to me, to be honest.

Uncertainty never goes away: it's a basic principle of the universe**. But I think I am growing, or stumbling - it may be the more apropos word - up. Insofar as up is a term that admits of definition.

I'm already growing into better understandings of my competence, I think, and the ways in which my competence may be persuaded to grow.***

I'll improve, with practice.

Practice. Now there's a helpful, hopeful thought.

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*Glorious 1998! Alas for the Spice Girls, and Boyzone, otherwise you might be year of sublime perfection in the golden fields of my memory.

**"Certain physical quantities, like position and momentum, cannot both have precise values at the same time. The narrower the probability distribution for one, the wider it is for the other." I approve of Wikipedia. It's useful.

***I'm also trying to grow into a better person, but, you know, that's one of those hard things.

Cataloguing the Arch Soc/Class Soc library: still not done. On the other hand, I brought biscuits, and there was conversation, and fun: the committee is stacked to the geek end of the student pool (case in point: we had Stargate jokes and Dune jokes and Princess Bride jokes, and only one person doesn't get the references).

Climbing: sent the blue 5 route, the orange 5 and the yellow 4 back-to-back; scrabbled my way up the red 6a feeling weak and failworthy, but improved the grey 6a. I like that dyno move: it's good fun, and I'm getting better at it. I am also figuring out how to do the last couple of moves of the black 6a with the undercling: I suspect the solution is to ignore the undercling, get my feet up higher, and go up with the left rather than the right hand. (The right hand grip is the first two fingers in a hole in the hold. It is not excellent, but far more stable than the undercling.)

Failed of the blue 6b, of course, without even getting as high as on Monday. But I kind of expected that. That Friday feeling, of course.

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Everyone's afraid of something, right?

It occured to me today that my - not an obsession, precisely, but definitely a need - my need to be doing exercise, to be fit, strong, able to run at least a couple of miles... it's related to fear. (It also feels really good to be strong and fit - endorphins are made of win, as they ought to be - but bear with me, okay?) I've been living with the constant, albeit purely psychological, need to prove myself 'worthy' (do not, I implore you, ask what that means: I am beyond ever thinking I can define it) for years.

Physical stuff, unlike academic stuff or writing stuff or people stuff, gives me measurable, quantifiable improvement that relies in the final estimation on me, not on other people's judgement. It's like the biscuit I can give the nagging sense at the back of my mind: Shut up. See there? Better than last week. Look, we're doing okay here.

Which is why, I guess, if the choice is between spending my time climbing and running and falling over dead when I get home, or spending my time writing? (And that is where the choice is, these days, mostly. My time is sadly not infinite.) I'm going to do the physical stuff.

This is my Deep Realisation (tm) for the week.

I realised a thing today.

I'll always think of myself as Irish. But I am beyond done with the general tone of the culture here.

I realise I spend most of my time in a very unusual environment. In my religions and theology and ancient history classes, I'm surrounded by geeks, by people who value knowledge for the sake of knowledge and not necessarily for its functionality. Half my Greek class is gay. There are fellow atheists, and other non-Christian types, and the odd person or two who'll start a conversation about slash and fanfic. Even the well-muscled boys at the wall are physics and engineering postgrads. The internets are full of congenial types, and trollishness can (mostly) be avoided.

And then I stick my nose back out into the land of middle-income middle-class Ireland, and the stupid, it burns. I mean, I'm clever, but I'm no genius. I know stuff, but not nearly enough. I understand some, but sometimes I'm thick as two short planks about things, but when I fuck up and be an insensitive ass, I do try to do better when it's pointed out to me, you know?

But it takes effort, or it ought to, to be that self-satisfied in one's lack of knowledge and lack of desire to acquire it, as so many people are. I mean, I don't expect people to be perfect? But when I walk past a busstop and I hear a knot of people talking about fags and lesbos and Nigerians -

It makes me very angry. People of a certain age have the excuse of unfamiliarity: the world's changed a lot since they were young, and it's very hard to let go of the things you grew up assuming were true (I should know: I got myself a whole raft of Catholic hangups about sex that most Catholics don't even get anymore), but guys, you're young. But not that young. You don't have that excuse.

And don't even get me started about the newspaper opinion writers. Who get paid for their offensive bullshit, even if it's not as obvious.

Okay, enough venting.

It just annoyed me more than usual today, because I had some great conversations with good people about identity and social constructions thereof in the context of the Roman and Greek world. About how you can't see history as always progress and how historical people are not any less intelligent because the lens through which they viewed the world, the things which they accepted as self-evident, are utterly/mostly/very/slightly different to ours. About how you can't romanticise history, but you can't see it all as mud and disease and war and death, either. About how we are not necessarily better than our forebears, even if we are different in ways that we see as good.

Nor can we say we're not better, of course: as I said to K., history'd be a fine place to visit, but if someone invents a magic time machine, I'd be stopping off for a sex-change before taking a trip back to have a look at my much-loved Greeks and Romans.

But that sort of thing carries over. And once you learn to look at things in context, to insert yourself as far as possible into the mindset of a Hellenistic Greek or a 1st century Roman or a Judean living in Egypt to better understand how they look at the world and what mattered to them, it's kind of hard to un-learn that, or to fail to apply it to the world around you. There are no absolutes, only people. And understanding context is everything.

This is easily one of the sharpest, smartest, and most ambiguous television series I've seen in years.

Andrew Buchan plays John Mercer, a former special forces soldier who spends five years in prison for murder. His early release is arranged by Lenny Douglas (Peter Mullan), a former police officer who now runs an extra-judicial task force aimed at combating organised crime. Mercer's continued freedom is contingent on his role as this group's hitman.

Jody Latham turns in a sharp performance as Calum, a cheeky chap who does 'this and that' for Lenny. His main interests are drugs, girls and music, but over the course of the six episodes we see an increasingly complex damaged young man underneath. Tamzin Outhwaite as Rose, a former copper who departed the force in scandal, gives an uncomfortably well-realised and complex portrayal.

Mercer's increasingly complicated and ambiguous relationship with both Rose and Lenny and the job they're doing is the heart of the thing. His relationship with his sister (Liz White) and her children is his sole tie to a normal life, and Mercer becomes less and less comfortable with the nature of his work and all the things Lenny holds back, especially after his encounter with Lenny's former hitman, now an uncontrollable spree murderer.

The series is an argument about the justifiability of vigilanteism, and flawed people doing morally questionable things in the conviction that they're necessary. It's beautifully shot and lit - one of the producers on the 'Making Of' DVD extra said that they were trying for an atmosphere of 'poetic realism', and that's actually a pretty apt description - and it doesn't take the easy way out of the hard questions.

Apparently, it's coming back for a second series. I hope it manages to keep up the tightrope-walk of ambiguity, complexity, and self-awareness while still keeping its characters both sympathetic and real: I have high hopes it might just manage to pull it off.

It's truly excellent television, and I seriously recommend it.

Today, I feel like a fraud pretending to be a writer. Actually, right now I feel like a fraud at personhood, so I'm assuming that the sensation will depart shortly.

This despite the fact that the sun shone, I went for a walk on the beach and brought a picnic, and then went blackberrying on the way back.

Railways are most fruitful bramble grounds.

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Three things to think upon:

First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak -- Epictetus

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. -- Frederick Douglass

Four stages of competence