Just Another Day, Apparently

Had I needed to write down the date or heard it aloud on the radio or something, it likely would've sunk into this thick skull of mine that today is another Sept 11. But without those cues, today is just the day that I have to juggle transitioning my current DDJ responsibilities to colleagues with jetting up to Mesa with toddler in tow for a date with a rheumatologist.

As it was, the date didn't click until I read this brief but excellent post by Scalzi. In fact, it didn't click until I got a few comments in. I read Scalzi's post and figured it was a clever and sarcastic reference to some goings-on in the science fiction community that I, in my infinite lameness, had completely managed to miss. Being slightly more nice to myself, I also thought it might be one of Scalzi's random posts to serve as a way to get silly comments about imaginary events and such. Then my brain finally came around to the big picture.

Every now and then I'm surprised by how much humanity, while decrying the daily grind, seeks to get right back to the status quo at least in the space of our own minds.

Writing Lesson Mirrors Life Lesson

One of the first things I realized when I started examining my process was that I had to write down my musings, no matter how far from the mark they were. I also realized I needed to review said musings every now and then, keep the memory of those paths taken (or not taken) fresh to keep the story clear in my head.

Thus, I shouldn't have been surprised that, when I went to journal my recent "being a mom is HARD" frustrations, I found in the previous entry from two months ago analyses of the same insanity my mind is dishing out now along with affirmations to kick said insanity to the curb. Should've been reading my journal. Should've typed out those affirmations and kept them up for regular viewings (which is what I did upon seeing them again).

I'm sure this is not the only way in which the application of writing wisdom will be useful outside of writing. In fact, I should probably think about that some and maybe, I dunno, journal through the possibilities. Incidentally, the reason why I need to notebook explains why the concept of my journals as memoirs to be handed down or published drives me batty. My journals exist to remove all filters, to sort through the morass of stupidity that is my right brain and my left brain trying to find common ground. The handwriting is going to vary between neat and painful even to a doctor's eyes depending on the severity of the junk trying to purge itself. My journals are the worst of my rough drafts.

I don't really have a problem with someone reading these thoughts and musings, though I would prefer to be dead and gone should that happen (I'm much too steeped in my middle class/air force brat upbringing to want to shed all polite fictions of appearances as I live and breathe--right now, anyway). I have a problem with someone reading those journals as if they told a story with any sort of narrative thread. Because they don't. They never really pretend to. That's not to say that there aren't threads in there. They're just cut up into lots of pieces and scattered all over the place. I'm not sure I could go back and link things together, let alone an outside reader.

That's part of the reason why life can get so frustrating, though. It's such a bad rough draft, and we're creatures who crave coherent stories.

Scattered Thoughts on Reading Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber

I've had this collection of Carter's short stories and her book Love in my TBR pile for a while. I picked up The Bloody Chamber when I was doing research on the Interstitial Arts Foundation, particularly to figure out if my writing would be a match for their anthology. (Boy, howdy, not only was Carson's Learning just an unbelievably bad product once I was finished revising, it was also dripping so horribly with commercial fiction's lesser points that I will be shocked, shocked I tell you, if I learn that the poor IAF anthology sub readers got past the first page.)

I enjoyed the collection, though some of the stories struck me with that depressingly familiar head-scratching confusion I often get when I read short fiction. Each story is a retelling/re-imagining of a fairy tale or folklore trope. I could follow and enjoy the fairy tales much better than the folklore, most often due to the focus on wolves and werewolves. I never did get interested in that much, so I found myself lost in some of those stories.

Regardless of this reader's unfortunate inability to parse everything she read, it was quite clear that Carter is a master wordsmith. In fact, I'll likely reread many of these stories just to get a sense of how she created everyday images in non-everyday terms as well as evoking the fantastic just as well. Also, the establishing of character voice in "Puss-in-Boots" is a very compelling reason for a reread. Lots to learn, oh yes.

I think my favorite story is "The Bloody Chamber," for which the collection is named. It's a retelling of the Blackbeard story, which I've somehow managed to read a few renditions of without really intending to do so. At its heart, the base story is about women being punished for their curiosity despite having been all but told to be curious by the punisher (if I'm remembering the various dissections and discussions right). The lightest reading of it I've found is an erotic twist in which Blackbeard subjects his wife to a dungeon scene for exploring his naughty room. There is no death and no real pain or fear in that one.

Carter's "The Bloody Chamber," however, is very different, but it still keeps the kernel of the myth at its heart: the role a woman plays at the whim of a powerful man, including relinquishing her life into his hands. One detail of this story that my brain keeps dragging out to examine and seek more from this story is that the woman, a pianist, eventually starts an affair with the piano tuner Blackbeard has hired. From the moment of the consummation of their affair, the woman (in narration and in dialog) no longer calls the man by his name, she only calls him "my lover." In fact, he is one of only two characters who is ever named outside of their title or their relationship to the narrator. I find this fascinating and a brilliant tie-in to the themes of roles and selfishness and self-discovery the story employs.

A juxtaposition that caught my eye and worked to the detriment of one story and the enhancement of the other was the order of the two Beauty & the Beast retellings. The first, "The Courtship of Mr. Lyons" was fine, and I enjoyed it well enough, particularly how it twists the tale in on itself and almost has Beauty trap the Beast as such and possibly doom herself to the same fight through the sins of self-absorption and narcissism, exactly what got the Beast in so much trouble himself. But then I read "The Tiger's Bride," and the manner of that retelling of the same tale was far and above the better of the two that I can't help but think of "Courtship" as a light, fluffy story that doesn't really do much beyond a clever writer's trick.

The collection became a challenge for me, though, once I started "The Erl-King." I couldn't place the parent text. And the last line just thoroughly confounds me. Maybe I'll read something later that will clue me in. And then came the Snow White story "The Snow Child." I could offer a couple of readings on it, but they are so inextricably linked with my own particular experiences and viewpoint that I'm not sure they even approach the authorial intent, let alone the accepted literary wisdom. (Note to self: actually read some Carter litcrit soon.) The collection ends in a series of stories that run vampire-werewolf-werewolf/Red Riding Hood-werewolf/vampire/Alice in Wonderland set that, as I mentioned above, gets decently far away from my interests and background knowledge for me to comment much beyond, "Yes, good story, that."

A couple of tiny details I picked up on that I hope were intentional, but if not were beautiful accidents: the heavy use of the word "somnambulism" and its kin, and the tie-back toward the end of the last story to the first story with the use of the phrase "the bloody chamber."

I'm working my way through my mother's copy of Carter's The Sadeian Woman, a collection of non-fiction about the Marquis de Sade (which manages to be scintillating instead of squicky), and there is that copy of Love still sitting in the TBR pile that I'm looking forward to reading. I'm not sure I get the "interstitial" label that the IAF in particular is keen to give Carter, but most of my reading since the CL debacle has informed me that my idea of insterstitial is far too heavily grounded in commericial fiction to mesh with theirs.

Changing My Approach

Towards the end of Battlestar Gallactica's third season, I started to really not like the show. I had always griped about the brain-numbing dichotomy between the technology and medicine the show employs and also bemoaned the theme-bludgeoning. But toward the end of seaons three, it felt like characters I thought I understood suddenly started doing things solely for the sake of conflict and plot, acting out required roles to keep the story going forward rather than actually being themselves. I notices this first in that episode where Tyrol leads a workers strike. I just didn't believe that Tyrol, Adama, or Roslyn would've handled that situation in that fashion. It seemed to contradict the people we had been getting to know. By the time Starbuck died and we all knew that wasn't going to be real, I was really annoyed with the show. Then came the Trial of Baltar and Four Cylons Revealed Musical.

Gah.

By the end of the third season, I knew I didn't like the show, and I was starting to figure out why. The overall impression I got from BSG by then was of a show throwing everything but the kitchen sink at me to keep ratcheting up the conflict. There didn't seem to be a pattern or method to the plot hurling and character twists. Big huge sweeping arcs of drama were tossed my way and discarded for the next shiny thing that caught the show's eye. So what about the cylon baby? Now we've got TWO, and no one seems to care anymore. The cylons have a plan, you say? All we determined it to be was annihilation of the human race, but the Plan was implied to be something more than that. But that dwindled into nothing by the time we got the four new models (which the other models aren't even supposed to think about), and suddenly the cylons are squabbling over equal rights for Toasters and killing each other because said Toaster aren't doing their job in the Big Plan that seems to be nothing more than killing humans. Then there's the whole God thing which seems more and more like it's really just the fanatic ravings of Caprica Six in Baltar's Head (and where the hell is Imprisoned Caprica Six's Gaius in Her Head?).

This show feels more and more like one of my first drafts from a few years ago when I understood that I needed to build tension and conflict on each page but didn't understand how to keep tension and conflict linked from one part of the story to the next, so I kept throwing new plot twists and challenges at the book without figuring out how the story I started might twist and turn on its own. Recognizing the "I don't know what I'm doing" technique just made me cranky everytime I sat down to watch the show because I know from experience that the odds are not good that this show is going to resolve in any logical fashion, let alone a satisfying one.

But then something happened as I watched the first few episodes of season 4. I can't remember what it was that triggered the click, but I finally realized that this show isn't SF or even a space opera so much that it's a soap opera set in space. And we're talking Days of Our Lives type stuff with Marlena getting possessed and Stefano mind-wiping and controlling people and aliens arriving in Salem. No wonder it feels like kitchen-sinking. That's not to say that soap operas are inferior shows, it's just that soap operas are not for me. They are often plot-heavy to get the characters into greater and greater scales of conflict and tension in ways that resemble the random insanity of life. This is not bad, but it is not what I'm looking for in my narratives at the moment.

This realization means that I need to go back through the whole show from the very first episode and watch it as if it were a soap opera and not anything else. I have a feeling I'll like it a whole lot more that way if only because I've changed my expectations of the show. And I might be able to figure out if the show is intentionally modelling itself off of soap operas for some clever purpose or if it's just a soap opera in space, which means I might enjoy it more watching it from that set of expectations, but I won't enjoy it as much as I could had it not been just a soap opera in space. Regardless, I'll see if looking at the thing like it's a soap opera enhances my viewing experience tonight.

Note to Self: Watch a soap opera if only to look at that genre of story-telling and make sure I understand it as well as I claim above

Recent Gender Idiocies I Have Read

In the gender debate, I think the crux of the problem is that women are far less likely to be treated as people than men are. That is, society is more likely to have the following culturally ingrained and resistant to change: women are women first, not people while men are people first, men secondarily. (Where "women" and "men" means thought of in terms of their gender traits above all else.) It's a working hypothesis, one that I'm refining as I move about in the world and observe how others are treated and how I am treated.

So when I read items as linked below, I hold my hypothesis against theirs and get a few mind-boggling disparities.

The Open-Source Boob Project. How it all began: "This should be a better world," a friend of mine said. "A more honest one, where sex isn't shameful or degrading. I wish this was the kind of world where say, 'Wow, I'd like to touch your breasts,' and people would understand that it's not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful." I think it's odd that in pining for a world where sex is not shameful and degrading, someone thought a request to fondle would be an appropriate way to express esthetic appreciation of another's bod. Really, it strikes me more as a wish to bypass emotional intimacy and go straight to physical, which is hard to do without making physical intimacy objectifying, which is degrading.

A Rapist's View of the World: Joss Whedon and Firefly. Hard to know where to start with this one. It helps (for reading comprehension purposes alone) to know that the author considers any heterosexual intercouse to be rape because society has so conditioned women into thinking that their bodies belong to men and not themselves that they can never consent. I've heard about radical feminism and usually discounted the fear of it because it always came in the context of men calling the proponents "feminazis" which is not a good way to critique anything unless it involves actual genocide. However, wow. It's probably one of the most insulting things I've heard that by the very nature of my gender, I cannot think for myself in a sexual context unless I acheive the enlightenment of lesbianism. And that's saying something considering the next link.

Respectful Insolence Links to Someone Else's Misogyny. I can't even bring myself to link directly to the culprit in question or even directly state the man's real or fake name. He lives to run all over the internet with his fanbase and lay the smack down. I'd rather not boost my stats that way. While what this guy says is extremely misogynistic, it mostly boils down to a logical error, a conflation of correlation and causation mixed in with the refusal to discuss what lies at the heart of the trends he opines (see my introduction to this entire post above).

Note to Self: Gender Issues will outlast the cockroaches.