Debbie N.

03:07 pm: Hermit Spring
light_of_summer woke up her diary here for what she is calling #hermitspring, and it seemed like it might be a good idea to do the same.

Is anyone out there listening? Check in if you are. I just glanced at my reading list after many years, and it looks like quite a few of you are still active, which is heartening.

I am wired extremely poorly for this kind of social isolation. But don't worry, I am wired for scientific pragmatism and I am doing what has to be done, and finding what workarounds I can.

Based in part on the advice of a friend who is a lay expert, I had been believing that small gatherings (4-6 people, in person, with care) were going to be okay, so the shelter-in-place rules for the Bay Area came as a huge shock, and I had a hard day on Monday, including collapsing into tears on the phone with a dear friend. But sine then (two actual days of the three-week initial planned shelter), I have been doing really well. I never thought I would be relieved to have put off retirement, because having a job and a five-day-a-week schedule is helping immensely. My employer is also being extremely thoughtful and responsive, and my colleagues are setting up video chats just for check-ins, as well as for work.

My partner and I live in a two-story duplex, and our downstairs neighbors (who are the tenants of the third homeowner) are long-time friends of ours. We've declared that the three of them (mom, dad, 7-year-old kid) are part of our pod and we aren't observing social distancing with each other, which means we can have dinners together, and I can help homeschool Kai, which is also helping me.

Walks every day, sometimes with Alan and sometimes alone. T'ai chi practice (well, one day out of four). House projects, because I dread having this be over and feeling like I threw the time away.

Lots of talks with friends.

Starting to plan some virtual events: tried some gaming-by-Zoom last night and it worked well, planning some "watch the same theater performance at the same time from different houses" and chat about it.

Keeping up with my political work.

I know what you're doing to stay healthy, and not to spread whatever you might have. What are you doing to stay sane? 







Tags: #hermitspring

01:55 pm: Wednesday Reading Is Eclectic
Martin Duberman's Stonewall has been kicking around my house for a long time before I finally picked it up. The book was updated in 1993, which means the update is a quarter of a century ago. Nonetheless, it stands as an excellent overview of the world of American (mostly urban) gay people just before, during, and after the Stonewall uprising. Duberman focuses on six specific individuals who took activist roles during that period, including three white men (Foster Gunnison, a rather stodgy, conservative "be respectable and win them over" character; Craig Rodwell, fairly far along the fire-breathing radical axis; and Jim Fouratt, sometimes a radical and sometimes a peacemaker), along with Yvonne Flowers (a black woman sometimes left out of both black issues and women's issues), Karla Jay (a lesbian activist) and Ray Sylvia Rivera, one of the drag queens at the heart of the Stonewall uprising.

The author traces each of them from childhood through young adulthood and into and out of politics (all were still alive in 1993 when the book was updated). That was never my world, and I was 18 when Stonewall happened, but from what I know he does a very good job of humanizing all six of them, and being fair to their different perspectives, desires, and approaches. He also uses their stories to build a wider history of the development of gay activism in that period. I enjoyed it; I learned a lot; and I couldn't stop wondering what all of them would say if they knew gay marriage would be nationally legalized within less than 50 years of what they did.

***

Rereading old Ursula K. Le Guin is fascinating. I've never been quite as much a fan of the Earthsea books as of the science fiction (in general, I like science fiction better than fantasy). A Wizard of Earthsea is, of course, beautifully written, full of treasures, and on occasion deeply moving. However, Ged himself is not a very likable protagonist, which I didn't remember. I found myself wondering, in fact, if Le Guin made him unlikable because her intention was to have him confront, in the most literal sense, his Jungian shadow.

The book is very description-heavy and very distanced. None of the characters, including Ged, come through strongly as individuals, except perhaps Vetch toward the end of the book. Genly Ai of Left Hand is, in contrast, a much more fleshed-out character, as is Shevek of The Dispossessed and the protagonists of the stories in Four Ways to Forgiveness.

I will go on to reread the other Earthsea books over time, and am especially looking forward to the author's later-life additions, but I have to say that this one was only intermittently satisfying, which surprised me.

***

Currently reading The Boy on the Bridge (prequel to The Girl with All the Gifts) by M.R. Carey, which is hard to put down. And about to pick up The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford for a long-overdue re-read.

What about you? 



Tags: martin duberman, reading, ursula le guin

12:50 pm: technology retrospective
This is going around; I got it from nanila. Just to be clear, I am 66 years old and, like nanila , I am changing the questions from "what age were you" to "when did you."

1.  Did you have a cell and/or mobile phone prior to your thirties? Did they exist?
They did not exist, so I didn’t have one.

2. Did you have cable when you were a little kid? When did you first get cable?
The first time I ever had cable TV was starting last year, when Alan and I acquired a free large TV from a friend, and set it up to do a variety of TV-type things we had never done before, including cable. Prior to that, we had been using our old non-cable-enabled TV as a big DVD player.

3. Do you know what 8-track tapes are and did you ever own an 8-track tape player?
Yes, I know what they are. No, I never owned one.

4. Did you own cassette tapes and walkman or tape player in high school and college university?
I had the kind of bulky portable cassette player that was intended for taking to the beach, but most of my music was on vinyl.

5. When did you get your first DVD player?
I don’t know; maybe about 25 years ago?

6. Did you learn how to type on a typewriter? Did you own a typewriter growing up?
Yes and yes. In college, I had a very early portable electric typewriter, which everyone wanted to use. We were in a cold community and the typewriter would stop working if it overheated, so many of my friends and I typed our papers in our winter coats with the windows open to keep the typewriter cool.

7. What was the first computer you owned?
When I was living with my first partner in Berkeley in the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s, we bought a computer which I could no longer describe, except that it very excitingly had two disk drives and a modem. I don't remember when we acquired it, but I know where we were living, which is how I can guesstimate the time period.

8. When did you first get email?
When I got the computer described above.

9. When did you first encounter the internet?
The internet, or the World Wide Web? My first internet account was on GEnie, again on the computer described above. When the Web was brand new (1994-ish), people started describing it to me and I didn’t understand what they meant, but someone showed me shortly thereafter, and it wasn’t long until I was using it, at least somewhat.

10. When did you start using Facebook, Twitter, and Dreamwidth, and Livejournal started?
I used Facebook for a short period in 2009, for weird reasons, but quickly got off again. I miss the information transfer I hear about from other people, but am really glad not to be there. I got on LiveJournal in the early 2000s, and Dreamwidth when it got started. Sometime in the late 2000s, I started using Twitter for a couple of organizations I was involved with, but I didn’t get my own account until 2017.

11.  What was your first cell mobile phone? Have you ever owned a smartphone?
My first mobile was pre-flip-phone but I was quite a late adopter. Now I hate to imagine living without my iPhone. nanila says: “I would be just as agitated about not being able to find my phone as I would be if I couldn’t find my wallet or my keys.” Me, my keys and my billfold are attached to my phone.

12.  What was the first printer like and the paper that you used when you got your very first computer? Could it print photos -- the first printer you worked on or owned?
My previous partner and I bought a laser printer (which almost no one had as a home device) at a charity auction at Potlatch 1, which the Internet says was in 1992. It weighed a ton and we got it home from Seattle with some trouble. I’ve had laser printers of one sort or another at home ever since. All the printers I've ever owned personally use plain white paper, not that nasty coated paper.

13. When you were in college university, freshman and sophomore years, did you type on a computer or type-writer?
See 6 above.

14.  When did you start using streaming?
I’ve never used streaming much, and I don’t know. I do have a Pandora (free) account which I've had for probably 10 years, and I use it occasionally.

15. What age were you when you got your first MP3 Player? Do you even own one?
Alan bought me an iPod somewhere in the late 2000s. I never got good at using it, and now it’s hooked to a good speaker for music in the living room.

 16. Did you own a record player, cassette player, CD player or MP3 player as a kid or teen?
 My family owned a "hi fi unit" when I was a kid. I later owned a portable cassette player/radio (see above). I think I also had my own turntable; certainly, my roommates and I had one in college.

17.  When did you start blogging on the internet?
On LiveJournal in the early 2000s, and with laurieopal at Body Impolitic probably around the same time.

18. E-book reader -- when did you get one?
I have never owned a dedicated e-book reader. I've had a tablet for about seven or eight years, and I do read e-books on it, including my current book. I keep some e-books on my phone and read them when other diversions or better readers (or print books) are not available or not feasible.

19. How do you listen to music? On what devices?
I do not listen to anywhere near enough music, and it is a lack in my life. That being said, I listen to podcasts addictively on my phone, and also sometimes through Pandora.

 

Tags: history, technology

01:12 pm: This Modern World
In the last few days, I

1) learned that I had frequent flyer miles that would expire if not revitalized by the end of April
2) tried to use them for travel in May, hoping that trying to use them would revitalize them
3) Paid for new travel for May, hoping that paying for travel would revitalize my miles
4) Found out the miles only revitalize once you've completed the new travel
5) Looked at other ways to revitalize miles
6) Opted to make a purchase (of something I needed, but would have bought locally) from a big box office supply store through the airline connection, to revitalize the miles.
7) Added something extraneous that I wanted but didn't need to my order to get free shipping on the main office supply purchase
8) Have been told that I will have revitalized miles in 2-4 days.

Commerce didn't always work like this.



Tags: 21st century, airline miles, commerce

11:10 am: Reading Wednesday is Expansive
I finished Nemesis Games (Book 5 of the Expanse). In this one, James S. A. Corey (pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) provide a Big Event that may, in fact, be the Biggest Event in the history of space opera. And in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won't tell you what it is.

Suffice it to say that the four crew members of the Roci have all gone their separate ways. The ship is in dry dock being repaired after the enormous damage done to it in Cibola Burn. Alex takes off to try to gain closure on his failed marriage. Amos learns of a death on earth, and feels that he needs to follow up. Naomi gets a mysterious request from an old lover which she can't ignore. Holden is left alone on Tycho, supervising repairs.

The authors play these four story lines out for a little while before dropping their bombshell.

I am not fond of storylines where people going in different directions eventually come together, but this is more plausible than most, partly because the Big Event is So Big. I liked finding out a lot about Alex's, Amos's, and Naomi's histories. The writing continues to be excellent, the story lines compelling, and the moral underpinning valuable. I was especially struck by a moment in which Naomi says (I think this works out of context):

Resonated with me in our current polarized country (which, of course, is where Abraham and Franck are writing).

Currently reading: Stonewall by Martin Duberman, and Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. Le Guin. Up next, almost certainly, The Boy on the Bridge by M. R. Carey (all these Careys and Coreys are confusing me).


Tags: james s.a. corey, reading

11:59 am: Cooking Extravaganza
Why do I feel like I've been doing dishes for three days? Here's why.

Friday morning, Alan made his weekly two loaves of artisan sourdough bread (this involves mostly prep on Thursday, baking Friday morning).

Friday evening, we had pork chops and salad for dinner, a simple familiar house dinner. After that, we did what we call "big cook," which is sauteeing and roasting the vegetables from our local farm box, which comes on Wednesdays. We missed big cook last week, so we had a lot to deal with:

• spinach, kale, and chard, all of which he sauteed (separately) with garlic
• beets, carrots, and leeks, all of which I roasted
• a big cabbage, which I made half of into curtido. Curtido is a vinegary Salvadorean cabbage salad with carrots and garlic and jalapeno, which I adore. The other half of the cabbage could certainly have been roasted, but will probably end up being part of a Thai peanut and cabbage salad

We got the idea of "big cook" from Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal, a book he randomly picked up at pantryslut 's house a few years ago. We've been doing it for three or four years, and we find it makes meals (especially lunches) during the week really easy.

Saturday, I made chicken broth with a couple of chicken carcasses I had frozen after we ate the chickens, plus leek tops and various soup vegetables. I also made a batch of marinated broccoli and (more) carrots, with a simple Chinese garlic and ginger marinade. He made carnitas from pork shoulder, and cooked up a batch of pinto beans.

This morning, I made our usual Sunday morning breakfast: bacon and an omelette of veggies from big cook plus cheese, toast from the homemade bread. He refried the pinto beans from yesterday, so now we have everything we need for Salvadorean pupusas during the week (masa harina dough filled with carnitas, refried beans, and cheese, and the curtido as the traditional side dish).

We are both cooks, but we rarely do quite so much in a few days. And since the division of labor is he cleans the cast iron and handles everything about the dishwasher, and I do the hand-washed dishes, we've both been doing a lot to keep the kitchen tolerable.

*phew*







Tags: big cook, cooking

08:58 pm: Science Fiction Books for Adults
supergee points to Jo Walton's list of science fiction books for adults. Seems like a good one to explore.

Boldface: I've read it.
Underlined: I recommend it.

Ada Palmer Too Like the Lightning (2016) and sequels: I've read the first one and will read the next. Recommended with various complicated reservations, enough to keep me from flat-out recommending it.

C.J. Cherryh Cyteen (1987)

Samuel R. Delany Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1986): The only Delany novel I don't care for much, but I have long suspected this is my problem, not the book's, so I should re-read it in the foreseeable future.

Ursula K. Le Guin The Dispossessed (1974)

Gene Wolfe The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) and sequels

Robert Charles Wilson Spin (2006)

Karl Schroeder Lady of Mazes (2003)

John Brunner Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Greg Egan Permutation City (1994)

Octavia Butler Xenogenesis (1987): I would recommend other Butler novels over these; I feel that these are less labors of love and more intellectual pursuits than some of her other books. But there is no Butler that I wouldn't recommend.

Kim Stanley Robinson Icehenge (1984): Again, there are many Robinson novels I prefer to Icehenge, but there's only one Robinson novel I wouldn't recommend, and that's Galileo's Dreams.

Andreas Eschbach The Carpet Makers

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1993)

Candas Jane Dorsey Black Wine (1997): I corrected the spelling of Dorsey's last name here.

Raphael Carter The Fortunate Fall (1999)

Ken MacLeod The Star Fraction (1995) and sequels: I read The Sky Road some years ago and liked it, but have never made my way back to MacLeod, which is just a case of "so many books, so little time."

I have a very high opinion of Jo's tastes, so I need to get to some of the rest of these, most of which are on my "someday" list anyway.


Tags: jo walton, reading

10:27 am: Public Service Announcement
(viajames_davis_nicoll ).

Thousands more people read James than read me, but in case not everyone overlaps ... Laurie Marks' Elemental Logic e-books are on sale from Weightless. These are awesome books, and you might as well join me in hoping that she someday finishes Air Logic.





Tags: ebook sale, elemental logic, laurie marks

11:11 am: Wednesday Reading Reads on a Wednesday
The 57 bus runs through a long stretch of my home town of Oakland, including many very different neighborhoods and class levels. I ride it in two directions on most Sundays to visit some friends. So, naturally, I was interested in The 57 Bus: The True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives, by Dashka Slater.

In 2013, after school, Sasha, a white high school student, living outside of the gender binary, was wearing a gauze skirt and asleep in the back of the bus. A small group of black teenage high-school students were horsing around nearby. One of them, Richard, lit a match, and touched it to Sasha's skirt, which went up in flames. Sasha was seriously burnt, but not killed. Richard was arrested, and charged as an adult.

The story was apparently all over the news in Oakland when it happened, but I have no recollection of it. Dashka Slater has done a remarkable job of bringing both Richard and Sasha, along with their families, their friend groups, and their circumstances to life. Slater's account of their stories makes both teenagers sympathetic and likable, and it would seem that this was not a terribly difficult task, because both of them were (and are) remarkable people. Slater goes far afield to create context--for Sasha's pronouns, for Richard's environment, for the high schools they both went to and the worlds they both lived in. The book sparkles with teenage energy, teenage life.

How did Sasha recover? What happened to Richard? Read the book and find out; I didn't know when I picked it up, and that added to the suspense for me, even though I am generally spoiler-immune.

***

I expect to do a lot of Le Guin re-reading this year, and I started where I would start, with The Left Hand of Darkness.

"I will tell my tale as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that truth is a matter of the imagination."

Thus begins this novel. I've probably read it all the way through at least six or seven times since I first encountered it, a few years after it was published. It remains, to my mind, one of the finest novels ever written.

This re-read was very surprising to me, because I think it is the first time I've read the book when the gender issues weren't the forefront of the story for me. If anyone doesn't know the story, it takes place on a planet where humans were genetically engineered thousands of years in the past to be ungendered three weeks out of each month, and then to go into estrus (kemmer) and assume either a male or female gender for that period. Thus, anyone can become pregnant, anyone can do any job, and people spend most of their lives gender-free.

Of course, this was amazingly groundbreaking when the book was written in the late 1960s and is still startling today. And it will always be a key part of the story. But I've reached the point where I've delved far enough into that aspect of the story to be familiar and unsurprised. So I was able to read the book as centering on the mysticism of the Gethenians, the friendship between the two main characters, and so many other things -- not new aspects, because I read this book carefully when I read it, but newly emphasized.

If you've missed it, you're in for a treat. If you know it well ... re-read it. You're in for a treat.

***

Currently reading; Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey



Tags: dashka slater, reading, ursula le guin

03:24 pm: Reading Wednesday Is Way Behind
Honestly, I didn't stop posting because you all had such good answers to my what-to-post questions. I stopped posting because I got too busy to read DW, and I won't post if I'm not caught up. But here it is still Wednesday, and I have a long stack of books to comment on.

***

(An even longer review of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay, of which this is an excerpt, can be found at at Body Impolitic), where I blog with laurieopal .

I have been a body image activist since the early 1980s. I have heard people’s body image stories, told my body image stories, led workshops where people tell their body image stories, edited body image stories for print. Doing this work for much of a lifetime, one of the many things I have learned is that while your story is not, is never, cannot be my story, your story nonetheless overlaps and strengthens and connects to my story in hundreds of places.

So that takes us to Roxane Gay, who has perhaps written the most powerful body image story ever told. Having made that statement, let me say what I don’t mean:

Gay, as she is extremely careful to stress, is not the victim of The Worst Trauma. She is precisely aware of her privileges and the ways she is lucky.

She is not, and is not trying to be, a stand-in for every other fat woman; her story is her own, not mine, and not anyone else’s.

Hunger is not a book about miraculous healing, or a road map for other fat and/or traumatized women to find healing.

The book has no new information, and doesn’t contain much that is surprising to someone who inhabits the world of fat activism.

What makes this book such a punch in the gut is that Hunger ranks high among the most nakedly honest books ever written. Whether Gay is reliving the story of her childhood, talking about her family, recounting relationships, or just telling every fat woman’s story of going to the doctor, she never for one second takes the easy way out. She never tells a simple version of the truth: the truth is always complex, thick, interwoven.

We live in a world where physical nakedness is easy currency, although its implications are extremely contextual and complicated, and the physical nakedness of fat women is fraught indeed. But Gay’s determination to be emotionally as naked as a human being can get is far from easy.

Just as everyone’s story is individual and unique, our stories all also overlap on each other. They intertwine and diverge and reconnect. And when they are brilliantly told, they reflect so much more than one person’s story. Without ever taking a moment to speculate on whether or not her truth is related to anyone else’s truth, Gay opens a window on human truth in general; she focuses unrelentingly on her own story, and by doing so models how each of us can see ourselves.

Read the book (if you can stand a graphic description of pre-teen sexual trauma, and an unflinching examination of its results). Read it whether you’re a lifetime body image activist or completely new to the concepts. Rarely will you find a book more worth your time and attention.

Lots of people (including me) will respond to this book by wanting to reach out and make a connection with Roxane Gay. If you have that reaction, and you follow through, I’m personally asking you now to make sure that whatever you send or say to her doesn’t ask for anything from her in return: not an acknowledgment of commonality, not a response, not advice, not comfort. She’s given us everything she has in this book, and you can be 100% sure that a great many readers are asking her for more, and everyone she has to turn away is a source of pain to her. Don’t be That Reader.

***
I'm not a Marvel reader, so I was missing a bunch of background which would have helped me understand the graphic novel Black Panther: The World of Wakanda written by Roxane Gay, Yona Harvey, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Rembert Browne, art by Afua Richardson, Alitha Martinez, and Joe Bennett. I'm still having some trouble figuring out who the good and bad guys are. (Maybe the movie will help?)

Anyway, the story itself is what you'd want from a Roxane Gay-written graphic novel (all kudos to her co-writers; I have no idea how they split up the work): layered, thoughtful, suspenseful, and erotic. I'm clearly going to need to read more in this series and in what I understand is Ta-Nehisi Coates' related series. But I hesitate to spend much money on graphic novels, which don't take much time to read for what they cost. (And they're not in my idiom, though I have come to appreciate them more and more over the years.)

***

Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is Becky Chambers' first novel, and in some ways it reads like one. It kept reminding me of the TV show Firefly, plus aliens (which are so much easier to do in books than in motion pictures). The two qualities that struck me most were the friendliness of it, i.e., how quickly I grew to feel connected to the characters and want them to do well, and Chambers' ability to make her aliens truly alien. In particular, fairly early on a couple of the aliens on the ship muse about how weird it is that humans place so much value on being happy, as if there was no value in the rest of the range of emotions. (I think this is actually more true of Americans than of humans, but it nonetheless felt like the kind of thing aliens might say to each other when humans weren't around.) She also has an alien whose pronoun is "they," and she (I suspect intentionally) uses that pronoun very differently than the gender-fluid/agendered community uses it, which was both disturbing and interesting.

One reason the book felt like a TV show is that it is very episodic. Some stories do build over the course of the book, but each chapter still feels like a complete story about one character, which is more or less finished by the end of the chapter.

I can pick nits here and there, and I don't especially love the episodic style, but I'm hooked, and will certainly read the next one. (Note to ladyjax : I did really enjoy this, and there is some mildly interesting gender stuff, other than Ohan's pronouns, but if I had been on the Tiptree jury, I would have wanted something with more centrality of gender.)

***

A handful of my very favorite writers and essayists leave me with only two questions, "Why didn't I say that?" and "How do you say things so well for me?" Rebecca Solnit is one of them. (Laurie Penny is another.)

The Mother of All Questions is the third of her short Haymarket books of essays. I loved Men Explain Things to Me and I still haven't read Hope in the Dark, though I seem to have acquired it three times in e-book. This one is interesting in part because it tackles the #metoo issues from before the recent cataclysm, in an essay that lauds both Aziz Ansari and Louis CK, both of whom have since been tarred with the #metoo brush. Nonetheless, Solnit was (as we all do) working with the facts she had at the time, and writing with her usual clarity, wit, patience, impatience, and grace.

The title essay is about the ongoing insistence of interviewers and questioners to ask her, and all childless women, about why they don't have children. Most of the rest of the book is about issues relating to sexual harassment, rape (and rape jokes), and the power and lack of power of women in the world. She is admirably careful to continually bring in the related issues of race, gender identity, disability, and other marginalizations, while still staying focused. Her "80 Books No Woman Should Read" and its sequel essay ("Men Explain Lolita to Me") are especially pointed and valuable.

Even when she isn't writing about hope, Solnit gives me hope in the dark.

***

Currently devouring The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater, which I read the beginning of in a proof copy in a friend's house. Bedside reading is The Left Hand of Darkness, and will probably be mostly Le Guin all year.



Tags: #metoo, becky chambers, rebecca solnit, roxane gay, ta-nehisi coates, wakanda