Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

My song is love unknown.

Here’s an unexpected tragedy of the commons:

The biggest single contributor to last fall’s Measure 36 campaign was an obscure east Portland company previously unknown in political circles.

That company, Christian Copyright Licensing International, contributed $410,000 ($200,000 of it in loans), nearly 20 percent of the $2.2 million raised by the Defense of Marriage Coalition. (The next-biggest backer was the national Christian group Focus on the Family.)

It’s part of Willamette Week’s rather dispiriting look at the infighting and fallout of same-sex marriage in Multnomah County, one year later. We do learn that anti–same-sex–marriage activist Tim Nashif, “a longtime Republican organizer” and CEO of Gateway Communications, “which makes its income by printing materials for political campaigns,” wants “reciprocal partnerships” in Oregon that would be “open to any two people not allowed to marry”:

“If it’s a question of people not being able to get benefits, let’s open benefits to anyone barred from marriage,” Nashif says.

And on the one hand, sure: I mean, it’s up to him if he wants to destroy marriage as he thinks he knows it within a generation, but so long as the benefits appertaining thereunto are available to all and sundry, regardless of race, creed, color, or sexual orientation, I’m down with that. What’s he gonna do, smack Chloe and Olivia on the wrist whenever they slip and talk about their marriage with their friends and family? I’m sorry, Bob and Ted—that’s a fifty-dollar fine for not using the sanctioned terminology for your relationship. —On the other hand, I smell a bait-and-switch: after all, Vermont anti-marriage activists want to replace that state’s civil unions with “reciprocal partnerships.” Some scrutiny of the fine print is called for.

Still, there’s something about a Christian ASCAP being such a big mover and shaker in the THOU SHALT NOT movement that tickles the husk of my funnybone. I mean, I don’t know that they’ve moved into the full-on protection racket aspect of the biz yet, calling up random churches and leaning on them for licensing fees, are you sure you’re covered? You’d better buy one, just to be sure, you know?

1. Photocopying. The Church Copyright License does not convey the right to photocopy or duplicate any choral sheet music (octavos), cantatas, musicals, keyboard arrangements, vocal solos, or instrumental works.
2. Copy Report. As a license holder, you will be selected to report your song copying activity once every 2-½ years. At that time you will receive a letter of notification along with a Copy Report booklet. The Copy Report will provide information about the length of the report period, and instructions on how to complete it. Your completed Copy Report is a vital element of the Church Copyright License, as it allows us to accurately process and distribute royalties to songwriters and copyright owners.
3. Congregational Single Songsheet (CSS). A CSS is a single song, which is found in a compilation of songs intended for congregational use (i.e., a hymnal or chorus book). These songs can be copied into bulletins, congregational songbooks, congregational songsheets, or placed on a slide or transparency. However, the above activity only applies if the song is covered under the Authorized List, and only if the purpose is to assist the congregation in singing. This is the only photocopying allowed under the Church Copyright License.
4. Copyright Notice. The Copyright Information you will find for each song needs to be placed on each copy you make, along with your CCLI License Number. If you are unable to display the copyright notice on a slide or transparency, because of lack of space, you may place the information on the frame.
5. Recording Services. One of the rights granted to you with the Church Copyright License is the right to record your worship service. This right includes recording your meditations, preludes, postludes, interludes, fanfares, handbell, vocal and instrumental specials. Please be sure to report these when it is your time to report on the Copy Report.
6. Rehearsal Tapes. If you would like to make rehearsal tapes for the purpose of having your choir or orchestra learn the music, you must contact the Copyright Administrator directly for this activity. There are no exceptions regarding this issue.

Seems to me it might be better to make a joyful noise in the public domain. More fitting, somehow, too.

My song is love unknown,
my Savior’s love to me,
love to the loveless shown
that they might lovely be.

—Filed 7648 days ago to Squawkbox; .

Why (those currently in charge of the) Republicans are evil.

This is related to what I believe is the Republican strategy to break any positive connection between citizens and government. The appointment of “Constitution in Exile” judges and the stripping of government of all revenues is part of the strategy. Even the horrendous Medicare prescription drug bill fits this strategy, in my theory, because in its arbitrariness, its cost, its “donut hole” where coverage is needed most, it will, when fully phased in, create only anger and frustration, not the positive associations that people have with a reliable, sensible insurance program like Medicare or Social Security. It is an “anti-entitlement,” the opposite of the guaranteed protections that entitlements can offer.

The positive theory that accounts will make people excited, entrepreneurial, wealth-accumulating owners, and thus Republicans, expresses one idea about human nature. The negative, anti-government theory embodies another: that people, unless desperate, will not rise up to demand what they don’t have and have never known. Here it’s useful to remember that Karl Rove’s historical parallel is the 36 years of Republican dominance from the McKinley election in 1996 to Hoover’s defeat. That was a brutal period in American economic life. Government offered nothing in the way of benefits for workers, minimal widows’ pensions, no aid for children, monetary policies that were cruel to farmers and regulatory laissez-faire that was cruel to workers. And yet, year in and year out, people took it, without question. It was the natural order of things. Only the greatest economic collapse in our history forced change. People generally don’t demand what they don’t have. When Social Security is gone, it will not come back, no matter how badly the accounts do. And people will not respond to its absence by becoming Democrats and demanding the restoration of an economic safety net for seniors. Rather, they will forget it ever existed and vote Republican, confirmed in their belief that government doesn’t do a damn thing for anyone.

—Mark Schmitt, the Decembrist

It is one thing to be mindful of the power of government; to use it carefully, perhaps sparingly, but to use it, realizing there are certain things that enrich us all that only collective action can accomplish.

It’s another to reject the power of government as water from a poisoned well—to say that nothing or almost nothing we do collectively is ever worth the price we all must ultimately pay. (Whether one says so adamantly or ruefully is really a matter of personal style.)

But to take the levers of that power yourself and do what you can to twist them, distort them, to cheapen and coarsen the lives of the people around you, to deliberately make us all worse off so that more and more will abandon the idea of collective agency and the common good? To poison the well yourself, merely so we’ll someday say that you were right?

(And so you might cadge a greasy buck or two. Or two trillion.)

—Filed 7649 days ago to Squawkbox; .

Unheimlichsenke.

Jed Hartman, who wrote that “Future of Sex” essay back in the summer of ’03, picks up some threads from recent discussions hereabouts and just hauls off and runs with ’em, handing me a real d’oh! moment in the process:

Though I would add that to some extent these days (thirty years after the Sanders novel was published), the presence of homosexuality in science fiction set in the future is more alienating than in contemporary-setting fiction, for a reason much like what I was talking about in my editorial: because there’s so much more homosexuality in the real world (and in contemporary fiction) than in SF set in the future.

Which, yes, of course, and I wish I’d said something to that effect. I started off on a very personal note with a TIME cover from back in a day when it was still possible without trying too terribly hard to grow mostly up in this country and not encounter the idea of same-sex love and desire and didn’t really look back up from it. —Things are different now: studies and anecdotal evidence both demonstrate that among the Youth of Today in America, there’s a marked jump in acknowledgement and acceptance of, and experimentation and experience with—humanity towards—alternate sexualities. At least insofar as gender preference goes. (I don’t know that we’ll be hitting gender-as-fetish anytime soon, but every little bit helps. —Will it hold, this humane attitude? After all, the Boomers were all about peace love and understanding, and look where they’re getting us now; we Gen-Xers, of course, were apathetic and disaffected underachievers, and look what we’ve got to fix. Backlash bites.) (Why, yes. That was a whole slew of unfair generalizations. Goodness.)

Where was I? —Oh. Right. So with this marked jump in humanity, why then does the future in our current fiction appear to be so darned straight? (And vanilla?) —To properly begin to frame an answer would take us all night and far afield; I’d suggest you start with Interlogue Four in “The Rhetoric of Sex/The Discourse of Desire,” when the pissed-off ventriloquized puppet takes over and rants for a bit—but I don’t want to tackle the big amorphous things Down There, crawling about the foundations to the tuneless tootling of shrill pipes; I want, for a bit, to pretend that history progresses; that there is a Big Picture; that with Metaphors I can construct Conceits and with Conceits I can grasp Concepts and shove them about to make pleasing Patterns that line up neat as you please, oh, I get it. So: first, I’d note that the fiction we’re finding wanting in this particular is outlined and written and produced by the Boomers and Xers and not so much the aforementioned Youth of Today. And second, I’d note that, much as none of us is as dumb as all of us, none of us is as normal; and third, I’d note that maybe the uncanny valley applies to more than just robots and rotoscoped CGI.

Ah, but here we’re playing with conceptual dynamite. Any time you start labelling this normal and that ab-, this human and that in-, you set somebody whether you like it or not up to play the ventriloquized puppet—sorry; chances are you haven’t read the essay. The Other, then: the One Who Isn’t. (Normal. Human. “Would you actually argue that I am, whether with my breasts thrust into black leather or basket heavy in a studded jock, the One Always There, who, when everyone else is redeemed, can be thrown to the dogs, at the eye of the patriarchal cyclone you’ve already located as the straight white [need I add?] vanilla male?” —To quote the aforementioned puppet. Did I mention it was pissed off?) —So let me repeat myself: none of us is as normal as all of us. And when we pitch our ideas for consumption beyond our immediate circle, we tune them to our idea of all of us, or as many as we can stomach: that matrix we all keep in our heads of what will fly and what won’t, what’s acceptable and what’s not, what’s titillating and what’s beyond the pale, what plays in Peoria and what doesn’t, what’ll run up the flagpole and who’ll salute it. What’s heimlich, and what’s un-.

(Yes, I know: there’s more than one: there’s a myriad alls for all the myriad audiences we could dream up; there’s Peoria and there’s Hollywood and there’s the Great White Way; there’s the MIT SF Club, and the one at Hampshire College; there’s even ways to pitch the same piece to more than one all at once, and never they’d know the difference. I know. Let’s brutally simplify it and peg one hypothetical all to the right of that graph up there, the axis labelled “fully [careful! dynamite!] human.” —The mechanism such as it is would be the same for whichever all you’d care to pick.)

As, then, an idea, a behavior, a way of being Other, approaches in familiarity that matrix of behaviors and attitudes we’re assuming comprises this asymptotic all, it climbs the red line marking the favorability of the all’s assumed emotional response: it’s a curiosity, it’s something new, something exciting, ostranenie; whatever New Wave is current can leap out and play with it and build strange weird glorious frightening (dull, turgid, inexplicable) shapes with it. —But as it gets even closer, goes from something conceivable to something that could conceivably affect us (transform us, replace us), it hits the cold dark heart of the Unheimlichsenke. (“Oh God I am the American dream…”) We push it away. With the most benign of reasons, sure: why should we bother; they have their own stories; it’s not our your their place; and anyway, if we foreground protagonize celebrate it, it will all prove too distracting, and we can’t sell it to boys aged 16 – 24. Best just to let it happen when it happens of its own accord. —Which is never, if we don’t push it.

Did you notice how the assumed matrix that made up that mythical, asymptotic all became we, and us? —Yeah. You’ve got to be careful about that.

Of course, this fable has a happy ending. History progresses, you see. Things get better. Having enthroned that all, having become aware that we’ve so enthroned it, it becomes our duty to broaden flatten spread it all as far and wide as we can. To open it up to as much as possible. (The ultimate futility of this task is no excuse.) —And our graph foretells a happy ending, doesn’t it? Things do get better.

Don’t they?

(Look at all the Assmissile jokes and ask yourself: what is so goddamn funny—what is so insulting, really—about enjoying anal sex? What is so belittling about being penetrated? —Don’t laugh. The ventriloquized puppet is still furious, and there’s a lot more to it than maybe you first thought.)

Um. Okay. That got a little stranger than maybe I’d first thought when I set out. Certainly longer. —What else was I up to? Right. More from Jed:

(Aside: It occurred to me recently, while reading a Human Future In Space story in Asimov’s in which there are actual homosexuals, that I neglected something in my editorial: it’s traditionally okay to have queer and/or kinky people in HFIS stories as long as they’re decadent and jaded and world-weary. This realization led me to decide that I want to write an Absolute Magnitude-style Starship Pilot Adventure Story in which the dashing starship pilot jock hero is gay but not at all decadent.)

Well, yes, but: there’s more than one dichotomy here. It’s not just straight/gay (straight/queer; vanilla/every other flavor in the universe); it’s active/passive, dominant/submissive, masculine/effeminate (not, note, feminine), penetrative/penetrated. There’s a lot of borders to shall we say interrogate here, and some are easier than others. A female character taking on masculine attributes—those ass-kicking chicks, in other words—they’ve made it past the Unheimlichsenke and are rapidly climbing the final asymptotic all. (For some values of all, yes yes.) A tomboy dyke with sufficiently feminine touches and an unrequited crush on the ingénue? What harm could she possibly do? (And we could bring up the male gaze, but let’s not; it’s late.) —A male character taking on effeminate attributes, though? As some would have it gay men must do: penetrated, submissive, passive, decadent, jaded, world-weary, distant, push away, push away, into the cold dark heart of the Unheimlichsenke, and that’s why Assmissile jokes are so funny. To some.

Our great hope here? Aside from the old reliable engine of slash, and all it’s been able to do? (Have you watched an episode of Smallville? It ain’t great, but damn.) —It’s yaoi. Go, baby, go!

What else? —I’ve got one more move to make in the “long explore,” as Lance put it; it was maybe going to have been two, or one-and-a-half, but I think I took care of that with this unlooked-for aside. I want to peer more at Jed’s original essay, and the why and wherefore of it, and some of the things that are going on outside the circle he’s drawn and examined, that maybe can be sources of pop-culture juice for engineering the epiphanies he’s looking for (but also, making it harder for those epiphanies to be engineered: “They have their own stories,” after all). And I want to look at what happens when you misuse that space, that grace I outlined; what happens when you try to engineer an epiphany and fail. (It’s not that they can only be epiphenomena, these epiphanies. I don’t think. I hope not. But it has to look like they are. I think. Maybe.) —And I’m gonna do it in 1500 – 2000 words. Oh, yeah.

Before we leave the grace of this in-between, backstage space we’re in here and now, though, let me point you in another direction, away from the straight/queer border and towards one that’s more between male and female, and how SF allows (again) a pushmepullyou of ostranenie and the unheimlich. —It involves Dicebox, which is the Spouse’s comic, which is maybe why I’ve been reluctant to bring it up, and maybe I’m a dolt; anyway, here’s cartoonist Erika Moen playing with some of the same ideas:

While a sci-fi story, it is impossible to lump it into any of the common stereotypical categories. It is not an adventure, it is not a hero’s story, and while futuristic gadgetry is present, it is hardly relevent. With most sci-fi stories the location and time are just as integral characters as the protagonists; the audience is there to be swept up in the exotic future. Manley Lee places the chronicle of Dicebox in a science-fiction environment not because that setting is pertinent to the development of the story but because it gives her the freedom to break her characters out of modern day gender stereotypes and rules without having to justify her decision to her audience.

So: one more move, and then I’ll see where I’ve ended up.

—Filed 7652 days ago to Paralitticisms; .

When standards are outlawed, only outlaws will have standards.

Kelli Davis, 18, had her senior class photo taken in a tuxedo top and bow-tie outfit provided for boys rather than the gown-like drape and pearls provided for girls. The school’s principal decided it could not appear in the yearbook because she didn’t follow the dress code.

Kelli, a straight-A student with no discipline problems, is a lesbian. She said she was uncomfortable to have her chest exposed in the photo.

“Because that’s me, you know. That represents me. The drape does not,” Davis said. “They’re not accepting me. That’s the whole reason we’re here.”

Here’s the photo of Kelli Davis that so mightily offended:

Clay School Superintendent David Owens denies it’s about her sexual orientation, just about a student not following the rules.

“There’s a dress code to follow—a dress code expected for senior pictures in the yearbook, and she chose not to follow them. It’s just that simple,” Owens said.

Here’s a prom dress “made by a Texas company that has advertised it successfully in teen magazines like YM and Seventeen.” While not an accurate depiction of the senior girls’ drape, it’s presumably closer to the æsthetic that Owens finds simply acceptable and Davis finds unacceptably uncomfortable:

Others applauded [Principal Sam] Ward’s decision, including Karen Gordon, who said, “When uniformity is compromised, then authority no longer holds.”

All I have to say to that is damn. If your authority is compromised by a girl in a tux, you’re in a bad, bad way.

(Mad props to yearbook editor Keri Sewell, by the way, who was fired for refusing to remove the photo.)

—Filed 7652 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [7].

Tooting my own horn.

Just for a moment, honest, and then I’ll put it away. —See, Atrios links to a report over at There is No Crisis which shows our favorite propagandistas, USA Next, were until recently nothing more than a spam farm that harvested the mailing addresses of guillible donors and plowed any funds raised thereby back into the charitable endeavor of raising funds. “Is the privatization scheme just a junk mail operation?” asks the headline.

Why, yes. Yes, it is. I’d like it noted, for the record, that this humble blog, not usually known for its policy prognostications, nailed this particular pelt to the wall back in December.

No, the ultimate argument against mandatory private retirement accounts is this: do you have any idea how much more junk mail you’ll be getting? From multinational financial corporations and fly-by-night penny-stock–pimping quasi-firms? Lurid brochures and badly written come-ons, envelopes tricked up to look like overnight deliveries with that stupid handwriting font misspelling your name in the corner, Kipp, I thought you would appreciate a look at this, Mr. J.K. Manly, you could be making thirteen percent, Ms. Beezel Lee, have you thought about your retirement account? Dire red-inked envelopes with bold block letters RE: YOUR RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS IMPORTANT OPEN IMMEDIATELY, anonymous cheap white envelopes hoping to sneak past your first brute-force Bayesian filter, your own goddamn bank shoving ten-page slick-papered prospectuses financed by your ATM fees through your mail slot every week or so, just because they can.

Spread the word, if you’re so inclined.

—Filed 7653 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [1].

Pitchforking.

I don’t read enough to know whether we really ought to stop reading it to save all of music journalism, but what I have read bugs me just enough to make me not all that eager to read more. I mean, the comparison that opens the thing I’m going to talk about in a minute, with the “food bands” and “not since Cibo Matto,” sure, it makes a quirky-cute sort of sense, I suppose, since Cibo Matto had a lot of songs about food on Viva! La Woman, okay, but still, I mean, you end up juxtaposing Cibo Matto and the Books as if the logic of your lede hadn’t just leaped the bounds of common sense and run amok through your CD collection, grabbing referents willy-nill. You can almost smell the flopsweat: the writer, staring at the screen, cudgelling their forebrain for a taste of something quirky-cute to get you to read on, spinning aimlessly in an Æron chair picked up cheap at a dot-bomb clearance sale—okay, maybe that’s a bit much, but when they reach down to pick up the pencil that fell from the ceiling tile where they’d stuck it with a perfect wrist-flip toss maybe fifteen minutes before, they happen upon sitting back up, pencil in hand, to glance down at the bog-standard press pack and note that when asked to describe themselves the Books came up with “blipworld / fakegrass / speedblues / chamberclick / eccentrock / country&eastern / glitch post-anything music with samples,” and then followed that up with “food band.” And the writer sighs and says food band, Cibo Matto, whatever, let’s run with it, I’ve got to get this fucking blurb finished for God’s sake.

Maybe it didn’t happen that way. Whatever. For once I don’t care so much about form, not when there’s content that makes me sit up and cheer like this:

Late in the ’04, The Books finished their latest full-length, Lost and Safe, which has been set for an April 5 release on Tomlab.

And look! Right underneath it! The Decemberists’ new album, Picaresque! Out on the 22nd of March! And they’re touring, too! And Petra Haden’s with them! In Portland on the 17th!

So, yeah, you say stuff like that enough of the time, it doesn’t matter so much how you go about saying it. I guess. Maybe.

—Filed 7655 days ago to Poprocks; Comments [2].

The fulness of time.

And anyway, you get right down to it, it was all little more than a side effect.

Sanders wasn’t trying to change my life or anyone else’s with The Tomorrow File. He just wanted to take the usual fare of his Palm Beach thrillers, the tropes of power and money and sex and intrigue, and spin them up as unusual fare, fresh and strange and even a little bit alien. And SF is a mighty fine tool for the job, though it can be a bit on the brutally efficient side as it so aggressively, even didactically, asserts the setting isn’t Kansas anymore. Ostranenie! Unheimlich! —Nicholas’s relationship with Paul is at once a detail of the overall unheimlich setting—bisexuality is no big deal in this brave new world—and itself a technique to foster ostranenie—potboiling sexual intrigue rendered suddenly strange and alien: “I had been in bed with Paul.” (And as such, it works quite well. Certainly stuck in my mind. —I think it was about Wild Things that some critic somewhere said something to the effect that bisexuality really shakes up the noir genre, kicking wide open the question of who can betray which for what, exactly—and yes, it does, indeed, but remember that everything new was old in its day. Even ostranenie; especially the unheimlich.)

But the thing about any tool no matter how mighty fine is that once you’ve used a hammer for a while you start to expect the nails. Read enough SF and you come to expect those unheimlich touches, the ostranenie of another world. It is itself familiar, usual, canny, heimlich. It’s what you opened the book for in the first place; that door damn well better be dilating by page three or you’re taking your custom elsewhere. —This is neither a good thing, nor a bad thing, it’s just a thing, and savvy writers and readers take it into account, ringing ostranenie games off their own expectations of the unheimlich as naturally as breathing. —But because Nicholas’s sexual relationship with Paul was aggressively, even didactically presented as one of the details that set the world of the book apart from the world around it; because it was an SF book; because as a reader of SF books, I’d come to expect, accept, even crave those details that deliberately set their worlds apart from the world around me—therefore, the book’s high unheimlich concept I accepted without hesitation. And that’s the twist of paradox, right there, that allows Nicholas to insist that even though he obviously wasn’t what he was, he still could be what he is, if only you’d let him. In meeting the writer halfway in order to set ourselves aside for a time in that other world, we also find ourselves unknowingly giving Nicholas the grace he needs.

So I’d had an epiphany, yes—but it was an epiphenomenon.

This uncanny æsthetic two-step, this strange state of grace—don’t mistake it for a necessary and sufficient condition. All art plays with ostranenie; pushing you over the brink is how we get to sensawunda. (Pulling you back: Oh, I see! Oh, I get it!) —Much as SF’s ability to make you take literally sentences that usually make only figurative sense gives the writer a more expansive word-palette than otherwise, the expectation that SF will of course be rich and strange allows it more room for accidental grace and pushmepullyou gamesmanship. (But that’s theory. Praxis: how does SF as a genre limit the sorts of sentences readers will take seriously? How do expectations of wonder and estrangement limit the otherworlds we can build within it?)

Necessary and sufficient or not, though, that space is central to the question of whether or not “Time’s Swell” is an SF story.

Now, it’s not a very good story. It’s a mood piece written in a muddle of first-person past- and present-tense that’s a universal solvent: salient details dissolve into a declamatory mush. As “artsy, shallow lesbian erotica,” about the best one can say is it doesn’t use “slick” as a transitive verb. But right out of the gate it aggressively, even didactically insists:

I remember nothing from before this place.

I ask her. Sometimes she is silent. Sometimes she tells me that she does not know, that she met me here, six months ago, that she knows nothing about my past. And then there are the days when she tells me that we’ve traveled through time, that we have come from the future and are trapped here. She tells me that she was a temporal scientist, that I was her project. That I am modified and enhanced for survival, for time travel, for perfection. Those are the bad days.

Sometimes I try to argue with her. If I am so altered, why do I look human? She has an answer for everything. Something about 23rd-century technology and spaceships that can move across time. It’s crazy.

Because we’re reading an SF story (no, I’m not tautologizing; bear with me), we expect a certain degree of strange and uncanny detail. Because we expect it, we accept it when it presents itself. And because we accept it, we don’t question the other details that support it: the extreme, impersonal detachment of the narrator from the people and the world around her, her simple declaration of things we’d otherwise take for granted, the eerie sense of timelessness that wafts languidly throughout (“The ahistorical dreamlike landscape where action is situated, the peculiarly congealed time in which acts are performed—”? Perhaps. These do, after all, occur almost as often in SF as they do in porn). The story depends utterly on these other details to get done what it sets out to do, and these other details depend utterly on the idea that (for whatever reason, it doesn’t matter) the narrator has come from the future and is trapped wherever here is. —It’s the height of folly these days to proclaim that something is the height of folly (we raise that bar on an almost daily basis, and yet still keep clearing it with ease), but to insist, as does Don, that the “authors could have easily removed all SF content and the story would not have been changed in any significant way” is to have let the point pretty much pass you by. It’s the obverse of McCarty’s Error: James McCarty, writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, confronted by a book that hinges on the peculiar properties time exhibits as one’s velocity approaches the speed of light, had this to say:

To label The Sparrow science fiction is an injustice and downright wrong.

McCarty’s excuse was that he thought The Sparrow was, you know, good. Don’s is that “Time’s Swell” wasn’t what he expected. But it’s the same basic canonization mistake—just different sides of the fence.

Speaking of canonization:

Some people have suggested that since Jed Hartman’s “Future of Sex” editorial called for more SF that imagines something other than an entirely heterosexual universe, then Strange Horizons must be practicing “literary affirmative action” by publishing such (shallow) stories as “Time’s Swell.” Okay, sure. The same way all the prominent SF magazines are practicing literary sexism by publishing so many shallow stories that star heterosexual characters.

Well, no, not quite the same way: the prominent SF magazines don’t proclaim to all and sundry that they intend to practice literary sexism by publishing so many shallow stories that star heterosexual characters. —To be fair, neither did Hartman proclaim, per se: he just said he’d noticed a lack, laid it out pretty clearly, asked for pointers to stories that addressed it. “Whenever I read such a work,” he says, of the typical sort of SF he’s been reading and found wanting, “it makes me wonder why the fictional society of the far future is less sexually diverse than early–21st-century America,” and it’s hard to argue with him. (Me, I might wonder why the SF of today isn’t nearly so adventurous on the fronts of identity and sexuality as the SF of the New Wave, but that’s a specious comparison; don’t mind me.)

Yes, it’s disingenuous to pretend that when an editor of a fiction magazine asks for pointers to a certain type of story, they aren’t proclaiming, or at least setting forth a de facto agenda. So what? Editors don’t just correct spelling and give the grammar a once-over. Selecting stories based on theme and style and intent and voice to further their ideas of what makes for good pieces and a good magazine? That isn’t “affirmative action,” it’s what editing is. —Like what Jed Hartman’s doing with his editorship? You’ll buy more, or read more, whichever’s appropriate. Think his agenda’s leading him by the nose to pick stories you don’t like over stories you do? Take your custom elsewhere. His fortunes will rise, or fall, accordingly. (I understand there’s a whole science devoted to this phenomenon, or something. —The canon that results, by the way? Epiphenomenon.)

So the immediate question isn’t “Is publishing ‘Time’s Swell’ an act of ‘literary affirmative action’,” but “Is ‘The Future of Sex’ leading Strange Horizons to publish the sort of story that’s driving the punters away in droves?”

I don’t know. You got me. I haven’t dug into publishing histories or traffic reports, and I’ll leave all that to someone who cares more than I do. But to this layperson’s eye, Strange Horizons doesn’t appear to be hurting, and if I didn’t like “Time’s Swell” all that much myself, others who know as much or more than I do liked it fine. So there you go.

But at least it’s a more immediately interesting question than “Does publishing ‘Time’s Swell’ challenge my personal notions of what SF can’t do and mustn’t be?”

—Filed 7656 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comments [3].

Now you’re just fuckin’ with me.

We should get this out of the way up front: my linking to this in no wise comprises an endorsement of the nasty tangled mess known variously as “recovered memory syndrome” and “trumped-up bullshit for which entirely too many innocent people are still serving time long after it’s been debunked.” Now’s not the time to get into why and how I might find myself saying and thinking pretty much exactly the skeptical things they’d (of course) want me to say and think; it’s enough to note I’m taking the following with as much salt as I can scare up.

And yet it’s still trickling ice-water down my spine. —After all, says Jeff over at Rigorous Intuition, “we went through the looking glass a long time ago. So there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be right, unless it’s dead wrong.”

With that in mind, let him sketch for you in a handful of dust a quick little story about John Gannon and James Guckert and Johnny Gosch and James Gannon.

—Filed 7657 days ago to Indulgences; .

You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around.

Traditional head-scratch at dearth of women in blogosphere.

Ritual response-link to What She Said!

Ancillary self-serving notation for record of new linchinography entries: Pinko Feminist Hellcat and Echidne of the Snakes.

Close with traditional packing away of subject, with flourish, someplace easily accessible. Note in calendar to exhume and respond to head-scratch again in three months’ time.

(You want to know what the funny thing is? The ice-edged gut-punching joke of it all? Five minutes spent perusing any feminist comment thread or discussion group would be enough to rapidly disabuse Messr. Drum and his commentariat of the idea that women aren’t “comfortable with the food fight nature of opinion writing.”)

—Filed 7657 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [7].

Boy, that’s a lot of moms.

You might remember the recent flap over Buster the Bunny’s visit to a couple of mothers in Vermont, and the outrage our shiny new Secretary of Education felt at the idea tax money was being spent to expose our children to those people. Here’s a videoblog entry from Blogumentary that features an interview with the show’s senior editor, with clips from the episode in question, and some distressing news about just how much damage the Secretary’s intemperate words have wrought. —I’ll also throw in a letter to Secretary Spellings from Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) that ends like this:

I am by now myself used to the kind of meanness which was the basis of your decision, but I am sorry that young people all over this country who happen to be gay or lesbian have now learned that the person who has been picked by the President of the United States to help with their education has such a fundamentally negative view of their very existence.

Keep those cards and letters coming.

—Filed 7661 days ago to Squawkbox; .

Could be belongs to us.

The second time I encountered the idea? I dug my way to the bottom of a paper bag full of paperbacks from the Breckenridge County Library’s annual fundraising book sale and came up with this—

I had been in bed with Paul Thomas Bumford, my Executive Assistant. He was an AINM-A, an artificially inseminated male with a Grade A genetic rating. We had been users for five years, almost from the day he joined my Division.

Paul was shortish, fair, plump, roseate. He wore heavy makeup. All ems used makeup, of course, but he favored cerise eyeshadow. Megatooty, for my taste.

Strangers might think him a microweight, effete, interested only in the next televised execution. In fact, he was one of the Section’s most creative neurobiologists. I was lucky to have him in DIVRAD.

The narrator is one Nicholas Bennington Flair; he’s young, brilliant, anethical, powerful, rich, gorgeous; that’s the opening to chapter X-2, which starts on the third page of “Mr. Bestseller” Lawrence Sanders’ 1975 novel, The Tomorrow File. It’s not, let’s get this out of the way, a very good book—it’s your basic beach-blanket brave new clockwork 1984, a dystopic vision of a far-flung future (1998!) full of kinky sex, freighted slang, and petroleum-derived foodstuffs. “Every year our bread became fouler and more nutritious,” says Nicholas, and that pretty much sums up the book’s moral tone. —I read it not too long after I saw that TIME magazine cover, somewhere between 11 and 12: old enough that I’d read any number of trashy potboilers in which men and women occasionally did the oddest and most obliquely described things to each other in and amongst the action and skullduggery; young enough that I was still trying to figure out exactly what. The mechanics were problemmatic: which was doing whom where, exactly? And in God’s name, why?

(Oh, shush. I was shy and bookish and a late bloomer.)

So meeting Nicholas Bennington Flair pretty much for the first time like that, having him so casually announce

I had been in bed with Paul

when just moments before he’d been flirting outrageously with his boss, Angela Teresa Berri, Deputy Director of the Satisfaction Section of the Department of Bliss (formerly the Department of Public Happiness, formerly the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare)—“Her nipples were painted black, a tooty fashion I found profitless”— It was another door, another seed, another bite, another slippery inch down those slopes. To have gone from zero past that image straight to a protagonist so openly, unapologetically queer! And more to the point: the protagonist of a Zukunftsroman. —Had Nicholas been narrating a contemporary beach-blanket thriller, he’d’ve been an alienating figure. No matter how exotic the locale, he’d’ve been insisting he was with all his queerness here and now, and I could look around me and see that this was not so. But science fiction—specifically, future-fiction, no matter how ham-handedly wielded, no matter that his once-future is now our past—SF gives him a certain license. He’s insisting that he and all his world could be, and inviting you to step awhile in his shoes and see the sights.

(We’ll leave once was for another time, and let’s not even try to tackle phantasy’s always already. —While the pieces of this essay-thing lay fallow, Jo Walton went and said the following, as neat as you please:

At twelve, The Dispossessed turned my head inside out on politics, making me question everything I’d seen as axiomatic. At fourteen Triton did the same on sexuality. What SF did was made me consciously aware of how the world was, of the things the world accepted as normal, and made me constantly question those things instead of taking them for granted. All SF did this for me. Heinlein did. Asimov did. Niven did. SF gave me the worldview of “this is a way of arranging things” rather than “this is the way things are.”

(So there you go.)

Which is not to say that The Tomorrow File is a very queer novel, mind. Sanders was “Mr. Bestseller,” after all; he’s not out to freak the punters, much less raise their consciousness—just titillate ’em on their beach blankets with a mere soupçon of épater. Nicholas talks a mean game—

“I’m bisexual,” I admitted. “By intellectual choice and physical predilection. I think most objects are, admittedly or not. The sexual preferences of obsos were conditioned by biological necessity and hence by society. Neither prevail today. Efs can procreate without sperm. The preservation of species is no more vital than its limitations. Now we can indulge our operative natures, which are androgynous.”

“What does all that mean?” she asked.

“That I like to use both efs and ems.”

“Oh, yes,” she breathed. “Use me.”

Ah, amour! —But! The only em Nicholas ever actually “uses” in the course of the book is young, effeminate, pudgy Paul, his assistant, his foil, his nemesis; him alone, as opposed to a score of efs, from the tootily black-nippled Angela to a couple of distressingly declassé Detroit girls. And while the book entire is something of an exercise in clinical detachment, it’s still telling that there’s not the slightest spark of lust or desire or longing in how Nicholas deals with Paul: he sees him; he just doesn’t want him. Only their final encounter is described with anything approaching the particularity of Nicholas’s encounters with those varied and sundry women, and that enough to make it clear it’s Nicholas who tops, while Paul Bumford bottoms. Our narrator’s essential masculinity, you see, has thereby not been compromised: buggering a subordinate is still splashing about in the shallow end of the genderfuck pool, a step or two beyond a couple of it-girls lugging it up on the dancefloor for the benefit of Mister Kite. —Also, and as another for instance, there’s the problem of the book’s only authentic queens:

Through the trees, drifting, came the two young ems, neighbors who had so amused my mother. Wispy creatures from the adjoining estate. Both barefoot, wearing identical plasticot caftans decorated in an overall pattern of atomic explosions.

They were carrying armloads of natural flowers: something long-stemmed and purple. They asked if they might leave them on my mother’s grave. I nodded. They put them down gently.

“She was a beautiful human being,” one of them said. The one with a ring in his nose.

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Who were they?” Paul breathed when they ran away. Startled fauns.

“Friends and neighbors,” I said.

“The kind of ems who give homosexuals a bad name,” Paul said. “Flits.”

“You’ve changed,” I told him. “You wouldn’t have said that a year ago. In that tone.”

“‘When I was a child,’” he quoted, “‘I spake as a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things.’”

“Now I’ll give you one,” I said. “‘Upon what meat doth this our Cæsar feed, that he has grown so great?’”

It can’t help sniggering, this book; pointedly opting not to judge the morality of the characters, the actions, the era it pretends to find so morally empty. Sanders, after all, is very good at letting his audience feel superior to the people who are indulging in the very vices they themselves would indulge in, if they had a chance. (How else does one become Mr. Bestseller?) —What’s significant is that for once bisexuality—a man’s bisexuality—is presented as one of those vices. What’s significant is that Nicholas’s relationship with Paul is vital to the book: while Nicholas himself might tell you it was wanting life to have more charm that was his downfall, or perhaps a morbid conviction that the only worthy moral verities are those drawn from an obsessive contemplation of the works of Egon Schiele, we know it’s the way he treats Paul throughout that’s key to where he ends up, and why. —And keep in mind: I was 12, maybe 13, and trying to fit together a couple of very big pieces of how the world works that had rather haphazardly been given to me: it is possible for men to like other men; here, then, is a man who likes other men; here is that man in a relationship with a man he likes. Heady stuff.

So—mediocrities and problematizations real and manufactured aside—I’ve got to give credit where credit is due. Because Nicholas Bennington Flair did not insist he was what he was, but instead that he could be what he is, if only the reader would let him, he became in an odd sort of way the change some wanted to see in the world. My world, if nothing else, became bigger because of him, and this book, and for that I have to tip my hat. Right time, right place, maybe; maybe my world would have achieved its intended size some other way, if I hadn’t found this book at the bottom of that paper bag. To quote Delany, stupidity is “a process, not a state”—

A human being takes in far more information than he or she can put out. “Stupidity” is a process or strategy by which a human, in response to social denigration of the information he or she puts out, commits him- or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out. (Not to be confused with ignorance, or lack of data.) Since such a situation is impossible to achieve because of the nature of mind/perception itself in its relation to the functioning body, a continuing downward spiral of functionality and/or informative dissemination results. The process, however, can be reversed at any time…

Maybe. But for all its flaws, The Tomorrow File was the key that opened the door; it’s what got the job done. Kudos.

Did it? —Get the job done, I mean. It takes a special sort of hubris to label homophobia qua homophobia as stupidity, shamefully toeing the dirt across from the blissful state of ignorance I’d been in, before I read Mr. Bestseller’s dystopia. —Whatever epiphany I might have realized in those tweenage days, it wasn’t until Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand that I understood—that I knew, in my bones—that a man liking another man was no different than me liking, say, Eva. And that was in my senior year of high school. Sophomore year, and altogether elsewhere, there was that unfortunate incident after a biology class, involving Bobby Brown, and that song Craig had put on a mix tape. “Hey there, people, I’m Bobby Brown,” I sang—sneered, really—“some say I’m the cutest boy in town,” and then I was on the floor having crashed into a lab table on the way down. Bobby stood over me, glaring, which was shocking—he was such a quiet, geeky guy, so much so that a quiet, geeky guy like myself felt perfectly—safe? justified?—in, well, mocking him. A startled faun. Where the hell had that tackle come from? He stormed out of the classroom as I pulled myself to my feet. —And if you’d asked me at the time I’d’ve said I don’t know, I had no idea, and if you’d asked me at the time I’d’ve said that wasn’t what I’d meant at all. It was just the congruence of the name. Mean-funny. You know?

But now I’m not so sure; I remember that little surge of spiteful triumph, that snigger just before he knocked it out of me, a rush that was as out of all proportion to the stupid, stupid joke as his sudden burst of anger. Why had I felt so safe? So justified? Why had he felt so threatened? “Oh God I am the American dream…”

—Filed 7662 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comments [4].

And it came to pass.

I had no idea at all it even existed before I saw the cover of TIME magazine.

The idea had literally never crossed my mind. It wasn’t that it was a thing that couldn’t or shouldn’t or oughtn’t be done; it wasn’t a thing, at all. It didn’t exist. Inconceivable. —After? Well, take your pick: I’d stepped through a door that slammed shut behind me; a seed had been planted; I’d taken a bite from the apple; the world got just that much the bigger. I was that much further down the slippery slopes that fall away on all sides from Innocence and Grace. I knew a little more of what it was I didn’t know.

When did I see it? Hard to say. It’s dated 23 April 1979, but I remember it alongside the cover they ran just over a year later, when Mount St. Helens blew its top. Magazines were kept in pretty much the same place, on and around the corner end table, so I might be remembering them together because I saw them (two powerful, iconic images) in the same place and not necessarily at the same time. So it was somewhere between April of 1979 and June of 1980, sometime just before or after my 11th birthday, that I first became aware of the idea of homosexuality.

(I don’t remember the article itself, which is a shame, though you’ll note it isn’t so important that I’ve gone to the library to look it up, or indeed perform much more than a desultory googling. It’s noted here as a “relatively sympathetic post-Bryant cover story,” and I suppose it’s a measure of our post-Bryant age that we’re now fighting over basic rights for homosexual relationships instead of basic rights for homosexualists. —I do remember wondering at the the pair of female hands, there at the top: I was confusing the Latin homo for the Greek homos, even if I might not have put it that way at the time, and further mistranslating homo as man. So the male hands made sense as “homo” sexuality, but not the female. Ah, lesbian invisibility! —If I did discuss the cover with either of my parents, it was merely to clear that up, but I’m mistrusting the memories that suggest such a conversation occurred, and where does that leave us?)

How about you? Any one moment or thing in particular? A watershed, or did it just seep in, with no clear eureka between knowing and not? Or have you always known, and do you find the idea of not knowing in your bones that this is one of the ways the world works to be quaint, odd, disturbing? —It’s important, I think, to note these things.

—Filed 7664 days ago to Indulgences; Comments [7].

Your first lesson in leaping with a laughing heart:

It may be justifiable anger, but I won’t trade the rest of my world for it.

—Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Hmm? Oh. Just pasting this on my virtual refrigerator. Don’t mind me.

—Filed 7667 days ago to Indulgences; .

• Previous
• Next