Continuing on with the manga theme, another treat my library provided in its new books section was Trickster: Native American Tales, A Graphic Collection, edited by Matt Dembicki. (For some reason I can't seem to get my cite tag to work. Bother. Anyway.) As there are a variety of authors (or retellers) and artists, the approach (and, to be honest, the quality) is kinda all over the map. The collection starts out very strong with "Coyote and the Pebbles", by Dayton Edmonds and Micah Farritor. Farritor's nicely rendered drawings and subtle watercolor-like washes complement this ‘how came to be’ style story of Coyote, whose efforts to make the ‘biggest and best’ predictably backfire upon him. One panel, in which the humiliated trickster hides in the shadow while a sympathetic Raven looks on, really pulled the whole story together for me.

As might be expected in a collection of trickster tales, many are funny, such as "Azban and the Crayfish" or "Rabbit's Choctaw Tail Tale" drawn by Pat Lewis in what I think of as modern "ugly american style" (think Pinky & the Brain). I loathe this style, but can't deny that it's well done and perfectly complements Tim Tingle's old-timey style of story telling.

As would be expected with traditional tales, the stories tend to male heavy, shading into outright sexism, as for example "When Coyote Decided to Get Married", which I think of as the American Indian version of "Sodom and Gomorrah", complete with pillars of salt stone. I think the author tried to soften the harsh condemnation of the young woman by making her sincerely in love with her choice, and her disavowal of her father's decision to (try to) marry her off to Coyote; but despite the fact that he not she is the liar, she's the one accused by Coyote, who is remarkably stiff-necked, considering his usual elastic approach to morality.

Jonathan Perry's "Moshup's Bridge" gives the Native American version of Paul Bunyan, a fella who uses whales as hammers; which just goes to show how universal these themes are, and how often they recur across cultures; something to my mind can never be stressed enough, when people seem so determined to reject others on surface differences.

A welcome respite to the sexism is Eldrena Douma and Roy Boney Jr's "Horned Toad Lady and Coyote", another very traditionally told tale; but one in which Coyote's bad behavior nets him exactly the fate he deserves. It's also the only story (so far as I could tell) both told and illustrated by Native Americans. While I found the digital chalk style an interesting idea, I didn't care for the execution at all. However, I'm an unabashed lover of line, so art with strong linear qualities, such as that used to illustrate the cover—an excerpt from Michael Thompson and Jacob Warrenfeltz's "Rabbit and the Tug-of-War", was generally more likely to appeal.

Not that there weren't exceptions, such as Elaine Grinnell and Michelle Silva's "The Wolf and the Mink", which featured the young (early 20s) Silva's delightful watercolor-esque (though still linear;) paintings. (Given the onslaught of digital it's hard for me to tell, sometimes, exactly what media the artists are using; hence the weasel wording.)

I've always enjoyed hearing fairy and folk tales from around the world; it's just that I've gotten less tolerant of the sexism in many of them as I got older (and I note, it's much less prevalent in the stories told by woman narrators.) With that caveat, I think this collection would particularly appeal to younger readers, though it's suitable for all ages.

In fact, my only real regret is there are no stories in which beads play a prominent part—surely there must be one folk tale with beads in it, considering how important they are to many tribes’ regalia? But, if you're feeling bead-starved, well, here's another round robin bracelet post.

So, again, another hiatus. Well, as I mentioned, server was down for a week. Also, the relay on my kiln controller finally gave up the ghost. So, no way to make large beads. Plus, I've been having some issues with numbness and discomfort in my upper extremities (yeah, all the way from the shoulder out—what a pain, literally!) which has made it difficult to make beads, let alone type up posts about ’em.

Sorry about that.

I have been reading some fun stuff. I finished Dong Hwa Kim's manhwa trilogy, The Color of Earth, The Color of Water, and The Color of Heaven, a gentle, lyrical coming-of-age story set in pre-automotive Korea, about a young woman and her widowed mother. Poor and without other family, somewhat outcast by virtue of the mother's being an innkeeper who must use a saucy tongue to keep the rauchier of her customers at bay, they depend upon and share with each other their hopes and dreams—centered upon the men in their lives.

Gentle as the story is—there's very little violence—it's quite earthy, and it says something about how wretchedly common violence is in manga that I could read another story bordering on (or perhaps crossing over to) rape without a second thought, but some of the sex the scenes in this book stopped me cold. Despite their depicting utterly ordinary aspects of your average teenaged life. That's a condemnation of me, not the story, which as other reviewers will hardly have failed to note, is full of lovely flower and plant imagery. I also found the curly ‘pig's tail’ pointers from balloons (as an indicator of mood) quite interesting—the curliness sort of indicating a more complicated mood.

My biggest issue with the story was the idea that beauty equals virtue: the main character is very much beautiful than her snub-nosed friend, who is depicted as having coarse, unpleasant morals. But that's a minor nit; assuming the ‘pining for a man’—not altogether surprising in a culture where being a single woman was (again, pardon the pun) a very hard row to hoe doesn't put the reader off, it's a charming tale, with delightful details.

And this was getting waaaaay too long, so stuff about some other manga/sequential art tomorrow. (Or whenev...) In the meantime, you can enjoy this equally gentle & serene pic of a butterfly

Ooooh, sorry about the week-long outage. The wizard spent last weekend at bar camp, learning all sorts of fun things about javascript and html5, so he wasn't able to get to the server till this weekend. —Usually it just needs to be rebooted to start working, but unfortunately it was having some issues with its ethernet cards, or something. And guess what? No server, no site. (Also, no email, which is even worse, from my point of view.)

At any rate, it's working now, with luck will continue to work, and so is my email. I'll keep checking my gmail account (rejiquar at blah-blah-blah) for the next few days—I generally only send stuff via gmail if rejiquar is down, given the privacy issues with gmail. I really wish google would get back to their company motto, a little less evil in the world would be a good thing.

At any rate, it's late, I'm tired, will try to get some fun stuff up.

Later.

In the meantime, here's a fun pic I took in Grand Rapids. Very pretty downtown, especially if you're into fancy carved (or molded) building ornaments.

The rule for ventilation (iirc, which is always in doubt) is that the cold air intake needs to be not less than 10’ from the exhaust. Which my setup achieves, barely. Unfortunately it's not perfect, because every once in awhile—perhaps when it's hot and the wind blows from the south—I get exhaust, that is to say nitrous oxides—coming back in.

Le sigh.

What this means is that yesterday, two days before having to leave for Gathering, I made one decent bead and quit for the day; I could've been writing story (or even web pages) but mostly I noodled around reading blogs, frustrated; and continued the practice this morning. This being the height of summer, posting is kind of thin right now, despite 300+ comment threads on Feministe (which after I read it, mentally reviewed my own memories of being a) horrified by my own children's unlikeable behavior and b) impatient with other children's unlikeable behavior is that the problem isn't the frustration people feel with unpleasant-to-them kiddies; it's structural sexism, with various lower-down factions—that would be women of all stripes, mamas, the childfree, the poor etc—fighting each other instead of recognizing the really difficulty is that our society puts so little of a premium on accommodation for children. Irony being, we say we value them, but do we really? Then why aren't we making more safe, public spaces, such that children old enough to ride bikes responsibly can go to the library, or the park, or wherever else, on their own? Why aren't roads safe enough that a ten year old child can ride on them unaccompanied, or a wheelchair trundle down them without taking hir life into hir hands? Instead of making parents, specifically mamas, keep an eye on kids 24/7 till they're 18? Yes, I'm old enough to remember running around the neighborhood, or riding my bike a couple of miles away to the main branch of the library. But that's a rant for another day. This is a bead blog, and we're heading back to beads.)

So the upshot is I'm cruising scienceblogs to see who's left after their little controversy and finding some interesting blogs, some of which I've seen before, others that I haven't. Casaubon's Book is evidently focused on sustainable living in a very down-to-earth way—the author raises goats, produce, and oh yes, kids:) She discusses the frustration of knowing, like Cassandra, the catastrophe that lies ahead to which others cannot find themselves sufficiently motivated to do something. I sympathize, despite being one of those shoulder-shruggers, for I've always felt a catastrophe lies ahead—when I was college age, it was gonna be nuclear winter and the end of civilization from WWIII. Now it's global warming. We seem, however slowly, to have backed away (mebbe?) from nuclear war, and I guess I have hopes that, somehow, we'll manage to save ourselves from global climate change, species death and all the rest, too.

Or mebbe not; and all that will be left is our slowly decaying artifacts.

Thus this post was of particular interest to me, in which she quotes another, Ugo Bardi:

"You see, this old watch is still working, more than 70 years after it was made. Whenever I look at it, I feel a kind of kinship to the man who had left it to me. I am grateful to him because he left me something that still works, that I can use and that I like. And I think he may be happy, too, if he looks at us from above, that his old watch is still appreciated by someone in this world".

Thing is, those old fashioned watches were pretty resource intensive, which is why only rich people had them for a long time, and why they were traditionally given for long years of service when working for a firm; now timekeeping comes free—nay as an expectation—on nearly every electronic gadget you buy. But easy on the environment? All that metal and gems to be mined, and then precision fabricated? Metal working is energy intensive; so's glass.

Unlike steel, the source materials of glass (e.g. silica) are incredibly abundant, though the metals to make it colorful are not. But the working of glass is expensive, in terms of energy. Glassblowers are credited with burning down major chunks of Germany's forests. Even today, the local glassblower doesn't bother to fix the inch sized gap in her studio door, rusted away, because with a crucible running at 2500 degrees, 24/7/365, the waste heat is more than enough to heat her studio.

I'm a lampworker, making beads, so my needs aren't as great: a kiln that sucks up approximately as much energy as your average hairdryer (but who leaves their hair-dryer on for hours on end?), a concentrator, a torch running off a 20 gallon tank of propane for approximately every 150 hours I have the concentrator running. No idea how much it cost environmentally to make the concentrator, or the torch, or the kiln, or the electronic controller running the kiln but I expect, something.

Never mind the energy the people who batched the glass and extruded the rods. Or mined the rare (and not so rare) earth metals out of the ground. Or shipped the stuff from Italy to California, and then to me in the midwest. —All to make a few, useless objects. And for the most part, lampworkers don't think about environmental impacts, or at least not ones involving peak oil (we're all about worrying about dusts and noxious fumes, but only as they affect us —disposal isn't much worried about.) Yet, it's occurred to me more than once that it isn't only because modern technology has made the exchange of ideas so fruitful that beadmaking has taken off—it's also because the tools, and especially the resources—in terms of bigger torches and personal kilns—are so much greater.

Venetian beads from 400 years ago often look unfinished and crude to the modern eye, but these folks were working with lamps. They simply didn't have the heat that I can oh-so-easily command. And sometimes I feel a little guilty about it. I could see myself, writing a little story, about some beadstringer/collector whatever, in the future, after peak oil has crashed.

"Oh yes," ze would say, "the pride of my collection, this floral vessel. It's not by one of the greats—say Leah Fairbanks or Kristin Frantzen Orr, but obviously inspired by that school, and nicely made. Of course, that was back in the day when people put cadmium and cobalt and whatnot into their glass without a second thought, when they wasted energy with such wild abandon that each beadmaker had her own torch, even her own kiln—which she would leave running simply to heat rods, and to avoid the irritation of having to batch anneal.

"Nowadays, the glass in those glorious old colors is no longer being manufactured, and only well-to-do artists can afford to purchase it when finds from old stockpiles show up—besides having the money to own, let alone operate, such an expensive studio. But back then, when energy was cheap, why, any idiot could make glass beads.

"But those days are gone now."

Perhaps someday I'll write that sketch above as a science fiction story.

Yet I buried a hundred beads with my father; and a thousand years from now they might still survive, at least as shards (cuz let's face it, hollow beads are surprisingly durable, but ultimately under most conditions solid ones are even more so). I rather doubt that watch will still be ticking then, unless it's been put in a museum, and not much used—gears wear out, after all. But there are beads in collections today that were made by the ancient romans. Hell, there are beads a hundred thousand years old.

But ultimately? The universe ends. (At least according to the latest theory. I'm hoping the oscillatory model makes a comeback.) But in any event long before that, my art, my stories, even my genes, will be as grey, undifferentiated dust. I know this to be as inescapably true as the second law of thermodynamics.

So, like everyone else, I make my compromises. I wash my laundry (mostly resale shop finds) in cold water with environmentally friendly soap, and sometimes I even hang it on the clothes line (well, until a bird shat on my sheets—ugh!) to dry. We live in a bike-friendly town, getting by with one car, and I keep the heat turned down in the winter and live without A/C in the summer (helps to have an 80 year old house with lots of windows for that sort of thing).

But I also make glass beads, and buy electronic goodies like cameras and monitors and computers.

I'm part of this world, both its problems, and, I hope, its answers. We do the best we can.

Because I've had fictive writing on the brain lately (instead of Gathering and the beads I'm s'posed to making for it, a fairy tale in lieu of real posts:

So once upon a time in a land far, far away (about a two hours’ commute, in fact) there lived a hard-working serf, um warrior, er code-monkey uh, programmer. Who just to make things even more complicated was usually called the wizard. This being a fairy tale, our serf/(code)warrior/wizard, despite having to toil away in the dungeons, er, basement, had everything of the best—challenging tasks, doughty (not to mention pleasant) companions, and reasonable hours, including nights and weekends off. Really the situation was nearly all any code-warrior could ask, particularly in these troubled times. (Well, excepting perhaps the travel, but fortunately he had a nimble trusty steed that required very little in the way of forage, er, got good gas mileage & was reliable.)

Having achieved in his existence a very nearly perfect HEA (aka happily-ever-after, complete with a not-golden-haired not-princess), there now needed to be some conflict, which a prince or a duke (or at least a manager two levels up) provided by bursting into a [slot in your preferred venue—a pub or bar is the usual, I believe, and either seems more atmospheric, I suppose, than a meeting room with conference tables, whiteboards and possible powerpoint presentation); and lo our prince or duke gave a dramatic cry, ‘We have an emergency!’ This small but growing kingdom was threatened not by, er, dragons or trolls, but the failure of a band of mercenaries outside contractors to, um, complete their quest finish their job before the dragon descended upon them all, roaring fire by the contractually specified deadline.

So a doughty team of their own was assembled (wizard, knight, er, help me out here folks—never actually played D&D and its various descendants, just fondled a few many-sided dice now and then, so, what else? Oh yes, a paladin. And, lessee, in addition to the usual human types, also the obligatory elf, dwarf, hobbit, nah, those are a copyright violation, halfing, oh wait, we're mixing kinds and skills here but truly this was a great kingdom in which the 51% of its population was in fact represented by rather more than half its questers (if not, perhaps by its warriors who not surprisingly skewed male...anyway, assuming we've got our band of nine or three or what evs). So our merry band team set off to climb the mountain and retrieve the treasure under the very dragon's nose before some other band group from other kingdom company did.

And before my metaphors run completely off the rails here (or jump off a cliff of this mountain) our wizard-warrior has begun to climb its faces, only to discover (under the direst of time pressure because recall that the code-warrior and companions were laboring under the handicap of being the smallest/youngest/sent out last having to do roughly in five days what the contractor had been given a month to do and there went the nights and weekends off. This of course did not dismay our champions, who labored mightily (the author being too lazy to research the proper mountain-climbing type imagery, but I presume there were some dizzying heights and trails so narrow and treacherous that death or at the very least failure was but a misplaced footstep away).

Alas! Much of the way up the mountain our warrior discovered his route would not do. He turned with dismay to his fair young middle-aged maiden (who by the by was contributing absolutely nothing to this tale excepting a metal-encumbered smile, and vague assurances, in the way of traditional story-book heroines shut up in towers everywhere, that he would of course succeed, and yes dear some treasure would very welcome, as parts of the roof were needing rather expensive repair—not very helpful, but then these sorts never are, though I ’spose to drive the point home I could make her violet-eyed and golden-haired and honey-tongued and gifted upon the guitar, except when I went down to the mary-sue store they were fresh out, so I guess she'll be average and ordinary after all.

So back to our hero (having successfully skirted around this feminine one-dimensional digression): he must backtrack, nearly to the foot of the peak before him. He must find another, surer path to the dragon's horde up the mountain.

In short, he must rip out a bunch of code and start again.

Which indeed he did. The treasure, last I heard, had been successfully retrieved and the code-warrior—or perhaps code-wizard, that being a somewhat less belligerent image, not to mention aligning better with my spouse's nickname—is to be sent on a new quest return back to the something-or-other project he was, um, kidnapped from. And what, you ask, has this to do with the price of tea in China, or an erratically added-to website ostensibly about glass beads?

Well, perhaps (only perhaps) I might've mentioned I have been off-loading angst resulting from getting hit by a car writing a story. It's quite a traditional story, very nearly fairy-tailish (literally in this case, the protagonists being kitty cats I'm sorry to say bear more than a passing resemblance to Avatar though thank goodness Andre Norton, C.J. Cherryh and my apa's own editor Bonnie Reitz have been doing kitty-cats in space forevah so however unoriginal the idea it least it has a long tradition, and fairy tails tales are nothing if not traditional, and this one is indeed very much so: yes, once again, Beauty & the Beast. Some day, I will write a different story. Mebbe.

And I've been doing things to add, yanno, some conflict and plot and thematic concerns & all that to this angst-expression, and gradually it's turning into sort of a story and not just emotional wankery. But. The time has come. After explaining all the problems I've been having with it the wizard (who indeed a knight and paladin of the highest order, to listen to me, or at least give a believable pretense of listening to me spend absurd amounts of time analyzing plot weaknesses in harry potter/vorkosigan x-over fanfics (yes, this exists, and yes, some of it is better than “real” fiction printed between the covers of real paperbacks) said:

Rip out that code and redo it.

And no amount of wailing about how difficult and time consuming and all around pain-in-the-assedness to do this made the slightest difference.

Rip out and begin again.

The only thing that consoles me about this whole mess (besides the fact that I might, yanno, learn something, is that maybe—just maybe—trying the second time around might go faster.

Have to see.

In the meantime, why yes Gathering is this weekend & I'm planning on being there, and selling my tigers and kitty cats and "these floral vessels" at my little half table—if you're in Rochester, stop by and say hello!

I see I have once again lapsed into hiatus. So, so, so very lazy.

Was wandering about the intertubes, reading the always entertaining slactivist, came across this astonishing 19ca hero via Making Light, and before long had detoured off to the always fascinating (to me) fanfic post which has many good insights (perhaps my fave being fanfic as a more-palatable form of ‘full-contact’ literary criticism. ) Yes. Also, jes’ cos I'm petty that way, this lovely, lovely takedown of a classic anti-fanfic rant.

Among the many other reasons I would give for allowing folks to (publicly) fanfic your works is while they might no interest whatsoever in writing, nor even reading fanfic in your world, they might decide to have nothing to do with you because they presume you're not interested in what they, as readers, have to contribute to your work. You don't trust to us to interpret your work; fine, we'll go somewhere else.

(Alas, it grieves me deeply to discover that my favorite fantasy author has a no-fanfic rule. Fortunately for her, she's grandmothered in: I started reading her stuff roughly 30 years ago, and can't give it up. Even more ironic, not only does she not want others writing about certain parts of her oevre, she herself has little interest in writing them either. And, her reasons, excepting the first—that copyright law is, at best, murky—aren't any better defended than the admittedly uglier rant above.)

Frankly, the fear that I'll spew something equally indefensible and unattractive is the single biggest reason I self-censor. Most people are average. They do some things well, others badly. They screw up, and hurt and their fellow human beings, even without intent. (Not all of us can be ibn Al-Kaders. Alas.) Quite apart from being pretty averagely nasty, even with the greatest will in the world, still, I goof. Sometimes badly.

I hate that. It helps, a little, to have learnt the social methods for ameliorating these messes (aka real apologies), but really, I'd much rather not make the mess in the first place. —Take for example the link above—the original rant was taken down, so perhaps the author has changed her mind. Honesty compels me to admit I too was once anti-fanfic, but I came to the conclusion this was wrong, and I changed my mind. (I was also once horribly possessive of my pweshus, pweshus creations, and am profoundly grateful to the open source community for opening my eyes to the other side: the culture on which my work is built, the others from whom I've borrowed. ’Tis only right to pass that generosity along. I do try.)

But the fact of the matter is, while people can forgive, they don't necessarily forget. Nor are they obligated to do so.

None of this has much to do with the body of the post, which is the latest incarnation of We Want You for Sord&Sworcery, the old-fashioned SF&F apa (Amateur Publishing Association) to which I belong. Well, excepting the fact that the sf&f community originated the term (though not the practice!) of fanfic, and still quite interested in it.

Hey, another hiatus, what fun.

To be perfectly honest, I've been lazing; now that Gift's gone back to Thailand, we've basically been slopping about, not making dinner or doing any but the most absolutely necessary of chores. —Went camping over the weekend, and since we had no exchange student with us, it wasn't freezing cold, the mosquitoes and black flies were only mildly annoying, and it only rained Sunday afternoon. We had a lovely spot on the water in a primitive campground, which basically meant we got to listen to a generator on Friday (folks! if you want showers and electricity, stay at the far-more-common improved campgrounds, and leave the rare rough stuff to those of us wishing to get away from that sort of racket. Thank goodness there was no cell phone coverage to speak of, or we would've been listening to all that as well—the locals’ powerboats, not to mention drunken midnite parties thereon, was plenty of noise, thankyouverymuch;)

I read a book my SiL had brought for herself, Timothy Ferris’ The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason and the Laws of Nature. I was gonna write a long critique review of it, complete with quotes and what not, and I may still, but the short version is that folks already on board with the idea that science (and science education) are critically important are not gonna find a lot new in this, and those disposed to find fault will have fewer difficulties than they ought.

I mean, I totally believe that we really need to emphasize science education, and that the way pure research (i.e. government funding of universities) has been gutted since the moon landings (70s) is eventually—in fact already is—coming home to roost.

But this book is irritating on several levels. For one thing, the introductory chapter looks as if it's been stuck on at the behest of an editor/publisher or something, going as it does into the necessity of science education for the Middle East as a way to cure that awful muslim fundamentalism. Okaaaayyy...I can see that; after all, that part of the world gave us some great stuff (arabic numbers and algebra, anyone?) but if this wasn't gonna be hopelessly condescending, then the next (or perhaps prior) chapter should deal with USian homegrown anti-science religious zealotry.

Which is barely touched.

So after piling on those muslims the first chapter, he basically ignores them thereafter to discuss science vis-a-vis Western thought (though India gets a shout-out as the world's largest democracy.) Then there's the assertion that science, because it worships at the altar of TRUTH, is gonna naturally promote everyone, regardless of background. Yeah, right. Tell that to all the women scientists and computer programmers and engineers who even today face appalling discrimination.

And what's with the snarking on the Romantic period? No matter what this guy sez, science, like any other human endeavor, is prey to the sorts of petty—sometimes disgusting—behaviors that fallible human beings engage in. (It also, no matter the popular image of the coldly rational scientist coming up with a hypothesis and then testing it, has an intuitive component.) There's no question that the scientific method is an incredibly powerful technique for investigating the world; but it's not the only way to experience life. The analytical has become so dominant that intuitive thinking has become sadly deprecated; and I've always felt that was a mistake.

Moreover, again, no matter what people try to tell you, at bottom we're emotional animals, who live in social groups, and this is gonna have an impact on the way we live our lives, be it scientific or artistic (or both). The Romantics, and their quest for deep, sublime emotional experience may not be to everyone's taste (though I like ’em a heckuva lot better than some classicists I could bring to mind, Jacques Louis-David frex—how I loathe The Oath of the Horatii...) but to dismiss an entire movement as aesthetically and even morally bankrupt strikes me as doing a rotten job for making one's case. Even if the Romantics were lousy scientists (and IIRC he cites at least one glowingly) the age still produced some gorgeous art, and to throw it all out because it doesn't meet his modern concept of rationality strikes me as intolerant and, to be frank, arrogant.

(Frex, the author thinks very poorly of Rousseau, whom he acknowledges had more of an impact on 20ca education than anyone else, despite being uneducated. Ok, that's a fair argument—but the fact that he had five kids out of wedlock, with a woman he was presumed to despise? Meanwhile I still don't know what it was about Rousseau's educational ideas that were so awful, because Ferris is too busy bending over backwards to excuse Washington and Franklin's ownership of slaves, or the fact that Jefferson fathered children on Sally Hemings. This sort of inconsistent treatment of figures the author admires or despises really annoys the heck out of me weakens his case.)

Similarly, postmodernism, the author's umbrella term for a variety of liberal movements, are casually dismissed as ‘academic anti-science’. Say wha? Not one useful thing to come out of all this? Feminism, to cite one I actually know something about, is not exactly recent, and moreover, treating it that way shows a shocking lack of understanding—not surprising since Ferris clearly despises it. Academic anti-science indeed! (All the women science bloggers I know are definitely feminists. Academics, or wanna-bes, too.) Somewhere he makes a claim that feminists advocate for some sort of woo-filled algebra (something I've never encountered in any of the feminisms I've read about, and while my grounding of the subject is hardly academic, I suspect the real problem was feminists complaining that algebra, or rather its teaching and putative uses is geared to men—only one of many bones feminists have to pick with regard to math and science.)

He suggests that Kuhn's famous book about paradigm shifts is inimical to science because it just means everything's going to change anyway, so why bother learning science? Well, I had to read that book for a freshman class, (taught by one of those airy-fairy philosopher types) and the whole thrust of the book as we understood it is that scientists are making new discoveries which can have a profound impact on how we view the world (plate tectonics is a favorite example). Which is in support of science, and its marvelous ways of continually expanding our horizons.

Pomo has its share of cranks to be sure, but an awful lot of people have found value in it. That makes me suspicious of its purported uselessness right there. Suggesting that its major founders are nazis (yes, really) comes across basically as godwinism (even if it's true.) Ad hominem and a cite to the famous joke (the nonsense paper) could very easily have opponents snarking on science's excesses, like all those “proofs” that women talk more than men, or that neuroscience shows women are more naturally nurturing. Look, I'm not crazy about woo either, but it obviously satisfies a deep and abiding need; better to try and understand where these people are coming from, rather than call ’em fools and give up. Otherwise, you fall in the very trap he notes we must diligently avoid, a sciency high-caste with an underclass of peons.

So what about his thesis, that science promotes liberty? Better, that science was the igniting spark of liberty?

Not convinced. I simply don't think science is necessary or sufficient; rather, it's one component of a civil, free society. Or put another way, the old correlation does not mean causation canard comes to mind. There are any number of theories as to what got the enlightenment going—the geography in Italy, that fostered many competing city-states, at which, if a man found no reception for his cool new idea at one, he could take to the next. Double entry bookkeeping. The slow development of intellectual thought in the monasteries, during the middle ages. The cross-pollination of the more egaliterian Haudenosee (five nations) culture. My personal suspicion? I think the invention of the printing press, which facilitated the free flow of ideas, with a dollop of having to be more creative after the Black Death (which wreaked havoc on the labor force and its traditional ways of doing things) was probably the biggie. But that's a guess, not an assertion.

Why do I think that? Because when the circs provide, people tend to take advantage—I don't think the Renaissance Man was suddenly so much smarter than his benighted Medieval ancestor, merely that things had finally come together in such a way that ideas, such as experimental testing of theory, could finally reach critical mass and take off. (One of the things I loved about Stephen Jay Gould's essays was that he liked to take reviled figures, actually read their own writings, and “redeem” their supposed superstitions with arguments that they were, by their own lights, doing “science”, or at the very least, thinking rationally—only to find their accomplishments often overturned or even completely reversed by historians of a later time. Sure, those old geezers were prey to mistakes and beliefs of their time, but they weren't stupid. Any more than we are.

This is also why I love the internet. While it's not a frictionless exchange of ideas, especially for the poor, still, it lowers the barrier to entry hugely; and I think we've barely started to scratch the surface of what promise it holds...always provided, of course, that it remains free. But that's another argument for another day.) But people are people, and given opportunities, they pursue'em.

Thus my feeling is that good science is a useful tool of free and open societies, and I'd certainly agree it thrives in them. But I'd hesitate to ascribe critical thinking skills, or even the ‘let's test this’ as solely the province of science. I play that game all the time, making beads, which last I checked...was art.

And as for wishful thinking? The author himself seems to lean towards the libertarian/conservative end of things, politically, yet his own facts (e.g. investments historically do better under Democratic administrations) force him to conclude that perhaps those wretched progressives (from whom he's careful to distinguish the classically liberal ideals promulgated in this book) might be onto something. Personally, I'd be very curious to see a real progressive intellectual (e.g. Michael Berube) take this thing apart. Given my 60 (or even 25) watt efforts, I have to wonder what would happen were a 500 watt photoflood from one of the leading lights were shined down upon (to push this horrendously cliched metaphor). Something tells me the results would not be pretty.

Which is really too bad, because he's got some interesting ideas, (and cites) but the poorly supported (and often unnecessary) digressions undermine his very valid points. (Which, oddly enough, returns me to one of his other overriding themes, that democracy, [and science] are messy, rather unregulated affairs, full of squabbling and erratic progress, compared to authoritarian lockstep. —Any number of progressive bloggers will rail about how, frex, progressives tear down their own, instead of staying on message. Well, so: this book has an excellent message—science and liberty go together like beans and rice—but here I is, picking.

The author suggests, and I agree, that such disagreements, though incredibly frustrating in the short term, resolve to the best solution (“the wisdom of crowds”) in the long term. So, guess I'm doing my bit to be a vociferous critic in the short term, and contribute (one hopes) to the betterment of science education in the long term;)

But hey, let's have art come to the fore, for a moment, with this pic of a daylily. For to be sure you betcha I'm thrilled with the technology that makes showing this image to world possible. Easy, even.

With luck I'll be getting my beads back from B&B in a couple of days, and then I'll have some of those fun new animals. Today's beastie is a cinnabar lion, who's hanging out in this turquoise and silver necklace etsy \artfire.

So, just to be a little less ranty than yesterday...I find it sort of interesting that on the same day I went to a bike fest, I happened to read about how Detroit is being revitalized in the local alternative paper—their lead article was Wheels of Change: Why the Motor City is becoming a cycling mecca. The bike lanes and what not is quite a shift from when we lived there; but to be sure the city is evidently in even more dire straits now.

I'd recently read/heard other articles about how the city was becoming a destination point for artists, because of the cheap land; also the less strict rules. Turns out the urban food people are also gravitating there, because of the opportunities (i.e. vacant lots) to grow food. Personally I think this is fabulous. I've always felt Detroit had lots of potential, and I think it would be great if it could overcome its twin issues (crime and crappy schools) and be at the forefront of the post-peak oil renaissance—as, evidently, it's showing signs of doing.

That's one of the great ironies, it's always seemed to me: if you're comfy, if you have loads of resources, even though you've potentially got the wherewithal to bounce back, you're the least likely to take advantage of them. Quite often it's the folks on a shoestring who are forced to be creative, to try new things. As someone who is rather deeply risk-averse, I've always tremendously admired folks who get out there and try.

Any number of them, I suspect, were at the bikefest/green fair rally.

Oooh, Monday morning. Time for a nice rant, to get the blood flowing, hmm?

In my efforts to avoid/procrastinate/escape the dreaded paperwork, I was noodling around on the web (on a beautiful Friday afternoon, so of course the bloggers were all out enjoying their weekend) and having discovered Pursuit of Harpyness (what a great name) meandered along their fab-looking blogroll, and thought, oh hey, haven't looked at bookslut for awhile, and via that stumbled over this post about atheism in which this guy claims that a) people don't like to admit they're atheists because we're all so "angry" and and have an "unpleasant tone" and b) that atheism is a religion. Hm, lots of feminists and POC could weigh in on the whole ‘angry tone’ thing, I'm sure. Minorities of all stripes seem to be prone to this. I wonder why that would be...?

Well, with claims like that, no wonder atheists get tetchy. Atheism is not a religion. This fella Prothero goes on to suggest it could be, because of ritual:

The way I think about religion, if I say, do people who love Yankees baseball... is that a religion? Or people who are in Scientology... is that a religion? I think you have to look at the family resemblances question.

Um, no.

‘Fan’ is short for fanatic for a reason; people can find the most innocuous thing to latch onto. But obsessive interest in something doesn't make a person religious. Belief in god does. Religion is, perhaps, more susceptible to fanatics desiring nitpicky rules to obsess over because, incorporating a moral system, it is more resistant to criticism: you're not gonna get the same slack for unacceptable behavior coming out of your baseball obsession or your Star Wars action figurines collection that you can for declaiming about the LORD. (That said, like so many other things, fanaticism—passion if you like—can be a good.)

But folks wishing to clothe their bad behavior in acceptable togs are no more stupid than the rest of us, and have no difficulty perceiving that pious wool is a better choice to shield them from the cold of criticism, than, say, sporty but sparse dog hair or (worse) that fannish, fannish (fennish?) cat fur (those things being a bit too close to the ancestral wolf.) But fanaticism is neither necessary nor sufficient to be religious.

Religions are about god(s). If you believe in god(s) you are a theist. If you don't, you are an a-theist (‘a’ meaning, without or not—see that HS effort to [mostly fail] to learn Latin was good for something). If you're not sure, there's a category for you too—agnostic. Religions failing to possess gods are, as far as I can tell, more properly philosophies, but what do I know? I had one comparative religion class in 9th grade, courtesy of Immaculata High (back when a Catholic education was actually about learning and questioning stuff and all that there.) It was an excellent class. (Immaculata also required sex ed, and discussed every form of birth control save abortion. Pretty cool.)

Nor does religion require ritual; but many religions, including the one I grew up in, the RCC, are rife, nay, famous for their religious rituals (i.e. rites). Well and good. But the word has broadened in its meaning, and includes secular activities too. Baseball is not religion. It may have fanatics, and cultural practices and all that...but it hasn't gods. Heroes, perhaps, but not literal gods.

I think this guy's problem (or one of them, anyway) is a false equivalency—ritual as part of religious worship, or ritual as a set pattern of behavior. Do I engage in rituals? Of the second sort, absolutely. I like to clean my lampworking table, sweep off all the shards and shattered glass, wipe it down, organize the rods I'm gonna use (and put away the ones I don't need for that session) lay out my tools, dip mandrels, etc. I can easily fritter away half an hour or more in this transitional state, which is basically my way of working up to making, or rather failing to make, beads. (Art is scary! Gotta work up to it!)

But the first kind of ritual? No. Not when I'm in the alternate mental space making beads, not when I'm braiding or embroidering or drawing, or post-processing, not even when I'm meditating during yoga. Just as baseball is not a religion, neither is a meditative state necessarily prayer (an address to god), or a part of religion—even if (as I've commonly heard) prayer is akin to knitting or gardening or meditation.

Atheism is not a special kind of ‘non’ religion. It is not a substitute for religion. It's not some sort of crappy alternative to religion. It's an absence. For some reason this is a difficult concept for people to grasp. I wish, however, that they would, for the same reason pagans don't like to be mixed with Satanists: pagans don't have devils. (That's a christian thing.) You wanna piss off a pagan, start talking about Satanism, which to them is a subset (cult) of Christianity. (No, really.) You want to annoy an atheist, suggest that particular lack of belief in god(s) is a substitute for religion.

No.

Thanks. And have a yummy spinach pie (recipe).

Must, must, must do paperwork (oh, joy) today, so today's post is gonna be short and sweet (for me anyway). Not only do I love making beads and stringing beads, I also love embroidering beads, as in these two wall-hangings etsy/artfire mini-art-quits etsy/artfire. There's just something so luxuriously, gloriously abundant about embroidery, even the tiny sections in these pieces: not just the texture and color, but the time.

It's a truism in art that's what you're paying for(1), be it the actual time to create the piece, or the expertise to be able to make it all; but wouldn't it be wonderful if that sort of thing were gloriously abundant? That we might live in an art-rich, rather than material-goods rich culture is one of what I believe might be the (mostly) unperceived upsides to a sustainable, post big-oil lifestyle. Because as an artist, I'm all about this:

“Abundance, by my definition, is the condition when all people, regardless of their backgrounds, now and in the future, are enabled to live life as art.”

Live life as art. Yep. That's what I want. Not just having the time to make art, but even just live life as a part of art—being in a beautiful, tidy sunroom, with thriving plants, reading one's favorite 19ca novel; or walking down the street, listening to birds, wind, and children playing (as opposed to say, leafblowers and lawnmowers.) Listening to singing or home-made music, instead of being subjected to a radio blaring as an SUV roars by (extra bad if they nearly run you down in the process for having the temerity to delay their right on red.) Seeing stars or the moon, instead of lifeless streetlights (that not only mess up my sleeping patterns, but screw up a whole host of organisms). —I get to live some little (sometimes large) portion of my life this way, and treasure those moments deeply; what would it be like to live like that most of the time, instead of snatched moments in the interstices of our industrial world?

(After all, once upon a time, people managed all manner of truly glorious folk art, as any embroiderer or beader familiar with the history of hir craft is well aware; and in some parts of the world (Bali, frex) there is still a lot of time devoted to making art—not just any kind of art, but disposable art, such as the sand paintings Tibetan monks do.

Well, so much for beauty. Here's today's fridayfugyly. (But hey, no beauty without risks, and risks meaning fridayfuglies;)

(1)Whistler famously sued critic John Ruskin (scroll down) over an abstract painting, for whom the latter, perhaps the best known art-critic of his age, had no greater opinion than most people do of abstract expressionism; the artist, when questioned, said that particular painting had indeed only taken a day or two to execute—but that the skills and knowledge had taken him a lifetime.

Today's etsy/artfire item is also the page (which is why there's only one photo—I was thinking post, rather than selling—but I think it's pretty representative of the piece in question.

Ah, my roundup of links. Via feministe this awesome mashup of Buffy and Twilight. Riffing on the comments of a couple of days ago, I note the creator has a walloping big notice about fair use and sources, (one of which was Harry Potter—the only film of the three series I could be guaranteed to have seen). Mebbe I've cited this excellent Jonathon Lethem essay before, but one of the points the above example illustrates is the idea that you don't necessarily have to be familiar with the original content to appreciate the parodies of it—as, for example, Twilight, which I primarily know by Cleolinda's humorous but for the most part rather affectionate takedown of the series. And I've never actually seen a complete Buffy episode.

Which I suppose brings us back to the original feministe discussion about romance—I think fanfic is a way for people who mebbe are (for whatever reason) unwilling to examine culture through an explicitly feminist lens to nevertheless attempt to reconcile the conflicting narratives—frex romance! twoo wuv! independence and autonomy and egalitarian relationships—in an interesting and playful way, without being straightjacketed into “typical” narratives.

(Which is not exactly a new observation, even from me, let alone other people.)

Continuing on with film, via Pharyngula, some stuff about a Spanish costume pic, Agora, in which the history blogger picks apart the recent film about the ancient mathematician Hypatia. I'd never heard of her, and the film looks luscious (if a bit depressing.) The blogger's problem is the wretched historical inaccuracies, which from internal evidence in the film the film-makers are aware; therefore, as one poster comments

Lovely review, by the way. Very in-depth, learned and clever, although you don't make any reference to that wonderful line someone or other made back in 4th century Alexandria "This is an act of savagery that future generations will choose to blame on the villains of their own age."

In a rather interesting recursion/falsification the blogger notes the quote itself may be a modern fabrication, and the discussion back and forth about fictionalizing history to delineate modern issues is an interesting one; but, like fanfic, it's a technique as old as the hills—Arthur Miller did it in The Crucible, and earlier, so did Nathanial Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter; in fact, my first real experience with christian fundamentalism came out of my OT studies, when the prof (Frank Frick) taught us that Daniel pretended to be set in the future, as a framing device of a prophet predicting the horrible events that would come to pass (i.e. the writer's present) if people did not shape up. I was blown away by the idea that those old geezers had it (fun literary conceits) in them, and thought my guitar teacher, whom I knew to be into the bible, would be equally fascinated by this really cool biblical history.

Um, that's about as close as I've ever seen steam actually come out someone's ears. Man, was he upset. —Apologies if I've mentioned this story before; but discovering folks like him (biblical literalists) was one of the ways in which my liberal arts education truly was horizon-broadening.

Anyway. I get that history should be taught on its own terms, that it's interesting on its own terms—though even then, quite smart people screw up their history, as Carl Sagan did in his talk about the library of Alexandria (which evidently at least partially inspired the film). Also, that people take movies (and novels) for fact even when they know better (she said, whistling...), which is one of the dangers of recasting historical narratives to make a modern point. Nevertheless, I don't think people are gonna stop doing it any time soon. (Which is one reason I like sf&f—you lift the bits of history that suit your story, and don't have to worry about these distortions.)

So, what was my point, again? Oh, fun blog. Honestly, I need to start organizing these cool history blogs I stumble across. Also, he has a link to yummy, yummy armor costuming.

And speaking of yummy, does not the color of this bead qualify?

As I promised yesterday, I have two new etsy listings for y'all, and I think they are just the cutest! They're teeny (okay, under an inch/2.5cm, anyhow) little snow leopard heads: one with golden brown eyes, /artfire and one with blue. /artfire Awwww, are they not sweeeeet? (So often one's stuff fails to match the internal vision, no matter how good it looks to the outsider. But every once in a while, something comes close—these are by no means perfect, but they're skirting that internal vision, which makes me happy.

Yeesh, has it really taken me two and a half hours to photograph beads & make a post? Ok, I guess the playing around on facebook doesn't count. Anyway. This has taken long enough, I will put up the various fun links that have been collecting tomorrow. Though I will note, my first daylily opened today (and I saw my first one locally yesterday.) Definitely June now, even if the all the rain makes me think of May.

In the meantime, a little post about fellow glass beadmaker Sheila Morley, and tips for applying murrine.

I have a couple of cute lil’ kitties I made today, but they really ought to dry before I photograph ’em (water ruins my background paper!) so today's post will just promote the beads I will be featuring at B&B. My work, along with many other talented members, will be at GlassAct's booth, ably staffed by Denise B-W and Kim W (thanks, guys!) So if you're gonna be there, stop by & say hi:)

While doing my usual procrastination/displacement activity thing, I came across some interesting links, such as this exhaustive, or at least exhaustingly long list of fanfics (via Making Light, of course.) The two-thousand year old one by the famous Greek-foundation-of-western-culture guys was particularly amusing. Somewhere or other I also encountered this link (via David Brin) to a cool train that only has to slow, not stop, at stations, instead off and on loading passengers via a roof-mounted ‘transfer car’. Which not only speeds up the train service, it's more efficient of fuel, too.

I get that cars are wasteful, and I'm happy to let someone else drive; but I just plain don't like buses. Trains, on the other hand, are cool, especially since they tend to have more space for you to read/craft/eat etc—mebbe because they developed in a different age, or because they're more efficient, and thus can spare the amenities—but in any event, it seems to me, if we want folks to get on board (ahem) the whole public/alternative transport thing, then it needs to be made attractive, and being squashed is not fun. Not having to putz around waiting for people to get on and off also strikes me as a plus.

And speaking of alternative transportation, if you're dipping a toe in to cycling to actually get somewhere, and feel your road riding skills are rusty (or non-existent) this is the resource for you. (Thanks go to a member of our local bike coalition for this one:) Short version: it really is safer (if initially more daunting) to ride in the road, as the vehicular traffic any cyclist becomes, once ze gets over 5 mph (walking pace) is far more likely to see you. And being seen (in time) is the name of the game. This booklet will tell you how to become a safe and effective cyclist. (Sure, you can still get hit by cars. That's true of driving too, though.)

And yes, my little would-be progressive, feminist self duly appreciated that the cyclists came assorted.

Enjoy.

Heydeeho. Sorry, no Friday Fugly: instead of photographing bad beads, I spent the evening reading a good novel instead. (Really I shouldn't’ve been doing either, since B&B is coming up. Ah well.)

We picked out three books at Penguicon, but as the vendor didn't feel that was a sufficient sale to warrant accepting our credit card, we ended up purchasing them from our local bookstore (the clerk of whom expressed disbelief when I related this story, but she was delighted to accept our money): the new Lee&Miller, something called Steamed (which as I noted in a previous post, I decided not to read in favor of perhaps trying to write something like that myself;) and Maria Snyder's first effort for the YA market, Inside Out , which had to be ordered. This is a story about a young woman (or girl) living in dystopian, overcrowded world bound by pipes and corridors and the endless, mindless drudgery of being a scrub—a sanitation worker responsible for keeping their world clean for the uppers, the wealthy elite who have space, wealth and leisure.

Those familiar with classic sf films will of course recognize the parallels to Metropolis, right down to the lower class heroine who leads the revolt. The other classic this most reminds me is Brian Aldiss’ Non-stop, but as it was published before I was born and is evidently out of print, teen readers are unlikely to engage in comparisons. (That said, it's part of the sf masterworks series, and deservedly so.)

Even without those hints, it's not exactly difficult for the reader to guess where it is the scrubs live and what the prophesied "gateway" is; the interest, therefore, comes from the sullen, distrustful Trella, the Queen of the Pipes, who has no use for the mass of people with whom she must make her life—except gentle Cogon, whom everyone, even she—loves.

After a broken-backed prophet excites Cogon's imagination with tales of secret files leading to the mysterious Gateway, Trella, against her better judgment, retrieves the files, only to discover that her actions have led the tyrannical Travas to capture her only friend, and are torturing him to learn the location of the prophet, whom Trella has hidden away.

Interestingly enough, Non-stop was written in response to Heinlein's Orphans in the Sky (which I cannot imagine not having read, though I don't recall it—it was much easier, then, to follow the “major” authors in the field. Heinlein's early work unquestionably remains my favorite, so I sought out everything he wrote, at least till he completely jumped the shark, what with women panting all over Lazarus Long's sacred sperm, the incest, the women panting all over pregnancy, the nubile young and beautiful things panting all over the opportunity for sex with Lazarus Long/Jubal Harshaw, a truly unattractive Gary Stuish stand-in for Hugh Hefner, the author miscellaneous squick-inducing old farts (which was the part of Stranger in a Strange Land I most detested, and this unprepossessing tendency of Heinlein's only got worse with time); but as this book (i.e. Inside Out) progressed, the Heinlein that came to mind was The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (with sprinkles of Vernor Vinge's The Peace War. Both of which have strong liberatian streaks. Of that, more anon). —Needless to say, it's not the plot that engaged my interest, since I had a good idea where it was going, but the characterizations, particularly of Trella, who slowly learns to depend upon others during the course of the story, and the contrasting cultures of the scrubs and uppers.

The cover reminded me more than a bit of Scott Westerfield's Uglies series, and in fact, I think readers of those stories will enjoy this one as well: there are definitely similarities in tone and style, part of the gritty approach currently in vogue for YA lit. In fact, I noticed this book because I enjoyed Poison Study so much, and f2tE (a bona fide YA) adores both series. Westerfield's books explored, in an sfnal and quite literal way, the enormous pressures on women, particularly young women, to be attractive, and the heavy personal costs this enacted when they hit puberty and were made ‘pretty’.

In a similar, if not quite as explicit way, this book explores the impact of reproduction on women. It's not explained why abortion is punished with forced, continuous childbirth for the duration of the woman's fertility amongst the scrubs, who accept pregnancy as a natural—and unavoidable—consequence of sex when they already are packed in living quarters like sardines, whereas the uppers are barred from having more than one child, but it seems fairly obvious the author is familiar with life history theory, which attempts to explain why reproductive choices vary with environment.

I'd say she's also aware of the differing issues of reproductive justice faced by brown and white women: the former are often castigated for being irresponsible, and having too many children; whereas the latter, particularly in fundamentalist Christian subcultures, are dissuaded, in the strongest possible terms, for refusing to carry their pregnancies to term (not to mention castigated for getting pregnant in the first place). In the book, however, it is the numerous, marginalized brown-eyed scrubs have no birth control except illegal abortions; whereas the (sometimes) blue-eyed uppers are permitted but one child, in an interesting reversal of current US mores.

(It's implied that the scrubs are sort of an average, brownish skin tone, but it also becomes clear over the course of the novel that the genetic separation between uppers and scrubs is hardly sacrosanct. Given that they all live in a controlled environment with controlled lighting, and clothes that cover most of their bodies, there would be no biological advantage to producing extra melanin; but on the other hand, the pressure to become light-skinned to get extra vitamin D seems unlikely as well, since the hydroponic food that feeds them could easily have this added. Depending on just how scarce food (and medical care) is for the scrubs, one could perhaps see them dropping features, like melanin production, that they don't absolutely need, but I don't think their lives are that marginal. But at least there's been adequate generational time for such mutations to take place, and an environment that makes their coloration feasible—unlike that book where the aliens either lived in a freezing cold planet and would be assumed to be light skinned, or on a tropical one and would be assumed to be dark, but instead were bronze.)

Be that as it may, I couldn't help wondering, if scrubs managed to illegally develop some extremely sophisticated mechanical tech, and buck the rules to the point attempting to keep one's own children rather than surrendering them to the creche after birth, why they had not even a concept of birth control (except abortion).

Granted, the penalties for abortion were harsh, but they're pretty staggeringly harsh in parts of the world now, and every statistic I've read has suggested that outlawing abortion doesn't stop it, but merely drives it underground. Scrub culture, as far as I could tell, doesn't attach any particular censure to pregnancy, but it's clear that a significant subset of women don't care to get pregant—the protagonist certainly doesn't, and neither does a minor character who expresses dismay upon learning she is pregnant.

Therefore, there is a demand for pregnancy prevention/termination. (The narrator doesn't explain how illegal abortions are identified; nor does she, or, more to the point, her upper friend, classify it as a method of BC, though it surely is.)

This is a technologically sophisticated culture, with cleaning robots and blood testing of a level in excess of our own; and people with a history of subverting their rulers’ edicts. That weekly blood testing, presumeably, is the way pregnancy is determined. Given that some 50–80% of pregnancies spontaneously abort, (not to mention the fact that it's easier to abort earlier in the process) it would make sense for the machine only mark pregnant women once they're past their first trimester. Statistically tracking the number of miscarriages could be one way of identifying deliberate abortions, but that's hardly infallible.

The other big difficulty to obtaining abortions is the lack of privacy and space, but these obstacles obviously aren't insurmountable if a woman manages to hang onto her children for years on end. —So the question then becomes, if these people have the resources to develop other, technologically complex solutions to their problems, why then is there not illicit birth control, particularly of a chemical nature? (It couldn't be ongoing, because of the weekly tests, but something like the morning after pill, or removable barrier methods, could work.)

What, I wondered, were the various competing idealogies amongst scrubs concerning childbirth? Given the severe penalties on the one hand for terminating pregnancy, part of a larger strategy, evidently, to keep scrub reproduction high, and the desire of some scrubs (such as Trella) to remain childless, I would've expected the powers that be to promulgate a rape culture and for there to be a (repressed) cult of childlessness (that Trella, in her aloofness, would nevertheless feel no attraction to.) however, neither is (currently) supported by the text: some couples are separated if they're deemed to be incompatible (i.e. too closely related) genetically, but otherwise, scrubs are free to form sexual liasons as they please, though long term bonds are discouraged.

The incandescent light bulbs, however, just struck me as silly. (I suppose they could be a reference to Ayn Rand's Anthem, but I surely hope not; but this book's parallel's with a number of famous libertarian sf novels is unavoidable.)

I certainly enjoyed it, ( Inside Out, that is; Anthem’s pleasures, if it be said to have any, lay solely in disjointing its repellent themes) though I was just a bit frustrated at the cliffie ending—but then, given the fact the book recapitulates so many classic sf themes, its employment of this old-fashioned device is only appropriate.

If perhaps not quite at the caliber of the Aldiss, this is well-written tale, with much greater internal consistency than the book I've been haranguing on for the past several days; I'm looking forward to the next installment. Alas, given typical publishing schedules, I'll probably have to wait until the subject of today's post—a purple and white iris— is back in bloom again. Next year.

I'm having a difficult time disciplining myself putting all the new kitties I've been making on etsy, cuz I'll just have to take ’em back down again in a few days, since they're all going to Bead&Button. So I'm relisting this lovely old turquoise and ‘cinnabar’ necklace on etsy & artfire instead, since it doesn't have any of my glass beads in it.

Doctor says I'm all better, which by his lights I suppose I am, since as far as I can tell he goes strictly by range of motion, but even with the pain discomfort I'm now able (as of yesterday, basically) to work several hours at a stretch making beads; I made three cats and a horse head yesterday, and five more cats today (plus a couple of resounding failures—FridayFugly will not be a problem for the forseeable future). I've started making minis, about 12–15mm—I'll try and post some pix tomorrow, or perhaps Saturday, for those of you going to B&B—my work will be in the GlassAct booth.

As a result I haven't been doing much besides futzing around in the studio, but I did, over the holiday, finish the latest Kage Baker, Not Less than Gods. Her last book (she died in Jan of this year, of uterine cancer) features Edward Bell-Fairfax, and his origins in the steampunk age. The book dealt with the usual themes in her Company series, most notably how does one attempt to effect good—effectively? What compromises must one make, for the means to justify the ends? How can institutions maintain their original goals, rather than sliding into bureaucratic mediocrity, or worse, outright corruption?

Baker doesn't waste any time digging into these complexities, for Edward's very conception is problematic, given that his mother is raped and impregnated with him without her consent. The author cleverly disguises this by framing the prolog humorously. Given the biases of the Victorian age in which Edward grows up (not to mention those of the average sf fan) I wonder if she wasn't testing her readership to see if they'd notice.

In any event, the event foreshadows Edward's own interactions with women, his persuasive voice acting upon them against their better interests; his reaction, in light of the many discussions of privilege at which I've been lurking, strikes me as a very-much-not-accidental metaphor for privilege, particularly that which is invisible to its possessors.

Like Octavia Butler before her, who wrote Kindred as her take on the vampire novel, Baker's last book jumps on the steampunk bandwagon; also like Buter, Baker did a nice job. It's clear that she had a grand ole time coming up with various steampunk-y type James-Bondian gadgets for Fairfax and his cohort to use during the course of their adventures.

However, though all the Bakerian themes were there, I found the book curiously flat, as if it were not quite finished; as if she'd done all the research, made a careful sketch and started her colors, but hadn't the chance to put the final, finishing touches, those last few layers to snap everything into the sort of sharp, painful, and emotional focus that characterizes her writing.

An example: once Edward grows up, he and two of his Company peers, along with a mentor, basically go on a road trip, fulfilling various disconnected assignments from company headquarters. One of the young men endangers their mission(s) with his incipient alcoholism (to contrast with Edward's whoring), and it's fairly clear this character's problems are suppose to contrast and combine with Edward's. But I never really understood why the mentor tolerated the drinking, or did so little to combat it—I got murky glimpses, but that was all.

It was nevertheless an engrossing read, and fans of Mendoza and her tripartite lover will enjoy this origin story. (Though, alas, she doesn't appear, it being set before she & Fairfax meet. And I gotta say, after finishing that arc, I felt a little less strange about my little quirks....)

One of which is taking photographs that have no doubt already been done by somebody else.