Not Anonymous

Workers of the World Unite and Dance around the Maypole!

So, yeah, where was I?!

Well, the day after I posted about the Seder, I actually went on a proper holiday weekend with a couple of my friends. We stayed in a very nice lodge with a stable motif. It also had no mobile phone reception(!!) and barely there WiFi (which I cared less about because I didn't bring anything that needed WiFi in order to live).

During that lovely weekend I read one the best young adult books ever and one of the few original Israeli sci-fi books!
There's a sizeable sci-fi/fantacy community in Israel and it's a very creative one too, there's plenty to chose from when it comes to translated works, but when it comes to original work in Hebrew the pickings are a little slimmer and this book was just, oh my god, I really hope it gets translated into other languages soon so that you can all read its gorgeousness.

Right after that holiday I was dumped back to school in which I wrote a crappy paper and probably got a decent grade on an exam.

I also found myself escaping into fanfiction a lot, being annoyed at Glee, being annoyed at Doctor who (I haven't seen yesterday's episode yet! EEK!) and being really unsure what to make of Game of Thrones... it is good. Really good. It's making me want to read the books good, though I have a feeling the books are not as good, because damn, High Fantasy does not like me about as much as I don't like it - that is to say, the series is making me have major, huge, thinky thoughts about many things, but they are possibly not the ones every one else is thinking. Or maybe they are, very possibly they are and I'm just not reading them.

And now, lunch. This year has been brutal on my updating, why!?

Working at a library has many perks.

You get to see how it actually works, the whole system and drudgery of hauling books to and fro, discovering that students (my peers) are often so helpless in the wake of the scope of the stacks.

That's very charitable thinking as very often they are simply lazy. That's also an unfair assessment, the books are intimidating, especially when you have this system to work through. It's called Dewey-Decimal. Why can't it just be alphabetical?
I used to think that, when I was in high school and spent most of my free time (or the time skiving off lessons) hiding in the stacks, reading useless sex-ed books (hey, you had to find porn where you could get it) and the slim selection of Science Fiction and Epic Fantasy was not much to go on.
But woe, the alphabet is sorely lacking in the nuance needed for arranging books in a Library that caters to those who are to be over-educated (like moi!).

I'm still under a lot of scrutiny. I try to take in stride but my boss is one of those unsmiling sorts and takes making sure I put all the books on the shelf correctly. I'm waiting for this month to end, if only so that I can be trusted with the books a bit more.

I find myself loving books more now that I handle them as objects and not things which contain things I want to read or know. it's a different way of interacting with a book. The majority of the books I handle are so incredibly boring I don't even bother leafing through them - seriously, "Introduction to Microeconomics", "Qualitative Research". Those are the titles.
I pity my fellow over-educated peers. I mean, granted not everything I have to read is a page turner, but still, they would pity themselves more than they would pity me.

My stacks are not sexy stacks, alas. They are metal and have many copies of one book - many of them is very bad condition. Wear and tear comes with the territory, but it being a reading hall Library (there is more hall than Library, in fact) you'd think people would take care - after all, the books don't actually belong to them.

In relation to the above, I was sitting around with friends a few days ago and while I can't remember what it was we were watching, it did contain a chase scene and the person running away pushed over a bookcase and I cried out along with a wince:
"No! Not the books!"
And was promptly laughed at by my friends.

The main (and self-indulgent and shows you all how anti-social I actually am) perk, is that I get to show off my mad book finding skills and feel superior to the other over-educated students who think we're going to find jobs with a crummy B.A. in the Humanities and the Social Sciences.

Unless you major in Econ. Then you have a chance. Maybe.

P.S.
BBC's Sherlock has taken over my brain side by side with Inception. I cannot wait to finally have a functional DVD player so that I can re-watch some of Doctor Who and Torchwood. I've been completely neglecting those fandoms!.

I am an admirer of those who use words. Those who convey a world Next Door as though I can walk by it and know I just need to reach out and be there.

Neil Gaiman is one of those word-smiths.

I don't want to rehash the incident, which you can read about here, as context is important and should be known, but for the benefit of those who haven't been in the conversation: ( See me rehash )

Now, my thoughts.

The biggest problem, beyond the obvious of Gaiman's Tweets (which is just a ghastly thing to do), is the implication of Gaiman's comment on Reese's blog post in which he apologised for his response in 2008 and continued to put his foot in his mouth by flippantly saying sorry to the Vikings and Norwegians who he may have misrepresented in the comment.

It is humour politics done very badly.

It is also a very Euro-centric mode of thought, that until the America's were settled by white people there wasn't anything there.

I myself am guilty of such thought, it's a white privilege thing (and not living in the North American continent thing as well, for some).

"A few dead Indians" is a bad turn of phrase. Very, in fact.
I ponder if Gaiman would ever make a Holocaust joke of a similar ilk, but then the only people I've ever heard make Holocaust jokes are Israeli Jews and not other kinds of Jews.

Sorry, derailing. It is however, the power of the joke. The notion that the issue is not important enough for anything other than a laugh. Historical narrative is complicated in what it includes, more so in what it excludes.

When I hear talk of America, my automatic knee-jerk thought is Discovery and not Invasion. This is because I am indoctrinated, period.

When I think of Gaiman and his treatment of America, I think of American Gods, in which he had a PoC (who I always thought was mixed race black/white, but later realised was native/white) protagonist who uses a name that is descriptive and not literal, in which the bloody history of American "immigration" (From the First Nations who cross the Bering Straight to the kidnapped Tribes from Western Africa to the Impoverished Farmers of Eastern Europe. And of course, his beloved Vikings) is detailed in the "interval" chapters found throughout the book between moments of the main plot.
The book is conceptually problematic in the way Spirit of America (The Buffalo Man IIRC) is framed, but I would argue that it's about the defeat of that spirit by the invading colonialist religions than anything else.
Sorta, a large point of the book is that the land itself is no good for the colonising gods, hence... the whole plot of the book.

It is Eurocentric, it's also self-indulgent in a way that managed to speak to a great many people who like the philosophy that Gaiman presents in his work overall.

Problematic yes, bad in and of itself, I don't think so.

Still, Gaiman uses his privilege as a famous author, as someone known to have a dry sense of humour and as a writer who has been known to write the Other to deflect this necessary criticism.

This is not about his knee-jerk reaction to the aforementioned posts regarding what he said in interviews, but regarding what he said about American history.

Writing this is difficult for me, you see I'm a fan. A huge fan. A fan who *squeed* quite a lot when I met him four years ago and I still admire his writing. Even when I heard about the premise of The Graveyard Book which is conceptually based on Kipling's The Jungle Book, I ate up the critique because I love being informed and thought that what Gaiman did in The Graveyard Book was truly brilliant - intertextuality is a kink of mine.

I also think it's important to know where authors and creators fall short. And it this instance, it is Gaiman.

It's disappointing and still... I feel a loyalty towards him. His work has inspired me, changed my way of thinking and is one of the reasons I managed to think about religion and faith more critically and in a way that satisfied me both intellectually and emotionally.
Meeting Neil was one of the best moments of my short life.

I always considered Neil Gaiman to be one of those authors who got things right, who wrote the world with a certain Truth. It is a talent that has garnered him great acclaim and fame. It helps that he himself is a pretty funny guy, self-deprecating but arrogant at the same time, a dry sense if humour that belies the notions of superiority he has about himself.

I always liked that kind of humour, it's uniquely British and makes me nostalgic about Black Adder, French and Saunders and P.G Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster (just to name a few, I could go on).
(Dear god, yes I know of the problematic dynamics in these programmes... I'm an Anglophile and everything that suggests. *sigh*).

But this is a fail and as a loyal and adoring fan I have to take this into account. I have to look at the works of this author, his words on and off the page and wonder, how is it that mainstream historical narrative (i.e. racist and elite oriented) is so pervasive that a the notion of genocide that continues to this day is viewed as nothing more than a cavalier utterance? That those deaths continue to haunt America and that the death of a Nation is an absence felt all the time, not only by those who survived the killings but by the cultural and narrative vacuum of that death.

Genocide lingers, either as an traumatic imprint or as the absence that I mention. There is more to this than "a few dead Indians" and European tombstones.

Oh, Neil...

I'll be paying attention to this. I may write some more.

Today was full of events and NSFW language!

First my Deleuze & Guattari Seminar prof came into class in the most hideous shirt I've ever seen! Good god, man, why?! Dark forest green with orange leaves, weird grey "blue print" sketches splotched all over.
It was hilarious. I was so distracted. I'm so happy he's compelling in his own right and I could focus on his voice while I stared either at my notepad or the whiteboard.

Then I hung out with friend in which we spoke about eugenics, which always makes me uncomfortable, not just because the subject is disgusting in its own right, but because I have strong associations to Mengele when speaking about race-based genetic research - Josef Mengele is my Boogyman.
Then we stalked other profs we like.
Yes, we're those students.

The highlight was seeing and hearing Michael Cunningham speak about writing. He read us the first chapter of his new book and it has a het sex scene in it. Which was kinda hawt seeing as it was basically a description of a man going down on a woman. I always enjoy hearing the word "clit" in public. He spoke about the female sex organ being either medicalised ("Vagina", blech) or, ya know, just demeaning (if you're not into reclaiming "cunt" or "pussy"), which was great too.

I like Cunningham's work, The Hours is an amazing book and got me looking at Virginia Woolf in a different way and appreciate her even more. I told him so and I even got a bit emotional, it's not every day you meet an author you appreciate and had an affect on your life.

I didn't expect him to be such a large man, then I again, I always imagine myself as much bigger (sometimes I feel like I've got a Hulk wanting to rip out of my skin... but that's when I'm angry... usually I'm simply a huge uber-nerd-geek fangrrl monster).

Last but not least, I had a Sign Language lesson today and got the gumption to ask my instructor how you say "gay" and "lesbian" (she didn't even know what "bisexual" was, so I gave up on "queer") and friend... I knew ISL would be sexist language, after all Hebrew and Arabic are very gendered, but I seriously didn't expect the Signs to be so unabashedly homophobic.

Gah, when she showed me the sign for "gay" I wrinkled my face, for "lesbian" I just burst out laughing... it's so rude! How would you make that Sign in public?!
Any way, I've decided that once I'm a bit more proficient and speak to some Queer Deaf people that there be changes done to those words.
And find out what the words, should they exist, for "bisexual", "queer", "transgender" and other pertinent words for the community.

...as I write this.

I'm not ashamed.

I decided to watch it, so that I could pin-point my hate of this franchise. Yes, I went into it knowing that I'd hate it.
Twihards, I know Good Vs Bad is hard to resist. I also know that reading about a girl who could be you (because you can transplant your personality onto her) being with a handsome boy who isn't all about the sex (though it really is) is compelling.

But let's get one thing straight; abusive relationships are not romantic. Thinking your boyfriend is a predator is not sexy. Stalking is a crime.

Also, my god she could be replaced by a blow-up doll and it have the same effect on plot, narrative and her personality.

That's great female role-modelling you've got there.

WTF! Sparkles?!

*sigh* I'm disappointed in literature sometimes, and thus the human race.

Related to this, I've taken to reading fandomsecrets. It's very fascinating, what anonymity enables us to say and do. Most of what's written there is quite common and a large amount of the secrets repeat each other in variations.
By reading F!S I can also tell which Fandom is bigger than others.

Today, this secret appeared:
( Hating Fiction ).
You can read the comments here.

I'm not planning on commenting.
Mainly because I find the "secret" a fascinating one. To me it reads as someone who possibly enjoys reading fiction that they are ashamed of.
Fiction and possibly fanfiction because it is de facto unedited by an outside reader and usually Beta readers (the editors of the Fanfic world) encourage the writers to go beyond what they consider their limits - you can read that often when authors thank their Beta readers.
The all encompassing offence of this "secret" is just incredible.

The way I see it, fiction gives us the ability to discuss all the "offensive exploitation and glorification of real issues" - humanity is not really good with dealing with things head on. We do truly horrible things to each other.

The monsters of fiction (Vampires and Werewolves and Zombies... whatever) are yet to have been verified by science - but we all know those people who suck the life out of us, those people who can be the sweetest people one second and then without warning can make you cry from the violent cruelty they impose and who hasn't met those people who just wander through life without passion and want nothing but to take the passion out of others.

Most of life's bad things are not actually spoken about. We do not talk about torture or how sexual it is. We do not speak about the fact that rape is a crime against humanity and that it is committed against 1 in 4 women, 1 in 10 men, 1 in 6 children of any gender - usually by someone they knew.
That incest is far more common than we want to imagine.
Fiction is able to present us with a disturbing, yet palpable picture of the world.

The "secret" is obviously accusatory, but I think it's more inward than anything else. The person who wrote the "secret" most likely has read a bunch of fiction that "offensive" and "glorified violence", enjoyed it and was ashamed of pursuing the stories that were gritty, disturbing, kinky and fantastic (= fantasy, not "amazing").

I say, if we can't discuss, talk, explore and live fictional lives how can we do the same for non-fictional lives - in which we hide, repress, suppress and oppress so much more?

As I finish writing this, the credits of Twilight are rolling. A more boring movie I can't remember seeing. Disturbing gender, race and class relations abound.
This is fiction that many find meaning in. It is bad, it glorifies behaviour that in our world can get you killed, relationships that can wreak emotional havoc and personalities I hope one day get help to sustain healthier lives.

If we can't say that on a world found in books, how will we ever be able to say it about the world that exists at the end of our nose?

Vampires have taken over our lives. They suck out time via books, television and film like no other supernatural beast ever could.

Why?

Because they look like people, like you and me, they can walk among us unknown and seduce us with their glamour, mystique and plain ole' attractiveness.
Vampires are always beautiful, those that ugly, do not need to be. We are attracted to the fact that they are excluded from daylight, that they are reflected only in the eyes of human (their prey) and to the fact that they are immortal.

They do not die.

We pass away and they pass on.

Vampires have reached a kind of peak of pop-culture popularity. Ten years ago when I was fourteen and obsessed with Buffy, I read Dracula, Interview with a Vampire and thought Bella Lugosi was the shit.
Vampires were awesome.

Now... they're poster boys for Abstinence.
Where have we gone wrong.
( This glamour will make you click on the cut )

In my previous post regarding the Lammy Awards I was very fuzzy on where I stood regarding the fact that non-queer authors were now disqualified from submitting their work for the award.

The way I roll, I think stories should be honoured first and foremost. Just this evening I was talking to my older sister and she was telling her kids how their dad was seeing the same Moon in India right now (because that's where he is) and it slipped out of my mouth "Because all times are now and all places are here. And that's why even fictional people are real" h/t rm.
My sister agreed with me whole heartedly and it began a whole discussion with my seven year old nephew about the veracity of Vampires and Werewolves.

My concern, first and foremost, is the policing of identity. We live in such fluid times, it causes problems.
I know I prefer to my Lesbian Friends and Sisters when it comes to political identification and queer social gatherings... I'm also wary of the fact that if I ever date a man (cis man specifically, whether he is queer or not), that I will be viewed as though I'm betraying some kind of identity promise.

That's a Queer concern.

So are the Lammy Awards.

When I first read about the Lammy Awards change, the people who were raising alarms and concerns were people who are openly queer.
Later on, as I read more on the issue I encountered the voices of straight authors who write same-sex romance, specifically m/m. Professional Slash authors, as they've been dubbed and like most Slash authors they are Straight.
Straight Cis authors who write LGBTQ characters, I thank you for writing awesome people with which we can fall in love, identify with and celebrate.
That doesn't mean you get to say that by taking Orientation into account you are being oppressed.
You are not, because you have straight and cis privilege.
By bringing up the fact that you're a member of another oppressed community you're derailing and playing the Oppression Olympics.

Stop it, just... no. Your entitlement and privilege blindness is showing by demanding to be recognised in an Award that is about celebrating our lives and stories. You happen to write people who could live our lives, and that's great, I love reading and knowing stories like that, that still doesn't entitle you to come into our space and trample all over what we (or the Lambda Literary Foundation, rather) built so that our status and visibility could be elevated.

I'll not be writing any more about this, but I wanted to get my piece out there. I wanted to say, this is a queer concern, about queer visibility, queer identity and queer story telling. As such, it's not about straight cis people.

The end, ces't tout.

Now I have to decide whether I'm going to write about Rape Culture, or about the fact that my Identity is flaunted as propaganda in order to deflect criticism over the human rights violations my country commits on a daily basis.

Any takers?

If you still want in on this meme, you can fill it out here.
But now, the lists!

There is no hierarchy to this Top Five Lists, all are equally awesome in my mind!

( Top Five Catchphrases )

( Top Five Musicians )

( Top Five Fights )

( Top Five Books )

( Top Five Comic Book Characters )

( Top Five Dream Jobs )

Any questions?

Here is a funny usage of Amazon Rank, I shall be using it as much as I can.

And a whole bunch of links about the issue to be found here at meta_writer.

If you find more info or interesting posts on the subject you can and should comment to the post linked above at meta_writer.

Thanks.

Also: Amazon: What Does the Amazon Sales Rank Mean and is It Significant?.

As usual.
Neil wins.

And they're both so cute!


Must get The Graveyard Book already!
And I want the English edition, I don't want want imprinted with the Newberry emblem.