Author: Liz Henry

The sounds of a park day

Posted on by Liz Henry

I had such a lovely time this afternoon in Dolores Park just loafing around. It was a glorious warm day, one of those days when I know it will be extra warm because in the early morning the sky was blue instead of foggy. I saw an adorable punk wedding party having a little picnic (I gave the bride some zines). It would have been fun to interview them and write up their wedding small town newspaper social reporter style but I suddenly worried that would be too intrusive. However if you know the punk wedding party, connect me please so I can write that funny social column news story.

a tall person in a plaid punk looking suit, someone dressed in black, and someone in a froofy bridal veil but ruffled hot pants instead of a dress, in the center median of dolores park

Acrobats, maybe an entire circus school, having their practices on the lawn by the tennis courts. A guy playing decent blues guitar not too far away. Little kids rolling in the grass and doing cartwheels. Tiny dogs drinking from the special dog drinking fountain. People in very short shorts. Mild beer drinking in a laid back way. Lots of small picnics and people lying on the grass. An old hippie guy in a tie dye with a mushroom shaped money bucket (selling weed and shrooms).

I like the sound of all those humans together and the distant shriek of seagulls mixing with little kids laughing and calling to each other. It makes me think of being a kid on Narragansett Beach (or Bonnet Shores but really more Town Beach like because of the crowds)

On my way to the J train stop at the corner of the park I ran into the girl from my Buy Nothing neighborhood group who (around the election time) posted to say she wanted to do a nice thing for random strangers, and also wanted to practice with her new sewing machine, so the first five people to respond who have women’s pants with inadequate pockets, she will come by on her bike, pick up the pants, sew better pockets into them, and bring them back.

Besides the beauty of this idea and its multifaceted layers of thoughtfulness, and the awesomeness that my rainbow unicorn pants now have pockets big enough to hold my phone and keys, there is another, maybe unexpected layer. Every time I tell the story of this pants pocket sewing girl to someone, they love it and are blown away and make a resolution to do something even half as cool and creative to put something positive into the world. I think because it is strikingly achievable, and also obviously something anyone would be pleased by (at least anyone who asked for it). Big problems are hard to fix so we need to have ways to take heart in small ways.

I told the lady waiting at the ramp the pocket story as we admired her sleepy infant who was gnawing at his own wrist and pointing at the trains passing the other way. “You know what’s messed up,” she said. “HIS pockets are sometimes bigger than mine. He can’t even walk. What does he need pockets for?”

It is one of the perks of wheelchair use, that you get to hang out with all the stroller pushers and their cute kids. Either on the ramps or at the front of the bus!

I do love this city <3

Thoughts on disability representation and images

Posted on by Liz Henry

I was thinking this morning about the problems of making images that somehow represent concepts of “disability” in general, activism around disability justice and solidarity, or just wheelchair stuff.

You may recognize the problem. It is a challenge to find cool disability related stuff. If you want 9000 boring variations on the blue disability parking / bathroom symbol, great. But we need to go way beyond that!

In addition to running a nonprofit (Grassroots Open Assistive Tech) and creating logos and cover images for my small press zines, I love stickers and posters and all that stuff. In my backpack and in the side pocket of my powerchair, I carry a little pouch of stickers to give away to people. Some are for my own projects, some are random, some tech related, some fun cartoons or animals for kids. And I like to have cool queer, trans, and disability related stickers to share too!

To that end I regularly go trawling through Etsy doing keyword searches like “wheelchair + punk” and see what pops up. “Cripplepunk” is remarkably fruitful! I especially love the dynamic, queer coded pastel knuckle tattoo-ed manual chair “crip punk” sticker from ChaosCripples, and really want that on a tshirt or an iron on patch!

head on, fists forward, art on a sticker, of a wheelchair user with knuckle tattoos spelling crip punk

This one is nice too! “Mobility Aids Are Freedom” from SnailTrailStickers!

art on a sticker of a rollator, wheelchair, crutch and cane, that says Mobility Aids Are Freedom

If you go do some image searches for “wheelchair user” most of what you find will be kind of boring. “wheelchair user punk” used to bring up ALMOST NOTHING but lately, has been kind of good! Some kind of cultural shift (and maybe a technical shift as well) happened for that to be the case.

It’s not like we haven’t been around! Witness this pic of me from around 1993 taken by my sister! There was a version of this pic also photoshopped by her to make it look like the wheels are on fire. Note my amazing, youthful wheelchair-given triceps! Anyway I was a punk in a wheelchair and I would have really loved to see any kind of representation at all.
photo of young liz in a cambered sporty red quickie in 1993, leather hat and gloves, also huge muscles wow

My own drawing skills are OK but have a finicky, scritchy, lynda barryeqsue aesthetic that is not always what I want in a sticker. So I had a try at AI generating images a while back and came up with the seed of the Burn This Press logo I’ve been using on the back of some tiny zines. I lost the prompt but it was something like “nonbinary genderqueer punk, doing a wheelie in a modern dynamic sports wheelchair with electric sparks flying out” (developed over many iterations of bad prompts with bad results). I got something close to the current BTP logo which I then got my sister to re-drew a bit for clean up, and then I did more edits to mess with the hair, neck, lap, leg position, and so on.

Have a look at the Etsy and other online shops where people are making this kind of cool art! Buy their stuff and support them!

I surely have blogged before to lightly mock the wheelchair users we see in murals. They are in a terrible hospital chair, pushed by someone helpful, and everyone is looking up slightly with a beatific smile for maximum Inspo. Barf me out!

(edit: I can’t find that post, maybe it’s in draft somewhere, but here’s an example from the mural by where the J and N Muni trains stop at Church and Duboce. Note the ridiculously transcendent facial expression of this lady despite that she is riding the world’s crappiest wheelchair)

(further edit, i am only mildly cranky about this and like to make fun of things and it is a pet peeve, don’t get me wrong, i also appreciate ANY sort of representation for disabled folks and wheelchair users in particular, because it’s so damn rare)

(Also also, as the CEO of Digression, adding that I can wrench my mind from irritation that the one wheely person in this giant, pretty good and weird mural, is in a crappy chair being pushed, and direct it to the actually good fact that the care worker can also use a representational shout-out? though this is a struggle because what I personally want is a wheelchair user who “looks cool”)

detail from a mural showing a wheelchair user looking oddly ecstatic

Another problem with disability activism images is trying to represent as nebulous and huge of a concept of disability in one image. Using a wheelchair as this symbol is super lame! j/k!!!
This is how you end up with somewhat awkwardly drawn cartoon people where one is in a wheelchair, someone has a white cane, there’s an older person, somehow they try to work Deafness into it, they will be several different races, someone is in a sari and someone in a headscarf, and so on. Usually they are standing awkwardly around together as if posing for a stock photo! Maybe with protest signs if you are lucky but more often they aren’t doing anything other than Representing. I love this, and it is SO HARD TO DO in a way that looks good, and has some actual solidarity and joy in it rather than coming off as totally cheeseball!

(NOTE: I HAVE POSED FOR THIS PHOTO OFTEN – on request – feel free to put me in your pic – yes, if I work at your company or speak at your event, I absolutely will be in the front row or in your web site photo about Diversity – fuck yeah (but maybe with a little eyeroll))

I think these images, while lovely and well meaning and managing to do Representation, can come off as kind of bad art, or maybe we can be less snobby and call it folk art style, but I wish for artists who can draw the anatomy of human beings more competently than I can, to have at it on stickers, murals, tshirts, posters, logos, you name it. I want some cool socialist realist art of this Representation Group! Some art nouveau dandy versions ! Be in a park! Go to a music show! Be playing dungeons and dragons! Be doing something, omg.

Really the main problem is that none of these Group Photo Representation images, no matter how nice, work super well as logos as they are complicated and you have to draw a lot of bodies and faces and a background. When they are the best (to my mind) they become much more like narratives than logos! And that is good actually! That means they are MORE TRUE.

Here’s a pretty good one I found while writing this article from a report called “Resourcing Disability Justice: Our Feminist Journey Toward Centering Disability Justice“! These disabled people are having an ecstatic experience while feministly weaving together, and also representing some kind of super punk-ass rhizomatic concept, in space, on top of a damn rainbow! You see that it is trying to solve all the problems I describe in this single image. It is OVERCLOCKED. Really quite a challenge. Actually, my deep respect to everyone who has tried to meet this challenge, and a shout out to this artist, Abi Stevens!

(Note this report title is ALSO doing the most! “Toward” implies a proper humility, in that you are not done, or objective, or definitive, you are adding your little yawp to the collective chorus over time! We aren’t even defining or creating, we are Centering it. It’s also so disability justice that it has to say it TWICE.)

group of disabled women and girls in outer space, on a rainbow, weaving something collectively and joyfully

Another option is to have something kind of abstract – but what ?! I like ADAPT’s burst chain, in this category! There are many that are just like, a shape, or some shapes together, for maximum safety and boringness and when I see those I always imagine the ten painful committee meetings that produced them via painful hashing through everything else I just described. Thus, you may imagine me for years muttering “Oh, look, a SHAPE” and snorting to myself, whenever I encounter these logos, a mutter and snort that should be taken to convey the entire contents of this blog post, but 30 years of it.

For GOAT I worked both with poking some AI generators and also paying a friend who is a graphic designer to walk through a bunch of these concepts. Rather than human figures I thought it might be nice to have cute, colorful little icons of tech things. That way we get the variety of cross disability solidarity and the idea of tech stuff. The DIY vibe that I was going for is like the whole earth catalogue, sierra club how-to, 70s-ass hand drawn illustrations you might have in a step by step DIY instruction. So, my human designer drew me a whole set of icons, and I am combining and using them in different ways. There isn’t really a canonical “logo” yet but maybe one will evolve as I play with these images! I went with a tablet or ipad looking thing for AAC, a stylized ear with hearing aid and sound waves, and so on. The gear and tools, rather than the people.

colorful hand drawn icons of a powerchair, wrench and screwdriver crossed, spool of thread and needle, robot hand shaking a human hand

I was also going to say a word about stickers and patches and posters. They are usually very hand made and “folk art” feeling, they may or may not have “good” production values ie they may look a bit shitty or like they were created by raccoons in a back alley. That is fine actually. But what we want in our punk stickers etc. is a clear message that is legible to both our in group (other punks) and maybe to a lesser degree to our out groups (especially if we are telling them to fuck off). There’s a lot more I could say about that!

And the point of having these cool ass stickers to give to people is to bring joy to them unexpectedly – there is something so nice about, another disabled person complimenting my stickers a little bit wistfully and then I pull out a whole sheaf of stickers they can pick through & take! People really light up! Of course it is always interesting to see what they will choose when offered a wide selection! Bringing this tiny bit of happiness and crip joy to random strangers is also useful activism to do in daily practice.

Coins, earworms, puzzles

Posted on by Liz Henry

In 1978 I got a little pocket coin pricing book, the sort of thing they used to have in grocery store magazine and book racks, and 9 year old me was somewhat obsessed with coins either because of that or before that. I had some penny books with all the slots to pop them in by date and which mint they were made at (San Francisco, Denver, maybe Philly?).

I have a strange memory of walking to school with my friends who lived on the block (Shea and Crissy) telling them some coin facts that I am sure they did not care about, but tolerated, and then a really foul bully (Ronnie Parsons – sorry… I remember you….) riding by on his little bike and circling us while mocking my penny price updates in a fake British accent to indicate that I was stuck up. He was one of those people who would be like “Reading the dictionary, Henry?!!!” A real asshole! Hello you’re in 4th grade. Chill! But no. I think I remember it because it is one of those rare moments that it dawned on me that perhaps not everyone wanted to hear me tell them interesting facts.

I also used to sit on the floor of my grandparents’ closet (the one that had a door into their room and a door into the hallway) dumping out their milk bottle and (bear shaped??? some animal) glass bottle full of pennies and sorting them. So many indian head/wheat penny / buffalo nickels! Wish I had that now!

I started some new penny and quarter books at some point as an adult and in parallel my parents were doing ALL THE COINS including the state and national park quarters, probably as a holiday activity, keeping two sets so that there would be one for me and one for my sister.

I also have crazy envelopes full of different international coins and bills (carefully sorted and labelled, in a big envelope) Which actually comes in handy sometimes when someone is about to travel and I remember we may have that exact currency.

None of these are valuable as they are not “mint condition” or even particularly nice. They are all greasy and worn down. I don’t mind, it is just fun to look at them and feel dragonish.

ANYWAY the point is, my parents (who moved here last fall) handed over the coin books and I found my old 1978 book! Memories! And the 1970s era penny books (not very complete). AND a lot of coins and bills from more different countries from my dad’s business trips in the 80s and 90s and a lot of Venezuelan money from when they moved to Vz in the 90s for a while. I just sorted those into envelopes because I impulsively dumped them out on the table last night and I need the table today to work on!

Observations:
* The (king?) of Belgium looks very much like a frog
* Simon “the nose” Bolivar is so easy to pick out
* Brasil, France, Greece have the nicest art.
* Oh, and Argentina also has great art and design. Very clean and modernist looking. Also a cute bird (a rhea I guess)
* Mexican coins also totally rule
* WTF, the UK, why do you change the coins so often and why, when you changed them, did you make the sizes so weird? Why make the 5p and 10p coins the SAME SIZE AND WEIGHT. Why suddenly make a coin of one value the same weight and size as some older coin of a different value (I have forgotten which one that was, but what the hell!) Make up your minds.
* I found some old shillings and coins with king .. uh… the guy before Queen Elizabeth … george?) Neat!
* Spain, your coins suck, they feel really chintzy, do you not have actual metal? Also I felt very creepy even touching a coin with Franco on it.
* Speaking of creepy and sad, the million peso notes from 80s Argentina. Fuck la dictadura!

I promised an earworm in the title and I hope this does not curse me further but it has lasted for DAYS. A few nights ago in my sleep I acquired “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?” and it is truly cursed. Listen if you dare! And it keeps coming back into my head. Oh, my god. For some reason it is mixing itself with The Smiths, Still Ill. Someday I will have to actually create the mashuups that get stuck in my head. (Especially the Satyagraha / Sister ray one – 20 years, at least, of that. )

As I continue recovering from my arthritis flare up and have to lie down a lot with my feet elevated I have been trying out the 20 years ago NYT Sunday crosswords. I mentioned earlier the 30 years ones are nearly impossible for me to complete without looking things up. The 20 years ago are just a tiny bit too easy or annoying sometimes. But 1999 seems to be a sweet spot. They are a little bit difficult, but in a nice challenging way and I can reliably finish them.

Sat. was Milo’s birthday and we had a nice relaxing time at my parents’. The weather didn’t cooperate for the plan of having a pool party but that was ok actually because I had no energy and my ankles and low back are not good enough for me to really swim. Laura and Jack made a delicious lemon cake. We looked at our old model horses. I plan to take at least the small Andalusian family (Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus) but ended up realizing I still felt attached to several others. I do not need 10 model horses and yet –––

My dad also gave me his pelo ‘e guama that he got on his way to work at I think Hato Mata de Barbara in 1966 or so. I can check his memoir. It used to hang on the wall with his spurs and cuatro and I coveted it…. so soft and velvety (it is some sort of fur – beaver? shaved close rabbit?). He explained it was not the fanciest kind (Borselino, with the number of Xs indicating quality) but was from maybe switzerland (actually, austria) and was the 2nd nicest kind but it also turned out to be slightly too fancy for his actual position as incredibly junior cowhand and was more like what the ranch manager would wear. More about the hat later. It turns out he … donated the spurs to goodwill! omg? Why? omggggg. “Because they were not useful really because they are for wearing while barefoot.” OMG. Just like with my grandma’s frying pans (her cast iron pan, and HER GRANDMA’s cast iron pan). Oh well!!!! Anyway, I am gloating over the hat. It is fun to loot my parents’ junk drawers! When they aren’t throwing away the very things that I said I wanted!

I was able to stand up more yesterday though, which was great, and so I put up my grandma’s mirror, and a little bathroom shelf for my cup to take pills with, and a small towel bar by the sink for a hand towel. Some of these installs did not come out quite right so I also shoved some spackle into the unfortunate mistake-holes. The hand towel bar is slightly too large and also rattles but I may just fix it with a little superglue rather than try to re-do it. All very satisfying!

More mysteries, and some unrepentant bitching

Posted on by Liz Henry

I read another Mavis Hay detective novel though the Oxford one turned out to not be very good. The subway one wasn’t really good either. They both had tiny bright spots that made them amusing or unique, but I conclude fiction was not her forte. I can’t quite recommend them! Though I am very curious about her art & craft books, like the one surveying quilting techniques of Britain. (I am not a quilter but that sounds interesting!)

On to the next one on my e-reader, Skull Castle. I hadn’t noted the author at all but was immediately struck by the punchy and exciting style. It is super gothic/romantic, atmospheric, feels like “action” even though they are just like, on a train or in a house party, characters all memorable and interesting. The Duchess is especially great so far. Then I went to look at who wrote it – oh! duh. John Dickson Carr. A known fabulous writer but somehow I have only read a few of his more famous locked room mysteries on some journey through a long list of famous locked room mysteries.

As I mentioned yesterday I am feeling irritable from pain and high steroid doses. One thing that really chaps my hide is when I get officiously lectured about some shit that doesn’t require a giant lecture from someone fucking ignorant or simply being a dick for no reason. Or because they hate their job and hate me. They should keep the hate close and save their breath because I’m not having it.

Examples.

Bus drivers who pull up at the not correct spot and then give me a lecture (yelling, over the sound of the ramp and beeping, to the entire bus and street, to tell me how i am in the wrong place, when i’m not, i’m in the little BOX that is PAINTED THERE for wheelchair users to know where to wait)

Hospital valet parking loading zone guys with little hats on, blocking my way off the ramp into the loading zone while they tell me officiously that I need to WAIT and NOT GO INTO THE STREET MA’AM you need to WAIT you CANT GO INTO THE STREET.

(OMG I must be ESCAPING!!)

Me: Excuse me. My van pickup is right there. Pardon me. (BARRELS BY HIM)
Hat guy: MA’AM
Me: *** dirty look side eye *** (ignores him completely)
Hat guy (chasing me into the loading zone, which is 2 cars wide, my van being in the 2nd lane) MA’AM!!!!!!!
Me: (Misgendered) (gets into van as van driver, thankfully, smirks to himself)
Hat guy to Driver: YOU CANT BE HERE YOU CANT BE IN THE ROAD
Van driver: Just loading my passenger! (emitting cheerful fuck-off rays) (I love him) (Great conversation with amusing driver then happens on my ride home)

Office phone answerer at the rheumatologist where my doc faxed a referral a week and a half ago who keeps telling me to wait for a call back to make the appointment, but then when I find out they NEVER GOT THE FAX (a fax…. fuck me….. i hope my doc sent it FROM THE BEACH) and I call to get the info again to double check it (which we all had correct in the first place) they lecture me again, then I call back to make sure they got the damn FAX and receive yet another exasperated lecture from office lady with a shitty job who has to deal with people like me.
Me: “I sincerely apologize for the annoyance but I will have to keep calling back at least once a day until I can confirm you GOT THE FAX.”
Her: (angrily) that isn’t how it WORKS you ahve to wait for us to call YOU once we receive the fax.
Me: Yes but I was waiting for almost two weeks and i’m not doing that again!
Her: Well I dont know what to tell you. We didn’t receive it.
Me: Yes. I know. This time, I’ll make sure you do get it. In a timely way.
Her: ** more cloud of lecturing **
Me: None of it is your fault and I’m sorry but I’ll be calling back tomorrow….

Everyone can fuck off… also I realized that the super bad van driver yesterday acts like that because he is normally a paratransit driver, who can act demeaningly to his clients because they have no other options, and who is super annoyed that I have any sort of boundaries and don’t let him do things like TOUCH ME OR MY CHAIR (it is utterly insane to act like you are going to do anything by “pushing” on the back of a power chair on a gently sloping ramp, for example) I hate a power tripping person, i am sorry, i’ve had shitty jobs too but always figured out a way to cope and not take it out on people!

The flare-ups will continue until morale improves

Posted on by Liz Henry

That’s how it works if you are Pollyanna! I am trying to be a little more active but I still can’t really leave the house except for doc appointments and I am using my manual chair inside the house for everything, still. Today I cheated and got a wheelchair van from the doctors’ office to my favorite cafe (Poesía, at 18th and Castro) for a nice sandwich in the sun at a table outside, wrote in my notebook a little, and went to Cliff’s Variety before taking the 24 home. That was actually too much but I am now in bed with my feet up for the rest of the day. My pain levels are high and I am irritable as fuck (also from the steroids), have no energy or creativity or mental oomph, can’t sit up for very long, and need to keep my feet elevated and keep icing both ankles.

This all sucks but it is also something I know how to cope with. Mostly.

Goal: get better asap and don’t end up in the CAM boots.

Smaller goal: get back to where I can do little physical therapy exercises from bed.

The construction on our house continues. We got a nifty new front gate that makes the entrance to our place more easily wheelchair accessible (at least to the back yard) and the iron worker guys are also finishing up some last touches on the handrail and footplate that goes alongside my fabulous new wheelchair ramp to the back patio and yard. It all looks fantastic. I already have been reaping the benefits of the ramp since I stopped really being able to walk at all, I can still get down the half flight of steps out front, get into my powerchair which lives in its little hidey hole and charging den under the bay window, and roll to the back yard where i can lie on a blanket in the sun. And because of the downstairs bathroom also being wheelchair accessible I can stay there all afternoon. All of that is amazing and I feel so lucky we were able to do it.

I’ll be very happy when I don’t have to deal with contractors several times a day! It has been a whole extra part time job.

One of the interesting things about the experience has been just how much I have had to argue and sit on everyone to make the accessibility work. It was never going to be actually ADA compatible but I wanted to get as close as possible. And yet every time there was a decision to make, someone would make The Absolutely Opposite of Accessible decision. No, I will NOT accept just a little inch and a half bump at the threshhold! omfg! Things like that. I had to (and am still!) pay daily attention to everything to have it not end up with access ruined unnecessarily. I guess that makes me appreciate having ADA standards more.

Reading – I re-read the first two of the Freya Marske magical Victorian smut series so that I could be caught up for the new (to me) 3rd book. They are good!

Now reading Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay. It starts out a little bit girls’ school jolly chums feeling, but then gets a little more complex. So far I have most appreciated how annoyed the characters are at how the newspapers refer to them as “undergraduettes”. The terrible (but very fancily printed) poetry book scene was also funny.

You can read a bit more about Mavis Doriel Hay:
https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/oxfordtrainees/tag/mavis-doriel-hay/
https://promotingcrime.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-golden-age-mavis-doriel-hay-1894.html

I was unable to find a photo of her to add to her Wikipedia entry, alas.

I noticed a while back in this British Library Crime Classics spree that people often say “All my eye and Betty Martin” which I assumed was some sort of cockney rhyming slang. Oblomovka took offense and claimed to have never heard it before – and it turns out to be really old and strange slang!!

All my eye and Betty Martin
“In Britain during the 1700s, the phrase was a common claim of dismissal (similar to ‘nonsense’, or ‘hogwash’), or a way to declare disbelief of an absurdity. It possibly originated as the punch line of a joke (though this is likely a folk etymology). Most variations of the joke involve a British sailor visiting Italy. He overhears a Latin prayer, “Ah! [Da] mihi, beate Martine” (which translates to “Ah! Grant to me, blessed Martin”, referring to St. Martin). The sailor mishears the prayer, and later uses the phrase as “All my eye and Betty Martin”. ”

Why it is popping up in countless 1910s-1940s british detective novels, I can’t say. Maybe it never went away, or maybe it became oddly popular around then, or maybe it was a fabulous in joke of The Detection Club, which I believe Mavis Hay was part of.

Another good thing I had to look up: “tamasha” which seems to be used to mean “hullabaloo”.

I am also passing time and enduring by doing old NYT crosswords and playing the game Roots of Pacha. Roots of Pacha is like neolithic Stardew Valley, without combat and with more “puzzles” in the mines. There is also a mini game where you play the flute to wild animals to tame them & then you can breed better quality domestic animals and try to collect all their colors. The storylines and social aspect of this game is good – I am dating every romanceable villager, am married, (Poly is OK in game!) and have an infant for the first time. I have read that the children in this game actually grow up, go to “school” which probably means they will take care of some animals or crops, and then choose a profession. It is very good, and very playable.

Nothing is quite as good as Stardew though!

I may play some more breath of the wild/Tears of the Kingdom if this flare up goes much longer. Punkgeek tries to suggest new games to me which ARE good clearly but which for one reason or another I just can’t roll with (like subnautica)

I have tried my hand at most of the 30 years old sunday crosswords and then skipped up to 20 years ago. Either way it is painfully like having to inhabit The Mind of Boomers. The best bit of it, other than actually solving an entire puzzle (MUCH harder than solving today’s Sunday puzzles!!) is getting obsolete computer terms – pre-web, for the 1994-1995 puzzles, and pre-smart-phone, for the 2005 puzzles. Compounded by the east coast flavor of cluelessness about either which is always hilarious.

Oblomovka and I watched a compilation of the “Have you ever sent a fax from the beach? YOU WILL” ads from or so.

@artiv3rse

#computer #technology #history #historyoftechnology #ai

♬ original sound – Artificial World

At at the time we sneered at these so hard (at least where I was sitting) for being goofy or, I don’t know. It’s hard to explain why they were cringy, but they were. For one, you are not going to want to send a fax from the beach and if you do want to, fuck off. For another somehow they were just “off”. They didn’t actually think hard enough on it, they weren’t informed enough either by the things imagined by actual computer using nerds or by science fiction things that had already been talked about for the last 50 years, etc. (which is odd because of course AT&T was full of knowledgeable nerds and researchers, though their marketing dept maybe was less so). Now, of course it is even funnier to think that not only do we do all these things but many of them are humorously obsolete as if they had predicted we would be sending morse code telegrams via Dick Tracy 2-way wrist radio from our commuter zeppelins.

I hope we really do get commuter zeppelins, still.

Other things:
* Missed going to CSUN, which I had a non refundable registration for 🙁
* helped a cousin with geneological research
* did a tiny bit of actual work last week and this week
* had a good long talk with dossie about her 2nd edition of Radical Ecstasy and am looking at her draft of a different book
* watching the end of Gilded Age with Oblomov
* Oblomov reading me bits of book 3 of Dance to the Music of Time, and bits of Hazlett “Plain Speaking” which is brilliant out loud
* talked with the waymo people about their wheelchair van service software problems
* missed several musical concerts I had tickets to and really wanted to see
* looking at my sister’s draft of some writing
* afternoon with yatima who brought me some groceries and did the dishes and was such good company
* spent a nice afternoon with my mom doing GOAT archiving work.

Last Binding and Witness for the Dead series

Posted on by Liz Henry

I had Katherine Addison Witness for the Dead book 3 on pre-order, so when it magically arrived on my Kindle I went back to re-read from book 1 and churned through all three books in a day. This was well worth it as the series (writing, plot, characters, world building, all of it) is subtle and beautiful. I was also in the right mood for a long suffering stoic protagonist and a moody atmosphere. Anyway, that third book was fantastic, and I love this entire series.

I also am in mid re-read for the Last Binding series by Freya Marske — charming queer Victorian magical romance novels, a bit smutty in a good way. Now about to finish my re-read of book 2 and jump into book 3. I recommend them, if you like that sort of thing! The writing is good, the magic system is interesting, and the characters delightful. I’m actually busy this afternoon (!!! yay!!) but still, will be done with book 3 probably before I fall asleep so I need to line up something else for the evening and to tide me over if I wake up in the night.

I’m still thinking about the not-yet-published book I read recently and seriously cannot WAIT for it to get published and for everyone to read it so I can talk about it. Oh, my god! Its initials are T.S.B. Sorry to be mysterious/not sorry!

More British Library crime classics

Posted on by Liz Henry

I’ve been plowing through more of the British Library Crime Classics series and finding some real gems in there. I think my favorite so far is Somebody at the Door (1942) by Raymond Postgate, which has a dreamy, sort of postmodern style, told from about 8 points of view – all the people in a commuter railway car. The stories and the structure feel like city life in a particular way – that I think about while riding the bus or train myself – just that all the people around me are going somewhere and for their own purposes and are the central characters in their own stories. I liked Postgate’s characters – they felt like people with their own lives.

Postgate turned out to be an interesting character himself! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Postgate

Shortly afterwards I read The Division Bell Mystery (1932) by Ellen Wilkinson and enjoyed that too. After I finished I looked up the author and found she was an MP herself – thus the (fairly minor) self insert character who was a Labor Party MP – She was a Fabian – And also she wrote A Workers’ History of the Great Strike – cowritten with Raymond Postgate! The conservative young MP protagonist of Division Bell has amazing moments where he thinks “Oh…. maybe these labor party people have a point after all” Because of the Bread Marches, which I had to look up but of course Danny didn’t.

The epigraph to Somebody at the Door was really good,

How often I have smiled to see, in a story which pretended to show me the life of Paris or of London, five or six persons, always the same, meet by chance in the most varying places. “From their box the Mortevilles suddenly saw the Duponts sitting in the stalls”; next, “on entering the enclosure the first pretty woman Jacques Dupont met was Alice Morteville”; next, “from the surging crowd of demonstrators Pierre Morteville saw rising the energetic head of Jacques Dupont.” The author may work as hard as he chooses after that in describing to us the immense surging crowd, the brilliant attendance in the enclosure, and paint in the background as much as he can; the poor man does not realize that his Duponts and Mortevilles, as soon as they “meet” and because they meet with such deplorable ease, annihilate all immensity around themselves, prevent me believing that Paris or London are anything enormous, where one may be lost, and make these cities suddenly little places like Landerneau…

The reader will not see this vast work arrange itself, according to traditional artifice, around a miraculously chosen central figure. He cannot count on a rectilinear action, whose movement will carry you along without troubling your laziness, nor even on a too-simple harmony between multiple actions, which in its turn becomes a convention. He will guess that very often the thread of the story will seem to break, and the interest be suspended or scattered — that at the moment when he begins to be familiar with a character, to enter into his cares and his little world, and to watch the future through the same window as he does, he will be suddenly requested to transport himself far away from there, and take up quite different disputes.

(Extracts from the Preface to Men of Good Will
by Jules Romains, restating the principles of Unanimism.)

The book didn’t disappoint.

I’m still in this autoimmune flare up and not very mobile, not working a lot of hours and not leaving the house — so let me know your book recs! I have some time to pass! I am in week 3 or is it more… of not walking at all and barely able to stand up. It is very frustrating when just recently I was walking so well and even thinking about bravely foraying out to the nearby cafe (a block and a half away) with only a cane or a walker. I was traveling confidently by myself, driving my car, walking with total freedom inside the house and going up and down stairs with barely any limp, feeling full of energy. Now I am slammed flat on my back. Actually it is too painful to even be on my back much of the time and i flop from side to side like a gasping fish. Low back, ankles, are just unspeakable and I am still on fairly high steroid dose which isn’t great either. It will pass, but It makes me so sad right when I was doing so well and getting so strong, to slide back into a giant flare up.

furious and sad

Posted on by Liz Henry

Every day is so unsettling, we just have to hunker down, take care of each other, survive.

But how to actively fight?

I can only do what I know how to do.

It doesn’t feel like enough.

p.s. Transphobes and homophobes, sexists and bigots and racists/nationalists can all fuck off right into the sun.

It’s a good time for some loud punk rock my friends.

Lorac and competent women

Posted on by Liz Henry

I started reading E.C.R. Lorac‘s detective novels recently as some of them are in the British Library Crime Classics series.

Death of an Author impressed me with its twisty reasoning — so many different what-might-have-happened theories! There were also hilarious debates on the mind of the female author, and whether one could tell the sex/gender of the author by reading the book, in which men argue with each other and sometimes change their minds. The main woman character in Death of an Author is notable for being super competent in many ways!

As I then went back to read as many Lorac novels as I could easily find I kept coming across amazing women who were more interesting than the detective main character.

Death on the Oxford Road has Miss Madeleine Hanton, who is not only perceptive and smart, as smart as the detective or smarter, but she also has a power wheelchair in around 1931.

“Her brother and niece disposed of, Miss Madeleine got herself settled into her electrically propelled motor-chair. It was a neat vehicle and assured her of “independent mobility” when she wanted to be on the move. This afternoon she decided to inspect the garden, particularly the shrubbery near the chauffeur’s cottage; if the Scotland Yard man were to arrive, Miss Madeleine intended to have a word with him.”

Miss Hanton was also a hospital Commandant in the war (World War I) and lets everyone know it:
““Rubbish, Waring!” snapped Miss Hanton. “How old are you? Twenty-three? Well, when you were seven years old, I was Commandant of a hospital in France. I’ve been bombed, and I’ve been torpedoed. I’ve bandaged men who were half blown to bits. If you think your corpse on the road is going to upset me, you’re making the mistake of your life. I only wish I’d been there,—I’m much more observant than most people, and corpses were commonplaces to me at one time.”

I thought back over many popular British detective novels of the time where there just weren’t ever women like this. There weren’t suffragists, or ambulance drivers, or nurses, or if there were they were undermined or mocked. Can you even think of a competent woman in an Agatha Christie novel who isn’t Miss Marple, who isn’t just like, the grossest and strangest stereotype?

Then I hit Post after Post-Mortem and while it had many intelligent women characters it seemed to leave it open to question whether too much intellectual activity and authoring might not be wrong for women, though it is the men (as usual) debating and questioning it. The subtext (to me) was that the intelligent, successful middle aged (?) woman writer was actually messed with and fucked over constantly by the men around her who supposedly admired and supported her. They could only cope with intelligent women if they were quite young, and thought that then the right thing would be for them to have babies, to keep them so busy they would not have time to be neurotic.

Ugh!!! Gross! I feel sure Lorac meant to be snarky about it.

In These Names Make Clues I’m still at the beginning but am charmed by Miss Susan Coombe (we are still in the 30s), who was a suffragist who had spent time in prison but post prison and post getting the vote, worked within the government (or with the government) to reform women’s prisons. She is instantly assessed by our detective as the smartest person around & a formidable intellect!

They are good books, not like earth shattering but a comfort read for me right now during this stressful time. There are often things to look up that send me down Wikipedia journeys – reading about what a Minty chair is, or last night, about the King and Country debate at the Oxford Union, from a casual line of dialogue in These Names Make Clues.

I’m glad I found Lorac’s work !

Seattle trip

Posted on by Liz Henry

I had a lovely mini trip to Seattle – taking the Coast Starlight there and back all the way in an accessible sleeping car. It is a 22 hour trip and despite being in a nice room with a bed and bringing my own blanket and pillow I just didn’t sleep well. But it’s still nicer than a plane trip imho! Having privacy and getting to lie down and not having do cope with TSA nonsense or my huge worry of my powerchair getting broken or lost by the airline – it is worth some lost sleep. The hypnotic beauty of going through the landscape makes up for a lot too.

I stayed in Pioneer Square & loved being in that little neighborhood as it was central to some fun night life, had good cafes and bookstores, and great transit. I would like to go back and root around the many used bookstores by Pike market next time!

Saw Els, Timmi, Eileen, and met Jen from U of W. Somehow did not take enough photos with people!

It was a good decision to bring my heavier everyday whill Ci powerchair rather than the folding Fi chair. The pavement was rough, I did a lot of traversing it & buses were fine for getting around.

I wrote less than I thought I would on the trip!

But I relaxed a lot more!