Category: books

Software Freemasons

Posted on by Liz Henry

From years of working from home in a tiny house I mostly tune out Oblomovka’s work meetings, but today a particular cadence caught my ear. He was asking someone a list of pointed questions about a software project and the staccato back and forth – I could only hear his end of it mind you – sounded oddly mystical. Who maintains it? When was the last commit? What are the dependencies? I realized that it reminded me of The Musgrave Ritual.

‘Whose was it?’
‘His who is gone.’
‘Who shall have it?’
‘He who will come.’
 

I then stopped listening.

“Did you have a list of questions you were going down? Or were you just riffing?” I asked after he was done with the meeting.

“Making it up.”

I then had to show him the Musgrave Ritual.

It would be funny to have a software engineer / open source project Ritual, maybe a bit like freemasonry.

Who shall maintain it?
They who will come.

At least – that is what we usually hope for.

Let us toast every Brother,

From the East to the West,

Who updates his packages,

And adds lots of tests.

More Inspector Rostinov novels; farm report; wheels n legs

Posted on by Liz Henry

I am now on book 10 or 11 of the Inspector Rostinov series. The Russian detective lifts his weights and considers his painful leg; his assistant Karpo is monastic and humorless with glimmers of feeling; the other assistants have their subplots and relationships so it is all very engaging. Right at this point in the book the collapse of the USSR happens and of course along with the current political situation (here and globally) it makes me think about “democracy” in a glum way where I wonder if it ever “worked” or the thing propping it up is mostly imperialism. And that’s all I want to say about that!

I love a good long series but also always have in mind that the author must be sick to death of their characters by around book 3 or 4, like Agatha Christie finally writing Mrs. Oliver into her series, a detective novel writer who talks constantly about how much she hates her detective and keeps trying to kill him off.

Of course I also think about the concept of “copaganda” which I wish I had recognized as a young person. While I love a detective novel I can also be at least aware that they are making the police to be sympathetic in a way that at least usually, or systemically, not deserved.

With all those caveats – This series is super relaxing and reading it is rejuvenating. I am also playing a lot of Stardew Valley on the Switch since the 1.6.X release has been out (Nov 5th). Voyager Farm is in mid winter, I have reached level 25 of the Skull Caverns and am slowly building up a small store of jade and iridium. My Meadowlands industrialization has progressed to the point where I will likely start buying iridium sprinklers from Krobus, as I continue my campaign to get him for my roommate. Usually, I build the community center in year 1 but this time didn’t really have that as a goal, so I have a pufferfish and a truffle still to go before it is complete.

Oblomovka is back from Thailand and it is so good to have him back after his way too long trip. He brought delicious Pracha Tai (tea from our friends at Prachatai) and made me a pot of it yesterday which I drank while playing Stardew.

Last Monday I also started a weight lifting class at a local gym that is aimed at women and in particular older or menopausal people who need to build up strength and bone density. My bone density is good despite my years of on and off oral prednisone; I am super flexible, have great balance, but my cardio is not great and my strength also not great. Though, I can swim a decent number of laps (for me)  where decent is like, 10 at best and then I can do more after a pause if my ankles and knee permit, but I usually don’t. So, weight lifting!  The gym is aggressively pink and has flowers everywhere on the wall and big fake flowers  on top of the weight racks and machines.  I do not need flowers to go to a gym, but I think they are useful here to filter out really sexist or anyone infused with a lot of toxic masculinity. Indeed, there was no grunting and sweating and judgey macho BS going on. Hurrah!

I got a very pragmatic instructor, M,  who I felt really comfortable with. No weird gender stuff. I wrote down all the sets that we tried together and made them into a weekly spreadsheet so I can check off doing all the things. For some exercises, M was maybe a bit too ambitious for me so I notched it down a bit or just failed to get all the way through the sets or the groups of reps. My little hand weights are 1, 2, and 3 lbs and I can combine them in one hand since they are soft with little straps. (So I am bicep curling 5lbs, and upwards pressing 6.) And, day 3 I only did the stretches because I was hella sore and could not cope. I had to switch from desk pushups to wall pushups as well. I think if I do even part of the checklist every day next week, I will catch up to where she thinks I might have been on day one!  We’ll see! For now, it feels good. The one thing I am “good” at is a rowing motion that uses my manual wheeling and kayaking / swimming muscles so I am able to unexpectedly “do” 25 pounds.

One of my little pretend goals, which I don’t take too seriously, has been to walk to the corner, buy something or sit somewhere, and walk back. 3 years ago at our old house — on the same steep hill we are on now — That was something of a dream and I would get kind of close and then not be able to do it. But now, I can do that half block walk and back on a good day. This has been a really long arc from my 2011 ankle blowout where I spent a year not being able to stand up without CAM boots. And let’s not forget the hideous pain like snakes squeezing 24/7 around my ankles and legs and feet.

Anyway, without having any REAL goal, I realize I have greatly improved my walking ability in the last few years. It is very slow and not linear. I spend weeks or months being able to walk inside the house now, with interludes or weeks or a month or so in the manual chair in the house.  (The house is now easier for my chair, too!!! With the bathroom floor level with the rest of the house instead of having an inch drop. Try wheelie-ing over that in the middle of the night half asleep when you need to pee. Ugh!)

I now try to just IMAGINE walking just a bit further than the half block hill to sit in the cafe, or buy something at the drugstore. (Standing up to wait in line part is intimidating.)  I try to imagine walking to the bus stop, getting on the bus, going somewhere that is right next to another bus stop, then crossing the street to the opposite stop to bus home. Can I do it? Could I do this limited “go one place where I know the number of steps I will have to take” trek, in a cab? I am only just starting to imagine it. Can I do it without setting my ankles back a year, or putting myself back into the Snakes Squeezing Walking Boot territory? That is my real fear I guess. But it also feels inherently scary, like I am about to leave the house defenseless and naked. Keep in mind I dream myself in my wheelchair or powerchair, and in dreams, when I realize it isn’t there, it is a nightmare that usually wakes me up. The thought of trying it brings up huge, weird, inchoate FEELINGS. They are not unfamiliar because I have done this before (in 1997, then in 2009 or so), had some amazing bipedal times, then WHAM, in a world of hurt.

a cartoonish outline drawing of a quadruped with the caption "defenseless animal"

 

And if the gaiome doesn’t hop down the lane to the badger’s library, I’ll tell you another story

Posted on by Liz Henry

Reading the last few days:

Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, which slides down easily and makes me feel like I can take deeper breaths than usual (physically and mentally) – Should you read this?  YES!!! Read it!!!! It explains some of the underpinnings of my feelings about why we should not be “going to Mars”. (Sorry.) I always tell Danny he can go to the Moon when we are very old if he really insists but I will be here making healthy soil from compost and a lovely ecosystem for bugs, grubs, and fungus.

Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf – Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret – To go with the Haraway book. Useful background.

Fourth Grade Rats – a very annoying short children’s book I got on spec from a little free library and am putting right back out – It is about toxic masculinity I suppose where one boy persuades another, more kind and innocent boy that to really grow up, he must be a bully, and misbehave, and throw away all the toys he loves and his cartoon lunchbox and stuffed bear, etc. This doesn’t go well and our soft boi is miserable. Their moms discuss the situation and meet them with a mixture of sternness and laughing at them. Soft boi gets a hug and his stuffed bear is returned to him. That sounds nice but something about it annoyed the hell out of me. I think the part where the moms fix it.  Figure yourself out! Jeez. So it is both putting the burden onto women, and also, condescending somehow. Also, sure fine maybe this would KIND OF happen at age 9 but try it in 5 years and see how it goes down.

Uncle Wiggly’s Fortune, by Howard R. Garis, in a splotchy pale green hardback from 1950, much like the ones I remember reading at my paternal grandparents’ beach house in the 70s as they were strangely short of books and yet had a large run, a whole shelf, of this Uncle Wiggly nonsense, which bored me even when I was small but I was desperate. I remember once starting to list out all the goofy chapter endings, where the author says something extra cornball and fake-down home, in a particular formula, like, “My! And if the butterfly don’t decide to take the grasshopper and use it for scissors to cut out a quilt pattern out of the tigerlillies to give to the post wagon man, then I’ll tell you the story of Uncle Wiggly and how he met the Littlest Hedgehog.”  I made that one up, but let me find a real one. “If the parlor lamp doesn’t go out to a moving picture show and melt all the ice in the gas stove, the story will be about Uncle Wiggily and also some more about the horseshoe crab.”  You may be able to imagine my childhood fascination (mingled with something a bit like horror, or snobbery) at these tag lines. They were foul, and boring, but I had to read them, and the only thing left to me was to overthink about the (horrible) style.

Looking it up now gives me a clue to where these books came from. Garis wrote a daily (!!!!) Uncle Wiggly story in the Newark News for over 50 years starting in 1910. My grandfather John A. Henry was born and raised in New Jersey (born in 1919) so he would have grown up reading this stuff maybe in the paper. It seems like a good theory – either he had some of these books as a kid, or he got them or was given them by his parents, to read to his children. I will have to ask my dad if he remembers them.

I guess we have to acknowledge Uncle Wiggly as a disabled protagonist – he walks, or hops, with a crutch.

Is he a manifestation of the African trickster rabbit? Even . . . a whitewashed one? Maybe! He is not very tricksy. But I could sort of see it.

I had also not realized Garis was a hugely prolific author not just for Uncle Wiggly but for a lot of the Stratemeyer syndicate books including early Bobbsey twins books. Probably the more boring of them.

As usual I spend more time writing about this nonsense than about the actually good soul-feeding book that I loved (Staying with the Trouble). Partly because i would have to think harder about what I’m saying.

I also read through a little new looking translation of Sallust (“How to Stop a Conspiracy”) which as I remember from some other reading/translation, is extremely confusing. To really understand what the hell is going on I would need to make a lot of little index cards for the cast of characters or generate an entire cheat sheet. Who said what, and who said who did what, and who said who said someone did something else, and for everything (this is the good part!) there is at least one other theory of what happened or some other group or different factions making different claims. Holy shit! Anyway, it also made me think again about Megalopolis which uses some of the names but none of the actual information or “plot” or anything you might think of as history, somehow. Like how you go from Sallust’s “everyone said something different and the situation kept changing very rapidly” utter chaos, to  a grossly boring plot about a genius great man inventing something with the love of a good woman buoying him up, but also somehow it feels like the Fountainhead, I do not fucking know. WTF again, Francis Ford C?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two kinds of soup

Posted on by Liz Henry

Did some blogging for my nonprofit, GOAT, to talk about the DIY lights and safety workshop we ran with ILRCSF, and a small conference I gave a talk at, Common Tools. I also did some extra work on my 2 consulting jobs, co-working on video chat with Sumana for companionship.

Before lunch I had a walk to bring soup to yatima since I made a giant pot of chicken posole yesterday. I actually looked up whether it might be possible to rent a miniature pony to bring to her in the garret where she is isolating, because i would like for her to have all the ponies, but maybe isolation and a visiting pony and several flights of stairs don’t QUITE mix.

At lunch (which was escarole soup my mom brought me yesterday!)  I read a kids’ book, Summer of the Swans, that I picked up from a little free library along the Bernal Cut. It’s a Newbery Medal winner from 1970 that I remember looking at and rejecting when I was a kid, basically for gender reasons as the main character bugged me so much I didn’t want to read the rest. I didn’t mind super old fashioned girls’ books when I was younger, like reading Heidi, or Pollyanna, or whatever, but a vaguely modern tween girl freaking the hell out that her feet were too big and hates her nose or whatever, was a big fat no.   However, I read it while eating my soup today.

In Summer of the Swans there are two POV characters, Sara who is about to be 14, and her little brother Charlie, who is non neurotypical in some way because of a severe fever he had when he was a toddler. Their older sister is 19 but acts maybe 15 by my standards even for 1970, maybe especially for 1970. Anyway, the younger brother has mutism and some kind of developmental delay, and his sister Sara has a fairly strong bond with him and defends him against people who bully or tease him. He then wanders off in the night and the extremely thin plot of the book is basically that Sara realizes how much she loves him and finds him in the woods along with the Yukkiest Boy she totally hated who turns out to be quite nice and asks her on a date for that very evening. The end!  Yawn. Did this deserve the Newbery? It is probably notable for having Charlie be a sympathetic character and including his point of view and how he thinks and experiences the world and what he considers important, and the fact that his family respects him maybe is radical for 1970 or even today.

The book goes right back out onto a free shelf though. I pick up a lot of free kids’ books like this, read and release them, and only a few make it to the bookshelf of honor and preservation in my house!

I am also well into, maybe nearly done with, Can’t Spell Treason without Tea, which is as fluffy or flufflier than Legends and Lattes, and is basically a knockoff of it where a tough palace guard and the land’s most powerful mage run off together to a small border town where they open a combination tea shop and bookstore/lending library while solving all the local political and magical problems and being adorable lesbians mildly processing their various insecurities and anxieties. Does our city guard “deserve” love or still feel she has to “earn” it? Does our mage take reasonable care of herself or run herself into the ground? Will they get married (duh yes but maybe in book 2). What will happen about the sucky, evil-ish Queen what’s her name? There are also mildly bad “puns” which I have to put in quotes because they hardly even deserve the name.

Obviously, I enjoy this comfort read and will read as many as appear before me magically on my Kindle.

Our contractors started painting today, or maybe just taping in preparation for painting the bathroom. Luis and his son also covered the back of the house in tyvek and started getting ready to do the exterior siding in the corridor alongside the new ramp, and also on the outside of the bathroom which was water damaged and a total teardown and rebuild. They are really great, but I am so ready for this project to be done with!!

Stardew and Voyager Farm await me – I am in mid summer and pushing hard on getting those 5 gold star melons for the Community Center bundle. I will also make myself amazing tacos with the remnants of the chicken posole. The broth is now gone, so it is just shredded chicken, peppers, tomatillos etc and the maiz blanco; I have white corn street taco sized tortillas which I will fry up lightly, maybe some refried beans from a can since didn’t think to cook actual dried beans, celantro, raw red pepper. I can’t remember if I have any salsa or cheese but am not feeling motivated to go out. Plain tacos are fine!

This weekend I am planning to hang out at the Legion of Honor museum festival with my sister and our parents and maybe my friend Mikayla. I will miss Lisa’s podcast for  Aaron Swartz Day this weekend (Saturday from 2-5pm) but planning to be on her podcast early next year to talk more about GOAT.

Disabled Ecologies

Posted on by Liz

Experimental liveblogging! I’m in Berkeley at Pegasus Books for Sunaura Taylor‘s book event for Disabled Ecologies. Sunaura is here in conversation with Yomi Young from the Shelterwood Collective.

I have been reading the book on Kindle but like it so well that I want a physical copy too!

yomi and sunaura with microphones at front of a book lined room

You can read more about Yomi and her activist work in a zillion places but check out StoryCorps and maybe this article on the DJCC’s work early in the pandemic.

As Sunaura started her talk it only just now hit me that Sun-aura = Sonora like the Sonoran Desert. Oh! How did I miss that.
sunaura with microphone alongside an ASL interpreter

Crowd instantly on board with Yomi’s joke about doing some comedy performance art where they try to pass each other sheaf of papers in crip time (miming dropping papers and scrambling with hands)

yomi in powerchair, with the microphone

Sunaura reads us a short section from the introduction, Age of Disability. “Environmenal destruction is a story of disablement.” (Of people and of the land). “Mass ecological disablement of the human and non-human world.” Her story and her research are deeply rooted in Tucson’s history.

I lived in Tucson briefly – only for a few months, but I loved it and the desert and its life very much! Good memories of my many visits (with membership) to the Desert Museum, geologizing all over with Halka Chronic’s classic Roadside Geology of Arizona, and sneaking through the weird ruins of Biosphere 2!

A main point of the book is that just as disabled people have adapted and created ways of being, living, healing, doing care work, and finding joy, we can, or must, do the same with our relationship with the land.

Yomi mentions being blown away by the balance of philosophical discussion and personal history in the book. She asks Sunaura, Why now? Sunaura replies, she knew she would write it someday and her whole career has been leading up to it. And it has taken her 9 years to write! Her own life is entangled with the narrative of pollution on the southwest side of Tucson near the air force base and Hughes facilities. Her origin story gives her the roots of thinking about disability and nature. Not just her individual problem but that it is a political issue caused by systems of harm, racism, war, etc. and impact a whole community. Injury to nature is harm to all of us humans.

(It is like 1 million degrees in this bookstore as we are a large crowd sitting on a raised platform (there was a lift). My kingdom for a fan, or the space to leave and find a bathroom to remove the long underwear I unwisely wore so I would not be cold on the way home. I also regret the woolly socks. )

Yomi talks about the way the book is constructed. She loves how obsessed with aquifers Sunaura is. The book itself has an aquifer! Which has this nuanced way of organizing information. The pages of the book have , running along the book, an aquifer with extra explanations!

Aw I love this. Yomi has the soul of a poet. And one that admires huge nerdiness. Yay!

Sunaura says this is her favorite question because she loves aquifers so much! She talks about understanding aquifers as relational and as connected. “Magical holders of ancient time.” Unimaginable amounts of water under there, fossilized water.

She notes that because she doesn’t use her hands to read, she doesn’t like footnotes at the end of the book. So the running footnotes felt better to her and metaphorically became parallel in her mind to the underground running stream of information underlying the book.

Yomi says the book is an important one for disabiliyt studies but also for the environmental movement as it is not often Yomi sees environmentalist advocacy or research that includes disability – She feels it is a gift to our community. Sunaura has blown her mind with the new framing of community, disabled ecology.

Sunaura takes that idea and talks about disabled ecologies and communities. When she returned to Tucson as an adult she was following the trails of disability. The pollution and contamination left a trail of people, of wildlife, who were harmed. Wildlife was drinking from the unlined, uncovered pits. The trees died. And the aquifer was permanently altered. Material injuries didn’t just impact humans. Disabled Ecologies is in some ways a mapping project. (You can map not just where the weapons are made, but where they go off.) Disability not just a personal lived experience. She talked with many people and there were so many narratives of disability and illness, in public health, in community activists, in litigation, and these narratives – and mobilizations were often racialized in various ways.

Another short reading – from the chapter The Ground Beneath My Wheels. “What was I to make of this patch of land…” She felt a sense of solidarity with the injured landscape and was drawn to get to know it just as she was drawn to get to know the human communities. “How was I to write myself back into nature?” She then reads a quote that mentions Yomi and her work! (Audience goes oooooh!) Sunaura then reads a bit that mocks the hell out of Edward Abbey and his misogynist, ableist, colonialist writing. (Quotes about possessing a beautiful woman; and a bit where Abbey exhorts everyone to get up out of their motorized wheelchairs. (Audience laughs and boos; I have double flipped off the air for good measure. Cartoonishly bad!)

Knowing an aquifer wasn’t hindered by (in)accessiblity – it needs research, imagination, and understanding to become intimate with the aquifer. “The injured underground became a sort of companion.” “The desert I desired was bursting with community.” “Knowing the desert was not nearly as important as learning to be responsible to it.”

Yomi talks about her own work about land and disabled embodiement. That disability is incompatible with nature – this is a lie – And that natural spaces must be pristine and untouched – that we (disabled people especially but all humans) damage and corrode it. We who have been harmed should be leading the thinking about how to heal together with the land.

Yomi asks Sunaura about Mexican American communities who fought so hard for the environmental damage to be recognized. They continued naming it over and over and confronting environmental racism in a way that was so effective. Outside of movements, we don’t often hear these stories, it’s all Erin Brokovich where someone comes in to save the people. The skill this community had to use every possible tool at their disposal – including impact litigation – is great.

Sunaura – Talks about Yomi’s work with Shelterwood. She started off this project not knowing about the decades of incredibly environmental justice activism in South Tucscon. They should be given credit for the aquifer protection laws that were passed in Arizona. They were really badass but even in Tucson they are not well honored. Decades of contaminated groundwater. the city officials did nothing. No investigation, etc. But the community knew something was wrong. And then in the 1980s as they mobilized the City blamed it on their “lifestyle” or their diet, racist ableist ways to deny responsibility and making the community feel it was their own fault. This is often something that happens with disability!

Then at some point people were like, cleaning up the environment is one thing but right now we all need health care!

Time check! It is nearly 7, yay read the book! Any questions!

Audience m ember asks What happened then! (We all holler, you have to read the book!) Sunaura and Yomi: The story continues. For a while, they got a health program at a clinic. They won a historic groundwater protection fight and passed strong legislation. But the continued fuckery of the system is still harming people. And they are fighting for things they need to live and thrive as disabled people. There is no end.

Yomi: It never ends. And it’s very important that we don’t leave anyone behind. We don’t stamp out disability. It’s part of the human condition. It’s about, how do we live with disablement. Not leaving bodyminds behind, moving together, at the pace of our most marginalist and most disabled. That’s what is really beautiful about it.

Sunaura: it is a hopeful book and the framing of disability is a hopeful one. i know from the beautiful expansive world of disablity community . how can we make that reality one for the non human world as well?

A really lovely interview and talk, and I look forward to actually finishing the book!

So far, it makes me think about what I was trying to say in my short essay here, “Thoughts on AI, comradeship, ethics, interdependence” which I rewrote and made a bit longer for my zine Tabahtea Triple Junction. There, I started in a different place, with some recent discourse on AI and sentience, and tried to recontextualize it to the relationships we build with non human things including land. Sunaura’s book is crystalizing a lot of that thinking for me in a very useful way!

Coincidentally I also just re-read some of the Haraway she mentions and my friend unixjazz had messaged me a few days ago to say he found an OG copy of Sandra Harding‘s The Science Question in Feminism from 1986 while he was on vacation and snagged it for me (another book mentioned in Disabled Ecologies!) So maybe it is no wonder we are thinking about similar issues as we imagine the underground ebbs and flows! I will be going to unixjazz’s Common Tools event later this month to talk about DIY assistive tech as a liberatory idea with ecological connections, too!

Rebel Girl and the Human League

Posted on by Liz

My sister and I went to see Kathleen Hanna talk about her autobiography, Rebel Girl, last week. I recommend it! She was interviewed by poet, musician, and zinester Brontez Purnell and that was a joy because they had such lovely friendly chemistry and were able to laugh and enjoy themselves.

What a story – that Brontez was one of, as he describes it, “the 5 total riot boyzz in the world” who were writing letters to Bikini Kill and getting answers back from Kathleen. She described his 1993-ish letter, accompanied by a selfie he took of himself on the school bus, and how she had it taped up over her desk for the next 10 years. Write to your heroes everyone! They may like it! Then years later his band was opening for her band and now they are friends! A fairy tale that I love so much. I will likely review his recent book Ten Bridges I Have Burnt in a different post, since I bought it at the talk but have not read it yet.

It shouldn’t have been surprising to find Kathleen is tremendously funny. I had this reaction seeing her age up into a mid 50s person who is happy and has a secure life who deals with the intense trauma of their past with wry humor and is hard as nails but also soft as fuck and able to let it hang out and tell her stories and have a different kind of creative freedom where you get to explore your art while also — shocker — impossible — being supported. Maybe it sounds a little arrogant but that is how I feel about my life trajectory and it was so good and moving to know she is in a good place with her bands and singing and writing and her Beastie Boys husband and their loved and cherished child.

I did not know but also probably should have if I thought for 5 seconds that she has some also similar experiences being a person who other people report their trauma TO. By talking about rape and harassment you become kind of a magnet, you have freed others to talk about their traumatizing experiences and they want to tell you about it. Like the boxes of riot grrrl zine mail I was getting (and still have in the basement unsorted, unarchived) while still super fucked up in my early 20s from girls just a bit younger than me – it can be hard to take and she had to do that in person while having that level of indy fame where people make a lot of assumptions but you are desperately trying to scrape $40 together for medical care and eating dry ramen noodles and working at a strip club while you are ill as hell. My point was that when you talk about fighting rape & harassment you become the respository of everyone’s worst and hardest stories, and that is a hard load to carry no matter how much you feel honored and are willing to do the work of it. I vibed with all of this.

Of course I could talk about riot grrrl shit for fucking ever but that can wait.

Loved her joy in figuring out recording and mixing stuff (much of that, later on, in Julie Ruin era).

Loved the Kathy Acker stories both about being told no one listens to poets – better to be in a band — and about being smacked with a challenge to feminist essentialism (which I don’t 100% agree with actually, but it sounds like it was good for Hanna to be taken seriously & challenged by Acker.)

You can think, well what if Kathleen Hanna and so many more of us could have made our art without all this abuse and trauma and constant harassment? What if we could have support and love from family and have friends who don’t rape us and people who support our artistic careers without grossly hitting on us every fucking 5 seconds ? WHAT IF. But you cannot eat your heart out over it. & just hope for the youth to be MORE OK or at least to have that love and support and freedom.

Instead of eating my heart out I just feel tremendous respect for all the punk rock women making their music and expressing their feminism against all the things that made it difficult – poverty – racism – family – gross men – addiction & alcohol’s pull – hostile media – And so on. They did it and they survived (or didn’t) and it gives me immense strength just to think of them.

(I still miss you, Johanna Lee.)

I’m also 100% ok with her telling her own story about herself. This isn’t a collective story written by everyone who was involved and it isn’t trying to encompass everything that happened. It’s quite hard to make a coherent narrative out of a life, even one’s own life! I also liked the style of the short vignettes (which I have also been trying out.)

I hope it is immensely (further) healing for Kathleen to talk about her book and her life on stage in venues where she is respected and listened to and celebrated as an artist and for her whole self.

I enjoyed her stories and the book. She left out countless assaults and rapes I’m sure (which she joked about on stage) And I read with some sadness but also interest, about “Susan” who I instantly knew who it was, and I’d link but, What the actual Fuck, apparently there is still shit you can’t talk about? Of course it is fraught but it was interesting to see Hanna frame that interaction as encountering someone who she could not deal with because of their intensity and over-familiarity and having repeated mental health meltdowns on the bedroom floor of someone who didn’t actually want to let you into their house. However I was kinda sad to see her throw shade on “Susan”‘s writing and zine output, which I thought at the time was great and still love for its raw energy and realness because it spoke to me. I always appreciated “Susan’s” zines, mail, and mutual distro activity. At the time I did not know about the ridiculous and horrible problematicness of their behavior and their claims. The information about how it went down was not super visible to me either at the time – a little bit thru zines but I only really got it a few years later once we had web pages and then i forget who explained it to me (pre-blog.)

As gossip comes to me over the years I continue trying to unlock levels of understanding about things that affected me and my art and friendships even tho I was incredibly peripheral to those things. Why must it be so mysterious. But then I can SO easily imagine the queer anarchist collective meetings, or the personal arguments and angst, or whatever, that probably went into the non-links in this non-entry: https://zinewiki.com/wiki/Riot_Grrrl_Press Though you can get closer with this thoughtful post by ciarra.

there was also a lot of really interesting stuff about REDACTED & her crew. the book didn’t get into all the race controversy that happened after REDACTED wrote in her zine about the racist antebellum “one-drop rule” & how it is possible that she may have a black ancestor & so she can speak on behalf of all people of color everywhere–basically turning into a denier of privilege & positioning her identity in a big sick game of oppression olympics in which she can do no wrong. but it did kind of edge in that direction & shared a bunch of other ridiculous shit REDACTED did that was pretty similar.

it made me think about all the ridiculous arguments i have had with people over political things–things that sometimes seem like pointless internecine in-fighting, especially in retrospect. it made me think about how imperfect riot grrrl was, but in a way that didn’t really make me feel sad. it made me think more about how these girls were just muddling along, trying to make something out of nothing, doing what girls do, & because they managed to concoct this historical movement that has created such an intense feminist legacy, all the fights & snap decisions that didn’t seem so huge at the time, are being documented, & then they become evidence of the fractiousness that has plagued feminist movements since the inception of feminism.

WHY MUST OUR HISTORY CONTINUALLY DISAPPEAR. AAAAAAAAUGHHHHHH.

(It is because, the more marginalized your group is, the more vulnerable/more precarious everyone’s situation is so there is more at stake if you reveal the problems you will all be attacked personally in the worst ways and your internal / personal problems used to represent your entire category of people.)

Once I tried to trace what “actually happened” (as if that is possible) with the ending throes of the Combahee River Collective and whoooo. It’s none of my business on most levels. But it is interesting because of the way the dynamics are so similar to other groups who do amazing things and how they do not always last for a long time because Reasons.

It is so fraught to realize that sometimes the people you are THIS close to ideologically and personally are also the ones you cannot stand to be near, maybe they are just that bit of extra fucked up or chaotic that means they will drag you into their worldview or their own mess. Or you realize (like I did with “Susan”) that their racism is real and super harmful. I mean, we all want to “fix this mess”. Sometimes we can’t do it together I guess! I’m glad that “Susan” seems to have a more stable life now too. I am also extremely glad I was not close enough to any of that to be anywhere near the actual drama. WHEW.

In comparison, Hanna makes an attempt to talk about her own and white punks’ racism and the harm it did. Her big example is when she co-hosted a forum about undoing racism without realizing at all what was about to happen, which was white women’s tears to the max to the point where all the women of color left the event by the end except her very upset black co-host. There are many lessons there and one is probably, know how to just stop an event like that in its tracks. Like disrupt it or tell off your own audience or just full out end the event in the middle. As I get older that is part of what I think I may have learned or am learning. Sometimes things that seem good or well intentioned need to be stopped or destroyed, because they are so full of shit that allowing them to continue under your watch, is harmful and you’re complicit. “BURN IT DOWN.”

ANNNNNNNYWAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY

I promised some Human League commentary in this blog post. I was randomly listening to their first (?) album this morning in the shower after reading all the way through Rebel Girl in my pajamas, and I realized how much I appreciated their most famous song when it was new, because of how it wasn’t the usual fucking thing of a man complaining about a girlfriend who broke up with him and doesn’t appreciate him with an extra helping of “veiled” threat. Here is my freshmen composition essay about it! (I taught freshman comp briefly and read many a hastily tossed out song analysis! Why not.)

In Don’t You Want Me, which honestly is a bit insipid, but whatever, we all know the song — the dude has his say – he claims he discovered and “made” her in some way (assuming a musical career or something similar) – Then the threat. “I can put you back down too” and “we will both be sorry”, disturbing! He doesn’t accept that she is breaking up with him, and even tells her she doesn’t know what she wants, a total denial of her agency. So far, par for the course in pop songs and movies and books and like, everything. (This is why I hate most movies by the way, along with all the rapey fear bullshit and more general hetero/sexism/gender essentialism. I don’t need to consume any more of that toxic shit!)

But then the song totally redeems itself by Susan Ann Sulley giving our former waitress and now successful (artist) a voice in this!

I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar
That much is true

Already, I’m happy because she instantly makes it clear she has a different version of this story! He doesn’t have a lock on the truth!

But even then I knew I’d find a life on my own
Either with or without you

Yes! Tell it! She also wasn’t pathetically waiting around for a man to come “discover” and “make” her! She had ambitions and plans and knew what she was doing! Thank you Susan Ann!!!!!!!

She acknowledges they had some good times together and she still has feelings towards Mr. ExBoyfriend, but…

But now I think it’s time I lived my life on my own
I guess it’s just what I must do

No argument, not a lot of explanation, no room for argument, just a clear message that it’s over and she is moving on.

I found this heartening and refreshing in the 80s. A woman could just break up a relationship and move on because it’s what she wanted to do. Duh! The end! (We hope, despite Mr “I made you, I can destroy you” making his gross threats.) It seems like a low fucking bar to set for one’s basic humanity.

The Unquiet Grave

Posted on by Liz

Morning reading: The Unquiet Grave by Palinurus (aka Cyril Connolly). A little treasure chest by a thoughtful, neurotic slacker, reader, and writer, a sort of miscellany as he muses on the problems of being a person of great discernment who has failed to write a masterpiece. My kind of guy! Moody longing, regrets, dreams, drama, probably some sort of opium ingestion going on as well. This is a great book to dip into to get yourself going poetically, like Coleridge’s Anima Poetae or Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having made the admission, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked!

I don’t really agree with this – obviously we can write for a million reasons, and readers don’t want to encounter nothing but masterpieces! – but I do understand the fierce longing to write something amazing.

“Others merely live, I vegetate.” Vegetating, contemplating, spacing out, are all very useful for creativity! Not exactly thinking – not exactly meditating. An interior liminal space.

Palinurus was Aeneas’s navigator, who the gods force to fall asleep at the wheel & fall overboard as a sort of sacrifice.

I found this book on a free bookshelf in Cole Valley – the one outside Cole Valley Tavern. What a gem!

book cover of unquiet grave

Weird SF and a kids’ book binge

Posted on by Liz

I did a lot of trying to say no to things and step down from things I wasn’t doing (well enough, or in some cases, at all) which was kind of my therapy homework and which was very difficult. Why is focusing so difficult? Why can’t we live 6 lives at once??? Why am I getting older and more tired? It just has to be.

More centrally (the therapy part I suppose) What if I didn’t feel like I was somehow failing all the time and disappointing people? I think last time I said this in semi-public a little group of my friends stared at me silently, looked around the table at each other and then one of them as spokesperson explained that when I said things like that with all the things I actually do manage to accomplish, I was insulting them. Like if I thought that harshly of myself, when I had a job, was in grad school, had a toddler, and was still also doing extra projects, then… how was I judging them? Years later I still think of this (thanks elaine) and how helpful it was at giving me a kick in the ass. (Not an instant fix obviously, but a useful insight)

Dealing lots with architects/contractors. There is some little thing every day and a bigger meeting once a week. Construction continues under our house. Someday, someday! we will live in that bit of house, it will all have wheelchair access, I will have a REAL BATH and soak and read in the tub, without the noise of power tools, and I will get to fix up the garden again to enjoy it.

Last week and this week, I’m focusing in on work for DIFxTech and on GOAT. I even got a little help from M. in discussing how to catalogue and tag some of the GOAT archive – how useful to have another librarian in the family! And both kids were here last week and are now back at school while Danny is in Europe till the end of the week.

Annoyingly I not only got a cold (not Covid thankfully) but also got my period for the 2nd time in the past year, resetting my menopause clock so I will still be officially “perimenopause” till at least next January. Mother of God, I was so fucking pissed, it was so great to have it over with, but no. Fuck!!

I took a sewing lesson in the Mission, making a striped velvet zippered throw pillow with fabric that reminded me of one of my grandmother’s couches that had similar colors and how I would lie on it and pet the velvet one way & then the other. Got my sewing machine out resolving to practice on it on some scraps but then realized the pedal was missing which led me to clean out the entire row of cabinets.

Will I actually learn to sew and finally complete the blue jean blanket of my dreams – modeled after that crazy quilt bed cover I slept under once in the 90s at Harry and Daffodil’s house, made of I think Daff’s former lover’s favorite jeans, with all the pockets and rips on top and the underneath soft with the texture of the inside-out frayed bits. It was comfy and comforting and so bittersweet to think of his love for this dead young man and all the ways the radical faerie & other community had come together & was grieving so hard. I have forgotten his name but not the love that whoever made the quilt had for him. I think he must have been an amazing person.

In reading this week and last:

Loved the Christopher Rowe books and short stories, tons of Weird Kentucky, the wonderful Navigating Fox, and I hope maybe there could be more about the detective dog. (Maybe a prequel so we also get the crow friend?)

I also loved Tuf Voyaging, which somehow I have never read. It’s a great read that comes off like light space opera, but which is actually kind of a complicated moral fable. The Portmaster was so interesting – like Martin trying to write in a super valid critique of his too powerful main character and what power does to him – I am always saying this so I warmed to it. It was like seeing him in dialogue with the ghostly hand of feminist science fiction, so I enjoyed that. Plus of course I warmed to the (too powerful) nerd hero and his cats and his (too powerful) spacecraft (as the youth say, he is “a bit acoustic” in a charming way.) Having the down to earth feministsf Portmaster tell him off repeatedly did not stop the OP MC one bit. But she wasn’t treated badly in the story, and she gets some kittens, and she had her own problematic behaviors; I liked how Martin treated her as a character.

Damiano by R.A. MacAvoy. Readble but not my favorite, a little too fetishy of a certain type of anguished christian man that just annoys me. I did like the witch Sara from Fennland for a moment, and then didn’t again (bad boyfriend, whinges too much about age) I also don’t think much of Damiano. Oops I accidentally slaughtered more people with my magic ™ waah waah oh my little doggie is so pure oh also my literal angel who i definitely don’t lust after, wahh wahh but also women are purty. Goth cosplay and a broken lute! The end. (Sorry everyone.)

Very, very, very annoyed by Rome of One’s Own, which I feared was going to annoy me. I had some hope it might be a nice overview, since “forgotten” women of history of basically anywhere and when is one of my very favorite things to read. Maybe I would learn something about women of ancient Rome. BUT NO. It’s so, so bad y’all. The most annoying kind of “history” book.

I want to just blast it with my scorn for a moment but let me set a background first. At best, the book is trying to explain that historical interpretation can change over time. But it fails to make that clear and usually ignores the historical context of it sources. Instead it messily conflates truth, what the authors of those sources (Livy, Ovid, or whoever) thought was true, what later generations thought, or may have thought, was true and how they interpreted a story about a particular woman, and then what the book’s author and apparently, her (British, women) readers will read into that story. Often kind of (and only kind of!) attributing agency, empowerment, or historical importance to the woman in the story.

If you want an example of this done incredibly well, I love how Margaret Reynolds approaches it in The Sappho Companion.

Rome of One’s Own did not do it well. It was like I was nonconsensually shunted into a wine o’clock mumsnet party who were all incoherently yelling “You go, girl!”

Please just go read some primary sources! OMFG!

There could have been a fine book here that clearly outlined, here’s some things that particular writers said about particular women who may or may not have been semi-mythical, and exactly when that was, and what else was going on, and then, what other people in England/Great Britain then said about those women in subsequent centuries and how they reinterpreted things in their own context! And then you could add your own Liberated Ladies perspective onto that but make it clear what you are DOING. you could write a popular audience history book that lays some coherent groundwork and is still readable!

And, only talking about what Livy and Ovid and like 3 other dudes said about some mythical women of Rome’s founding, does a huge disservice to all the cool history of regular people and women’s daily lives that we can look at from the past… century that puts it into actual context including with archeological sources!

Here is where I should recommend something better as an antidote and I do have examples but the first thing that comes to mind is Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s “Women’s Work” and of course Prehistoric Textiles. (Way too broad in scope, not actually Rome, but gives you actual information! that! is! organized!)

I then bounced hard off a detective thriller, Zero Day. It started OK promising a married pen testing duo and a competent hacker heroine and then went quickly to some places I did not want to go: a background of what sounds like violent/life threatening/maybe rapey abuse by her cop ex boyfriend, and her nice hacker husband murdered by chapter 2. I can’t read that shit while D. is out of town! Fuck no!

Not to mention, after the murder, she gets a mysterious email saying that there is a mysterious 1 million dollar life insurance policy and she CLICKS THE PDF IN THE EMAIL.

Nope nope nope! Must we?! NOT going to finish that one. If there is a less violent novel by Ruth Ware, with less dwelling on women’s fear, trauma, and fucking up, please let me know.

To clear my mind of all that, I went on a Project Gutenberg spree and downloaded a lot of dumb Angela Brazil books (The Jolliest Term on Record; Madcap of the School), an equally ridiculous Cherry Ames book, and Clematis by Bertha Browning Cobb which is a lovely book about a neglected orphan and her beloved kitten. And some things off the 19th century list of classic kids’ books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_children%27s_classic_books that I haven’t read.

So in short, BRB, gonna play some jolly field hockey with my chums and then go back to my digs for tea and spiffing rock cake (wtf is that, i’m still not sure but it does not sound nice). Why is diggings, or digs, school slang for where you live? mining and miners? archaeology? something else?)

Happy 2024!

Posted on by Liz

I didn’t do a year in review for 2023 and I hope I will do something like that. But it’s too much for this morning and I feel like just starting fresh with a diary of this first week.

On Sunday, NYE, I officiated a wedding in Golden Gate Park and that was really a lovely experience!! A first for me (and for the women getting married). My license was from American Marriage Ministries, which is non spiritual and non theist and which you can get free online in like, 5 minutes. We had several discussions about their feelings and what they wanted, I drafted a ceremony, gave them some sample vows to work from as a template, and we did the thing on about one weeks’ notice. Lovely group of friends, and the most biting and wearing of cat ears of any wedding I’ve ever officiated! On Jan 2 I went down to City Hall to turn in the license and got to enjoy the gorgeous building, and visit the statue of John F. Shelley, who is (probably) our house’s most famous former resident.

I hung out at home on Monday with Danny, then at Poesía Cafe to do some writing in the Castro and got a haircut and saw my sister & nephew. Allergy shots – More appointments – Cole Valley and Noe/24th – And today is Trans Nerd Brunch at Zeitgeist.

For reading: Foz Meadows Strange & Stubborn/ All the Hidden Paths (gay fantasy romance, angsty, good), Bookshops & Barbarians (not actually that good alas). A super cheesy kids’ series called The Historical House which is set in a particular made up house in London over 300 years, with a different 12 year old girl starring in each book. Each girl is incredibly bland but has some kind of ambition, and the stories connect. (Why do people dumb down books for middle grade! unnecessary! ) These actually sucked (SO BLAND, so bloodless) and yet I was drawn to read them all. I think because I just like the idea of thinking about the lives of all the people who have lived in a particular house.

I also SCORED majorly as I picked up an old paperback copy of The Unquiet Grave by “Palinurus” aka Cyril Connolly. I dipped in and out of it but haven’t read it through yet. He must have been fun at parties. (All that Benzedrine.) He may get invited to my secret End of Greatness club.

The best book I read this week was Wole Talabi’s Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon. This is just great, while it took a little bit for me to catch on to what was happening, about halfway through it built up to an amazing story of corporate gods and spirits and rebels, freelancer outlaws, power struggles between gods, a Nigerian and, I guess ancient near eastern (!) view of the world, a fantastic heist, a guest star spot by magician Aleistair Crowley & friend as well as his modern incarnation. The exotification of British magic was *chef’s kiss*.

It was so good also to have multiple times and locations within Africa, I don’t know how to express this in a way that isn’t clumsy, but, we get a sense of the greatness of history and huge diversity because of locations in Cairo, Tunisia (?), medieval Ghana, Axum/ ancient Ethiopia/Eritrea, and so on in addition to Nigeria past, present, and spirit-worldish.

This would make the BEST WEIRD MOVIE. Glitzy club scenes with terrifying rich people! Weird sex magic! Amazing historical panoramas! God wars! Spirit worlds! British Museum heist! Seriously.

As I read, I went on a zillionty Wikipedia and beyond spelunking expeditions, looking up people, places, myths, and so on. Any cultural reference I didn’t get, I looked up. I have to go back and make a list of the neat stuff I learned from my sidetrack habit while reading this book but one good starting point was the East African queen Gudit. And another neat one, the Eritrean Hawulti and other stelae!

Anyway, Talabi is another author I will follow with interest – I pre-ordered his next book, Convergence Problems!

And, if you haven’t read Africa Risen, it’s a very good anthology where I first encountered Talabi’s work, and I highly recommend it if you want to start getting into reading African science fiction authors!

My high school banned books article, banned

Posted on by Liz

In high school in Texas the 80s (Cypress Creek) I wrote two articles for the school newspaper that were banned.

I was just thinking about this as I looked at the totally bonkers list of books banned recently from the Katy and Cy-Fair school districts on the outskirts of Houston. Wacky Wednesday??! Yes, the Dr. Seuss book! Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret at least has a long history of being banned, though it was pretty bland, mostly about getting your period, not even anything spicy. I’m trying to imagine why Wacky Wednesday would be banned as “inappropriate for children” and failing. (Secretly about drugs?)

My first banned school newspaper article was written from interviews with kids I knew about how what drugs people were doing and how they obtained them. It’s been a while, but my memory is that most kids stole them from their parents (coke from briefcases, or for the less rich kids, weed) and others hung out with older kids and did weed or X. (Which is what we called ecstasy before it was “molly” I guess. Why is it molly?)

Since at that time I was getting in-school suspension a lot, for being kind of fucked up but also just for dumb shit like — not even making this up — “satanic symbols on my folder” – which were anarchy signs and runes that said “Ph’nglui mglw’nfah Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! or “Cthulu lies dreaming in the ancient city of R’lyeh”. ANYWAY. I was in the nice, peaceful, quiet in-school suspension room doing my homework packets, reading, and not being bullied, and at lunch the druggie kids would tell me how they bought weed, so I wrote about it.

I got an A on the assignment and it was set to go in the student newspaper. None of us realized that the student newspaper was read over by the administration. But I found out! The extremely nice teacher let me know that I could keep my good grade but the administration would not let it go in the paper. I was so pissed.

So I wrote another article about censorship. I called various school libraries in our district, Cypress-Fairbanks, and called the superintendent of schools office and found that there were lots of banned books. They usually were banned because of something called the Committee of Concerned Citizens, which I had never heard of!

In our school library I found a lot of examples of incredibly pornographic gross romance novels, which I knew about because my super conservative friend’s super Christian mom used to read them and my friend let me borrow them. So many rape and Civil War scenes y’all, I can’t even. The books they banned included James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Yes, 1908s Houston, I’m sure all of us were just raring to read Ulysses and DH Lawrence.

So I wrote my article, it got an A, and then it was not allowed in the paper.

So I made an underground newspaper with both of my dumb articles in them, and some other writing I don’t remember that might not have been from me, and some badly drawn cartoons, featuring, a dead rat dead from “cafeteria food” as the assistant principal peed in a filthy school bathroom, missing the urinal (why? i don’t know, but someone drew it and it seemed edgy). This girl I knew vaguely took it and made free copies at her dad’s office and we spread the paper around and a few days later were busted. I wonder who told!

We were both actually suspended for this, but I was allowed back because if I missed my final exams I woudl flunk. I remember a tense meeting with the principal, a counselor, and someone from the superintendent’s office, and them saying, “We just want you gone. We’re letting you back so you can graduate and get out.”

Thanks y’all! Fuck you very much!!

I don’t know what happened to Elise or what her last name was or whether she got to take her finals but I hope she did!

I also wish I had a copy of that newspaper but it is long gone.

Also, check out this kid Cameron Samuels’ great speech to the Senate! https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023-09-12_-_testimony_-_samuels.pdf “It should not have been my responsibility as a 17-year-old to defend my rights and challenge bigotry. Protecting children requires empowering us students, not allowing one or two parents to dictate the policies of an entire community.” Fantastic!

There’s worse shit to be mad at Texas about including their extreme anti choice laws and anti trans laws and trying to take kids away from their parents and not allowing trans kids to use school bathrooms but I’m also still mad about the books and the censorship! It’s all part of the same damn thing!

Fuck you very much AGAIN, you edge of Houston, kicker scum, fat faced, child molesting, golf playing, homo-hating, hick-ass Jesus lickers! I’m sure your nonsense is no better today than it was then! And I hope Wacky Wednesday bites you right on the ass.