Composite – Page 46 – Internet — information — criticism — poetry — connection — feminism — open source — open spaces — translation — digression — recursion — boats — wheelchairs — disability rights — ranting — the future

Hackmeet report, Day 1

October 16, 2011 Liz

Hackmeet was amazing yesterday and after a bit more rest I’ll be heading out to catch the last half of day 2 of this activist & tech unconference. Over the last few months I ended up at some of the hackmeet organizing meetings and agreed to give a talk on whatever they thought might be useful. I couldn’t tell who the audience was though as the schedule evolved. Cypherpunks? Security researchers? Data liberation nerds? Activists who need help making web sites and having https (and its problems) explained or who want to make mobile apps? The sort of people who are kind of activists but a bit more like people in nonprofits who barely use the net at all except to get people to sign a petition? WHAT. Seriously I could not tell. It turned out to be a kind of wild mix of all that and more with what I think was a fair bit of crossover from #OccupySF and #OccupyOakland.

I listened to part of the Electronic Civil Disobedience and Hacktivism talk by a guy named wrought, which started out trying to root online activism in earlier civil disobedience heroes (all male: Thoreau, Gandhi…) As a history lesson I thought it was a condescending and oversimplified bid for legitimacy, but, okay. And then I got so annoyed by the pedagogical technique that I hate, repeated asking “And who here knows what X is, who This person is, raise hand, reply from audience?” It does not work well for me in a classroom when I’m a teacher or a student because it does horrible things to power dynamics; and it really is out of place in a meeting of anarchist activists! (Hello, let’s do it alanya to alanya style or not at all!) Again, okay, whatever! Maybe it works for some people! I voted with my wheels (exhausted, sick, and cranky) and went to hang out on the other side of the space for a while.

The second talk I went to was a discussion on Technology and Privilege. It was really run like a discussion, which was great. Chairs were rearranged in a circle and was run by a beardy guy named Flatline, in all black except for his hot pink chucks. There was a quick round the circle name-only introduction. Flatline asked if anyone had felt that their access to technology was affected by privilege. I can’t remember the original question in detail, but people responded with some thoughts about how they were conscious that their owning a computer or having access to one was because of their class background and sometimes gender (especially in the case of having access to computers in childhood — or not. ) Nothing hideously faily was said that I can recall. We were all 30 or 40 of us on the same page with this. I wondered how many people had read Restructure’s post about gender and computer access?

A K-12 educator talked about kids’ access to computers and how it was controlled and policed. I mentioned gender and class in relation to privacy, that it is important to keep in mind when you make tools for people’s use that they may have access to a computer but it is not under their control or accessible in a private place. We touched on accessibility and disability, screen readers, other things than considering screen readers when making web sites or distributing information. Mike Kan brought up different learning styles and needing the visual and GUI aspects to information and hating the command line. The discussion moved on to race, ethnicity, culture, country, infrastructure. Someone who did a bunch of activism in something called tao.ca (early — not gonna be much trace of it in history on the web) talked about having email or not in the early 90s and what a privilege marker it was; people stopped asking the question in the late 90s and assumed “everyone has email now.” She also had a good story about how, to have root on their boxes you would have to take on a woman (I think) as your apprentice and teach her how to do everything you could do, although no one really liked the word “apprentice”. I asked a bit suspiciously if the women ever stopped being apprentices. Yes! They did. This sounded like a very good model for increasing gender equity or equalizing power and access to tools across other lines of identity.

I liked this discussion. I wish I had remembered to mention bettastop.net, a cool project for bus riders in Oakland (and maybe the whole Bay Area) to report bus ride data over SMS.

Afterwards Rae and I and some other women were like, OMG… usually we want to shoot ourselves in the head during these sorts of discussions, but we didn’t! Surprise Non-Fail! We expected it to be super faily, and then it wasn’t! (Strangely all our metaphors about hating and not wanting to go to those privilege discussions were about violence towards ourselves. Catch yourself doing that, think it over!!) Rae and I ended up gossiping about GeekGirlCon and the game of thrones post and intersectional identities and the Crunk Feminist Collective and I went on a little bit about how much I adore Kid CuDi & the post I need to write about loving his work. She talked about hyphy and crunk and the pain of loving it but having serious issues with the Problematic parts of the works and the culture. nihilistech and I also talked a bit after the session and I gave her a tour of Noisebridge quick before it got too crowded for us to move around the space easily. (It was still too crowded.)

In one talk but I can’t remember which one, a person who sounded like he was active early on in ACT-UP talked about their strategies and early work. I was part of that (perhaps not as early as him — in Texas we just copied it all, cargo cult style, from stuff we saw in the news and whatever actual ACT UP materials we had gotten our hands on; we did many successful actions and produced tons of our own materials, zines, flyers, events, and so on.)

I had lunch with miloh and sasha and another guy and Mia. The Tastebridge people and others who I think sometimes work with Food Not Bombs had made food for everyone (probably about 150 people.) It is so awesome when people make food at these events and work to feed each other. I think it’s beautiful and I don’t respect people who mock it as being a fucking hippie thing. The integration of actual needs of life into our shit isn’t “fucking hippie” and it is ignorant to disrespect domestic labor. Also food is love. Call me a fucking hippie then, since I cooked for 100 people for years at my co-op and loved it! ANYWAY deep respect for the people who cooked and cleaned and organized.

So then I did my kind of half assed presentation, Browse Anonymously from a USB Key. I had expected to do this for about 10 people who were very non techy and instead it was a totally unreadable mixed crowd of like 50 people. I passed my little pocketful of free usb drives around the crowd and told people to copy or download the files, format their own USB in fat 32 if they needed to do that. (Hilariously resulting in someone from the audience perseverating for me to explain what FAT 32 means to which I finally went, JFC, Google it. To me it means “the thing you click when you format a drive to make it work on Mac and Windows both” and that is fucking enough.) I had only tested out doing this on a Mac and Windows so did not really have any particular knowledge of running Torbrowser and Vidalia on Linux and assumed it would work.

I gave a total amateur’s explanation of how Tor works. Then was like, Okay, well, copy the file onto your usb drive, click it to unzip it, quit firefox or your other browsers, and run Torbrowser. You will see the Vidalia control panel and then a modified Firefox version called Aurora will open up. Hurrah. You are using Tor!

A bunch of people told me later that they had no idea it was that easy to install and use. So I’m glad I gave the talk. Honestly I was not feeling the mojo or energy I usually have while public speaking. It was also inherently embarrassing to stand up and be like “Derp! Use Tor!” alongside actual crypto/security experts. Still… if it was useful to someone, that doesn’t matter!

The session ended early but then as people came up to talk with me it became clear I should re-open the talk. Maybe 15 people gathered back around to talk about how to meet with people or host group chats online. IRC is too fucking hard to deal with for most people (not just using it — I mean in setting it up and hosting a channel). I recommended and demonstrated using PiratePad over Torbrowser, which gives you chat and a collaborative editing environment. Piratepad.net itself would have access to what you do if you don’t trust them, their logging or their ability to withstand a subpoena, but they would not have a way to connect it back to you since you connect to it with Tor. People seemed to like that as a use case and a solution.

Then I listened a bit to Aragorn who runs Anarchist News talking about… Something. Everything and nothing. This talk bored the hell out of me and I wondered why anyone would stay sitting through it. You are anarchists right? If someone is standing up with a microphone spouting pure bullshit and it’s boring, why just sit there? I think they all started checking their email (reflex from years of bad professors). Near as I could tell was a mix of statements about Internet culture lambasting us (who?) how We aren’t being visionary enough and yet then going on about being a l33t sys admin. If anyone got something out of this talk, I’d love to know! I tuned out of it and put up the rest of the photos I took last week on the Friends of Noisebridge wall.

At 4 I ran a discussion session called Feminist Anonymous which was me asking people to talk about Anonymiss, and if something like Antisec or Lulzsec were focused on feminist goals, what would they be? What will it look like when specifically feminist hackers start to act collectively and with political consciousness? Legal or non legal actions? Who or what would their targets be? Would it be indistiguishable from other social justice hacking aims of similar groups or would there be a different dynamic? I touched on debunking ev-psych essentialist reasons “why there are no women hackers”, asserted that there were and are. But even when there are there are social barriers to banding up with each other and acting in solidarity. I ranted a bit about tricksters and geniuses, mean fandom communities that are women running 4chan-like boards, and where that might lead. I brought up the idea of “namearapist.com” which got many people in the room a bit excited and wanting to talk. During this bit of the discussion my head exploded and I ranted a bunch, ended up going, to the question of “omg but what about false accusations”, CRY ME A RIVER. Yes, I like ethics and don’t want to harm people. But it is amazing to me that in the balance, the possibility some guy might get falsely accused and it might ruin his life, weighs so heaviliy in the balance that it prevents anyone making an infrastructure for people to report actual violence and harm and dox their perpetrators or to do that naming publicly. We are really heavily colonized to have it be our first reflex to protect those innocent privileged men. What about those of us already suffering the harm of being trolled, not hired for jobs because we google up “feminist” or “rapist-namer” and thus unhire-able troublemaker? When our mere public presence (real life or internet) is an invitation to violence and harassment, when we can’t participate in public discourse even in the mildest of ways without bringing down a world of hell on our heads? I have to give a shit that you might get falsely accused and have to consider for a moment defending your identity and your truths which apparently otherwise are untouched, I have to shield your aristocracy? No. I don’t and I think it is reasonable to propose the fucking idea, though even just proposing it, I expose myself even more as a target. Adding to the irony, feminism is often positioned by people as being opposed to free speech. Yet we are supposed to police ourselves to stay silent and private and discreet when we are the targets of violence and misogyny — because someone, somewhere, might game that kind of accusation! Seriously, give me a fucking break. Honey badger don’t care. I wondered if anyone got my references to SCUM and Hothead Paisan as I tried to say that I am against actual violence but feel differently about words and writing and the net.

Lots of people talked about feminist consciousness, naming problems, backlash, intersections of race and gender, realizing there was a problem (or not). We touched on the geek feminist wiki timeline of incidents, the Ada Initiative and tech conferences (which someone else brought up), Hollaback, I explained the hierarchical structure of Perverted-justice.com. Someone (I think liriani?) came in in the middle and said is this all about anti-rape or can we talk about how to build a feminist internet, across queer, race, gender identities? That was a good question that I did not answer, a much different framing of the problem than we had gotten a bit deep into since the session was more on “How can we fuck shit up and why don’t we more often?” I am sorry I didn’t make more space for that in the discussion and feel like I fucked up there. I want feminist antiracist queer activism in this discussion of goals, targets, and methods. Also when people were enthusing over hollaback we did not complicate that in any way talking class or race. We did talk about the importance of comment moderation in establishing safe spaces for people to converse. The person doing the moderation job still gets the stress.

I think folks were intrigued by the idea of doxxing people who say misogynist shit in public. That gets around “false accusation” “problem” and will be funny. It is important to bring lulz. And it would be satisfying!

Someone said the word “episteme”! Noted and filed.

We had more interesting talk from K-12 educators about kids’ access to computer information and skills. I recommend talking about identity and cybersecurity in schools as a way of furthering good information! Funny side conversation later with her and mia and X. Trapnel about how the net nanny “don’t give your name and address to anyone on the internet” mentality of teaching kids about computer stuff, completely ignores that the actually more prevalent danger is that our identity and cultural consciousness raising info has outstripped our computer security info. So kids go online and talk about being trans or queer or feminist and then get busted by their parents and beat up or kicked out of the house. What they need is Torbrowser, encryption, anonymity and good password security against their own parents and teachers. The predator is inside the house…

Someone gave an interesting explanation of her national or maybe international organization which has a very long history of women supporting other women who are drug users. They have good security practices, and they also have a strong real life network and practices developed to support each other in emergencies or bad situations, in custody battles, court, jail, and so on. Her point was very good — that women activists need strong support networks.

I think we are gonna end up having a continued feminist anarchist hacker/activist consciousness raising meeting at Noisebridge maybe run by me and snail.

At one point I got to exercise one of my superpowers of discussion moderation, as some total douchebro came into the room and began to bray.

Douchebro: “Blah blah blah me me me I blahblah don’t know what you are talking about but in MY definition of feminism…”
Me: “While I’d love to hear your definition of feminism later, I’d like first to hear from HER and HER over there in the back.”
Douchebro: ……..!
Rest of room: *ELECTRIC RELIEF*

At moments like those I think of myself as an implacable Douchebro Redirect process and I imagine that while polite innocuous words are coming out of my mouth everyone can see a giant cartoon style thought balloon over my head that says, “FUCK OFF” while a green-lantern-esque ray comes out of me and blasts the braying jackass wrapping him in a cone of silence and bewilderment. If done right it is like beautiful sleight of hand and everyone should feel a bit of disbelief that it really happened, like they are hallucinating.

It’s hard to do it without giggling. A slight professorial nod and expression of deep concern works well. Or, I just imagine that and it always comes out as an unholy smirk.

You too can learn to do this in your real life! So useful! It takes practice. You can role play “Douchebro Redirect” with a few friends. Set someone up as the listeners and someone up as the loud bore who honks on and on offensively. Then take turns interrupting the bore and talking and listening to each other rather than paying more attention to the bore.

Meanwhile actual knowledge about SSL and the fucked upedness of the CA system was being dropped and there was a session that sounded great about secure email and IM. I caught some of Morgan’s resisting forensics talk , a couple of lightning talks (including the one on sassaman) and then took off. Exhausting!

I’m going back now and will probably offer to run people through the diceware method of choosing a good password. I thought also of running through the Joanna Russ categories as anti-patterns for anarchist feminist antiracists to notice.

The Eye in the Door

October 16, 2011 Liz

I’m reading Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, which is elliptical, perturbing, and depressing but very good. It’s about WWI, the trauma suffered by soldiers, conscientious objectors, and the people around them. It’s deeply anti-war.

I liked this bit from Eye in the Door, the second book. Prior, a former soldier with severe shell shock and asthma, is thinking about his boss Major Lode’s mindset.

Lode had no idea. He’d spent his entire adult life–boyhood too, for that matter–in uniformed, disciplined, hierarchical institutions, and he simply couldn’t conceive of the possibility that other people might function differently. It was all a great big chess board to him. This rag-bag collection of Quakers, socialists, anarchists, suffragettes, syndicalists, Seventh Day Adventists and God know who else was merely an elaborate disguise, behind which lurked the real anti-war movement, a secret disciplined highly efficient organization dedicated to the overthrow of the state as surely as Lode was dedicated to its preservation. And on the other side of the board, as head of the opposing army, elusive, tenacious, dangerous: The Black King himself…

Very apt in thinking about the state mentality about the OccupyWallStreet and #OccupyEverything protests. There isn’t a King. That’s the whole point.

I’m still trying to untangle the fiction from the reality as I read articles about Maud Allan and the infamous Cult of the Clitoris article and the “Black Book” that supposedly held the names of over 40,000 lesbian, gay, or bi people in Britain who were being blackmailed by Germany into betraying state secrets. Okay! Totally weird! Truth stranger than fiction, as usual. If we don’t have the supposed Berlin Black Book I’m surprised someone didn’t write a fake one!

But on a more serious note the books made me think of Bradley Manning and his ongoing ordeals in prison. His “eye in the door” is the same eye from 1917. I also often wonder about sexuality, gender identification, and anti-war resistance (result of consciousness raising/epistemological inquiry). Though there isn’t a King, there may be a rhizome. Consider that we also present a greater attack surface because of our intersectionalities, so that our strength is also our weakness. Apparently Pat Barker’s ellipticalness is infectious!

Ada Lovelace Day: The Other Geek Girl

October 7, 2011 Liz

For Ada Lovelace Day, I’d like to write about this girl from my high school. It was (and is) a huge school, with over 3000 students. I didn’t know Carla very well. She was in my classes, the “advanced” ones and the ones for gifted kids. Did we ever have a conversation? At all?

She almost always wore a funky old fashioned, maybe vintage, purple hat. How to describe the hat? Picture it being 1984, the outer fringes of suburban Houston. We’re maybe 15 or so, sophomore year of high school. It’s so totally Breakfast Club you wouldn’t believe it, but with more raw brutality. Carla’s hat was like something Queen Elizabeth would have worn. It was “weird” even among people who wore weird things, and it had massive amounts of dignity. This hat made me think of Harriet the Spy. Not because Harriet would have worn it but because it made her seem like a character out of Harriet’s world, like The Boy With the Purple Socks. So I thought of Carla as The Other Geek Girl, and The Girl in the Purple Hat.

In math classes, she was one of four of us who would always get 100% on everything, plus all the extra credit problems. Her, two dudes, and me. I was SO GLAD she was there. I wasn’t alone. Though I was a freak and geek and proud, it was so good to be just that little bit less of a freak, because she was there, a secret rock star in my head.

In computer math class, as we typed away on our machine-gun-sounding IBM keyboards, she was quietly, serenely competent. Her program would just work. She didn’t show off, but if someone asked, she would explain how to do stuff in Pascal, sometimes clearly figuring it out on the fly. She and I, and those same two dudes from math, and a couple of others, knew more than the teacher. (Not hard in a high school computer class, then or now.)

I was more flamboyant, competing openly and boasting and mixing it up with the boys who acted like they owned the world and who were so hostile and cruel. But Carla would just do her thing. She sailed on through. The bullshit never seemed to touch her. I admired her so much. I felt like I could never be like her. Just doing it, so matter-of-fact. I wondered, did she feel like I felt? Was she struggling? Was she angry? Was she being harassed all the time? Did she have anyone to geek out with? Was she having any of the issues I was slamming up against at high speed? Did she like science fiction?

What if we had talked to each other? Maybe she would have just been like, “Yeah whatever, skank.” Or we might have had nothing to say other than “Nice math test!”

No one would think of me as shy, but I was too shy to say anything to the other obvious geek. Part of that wasn’t individual shyness but of not wanting other people to comment on us or target us any more than already happened. If we banded together, we would just be a bigger target.

It sticks with me, sticks in my head, that she inspired me and gave me courage, maybe even sisterhood or shelter, just be being there and being awesome. I think I’ll try to find her on Facebook, and say so . . . Thanks for being awesome, Carla!

I had this whole mythology of a person developed in my head, but how much nicer it would have been to try to get to know a person.

Past Ada Lovelace Day posts from me: 2009: basically a long list of inspiring geeky women — 2010: Some of my best friends are unicorns.

An extra note, the upcoming issue of Cascadia Subduction Zone is on Women in Science! I think it will be out next week and it will be well worth a read!

And, I’ll be at GeekGirlCon all weekend in Seattle, so if you see me, come say hi!

Italian Wikipedia protests censorship law

October 4, 2011 Liz

The Italian Wikipedia just blacked out its site in protest of a proposed law that would function to censor the Internet — mostly targeted at bloggers and online journalists. A group called Populo Viola are protesting in Rome. Hurray, Purple People!

The Italian government attempted to pass similar blog-censorship laws in 2007 and 2008.

As I understand it, section 29 of the proposed law says that in case of offensiveness, anyone (really anyone? I’m unclear on this point) can email a blogger or other online news source and demand a takedown in 48 hours, or the blogger can be fined 12,000 euros. If someone who can actually read Italian could explain this law better and who can send a takedown in what circumstances, I would love to see a link!

Also, can anyone explain “Populo Viola”? Why Purple People?

Needless to say there is hot and heavy argument about this on all fronts on Wikimedia discussion lists, where I lurk like a lurking thing. Some people are upset that a language-based Wikipedia project would blank itself (even temporarily) thus becoming involved in national-level politics (rather than remaining politically neutral, as perhaps befits an international nonpartisan encyclopedia). What if Australia blacked out the entire English Wikipedia to protest a law proposed in their country, affecting English speakers all over the world? On the other hand, Wikipedia is more a “citizen” of the Internet, isn’t it? So it would make sense for specific communities who make decisions about a language-based project to support an Internet (in Italy or elsewhere) that doesn’t put this kind of burden onto web publishers. The Wikimedia Foundation’s position so far is that since the Italian-speaking wikipedians went through a community process to decide to do this, it’s up to them what to do with their project, and the WMF supports their decision.

Will you need a photo ID to vote in 2012?

October 3, 2011 Liz

The Brennan Center just published a huge report, Voting Law Changes in 2012. The description of the report says that these laws will affect disabled people as well as young, minority, and low-income voters. Here is the lowdown on how these laws may affect people with disabilities.

Seven states have changed the law on voter registration and on absentee ballots to require government-issued photo ID. If you’re disabled, and you don’t have a current state or federal government issued photo ID, you may need to do quite a lot of planning to get one. Transportation, and the process itself of waiting in lines and going to various offices may be a barrier for many people.

If you have an elderly relative whose ID may be expired or who may not have a photo ID, and you’re in one of these states, you might want to help them prepare to vote. Let them know the law has changed and ask them to check their ID expiration dates now!

Unexpired driver’s license, non-driver’s ID issued by a motor vehicle department, U.S. passport, or U.S. military photo ID will be accepted by all seven states: Alabama, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin.

Student IDs: Alabama, Kansas, and Rhode Island.

U.S. naturalization documents bearing a photo: Alabama, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Tribal ID card with a photo: Alabama and Wisconsin.
Concealed handgun licenses: Kansas and Texas. (Okay….)
Any old ID with your name and photo on it: Rhode Island. Woo hoo, print your own!

Here’s an excerpt from the Voting Law Changes in 2012 report that describes the situation in detail:

In general, the photo ID bills that were introduced this session are more restrictive than those in prior sessions, including fewer forms of acceptable IDs, fewer exemptions, or fewer alternative mechanisms for eligible voters without the specified IDs to vote.

Those laws that have passed this session vary in several respects, including: (1) the types of photo ID that voters are permitted to show for voting; (2) whether the requirement to provide ID applies only to in-person voters or to those who vote by mail as well; (3) whether there are any exemptions from the requirement to provide ID; and, most importantly, (4) whether there is an alternative way for a voter who does not have an accepted form of photo ID to cast a ballot that counts. Detailed descriptions of each bill are included in the appendix to this report.

The types of ID permitted
With the exception of Rhode Island, each of the states that passed voter ID bills require voters to show government-issued photo IDs, though the list of acceptable IDs differs from state to state. All seven states accept an unexpired driver’s license, non-driver’s ID issued by a motor vehicle department, U.S. passport, or U.S. military photo ID. All states except for Kansas and South Carolina also accept U.S. naturalization documents bearing a photo. Alabama, Rhode Island, and Tennessee broadly accept any photo ID issued by state and federal governments, though Tennessee expressly excludes student IDs from consideration. Only Alabama, Kansas, and Rhode Island accept student photo IDs issued by state institutions of higher education. Wisconsin purports to accept certain state-issued student IDs, but the state’s new law imposes criteria for such IDs that few if any state schools’ IDs meet. Kansas and Texas expressly allow concealed handgun licenses, and Alabama, Rhode Island and Tennessee accept such IDs as well. Only Alabama and Wisconsin accept a tribal ID card with a photo. Rhode Island is the only state that accepts non-governmental photo IDs for voting; indeed, any current ID with a voter’s name and photograph suffices.

Who must show photo ID

All seven states require individuals appearing to vote in person at a polling place to show photo ID. Only Alabama and Kansas require all persons who vote absentee to submit a copy of their photo IDs with their mail-in ballots. Those states are now the first two states in the nation ever to require photo ID with absentee ballots. Wisconsin requires permanent absentee voters to submit a copy of their photo IDs, but only the first time they vote absentee. As a practical matter, all absentee voters in Wisconsin will have to provide a copy of their photo IDs when the law first goes into full effect in 2012.

Exemptions

Several states exclude certain categories of voters from the requirement to show photo ID for voting. Alabama exempts individuals who are entitled to vote absentee under federal laws protecting certain military and overseas voters and certain elderly and disabled voters. Wisconsin also exempts military and overseas voters, as well as voters designated as “confidential,” such as police officers or domestic violence victims. It does not exempt elderly or disabled voters other than those indefinitely confined to certain care facilities. Tennessee exempts voters who are either hospitalized or in nursing homes. Texas exempts certain voters with disabilities who can produce a statement that they have been determined to be disabled by specified government agencies and do not have the required ID. And Kansas exempts only permanently disabled and absent military voters from its law, but allows persons over sixty-five to show expired photo IDs.

I’m not in any of those states but thought I’d help get the word out.

If you’re in California, take a look at Disability Rights California’s page on Voting Rights, it’s very good and has a ton of links to information in Spanish, English, Cambodian, Hmong, Chinese, Tagalog, Laotian, and Vietnamese on voting while disabled.

Thanks to Dan Gillmor for the link to the Brennan Center report.

Kandila – bilingual poetry book

September 23, 2011 Liz

My friend ephemere is taking pre-orders for a calligraphy poembook. Here’s her description of the project:

Kandila will be a little book rendered completely, from the title page to the very last leaf, in calligraphy. It will feature three of my (rather long!) bilingual love poems to my country, the Philippines, rendered in different calligraphic styles, as well as a few pages of baybayin calligraphy and “playing around with letters” calligraphy art. I estimate the approximate length at fifty to sixty calligraphed pages. Each book will be signed.

A .pdf of the entire book will be available for free online. Please note that there will be parts of this book rendered in Filipino, but the translation will not be calligraphed; instead it will be available as a printed sheet accompanying the book, and will also be freely viewable online.

Kandila will be sent out by mid-November. All funds raised will go toward supporting me in the wake of my being terminated from my job, which I lost due to my unwillingness to remain silent about my marginalized identity and beliefs.Details here.

ink and pen drawing of a woman in a lace head scarf
Please support her, buy the book, order her beautiful art, and pass this on if you can!

Recently published poems

September 13, 2011 Liz

At some point this spring while I was sick in bed for weeks I sent out a big batch of poems and this time tracked what I sent to what magazine. I guess about a third of what I sent out got accepted. I should do it more often! Plus Aqueduct Press is going to put out my new book, Unruly Islands; I’ll talk more about that later!

Here are some links to the recently published poems and the journals they’re in, with snippets of the poetry,

cover of stone telling journal

Mother Frankenstein, in Stone Telling, a really great online magazine that publishes “literary speculative poetry with a strong emotional core. I like the other work in this magazine quite a lot and am incredibly honored to have a poem in it, especially this poem which I wrote many years ago and still love. For a while I was reading this dense, ranty poem at open mics and people would just clutch their heads and go WTF!!! Stop it! Too much! Where did that come from! So I’m glad it’s out there; no one ever seemed to want it; too long, too odd, doesn’t fit, etc. Stone telling is the perfect home! Read the rest of their poetry and you’ll see what I mean — and you will probably get sucked into their archives.

stitches straining to burst with the bowling ball weight of the guilt
of futile miscarriages tumbling in cataracts, stochastic tapestry,
I would leap into the night, iridium flash, verso of the meteor’s flight,
unintentional handful of nothing and words and the workbench of memory,
Mary mother of Frankenstein you give me your blackened tooth’s unwatched star,
your handfuls of stigmata, your soldier ants slicing the moon’s andalusian eye,
your body’s machinery in the bonefrost of lost desire and a kiss of loving betrayal,
the memory of your pellucid eggshell trembling in the corpus luteum of my fists

A poem in Our of Our volume 11. I like their magazine, which is kind of old school City Lights-ish. They published “Hard use”, a poem I wrote about how much I loved my pickup truck which sounds like it will be about hound dogs and railroad tracks but is not. I think I have one other poem in there (but cannot remember and the magazine is not in front of me) Here is a little bit of “Hard use”:

rattle up wood-stake spade and rake
shoot that agave smack to the gas can

radio: ay! cumbia!

pop into the dust groove
needle in the cinderblock
gas cap, hubcap, rope
loud hot in the truck bed

I think it is not yet actually printed but I had some translations of fantastic poems by Carmen Berenguer accepted by specs journal for their Fall 2011 issue. I’m so excited about that! I love her work, and some of these were supposed to be in Five Finger Review but the journal sadly folded for lack of funds (or something) before the issue was published. This issue — themed “kaleidoscopic” — sounds well worth reading. Check this out, this was their call for submissions, you could not get more perfect for Berenguer’s work:

This year, specs is working in collaboration with the Florida Studies Initiative at Rollins to support the Alfred J. Hanna Symposium on Florida. The symposium shares the theme of kaleidoscopic point and celebrates critical inquiries that consider the people, places, and events rooted in Florida’s cross-cultural past and transnational reality.

In May, an online zine called O Sweet Flowery Roses published “2 pelican poems”, short funny bits of language about, well, fucking pelicans, what do you expect? Their permalinks are not working so to get to my stuff you need to click on Archives in the sidebar and then May 2011. I submitted to them because I like their taste and their rapid publishing pace. These poems are what I always think of when I look at pelicans flying over the ocean, it’s as if I just summed up all the thoughts about them and can’t really go any further. Notable if you like alchemy and for the funny word “icthyo-athanor”.

Wavelines
    collect
      all
    pelicans

draw
  mainsail
   wind-ropes

full
    throat
      wind-belly

A poem I wrote a very long time ago in Blue Lake Review.

I’m missing something here — there was at least one translation published in the summer but I would have to go through my email laboriously to figure it out. I would like to complain that no one ever wants my absolutely kickass translations of Nestor Perlongher; however I have gotten a few nice emails from grad students writing about his work and was happy to hear about their projects & give them some reading recommendations. Annoyingly years ago I sent a batch of them to some dude on the East Coast at his request who did not publish them but then went on to publish his own! So it goes.

My backlog of unpublished work is very very clogged full of translations of Juana de Ibarbourou which I was in theory supposed to publish with Green Integer but somehow that never happened. I should send those out again or re-contact green integer if they’re still around.

I also wish I could “place” my translations of work by David Rosenmann-Taub and a bunch of other interesting, odd, philosophical poets.

Meanwhile I also put out a 3rd tiny book from Burn This Press, moon landing, but that will need to have its own separate post. I’m gearing up to print at least one more Burn This Press book for 2011, plus a reprint of Composite #1, the Baudelaire issue.

Belladonna readings in NYC

September 13, 2011 Liz

The Belladonna collective has some kick ass poetry events and I really wish I could go to their upcoming one:

Our Material Lives: Feminism and Poetry at Various Ages

Our 2011-2012 season will call to attention the material life of the artist, as person, who, in addition to being creator/conspirator to a body of work, possesses a physical body, and real financial, medical and social needs. To inaugurate this season, we’ll begin with an unique event focusing on feminism and writing in the many stages of our poetic lives.

The evening will include an exclusive screening of The Poetry Deal, Melanie La Rosa’s film about legendary poet Diane di Prima, readings by internationally acclaimed poets Ana Bozicević and Caroline Crumpacker, with Hannah Zeavin and an opportunity for conversation among presenters and audience.

If I could I would also subscribe to their entire series of printed books and go to their readings which all sound great.

While it is the people I haven’t heard of who I really want to hear…. still it would be kickass to be there for Anne Waldman‘s performance. She’s so weird and screechy, uncomfortable in a good way.

I’m going to listen to some of the Belladonna reading series mp3 archive today while I work. 20 minutes of Maureen Owen, fuck yeah! I’m downloading them now and making a playlist. Will blog anything particularly great.

It’s been too long since I’ve gone to readings regularly! I need a little poet community feeling! There’s so many readings in SF and regular open mics every day of the week. I’m thinking of trying to go to Word Party at Viracocha, or Smack Dab. I love to go to an open mic and take notes… and blog about it!

Asking for access

September 4, 2011 Liz

This week I noticed a great post by lightgetsin on asking for accessibiilty improvements in which she records the results of asking a couple of dozen sites to fix inaccessible content.

It was a familiar story to me, very similar to what happens when I ask for accessibility accommodations off the web. Sometimes no response at all; sometimes a few reasons why the person or company can’t be bothered; very often, outright hostility, fear, and defensiveness.

Lightgetsin’s post became very popular over the past few days and the responses were quite interesting.

The reactions on Hacker News, Asking for accessibility gets you nothing but grief, were often faily but in complicated ways, worth reading and sometimes worth arguing with. You can see from many of the responses that it is the norm for developers to think that it’s not worth it to make software or sites accessible. Their reasons vary. There are also excellent and positive comments in the Hacker News thread.

Naomi Black from Google responded to the post in a more helpful way, pointing to Google’s accessibility page.

I’m glad that lightgetsin’s post has sparked such widely ranging discussion.

It’s always hilarious to me when people ask me for help or advice with web accessibility or want me to be on web accessibility panels at conferences. I’m a wheelchair + crutches user; I don’t surf the web with my legs! And while I want to be a good ally, frankly, I am not always, and don’t have particularly special knowledge about web accessibility. You could boil down what I know into “use alt tags on images”, “don’t autoplay stuff”, “transcribe videos”, “make the text in hyperlinks meaningful”. So I try to refer people to actual experts in the field, when I get asked.

I’m spending the morning today checking my blogs with WAVE, a tool to show errors that would break a web site reading experience for users of screen readers. I’m also going to install the WAVE Firefox toolbar, to help remind me to check my blog posts for obvious accessibility errors. I’m looking at this huge list of resources, hoping to learn a bit more: Web Design References: Accessibility.

What guides or tools would you recommend for web developers, bloggers, or software developers, to educate themselves about accessibility?

SXSWi talks I'd love to go to!

September 1, 2011 Liz

Take a look at these suggested SXSWi panels, and please vote them up and comment if they sound good to you! I first spoke at SXSWi in 2006 on a panel organized by BlogHer who were invited by the SXSW folks as part of their effort to diversify the conference and get more women and people of color to speak and attend. As they sustained those efforts over the years SXSWi grew exponentially in size, developed a fairly decent gender balance, and became something more than the same old talking heads who only hear each other’s voices. The talks are good and the scene is amazing as Austin fills up with musicians, geeks, and filmmakers for several weeks.

* How to Be Yourself When Everyone Else is Faking It I’ll be on this panel with Biella Coleman, Zeynep Tufekci, Scott Rosenberg, and Brian Christian and honest to god, that alone would make it amazing no matter what Internet pundit topic we picked. We’re going to talk about identity, names, ethics and internet culture; I predict some fierce synergy. Biella is a hacker anthropologist and FLOSS advocate, Zeynep is a sociologist of net culture and while we haven’t met I’m a huge fan of her blog. Scott Rosenberg is a writer and editor whose work is totally amazing – He wrote Dreaming in Code and Say Everything and is a great tech journalist. Brian wrote The Most Human Human; do you think I can convince him I’m not a sockpuppet ? As for me, I must be on this panel because of Amina et al but I will talk a bit about my ideas from The WisCon Chronicles and my essay there about free speech, internet drama, and feminist safe space; what happens when ethical expectations collide.

I hope to get everyone on the panel on board with my project, The LOLcat Delusion, which will explicate Evgeny Morozov‘s book The Net Delusion entirely through macros and animated gifs.

* The Fall of the Geek Triumphant In which Danny O’Brien (Oblomovka, Committee to Protect Journalists) will humorously but brutally explain our cultural mythos to us & the risks of what happens when geeks (us) become the popular kids (i.e. incredibly fucking powerful.) This will extend the talks that I heard Danny do at FooCamp in June and it got everyone there very excited as they saw what we have been doing and believing in a bit of a new light (and ways to fix the problems with it.)

* How to Run a Social Site and Not Get Your Users Killed. Consider activists and journalists who are in danger from governments and law enforcement as use cases when you make a social site (or a blog, or anything really) This is incredibly important! Jillian York from the EFF, Mathew Ingram from GigaOm, Kacem El Ghazzali, Danny O’Brien, and Sam Gregory from WITNESS are going to break it down for us.

* Race: Know When To Hold It And When To Fold It . Adria Richards, Anjuan Simmons, Corvida Raven, Erica Mauter, and Scott Hanselman talking brass tacks, how can we keep diversifying tech conferences and make events better?

* Man Up Ladies or You Don’t Stand a Chance Obnoxious but I love it. Comp Sci profs tell us to Man Up! I wrote to Sue Black and asked if I could be on this panel but if not I’m certainly going to it!

*Digital Sisterhood for Women Entrepreneurs , Ananda Leeke leading a panel on participating in strong communities of entrepreneurial women, how peer support works, and basically Sisterhood as a business model. Good stuff!

* Tech Cooperatives: A Better Way to Make a Living . I have lived in co-operative housing for a long time and love the idea of work co-ops and worker-owned businesses. That’s ideally how I’d like my working life to be organized and so I really want to hear how people set this up in practice. My friend Raeanne from Quilted Coop, a web dev, design, and strategy company that focuses on developing sites and apps for nonprofits and companies that promote social change. They also seem to do a lot of work for artists.

* LiberationTech – how geeks overthrow governments. Hacktivists!

* Binary Bitches: Keeping open source open to women Another “Man Up” but from a different angle — talking about gendered communication and communication styles. Can’t tell if they’re going to be all like “be pushy! toot your horn! don’t be so egalitarian!” or tell dudes to join our Modest Workers’ Commune Circles or what. Probably both. Should be a great discussion!

* Open-Web, Open-News: Reporters & Developers Remix . Dan Sinker – Mozilla Foundation (Also from @mayoremmanuel !), Mohamed Nanabhay from Al Jazeera English, Emily Bell from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and Andrew Leimdorfer are going to unleash a world of fabulousness in this panel about the future of journalism and I think there will be a lot said on developer-journalist collaboration. This sounds very NewsFoo so I look forward to it greatly!

* Trekkies, geeks and furries oh my! Covering fandom Obviously I want to go to this panel since I edited an entire anthology on a feminist science fiction conference and its culture and am part of stuff like the Organization for Transformative Works. SXSWi has fandom running through it like a weird secret system of pneumatic tubes but no one talks about it as part of geekdom — for one thing I think the ethics and policies developed in fandom are quite influential in geek culture and for Internet social practices.

There are so many more I have left out!! And there are more here than I can possibly attend at once conference. If I left your panel out and should not have, or if you just want to court my thumbs-up vote for the panel picker, please tell me in comments!