A girl can wield a mean soldering iron

Posted on by Liz

When I was around 10 and 11 I was very into soldering irons, little electronic bits and pieces, and anything that made me feel nerdy and mad-scientist-y. I loved the smoky metal-hot smell of the solder and how scary it was… and making things that worked and were “real”. At first I just made different kinds of switches and circuits with tiny lightbulbs, and then advanced to collecting hydrogen in a test tube and lighting it on fire to make it pop. EXCITING! The coolest thing I ever learned about was electroplating. I copper plated every small metal object in our house, adding all sorts of weird stuff to the copper sulfate solution to see what effect it would have; my sister’s dollhouse toaster came out really well when I made a strong solution using tons of ketchup. And hello, what could be cooler than safety goggles and a voltmeter?

I had a point in here somewhere.

Erica Rios of Xicanista, a former instructor for Techbridge, passed on this job call for me to post:

Techbridge Program Manager

Want to make a difference in a girl’s future? Help change girls’
images of and experiences with technology and have an opportunity to work with a dynamic team of educators. Techbridge is an innovative program to inspire girls in technology, science and engineering. The program is hosted after school at elementary, middle, and high schools in Oakland, San Lorenzo, and at the California School for the Blind in Fremont. In these after-school programs, girls work on a variety of projects such as making solar LEGO cars, soldering, digital photography, and building robots. The girls also participate in field trips and meet with role models.

Under the supervision of the Program Director, the Techbridge Program Manager is responsible for supporting and supervising staff, coordinating and implementing our after-school programs, developing and piloting curricula, and leading professional development workshops for teachers, role models, and professional audiences. We are looking for an experienced and dynamic individual who has the ability to supervise a team of instructors, work with the Techbridge project director, and oversee the development of training and resources to teachers, professionals and partners.

It sounds like a GREAT job getting to be a nerd role model for techy girls. Write to techbridge@chabotspace.org if you’re interested in the job!

Now, part of my point was that I was extremely into the soldering and circuits and experiments, but I reached a point very quickly where I had nowhere further to go with it, and no where to go for information or leadership. Books from the library only went so far, and then information stopped. How to take it further? So — if you DO get involved with a program like this, or you know a young nerdlet, please try to find them mentors and books and extra information, to keep their interest going and feed their love of science and tech.



Women in tech – for younger women

Posted on by Liz

I would like to say to all the young women who are computer geeks, or science geeks of any kind, that it’s more important than you can imagine to join up with other women.

I have been a feminist all my life, and yet somehow, when I was working in tech, I didn’t hook into women’s networks. I didn’t know about them, actually.

But you can join, or read:
Women-related Science/Technology email lists – resource page with a great list!
Systers (mailing list)
devchix.com (group blog)
Deeply Geeky (mailing list sparked from BlogHer
Linuxchix
misbehaving.net
Wikichix
WIT & WorldWIT
WISE Women in Science and Engineering (suckily, page last updated in 2003…)
BlogHer (group blog)
She’s Such a Geek (group blog)

And so many more —

I have joined a lot of these lists and I have to say, there are many days I read them and burst into tears. (In a good way.) Why? I’m not sure. What people describe is so close to my experiences, so well articulated and analyzed — and yet often from women who are so much more of studly geeks than me — and much older. It’s hearing the wisdom of people who I wish I could have learned from years ago. There are such great ideas, wonderful advice, balanced views, and very realistic.

I had a lot of conversation one on one with other women about the issues addressed in these forums, but it’s different for it to be public, and so wide-spread, and more political-feeling instead of personal cathartic hopeless storytelling — which was valuable and validating, but didn’t always help create change.

It would have changed my life drastically to have had this kind of support, resources, validation, etc. available to me when I was 25, or 20, or 15, or 10.

If you have a daughter, or a younger friend, and she is into science and math and computer stuff, please hook her up with this sort of resource if you possibly can, and with older mentors. It’s really really important! Please do it!

Technorati Tags: , , ,



It was magic!

Posted on by Liz


These sketches are from two small books I made for Moomin when he was two. One is a simple picture book called “What Little Birds Do” that has a different verb and action on each page. The other was a book about how our cats cast a spell on him to give him cat ears and a tail, and they all went together to Cat City on a flying train to eat tuna fish ice cream cones.

It was fun to find the preliminary sketches for that book, which I’ve lost completely. I’m a sloppy, sketchy artist but try to make the sloppiness part of a style rather than the ineptitude and laziness than underlies it – and to me at least, the sketches have a cheerful & dynamic charm.

Milo liked seeing himself in drawings a lot! If you like the drawings in my “sketches” set on Flickr then leave a comment for me!

They’re watercolor pencil and fine point black felt tip marker.

I hope you are inspired to make your own little books for your kids, which will then inspire them to make books too.

Did someone say the R word at a school board meeting?

Posted on by Liz

The rounds of meetings for the school district’s NCLB plan have been very interesting. This meeting had a fairly low bullshit level and the speakers were persuasive. Around 25 parents and teachers were there.

Some background: Last year several more schools in the district flunked under NCLB. The district as a whole is under “PI Status“. Unfortunately “PI” doesn’t mean we get to throw pies at each other or become private investigators. In September, all parents got a letter saying that we were in PI status. I had no idea what that meant. It meant that someone had to write a Plan… Meanwhile, I think before PI Status was declared, I went to a community meeting at my kid’s school where the new Superintendent spoke and impressed me a fair bit with talk about process, feedback, communication, and other fuzzy warm things.

Then a few days later we were all in PI status and were freaking out. What did it mean? At that point all it meant to me from my point of ignorance was that a 5 year countdown was started, and a scary one. And that drastic changes were probably going to happen.

(Let’s point out here I had the luxury and privilege of being ignorant about it all, because my kid was going to a “good” school, admittedly one that was recently and marginally deemed “good” or up and coming, but still; if I didn’t live in this “good” neighborhood then I would not be guaranteed a spot in this school. Parents and teachers and kids on the east side of town have been dealing with this for years now, since NCLB passed as law. My point is, I want to reject that luxury and privilege of ignorance; the philosophy that enables people like me to live in little enclaves and then do “charity”. That’s segregation and it’s inherently wrong.)

Then a lot of fighting happened on the school level and the incompetent weaselly creepy principal got replaced. I was reassured. I kept going to all the EL meetings (English Learners).

(Anglo parents were asking me questions like “What do they talk about in the EL meetings? How they can start learning English?” Ouch. How can white people be so dumb?)

THEN in early December we got a handout at several meetings that summarized the Plan. The Plan started in February (2 months away) and made what to our school looked like major, major curriculum changes as well as laying down how a large part of the day had to be spent. This jacks up the very schools that are passing and surpassing the tests and that are “working”. A week and a half went by with gossip, emails, meetings, and rumors building to a head. Teachers and parents were upset and confused. There was a meeting called quickly by the district (at our new principal’s invitation, I think) at which the Plan administrator told a roomful of parents that there was no room for feedback or change and this was the plan that was happening.

I was pissed off because after all that talk about community input and process from the Supervisor, this is what we got? No communication, no asking for feedback? I heard that other schools also had no idea this was happening or what the plan entailed.

What is at stake for the district is their own jobs. If the district fails in PI two years from now, if they haven’t implemented NCLB in good faith, then they could lose their jobs and the state takes over and replaces them.

So I felt extremely suspicious and angry, very mistrustful, as did many other parents at my kid’s school. You can see where I got cynical. I was so angry I didn’t talk about it on this blog.

Fireworks! More meetings! Massive meetings! A packed school board meeting where we all held forth with our best demogogue suits on.

The Plan scared the pants off me. To me it sounded like taking a barely adequate (for my child) program and changing it to be “cookie cutter” and making everyone study from the same page at the same time. The sticking point for me was the 90 minutes per day of on grade level uninterrupted language arts from a state-mandated textbook. With the teachers basically told what and how to teach, so that everyone in a grade gets the same thing. It was presented as being extremely inflexible.

At the meeting tonight it was spun a bit differently. The training for teachers was emphasized not as something punitive but as something that could be useful and good. (I have my suspicions because the curriculum itself doesn’t look very good.)

But the thing that came through was that the district views itself as fighting institutionalized racism. The English learners are treated as if they are several grade levels behind, when they aren’t. This new plan guarantees that they are all exposed to the grade level material, as well as getting extra EL help.

I was mollified by hearing that it would not be everyone doing the same work for 90 minutes no matter their ability. Instead, the schools can actually split the kids at grade level up however they want. There will be several levels within a level and the curriculum somehow allows for “two grade levels ahead” work. (I’m sure it’s lame, but at least it tries to be there, and the hope is that all the professional development for teachers helps them come up with ways to implement it in ways that don’t suck.)

You can see how my knee-jerk reaction was to be upset that my kid would be bored by the grade-level material, when the reality might be that many kids in his grade in the district never see anything as complex as that material. (Can it be true!? But that’s what they said.)

The Super also talked about her disagreements with NCLB and its treatment of special ed students. She said she thought that would be the first thing to change in the law when it’s revised in 2007.

The EL director talked about many things that were amazing and cool; one was that in her view the district focused on only the EL students (“still learning”) and not the Spanish speakers who were classified as proficient in English. Out of 8000 students in our district, 5200 of them speak more than one language. Their new plan tries to emphasize helping all of them keep their proficiency and develop it. (I’d like to see how, but, at least they seem to have a good philosophy.) She sparked a meeting by personally calling and inviting all the EL parents at a school to the meeting. And she outlined what they came up with (and what the EL committees) came up with for what they wanted to see happen. Their points were: parent resource libraries available locally, more tech help on a local level to help with digital divide issues and make communication better, explanations of the American and California school systems as opposed to those in Central America and Mexico; more trips with parents and kids to college and university campuses, and more cross-school committees with parent representatives.

So much for the numerous people (really!) who said that because our district has so many Spanish-speakers who are used to a different system and who don’t question authority, (so inaccurate of an assumption!) it is a waste of time to try to get their input. (I’m still appalled at this viewpoint but I have heard it time and time again. There are some reasons why white upper class women might not hear the opinionated moments of women of color, i.e. power differential; not some kind of inherent cultural meekness. Argh!)

The superintendent wants the school day extended at the schools that have shorter days. Her mantra is “I want any parent to feel comfortable and happy about sending their kid to any school in this district.” Actually, I can’t argue with that.

I really liked the substitute teacher who spoke up to talk about her perceptions as a person who went
from school to school all throughout the district. She had a lot to say. I was sighing with relief that she pointed out that if “enrichment” happens during the EL time, then the EL kids will be missing out on it and it is insane to make the genius spanish speaking kid who just got to this country miss out on the Lego robot programming class (if we had such a thing, which we don’t – much) to sit in remedial kindergarten English phonics. Hear hear.

Our school’s great dance program was mentioned as something the district wants to preserve – and to spread. Of course, we only have that great dance program because our neighborhood gentrified and then the dot com crash happened and then none of the yuppies could afford private school, and also we were radicalizing a bit online to do public on purpose and to Be Involved, and thus our PTA was able to raise 50K for a dance teacher, and on the other side of the tracks they don’t have that 50K. Instead it was a big deal for them to raise $3000 in donations of materials for their school garden. I feel horrible whenever someone points to the Fabulous Dance Program at my son’s school because all it does is emphasize the basic inequities in our school system. No – we don’t want to destroy them or to punish or stifle or drive away the creative independent-thinking teachers – Well, if we don’t then the district had better scramble fast to undo the damage done by leaving those teachers out of the information loop and the planning process.

The superintendent mentioned with a somewhat evil leer that she put the special ed autism kindergarten at Roy Clod (previously the school all the uber rich yuppies fought to get into) to level things out and to make them have to deal. (Unlike the previous district policies which were deliberately concentrating the special ed and “problem” kids at Fenry Horde. And while I’m mentioning Fenry Horde let me add that they had the best poetry in the poetry contest that I judged last year. So much for the “bad school” myth.)

This is all too long and I’ll have to make another post to go into the details.

But, I felt like a bomb thrower by using the words “institutionalized racism” at all. I also suggested that some of the education that needed to happen was education the Anglo/English speaking parents about what “institutionalized racism” means and looks like. Oooo… I said “racism” and suggested we need to have some community discussions about how it gets swept under the table.

My feelings after this meeting are that NCLB still sucks. But the district’s ideas might be good. I still want my kid in the gifted/talented school as it stands. And yet I’m conflicted, because I want all the schools to have excellent gifted/talented programs and would also like all the creative education and fun projects and depth of learning and connection NOT to be just for the g/t kids. (Who perhaps need them least.)

I feel like my brain just got hijacked by subversive maoists, unexpectedly, where I thought I was dealing with incompetent ass-covering bureaucrats. They are revolutionaries and idealists and if a bit of my privilege and my kid’s gets axed in the process, is that such a bad thing in the long run? I want my kid to grow up with peers who have good educations, and who are not discriminated against, more than I want him to program a lego robot when he is in 4th grade.

Misogynist stereotypes on Valleywag

Posted on by Liz

I don’t care what S. Littlefield is actually like; I don’t know her, and I’ve never met her. Also, I am not intrinsically fond of superwealthy society people. Who knew that “Gentry” magazine even existed! Not me! Gentry. Wow. Weird. Lifestyles of upper class philanthropists; really beyond my comprehension – they’re like aliens.

Anyway. Gossip is fun and I love to hear it. Dirty gossip is great. I would love to see Dirty Friendster with all the possible totally sophomoric sex gossip charts of who slept with whom and who just made out in the conference room.

That said, I think that Valleywag’s post on Littlefield deserves to be called out on its misogynist rhetoric about Ms. Littlefield. The article says she “used to go to tech conferences in search of husband material” and, worse:

She’d arrive on her own and return on someone’s private jet. She is absolutely gorgeous in person, but I don’t think it took people too long to figure out she was a gold-digger.

I’d like to look at what stereotypes this gossip plays into and what reactions it can possibly evoke.

Here, who a woman sleeps with or marries is used to throw her competence as a tech executive into question. It is strongly implied that she is not a real geek, or maybe has no “real” skills at all other than her looks. When an article like this gets written, it also by association casts aspersions on all women in tech. Would this article be written about a man, a senior executive? Would there be any equivalent way to devalue and slander and ridicule a man?

It’s very strange because while men are always whining about reverse sexism, and how everything should be genderblind and we should all just be human and be judged on our skills and not our gender… Then they whip out this sort of rhetoric and use it against women. The stereotypes are built in and waiting, ready to be used against any woman, from the most successful and visible to the least important. As women, none of us are immune to being objectified by exactly the sort of rhetoric used against Ms. Littlefield.

Notice the way that the quote above suggests that Ms. Littlefield habitually went to tech conferences alone and then left with different rich guys – and that she went to the conferences solely for the reason of wanting to pick up rich geek guys. And also implying that’s how she got her jobs – by being a jet-set slut.

Again, I’m no expert on the upper class. But don’t quite a lot of rich people work off their personal networks and backgrounds and friendships? The woman has an MBA from Harvard and she speaks five languages. What’s so odd about her getting a good executive job? Didn’t like 5 gazillion MBAs descend on Silicon Valley during the boom? Why shouldn’t one of them be a multilingual cosmopolitan Guatemalan beauty queen from Harvard?

But no… instead Valleywag points to Littlefield’s past achievements as a beauty pageant winner and the fact that she’s from Guatemala as something further to objectify and sexualize her. Then they make fun of a newspaper article quoted on her homepage that calls her a “Latina who defies stereotype.” (See Common stereotypes of Latinas for more explanation.) Hey, if you are a Latina who defies stereotype, and you’re a successful senior executive in high tech, and a VC person and a bigshot international philanthropist, why not be proud of it? Valleywag evokes a stereotype in response, and stuffs her right back into it.

Waaah! Women in tech are toooooo sexay! That sucks! It ruins our whole homosocial male bonding geek guy thing! Get them out! Or, quick, give Sandy a reverse makeover, a pair of glasses with electrical tape on the nosepiece, and some penny loafers!

Everyone needs to keep in mind that when women sleep with geek guys, it might just be because they like geek guys a lot. Sleeping with geek guys doesn’t invalidate one’s geek credentials. It’s not like they have to be *rich* geek guys and the women have to be brainless bimbos going after their money. Trust me, geek guys, you are often super cute all on your own. It’s the devastatingly sexy unhealthiness caused by hours of late night hacking, and how you get all passionate about open source, and the way that you probably got pushed around by those jock dudes in the locker room long ago. We love it. It gives you a mysterious aura, like consumptive bohemian poets from 1890 who smoked too much opium and thought they were in touch with the Divine. Heterosexual nerd chicks go for that kind of thing. It’s completely natural.

Anyway, Valleywag tries to preempt any criticism by saying they don’t really care, and they don’t think Littlefield is “evil”. Just mockable. Misogyny is automatically funny. Sexy women are automatically dumb golddiggers. We’re supposed to read that post and laugh and nod knowingly… as if we know the type. Do we really? Or do we know them from the idiotic stereotypes made up by and perpetuated in Hollywood movies?

It’s not uncommon for writers to evoke sexist and racist stereotypes for a cheap laugh. But not all of us are laughing when we read that stuff. Instead, we’re pissed off and alienated. Or we might respond by laughing at the writers for their cluelessness.

Technorati Tags: ,



Gender and genre in blogs

Posted on by Liz

In her paper on Gender and genre variation in weblogs Susan Herring and her team hypothesized differences between male- and female-authored blogs. I haven’t read the paper closely enough to get the detail, but the gist of it is they expected women to say “I” more and refer to women more, and men to write more impersonally and refer to “he” and “you”. Instead they found that personal blogs, male or female, show the characteristics that had been predicted for women’s writing, according to, I think, other studies and sources like the Gender Genie, based on grammatical analysis by Argomon & Koppel. (I have to say, when I messed with the Gender Genie I thought it was just annoying…) While filter blogs, meant to give information on a topic, have the characteristics associated by the Gender Genie with men — whether they are written by men or women. Herring et al.’s findings contradict Argomon & Koppel. She suggests that genre itself is gendered.

I agree with this, which matches what I found in reading women’s poetry from 100 years ago and in reading the criticism about that poetry. The gendering of genre appears to me to happen over time as a way of valuing or devaluing the quality of the writing. Entire genres would become (simultaneously) “feminized” in order to devalue them, or as they became devalued they were described as feminine, or as women succeeded in the genre, it was considered less important.

Many factors contribute to this and one of them is that women at times do the less important things or write in the less important genres because there is less backlash for doing so. And when they do enter the male-dominated genres where power is considered to be located then there is a strong backlash and the entire genre is at risk of being devalued.

When women in the 19th century succeeded at Romanticist poetry, for example, they were hailed as being unusual exceptions, virile, oddly masculine, at the same time perhaps kind of slutty or of questionable and abnormal sexuality. And when women began to dominate the genre to the extent that they could not be ignored and tokenized, then the entire genre was disempowered over a period of years – it became girly, uncool, dumb, awkward, not cutting edge, old-fashioned. When it was clear that women had mastered it, it didn’t matter anymore.

In short, there is a pattern of the “pink collar ghetto” in literary genres as in other professions. (I just looked online for something to link to, to explain pink collar ghetto and did not find an adequate explanation. Yes, it refers to jobs with a high concentration of women. But it further refers to a process: as women enter a high status profession, the pay for that job goes down, and there is a tipping point where the profession itself becomes devalued because women have entered it and succeeded. I remember going in around 1991 as a fledgling tech writer to a meeting of the Society for Technical Communication, and hearing a lot of incredibly depressing but realistic talk about the pink collar ghettoization of tech writing.

Anyway, back to literary genres; the same pattern becomes clear as I do further feminist research; If you have read much Dale Spender as well as Joanna Russ then you can see a lot of good evidence.

I point to this as something that bloggers should be aware of & consider.

(I am using the word “genre” here but may be talking about some more vague category, literary movements or styles or subgenres, like “Romanticist Poetry” or “Western novels” or “science fiction” for example. )

In fact – a short digression – consider science fiction and how as women write in the genre, there is a scramble to define the part of the genre that only men do, or mostly only men do, or only men do well. Why is it so important to prove that, for example, “hard sf” or “cyberpunk” is so masculine? (Of course in the face of any evidence to the contrary.) Hmmm! Could it be a backlash to preserve the perceived literary value of a formerly male-dominated genre?

Back to Herring. From about page 15 onwards Herring & co get into the nitty gritty of some excellent questions:

Diary writing has traditionally been associated with females, and politics and external events, the mainstays of filter blogs, have traditionally been masculine topics. Furthermore, previous research shows that females write more diary blogs, and males write a disproportionate number of filter blogs (Herring, Kouper et al. 2004; Kennedy, Robinson and Trammell 2005). But what is the direction of causality, and where does gendered language fit in?

In conclusion Herring points out that the gender differences are in which genre a male or female author writes in, much more than any essential difference in grammar or writing style, and that:

Social and political consequences also follow from this
distribution: Men’s blogs are more likely to appear on ‘A-lists’ of most popular weblogs (Kennedy, Robinson and Trammell 2005), and to be reported in the mainstream media, in part because filters are considered more informative and newsworthy than personal journals (Herring, Kouper et al. 2004). This recalls the traditional stigma associated with ‘gossip’ and women’s writing (Spender 1989), and reminds us that genres are socially constructed, in part through association with the gender of their producers.

Oh look, she just referenced Spender. Right on… No wonder I like this paper.

Anyway it’s a good paper – go read it. I’ll read Herring’s other papers and I look forward to printing it out and giving it an hour or two of more close and serious reading and note-taking & reaction. Oh – and in good blogging and gossiping tradition I should mention that I came across this paper after reading Managing ‘Trolling’ in an Online Forum, which is amazing and excellent; I got to that from Wikichix, which I found because I was bitching about the lack of good feminist content on Wikipedia and a few weeks ago, some dude commented and told me to check out their talk page on Systemic Gender Bias. Since I am involved with some feminist wikis and ticked off whenever I try to engage with Wikipedia, Wikichix sounded great. If you are a wiki editing woman or would like to be, then sign up with Wikichix and add to the discussions there. There’s a mailing list and an irc channel as well as the wiki pages. & on alternet recently there was a brief article that talks about the Wikichix, Wikipedia vs. Women? with an interesting comments thread.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,



Five things you probably don't know about me

Posted on by Liz

I got tagged for this meme by Chris Carfi of The Social Customer Manifesto. It was interesting reading Chris’s 5 things and following some of his links. I also came across The Blog Tag Tree which traces a bit of this meme’s geneology. Though – I first saw it a year ago or maybe longer, on LiveJournal.

“Write down five things about yourself that others probably don’t know, and pass it on.”

  • I lived in a 100-person co-op house (21st St. Co-op in Austin) for 5 years, and at different times held the positions of menu planner, dinner cook, dessert cook, and “cookie monster”. From this, I know how to cook a fancy meal for 200 people and how to boss a crew of helpers, as well as how to go to endless community meetings.

  • I can move my littlest toe on each foot independently of the other toes. Try it!

  • From age 14 to 17 I worked in a dry cleaners in Houston, way out near Tomball. Conditions were disgusting and inhumane. Don’t buy dry-clean-only clothes, if you can help it.

  • I played 5 bells in a handbell choir in a church in Allen Park, Michigan, when I was a little kid. The bells were huge and shiny, and had special fancy cases lined with velvet; we wore white gloves. In regular choir I sang alto and sometimes tenor. It was a good choir, and I liked wearing the robes. Once I got to be a ceremonial candle-snuffer, which was fun even though I was an ardent atheist.

  • Secretly I often like to pretend I’m someone else who has switched bodies with me. Usually they’re people from books I’ve just read – either fictional characters or people from history. What would they be thinking? How would they react to being in my body, doing whatever I’m doing? And what would I do if I were in their body and time? Now you know. You might be talking with Genghis Khan, Ayla, Ataturk, the Continental Op, or Laura Ingalls.

    • Tag, you’re it:

    * Ellen Moody from Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Too
    * Vim from Screamything
    * Minnie from Screamything
    * Gabby De Cicco from Pont des Arts
    * Prentiss Riddle from Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada

    Technorati Tags: , ,



    Trivium, twittering, gregarious behavior

    Posted on by Liz

    twittering
    Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

    Some rambling thoughts on twitteration, or twitteritude:

    Twitter is fun. It’s a microblogging site; your entries are strictly limited to just a couple of lines of text. You can friend people and get their twitters on a web page, on IM, or on your cell phone. Sign up, watch the public stream go by, friend people who strike you as interesting.

    Now you have 10 imaginary friends, tamagotchi who need feeding, your loneliness is assuaged, and you feel important and hip and cool as you’re standing in line or sitting in a boring meeting and you get texted on your cell. Shallow me! And shallow you if you like it. You must not be very important. You must not be busy enough. Listen to the mean ol’ grinches who love to hate Twitter! Broadcasting the trivium of your day! It’s almost like social conversation, gossip, small talk. It’s almost like the glue that holds relationships and people together. It’s not important enough to blog. It asserts the importants of daily life. It forces the compression of your own evaluation of your life into two lines a day. Are you twittering too much, to people who already have too much of an information feed, and they’ll drop you?

    The more in-the-corners and unimportant you are, the more fun and important a twitter or a myspace becomes.

    Maybe it isn’t a productivity tool. Or, with more focus, with groups and channels, it could be made into one. Why slam it for being what it is? Why not take the idea and run with it, tinker with it?

    I had a strange moment at Writers With Drinks, when I was introduced to a guy named Yoz and realized 10 minutes later why his name sounded familiar, the sort of thing that used to happen from orkut or friendster, a familiar moment to anyone on a social network. It was because he’s the last person on the friends-badge list of a bunch of people I “know” on Twitter.

    I appreciate social media’s enabling of fun webstalking, of course.

    But that’s not even the interesting part.

    It’s the potential for literary forms to evolve with technology. I see particular people who have immense Twitter charisma, who are more interesting in that venue than they are on their blogs or in conversation. Shouldn’t that be okay? If we are abandoning objective standards for quality, then it’s good to look at what’s good in all media. It is pointless to bemoan the fact that people like to do stupid things. Instead, look at the mass of stupid things and pick out the best of, according to the standards of that community and not just according to the standards of dominant culture or dominant literary forms. It is possible that the great internettian novel is being written right now on Twitter, or will be written next year.

    Or we’ll get a bunch of poets on there and do renga. No, wait, I forgot, that might interrupt my productivity! Chatting, fun, and art: bad for productivity… of course…

    It isn’t useful for some people, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something interesting going on under their radar.

    If everyone in a nursing home right now had phones with Twitter, or something twitter-like and the knowhow to use it, think how cool that would be. Loneliness is not to be sneered at. I bet we all know several lonely people who would like some imaginary tamagotchi twitter-friends. Surely, soon, we will have better two-way social networking appliances than phones, laptops, or crackberries, easier to use, easier to type on, marketed towards the senior niche. And then the great internettian novel will be written by a 95 year old former kindergarten art teacher in Modesto.



    Excellent feminist rant on being "of a time"

    Posted on by Liz

    I really enjoyed Ide Cyan’s “Timeless” on the Feminist SF blog; it’s a polemic on Time and social change, and was sparked by Ide’s notice of the ubiquity of the defense that a sexist or racist or otherwise annoyingly biased person was a product of their time. This sets up a framework in which “now” is seen as a product of progressive linear evolution with Now and Us ethically on top. I agree with Ide Cyan that this is a false construction, a construction in which Time stands in by a trick of rhetoric for individual responsibility and agency; a construction that is deeply harmful.

    The part has become the whole.

    It’s very, very convenient. It’s very, very easy. And it means the oppressed vanish in a puff of rhetoric.

    Her concluding paragraphs using synechdoche and the body (namely, assholes) was hard-hitting, outrageous, and deeply funny!

    Technorati Tags: , , ,



    Writers With Drinks report, Saturday Dec. 9

    Posted on by Liz

    Writers With Drinks, at the Makeout Room in San Francisco, was fabulous again. Indigo Moor, a poet from Sacramento, read first. He was a dynamic and clear speaker, funny, warm, with a lot of stage presence, and I enjoyed his poetry; he read a poem about the violent territorial nature of hummingbirds (“hollow bones… strung together by frayed nerves”), “Trigger”, “Pull”, a poem about a hunting trip (“…the way everyone… is trapped in love”), and “Apotheosis”. I especially liked the hunting poem.

    Laura Moriarty read two chapters from her experimental poetic bizarro science fiction novel Ultravioleta. I just heard her read from it for the anthology Paraspheres and am in the middle of the book. Wyatt, one of the human characters, gets all mixed up with Wyatt Earp and there are some good romantic slashy bits about him and Doc Holiday. There’s some aliens call “the I”. Gender and love and reality all screwed up and weird. It was hard to follow the thread of the reading; while I liked it, I think it would benefit hugely from being read aloud in a livelier way. It just occurred to me that while I just bitchily wrote “It’s not like postmodernism is a language from Mars” in another context (on a Wikipedia talk page on an article on Donna Haraway, the author of The Cyborg Manifesto) actually Moriarty’s book is kind of about postmodernist language from Mars.

    Kevin Monroe, the stand up comedian in WWD’s genre mixup, was hilarious, with routines about prayer, god, and spam; Jesus’ capacity for protecting people when he wasn’t too hot on self-defense; the missing bastards of the Iraq war as compared to the Korean and Vietnam wars (the bit of race-based that made the audience the most uncomfortable, for sure), and back-alley assisted suicide. He made fun of the idea that God cares about prayers, for a minute being God, “Increase the size of your penis? What the fuck? That’s the 12th prayer on that I’ve gotten today…” leading to something that cracked me up by its outrageousness, “Fuck Nigeria. Their main export is fraud.” And then “You can’t hide an afro under a burqua.” “Malt liquor – the gatorade of street combat” and the funny bit about assisted suicide. “What? You only got 50 bucks? I hope you live, motherfucker!”

    Charlie had a particularly hilarious interlude about how we were going to have a new thing at Writers With Drinks: 2 minute dates in which we all pair up and establish who’s dominant and who’s submissive, then rotate. When we’ve figured out who ranks where, the most dominant will cook and eat the most submissive while everyone else masturbates, as is customary at a literary event. There was something in here about the vanishing middle class, but I’ve forgotten… it was funny, anyway, as I contemplated literary feuds and how so many people behave like annoying divas. As usual Charlie’s humor exposes something true and interesting in a way that isn’t mean or bitter (which is so rare in humor, especially standup comedy).

    After the break, Stephen Elliott read an excerpt from his novel Happy Baby – a guy sees a former guard or employee from juvenile hall who used to rape him and abuse him and “protect him” and follows him home on the bus while thinking of then and now and his current girlfriend. It was really good! I had a nice time talking with Stephen – had never met him before but I have a short story coming out in his upcoming anthology about sex in America.

    At some point I met a dude named Yoz who was very bouncy and fun …

    At dinner afterwards at Esperpento… (to be finished later… oops must go upstairs for jury duty)

    As usual, Writers With Drinks was well attended — crowded — despite the heavy rain that prevented two of the readers from coming. (One, Grace Davis, on the wrong side of the mountains and reluctant to come over Highway 17, and the other, Lally Winston, stuck in traffic for two hours in blinding driving rain.)