Category: personal

today’s trivial observation

You know that conversation that I assume most people have had with their parents at some point that goes like this?

Parent: Did you do that thing?
You: Yes.
Parent: No, really.
You: I did the thing.
Parent: I seriously don’t think you get how important the thing is.
You: I did the thing! Look, I’ll show you the evidence of my having done the thing!
Parent: Don’t act like that. I trust you, but the thing is really important. So did you do the thing yet?
You: OHMYGOD I DID THE THING LAST WEEK!

Sometimes, I feel like the entire Internet is a version of that amongst peers:

You: A statement about a thing.
The Internet: Well, what you failed to consider is exactly the thing you just said.
You: Yeah, I said the thing that you just said back to me. So thing!
The Internet: Because I really don’t think you understand the thing you said that I’m retelling you because you totally didn’t actually just say the thing, because the thing is only said when I say the thing.
You: Okaaaaaaay. Yes, the thing! I said! The thing I said which then you said, that started this thing!
The Internet: No really, you’re not getting the thing!
You: Wait… I said the thing and you said the thing! So we agree on the thing! Let us dance! Frabjous thing day!
The Internet: Thingthing somethingsomethingthing noyoudidn’t thing
You: But the thing… Oh, fuck it….

You know? Tell me I’m not the only one.

(And because it’s inevitable: No, it’s not you. Or rather, yes, it is you. Because sometimes it’s all of us).

all things imperfect and poisonous

Books are dangerous. And that’s a good thing.

I talk a lot about how stories have shaped me, how they have, in their way, saved my life at various times. It’s entirely true, of course, but it’s also a simplification and so much prettier than the truth. Increasingly, I also think it’s a disservice to stories — stories I love and stories I want to tell. We’ll get to why later.

Right now I want you to know that stories have saved my life.

They’ve also made me cry and made me angry. They’ve made me feel alone, ugly, scared and victimized. They’ve made me ill. They’ve made me fall in love. They’ve taught me how to seduce, how to lie, and oddly (and this is totally true) how to ride a horse. They’ve made me victorious and taught me a thousand names for my otherness.

Stories aren’t comfortable — they are what we can be, what we were, what aren’t, what we desire and what we fear. And it should, I think, go without saying that not all stories are for all people and not all people have the same tastes and needs in stories.

Despite the large amount of fan and pro work I’ve done related to the Harry Potter series, I’m not a huge fan of YA. I don’t usually read it unless pressed by those close to me (who are, as a rule, fans). So I don’t really have an obvious personal investment in the controversy regarding Bitch Magazine‘s list of 100 YA Books for the Feminist Reader. I haven’t read most of the books on the list, and I probably never will.

But how the list got put together and how it seems the list got changed, is deeply troubling to me.

Stories, like words, have a great and terrible power. Some of us want stories that show the world at its best and some of it at the worst of its worst. And both of those types of stories, among hundreds of others, can provide the same value and feed the same personal, individual need for various individuals. It troubles me, deeply, that it seems (again, remember, this is Not My Area of Expertise) Bitch decided that some stories that show the way the world can hurt, simply can’t help. Anyone. At all. Ever. Because for some people, not all people, they were harmful.

Here’s the thing. I write stories about terrible people. Kali and I write stories about terrible people in terrible worlds. We write about colonialism. And racism. And there is misogyny in the plot of the book we’re working on so horrible sometimes it wakes me up in the middle of the night. And we write that stuff not because we advocate it, nor because we want to provide a transparent object lesson in its horrors. We write that stuff because we have a story to tell, not about a fantasy world you will long to live in, but one which, like historical reenactments, seems beautiful until you realize how if you were there it would chew you up and spit you out and grind you into the dirt and never respect you for a second. It is the world not as we wish it were, but as we believe it already unfortunately is.

So our thing? That’s not going to be a story for everyone. And, to be frank, I think we might be concerned if it were. But it’s something we find value in working on from our own personal intersectionalities of privileges, marginalizations and experiences — stuff that we certainly have overlap on in some regards, and stuff which we totally don’t in others.

I ultimately can’t tell you if the books that first were and then weren’t on the Bitch list are good or bad books. Or take, as opposed to show, views that can only cause harm. What I can tell you, is that orthodoxy when approaching the complex intersections of art and social justice, can be really harmful to both art and social justice.

I love, for example, C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen. Aside from a fabulously constructed narrative that can’t but appeal to a Cold War baby like me, it has helped me internally address female power, concepts of ownership and loyalty, and the consequences of being smarter than the average bear. It’s also a book that has a lot of profoundly ugly moments surrounding consent and sexuality, and it’s not a book that could have told its stories without those moments.

Too, I think of the film of V for Vendetta. While flawed, I find its rendering of Valerie’s Letter near perfection, and, as such, it is profoundly important to me as a queer person. Unfortunately, that sequence is almost impossible for me to watch. Due to my own medicalized childhood, I find it disturbing and personal to the point of inducing a feeling of nausea in me. It hurts me. It harms me. And I value it desperately.

Clive Barker’s Imajica also comes to mind. It is a book I’ve read a dozen times, but also once threw across the room because a private moment in it so reminded me of a private moment in my own life. It is a talisman to me, this story of a man who has forgotten who he is and a third-gendered creature whose true form can only be seen when observed desired by a third party. But, it’s also a book with a troublesome, at best, central Magical Negro trope (that one may or may not consider to be somewhat mitigated by the author’s personal life) and a pretty significant problem with women.

And then, of course, there’s Ender’s Game and everyone who grew up taking solace in it and then had to confront the reality of the beliefs of the man who created it.

Beautiful stories can be told by ugly people. Ugly stories can teach us beautiful things. And everyone’s mileage varies on everything, all the time. I’m someone who likes stories that jab their thumbs into my wounds; all readers certainly aren’t like that or don’t even necessarily have the luxiry of being like that.

But stories, from all sorts of sources and with all sorts of flaws, have saved my life. Sometimes by teaching me I was a fool. Sometimes by teaching me I was wrong. Sometimes by opening my wounds to get the shrapnel out. Sometimes by disappointing me. Or by shaming me. Sometimes, just by reminding me that I’m still here.

Stories that hurt us, and hurt our peers and groupings and compatriots, in ways that are not useful, in ways that are ignorant, cruel, exploitative, hateful, mean-spirited and just plain careless or lazy, are worth speaking out about, always. But I think it is so important that we remember not only that poison comes, unfortunately, in many forms, but also that some poisons have worth for some people in some circumstances precisely because they are poisonous; someone exactly like you may actually feel totally differently about a story you love or a story you hate or a story that caused you pain to no use or fairness.

This is a post, regrettably but necessarily, without a neat conclusion. It can’t have one, because this is not an argument about what Bitch Magazine should or should not have done or an act of advocating for some idea of what is and isn’t appropriate in either responding to art or in conducting social justice. It can’t be, because I am not only speaking solely for myself, but against the perils of orthodoxy.

Stories are complicated. So are people. Maybe that’s because they’re made up of each other.

news selection, narrative, fiction and non-

I have started, stopped, and restarted this post four times. Basically, all I’m trying to do is talk about Egypt, media, propaganda (as a value-neutral political marketing word), and news selection, about how history isn’t just written by the victors but by the editors.

The problem is that I’m exhausted. That the news hasn’t slowed down enough for me to eat a meal away from a screen (honestly, sometimes as many as three live screens) since the Giffords shooting. And I’ve been on the night-shift for the last week, covering Asia and Europe. Then on Friday at about 3am, I spoke to Patty in India who has no news access there, to tell her Egypt was falling.

Fundamentally, the unifying nature of all the stuff I do is that I’m interested in how we tell stories, whether they be fiction or not fiction. I’m interested in (although not exclusively) the space between what we think we’re talking about and what statistical examination of what we’re saying actually shows we’re talking about. When we talk about the news, we call this agenda-setting theory, although many of its basic principles can also be applied to fiction. Time, however, has a much different function when dealing with fiction over non-fiction because fiction is generally happening in a forever-past that is also a constant-now and non-fiction is generally happening linearly and currently.

When you choose what news to read to garner information about the situation in Egypt, you are performing an editorial function on behalf of yourself and engaging in news selection. When it’s easier for you (if you’re in the US) to access The New York Times vs. Al Jezeera, or you are leery of accessing Al Jezeera because of its association in the US with terrorism (which, if you’ve ever left Al Jezeera on for 24 hours like some of us also do CNN, you’d realize is essentially absurdist), you are being impacted by news selection activities from others that ultimately help dictate your own news selection choices. When you read an article or watch a TV report, no matter where it is, there has been news selection that impacts both the language used in that report, the prominence of the placement of that report in the media in question, and the decision to make that report available at all.

News selection is the central manipulation (again, used here, like propaganda above, as a neutral term) through which we understand the world. But, as viewer, we mostly don’t feel like this is the case. What we don’t see as or don’t personally select, we don’t consider; it is often as if the material we do not select never even existed to be chosen or not. So there is the news we see, and there is nothing. Even if we don’t trust the news we see, our ability to be mindful about what didn’t make the selection available to our personal experience is often incredibly low. That’s why agenda-setting theory is so compelling. That’s why the agenda matters so much.

Fiction can be considered in all the same ways (and on the many more detailed levels that also come into play with news-related agenda setting theory, but I’m not sure I’m getting there in this post). Story selection happens much the same way and is conducted by you, by writers, by editors and then by the journalists and pundits of fiction: critics and fan communities. How much screen time did Jack and Ianto’s relationship get in the first two seasons of Torchwood if we count it scene by scene or statement by statement? How much screen time does it get in fandom if I look at the number of fanfiction stories self-described as focusing on that part of the shows narrative? What does the audience member ultimately see? What was in the story or what they were told (or participated in telling others) was in the story?

It works with anything really. Compare how many statements in the Harry Potter books were meant to showcase that bullying was bad to how many statements showed characters you were supposed to view as heroes engaging in bullying without repercussion (another fun one there is to look at what the films say about tragedy vs. the books solely due to character age in the text vs. casting ages in the films).

Or, take a look at Buffy and Angel, do a gut check, and then see if that matches up with the focus the shows ultimately put on life vs. death. The message you extrapolated might be different than the one you were actively being told depending on where else you were getting information-selection on the two series.

The many iterations of Sherlock Holmes, particularly that of the recent BBC series, Sherlock, provides us with a particularly fun one if we look at, on a scene-by-scene or statement-by-statement bass, statements about character’s sexualities and compare those frequencies and shares to what goes on in fandom. Are the canonical characters that surround Sherlock in the narrative (that is, his fictional audience) queering him? Or is that solely an act of fandom (his non-fictional audience)?

News-selection and salience when compared to audience responses can have predictive qualities regarding media influence. They can also highlight, especially with regard to fiction, what are effectively optical illusions of the soul.

The place where this stuff can, and often does, intersect the most vividly is when we have news rounded up, tightly edited and set to music. It’s like the montages of those who died in the last year we get at the Academy Awards or in that “a look back at the year that was” stuff that airs non-stop between December 27 and January 3 because there’s usually little new news in the world when so many people (at least people with the power and resources to agenda set) are on holiday. These things are news selection on top of news selection: a greatest hits of the agenda, framed in narrative styles we more closely associate with fiction.

Mostly, I think of these things as interstitials and station promos that make me tear up if I watch CNN when I’m feeling particularly fragile. But thanks to the Internet, cheap and relatively easy video editing, and a world in which huge numbers of people outside of agenda-setting institutions (unless you choose to count the Internet as one), finally, have the power to be agenda setters for more than themselves, Tamer Shaaban has made this video about the current situation in Egypt. It is exceptional in its use of image, music, rhythm, and framing to connect the viewer not just to the events, but to a selected emotional state about those events. When I first saw it yesterday, it had 10,000 views. At the time of this posting? Nearly 200,000.

History is a type of story we tell. And it is told not just by the victors, and not just by writers, but also by editors. In the world as it is now, we are all, in one way or another, increasingly capable of being those editors, if only for ourselves. And that experience of the world, and our increased of ability to share that experience of the world, both helps us understand stories as they happen, but can, in fact, also help obscure them.

I can, for example, try to aggregate the facts that seem pressing and relevant to me from multiple broadcasts — which is one form of news-selection — or I can tell you that sometimes it seems that history (by which, of course, I also mean narrative, and mythology) focuses to a point always in certain places, like Berlin. And, this week, like Alexandria.

It’s all true, in its way. But is any of it accurate? If news is arguably a showcase for the public events of the human heart, are facts truly certain or viable? And if fiction showcases the truth of our collective longings, what matters more — the stories we’ve actually seen or the ones we’re convinced we did because they were what we wanted, so much and more than anything?

practical intersectionality

In the course of a hellish commute today, I took part of my journey by taxi. My cab driver was from Guinea and we spoke at length about Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, Israel and the legacies of colonialism. For a stressful (and expensive) morning, this was pleasant, engaging and interesting. We ranged over other topics too — how much the weather in New York has sucked this winter, his son’s student loans, working in the media, where we had traveled, and why it costs more to fly to Senegal from the US than to Australia, despite the flight to Senegal taking half the time.

And then, somewhere, in the ranging of topics, he says to me that when in Morocco last year he met a man from Saudi Arabia who said he would not travel to the US because “Men marry men there; even the animals do not do that.”

The animals, of course, actually do, do that, even if they are short on wedding planners. But it’s the classic now what? moment, isn’t it? I had no way of knowing whether or not he approved of the Saudi man’s perspective. And I had no way of knowing if he did, whether it was a topic he was open to discussion about. And I had no idea what my obligations were both in assumption and in action — it’s extra tricky in a cab, particularly, because not only am I a guest (albeit a paying one) in someone else’s space, I’m in a car with a stranger, and that’s not necessarily the best time to be outing oneself or fighting for social justice (Seriously, years ago, I demanded a cab pull over and let me out after the cab driver issued a string of slurs about people of Chinese descent after trying to hit a pedestrian crossing the street legally in front of us. The cab driver then locked the doors from his control panel, wouldn’t stop the vehicle for me to get out, and started threatening me until I held up my mobile and said I was calling the cops; the experience was sincerely frightening and I am now very reluctant to try to change anyone’s mind from the backseat of a taxi).

So I said, effectively nothing. I nodded and went Mmmmhmmmm.

The cab driver continued, “I said, yes, they do there, and he said he would not go.”

And then he changed the topic because I clearly had nothing to say.

And I still don’t know if I failed because I didn’t press for an answer and abandon the vehicle due anti-gay sentiment from the driver, or if I failed because I assumed a threat where there was only an ally. I just know that I’m pretty sure that I messed this one up somewhere along the way, and that even the correct choice (which may or may not have event existed) might not have been the wise one.

It’s intersectionality and ambiguity like this that makes my heart hurt. And it’s awful when the only consolation is that this is the sort of stuff that, ultimately, none of us are really that good at. I’d like to be better at it, but I’m not even sure if, in scenarios like this, it’s possible to be.

there’s so much snow we can’t even see the trash day

Trash day is going to be kind of serious today, because I’ve got some stuff on my mind, but I hope it will keep you engaged anyway, and there’s some fun stuff too, including updates on a few older stories here towards the end of this post.

You need to be watching the Middle East right now. First, there was Tunisia. Now, there’s Egypt, which has just shut down all Internet traffic in and out of the country. There are also large protests in Yemen and additional reports of smaller protests in Libya and Lebanon.

The thing about events like these is that they tend happen very, very quickly even if the precipitating conditions are generally long-standing. If protests like this succeed in their immediate goals (i.e., regime change) that also tends happens very quickly. However, you should be careful not mistake the volume of information flying about these things for that happening-very-quickly factor. Journalists struggle with this. Audiences struggle with this, and folks like me who do media and news analysis for fun and profit (seriously, I have professional training and experience this stuff; I’m not just talking about random blogging) struggle with this. Combine that with the disparity between the nature of information flow where the events are happening and where you’re watching from, and it’s hard to know what’s going on, especially now that Egypt is effectively an Internet black-out zone; SMS and mobile service also seems to be out or on its way out, and there are additional reports of land-lines starting to go down. An hour after I first posted this I am now seeing reports of the government cutting water and electricity throughout multiple cities.

Next, LGBT people are still being murdered in Uganda, whether that “Kill the Gays” bill goes through or not. And part of the reason they’re being murdered? US religious activists who, unable to engage their agenda fully in the US, went to Africa to see what they could do there instead. When I wrote about this on my LJ, one of my fandom friends linked me to a fund that supports an LGBT-inclusive church in Uganda that’s run by a Ugandan minister. If you have other suggestions for how people not in Uganda can help address this mess, please leave a comment.

Now that we’ve gotten that stuff out of the way, it’s worth noting that I don’t think of myself as a political or activist blogger, even though I certainly blog about both to varying degrees here and on LJ. But I do think that Sady Doyle has a lot of interesting things to say about the realm of nasty reactions from readers at her Tumblr. I don’t get quite the same types of hate as Doyle does, and I very much suspect I get it from a different audience (although that may have more to do with my origins on LJ, which has a different male/female ratio than some other spaces on the Internet, than anything I actually do or write about), but Doyle nails some trends in nastygrams directed at female-types on the Internet with this:

… I generally think it’s the same for every woman who receives a massive amount of blowback. Either you seem too sure of your own worthiness as a person, or you seem too sure of your opinions; either way, something has gone wrong, because you don’t hate yourself, and we need to fix that for you.

I think anything I have to add to that is probably superfluous today.

Okay, fun things!

It wouldn’t be trash day without linking to something on Kickstarter. This project is already fully funded, but there’s still time to get in on it and get your very own math dice, which I personally think should be a featured element in any sort of Doctor Who table-top role-playing game ever.

And, speaking of Doctor Who, as we do around here: Ride-in Daleks!. Kids only, and alas, I have no kids to put inside Daleks. Maybe the cats though…. would that be wrong?

And we have some updates on some previous stories:

I’m going to get to eat cups! But yet on a more serious, and continuingly relevant, note there was a slight bit of dramarama in comments on that project over on Kickstarter as the deadline neared. Someone showed up to say that the people running the project were bad people, provided no details, and offered an analogy that may or may not have had direct relevance to whatever accusations they were trying to make. I don’t know the Jelloware people, and I don’t know the person speaking out. But I do know if you’re going to say, “Hey, you shouldn’t support these people” you need to say why. And if you don’t? I’m going to refer you back up to the previously quoted remarks from Sady Doyle.

Next, it looks like the Internet stepped-up and Teresa Jusino will be joining us in LA for the Whedonistas launch!

Finally, for those of you following the hawkward situation at the Library of Congress, the bird has been rescued.

the summer of no sleep

It is, it seems, a universal constant that only -children seek or long for family additional to what we grew up with. Or so I have always heard. Certainly, my friends who are only-children (and that’s most of them) have long reported to me about longing for a sibling or two or, most particularly a twin. Despite also being an only-child, this has never been a desire I’ve particularly shared. Certainly, now that I’m older and my parents are also older, it would be nice to have someone with the same loyalties to them to share the stresses of their aging; and I make no secret of the fact that a lot of the aggravations of my childhood would be easier to put to rest if only I had someone to compare notes with regarding the indignities of six, ten or twelve. But I don’t, and it’s not a particularly big deal to me. Considering the richness of the fantasy lives I cultivate, this is, I suspect, somewhat notable.

What I do have, however, is a history of longing for creative family. I could blame this on the fact that my parents are both painters, or on the desire for the instant family of high school drama club that I observed but, despite being the in the plays, rarely felt a part of (although I did, that time someone sat at the piano and someone else plopped down at the drums and we all spontaneously sang “Ruby Tuesday” and later, at the cast party that same year, when we kept tormenting this kid named Jonah who was stoned out of his mind by telling him whales were chasing him). I could blame it too, I am sure, on the backstage narratives of so many musical I grew up with, around and in — shows like 42nd Street and Kiss Me Kate. I could also blame it, however, on the summer I only slept four hours a night, every night, because I thought that was how I was going to change my world.

This was the fault, indirectly, of our host over at InsomniBake. She conned me, despite my having thought I wanted nothing to do with it, into watching Moulin Rouge with her one night on DVD (that tango scene is a gateway drug). I dug it, and, because I have a fannish personality, I acquired a lot of info about it, its process and its creators, fast. I loved the idea that the director made it with his wife and that she (the amazing designer, Catherine Martin) was the one who kept winning awards for it. I loved that it was written with the director’s best friend. I loved that it seemed everyone on the team had some backstory, backstage, connection to everyone else. Over all, as a lifestyle choice, I decided it made artistic family seemed like the Best Idea Ever and somehow that never sleeping and making all the art ever was, inexplicably (oh, there’s an explanation, but it’s too absurd to repeat here), the way to go on making my little fantasy a reality.

When I think about it that way, in terms of how little sleep I had at the time, it all makes a lot more sense that, that was how I wound up with the lover in Texas I wrote stories with and who I wanted to move up to NYC to open a restaurant. Now, that didn’t work out by way of a lot of things, including an ill-advised wedding (not mine) and a very long bus trip to Texas (mine). But The Summer of No Sleep was also how I started writing with Kali (which has also been an evolution of relationships, and, in the interest of full disclosure of my pure loser-ish geekery, I will totally admit that I once dragged her to sit behind a table at a casting call with me and called her my designer just so someone could sit there and share with me the horror of what you deal with when you hold an open call in New York).

Patty and I, meanwhile, don’t particularly create art together. Not for other people, anyway. We do proof reading duty and talk ideas through with each other a lot, though, and we certainly do all that day-to-day art stuff that couples do with each other — the “this scarf or this scarf?” question and making up silly little songs for each other and cooking and telling stories in the dark. That stuff is totally art. Big art, sometimes; important art, always, and it’s nice to have art that isn’t for other people. Almost ten years ago in The Summer of No Sleep, I wouldn’t have really gotten how private art would be good for me, but that’s because I was a fool and in the throes of one of my things. The Rach & Patty Show, audience of mostly just us, is divine.

But I, somehow, wound up with collaborators anyway. The dude in Texas is often one of my first readers. Kali and I have a stack of projects we can’t get enough of. Erica, who I knew for two weeks through an academic friend and Inception: The Musical, jumped on the idea of Dogboy & Justine with an enthusiasm I’ll never stop being grateful for. And now, it seems, I’m doing some scholarly work regarding media with a collaborator as well.

When I look back at The Summer of No Sleep, which I do a lot, because it was very well-lit (that apartment was screwy but had great light) and I wasn’t working, so there was a lot of being in the city and thinking about conquering the world, it all seems very strange. Creative partners. Collaborators. Co-authors — all words that have cause to roll off my tongue a lot these days, because they are practical details in necessary professional and social conversations. But in The Summer of No Sleep they were pretensions, fairytales and fantasies, something the people who were there that summer won’t likely ever let me forget.

It’s not something I mind really. Because I still like the stories — the ones belonging to other people, the ones that were make-believe, the ones that didn’t quite happen to me or happen yet (gosh, I still really need to win the lottery so I can have my very own New York City townhouse in which to make things and have parties, ne?), the ones that got me to Australia and back.

That summer of self-imposed insomnia is a good reminder, too, that the only life you can have is your own. That you shouldn’t, as Dov Simens (I should really write about that 48 hours of madness sometime, but short version: thumbs up) says, compare your insides to anyone else’s outsides. And that you really can’t live a story you yourself aren’t writing, start to finish, with as many damn co-conspirators as needed in whatever configuration it takes.

P.S., Never take a bus from New York City to Austin, Texas. Ever.

still worried about lunchroom hierarchies after all these years

“You always feel like you are in the wrong place at Davos,
like there is some better meeting going on somewhere
in one of the hotels that you really ought to be at.
Like the real Davos is happening in secret somewhere.”
– Steve Case, founder of AOL

It’s World Economic Forum time again, which means it’s time for the above quote from Steve Case, which I love oh so much. I’ve seen the quote mentioned a lot this year (although it’s from last year, if not earlier) in criticisms of the Davos event, but even without having ever been to Davos, I’ve never really felt like that was the point. Case isn’t complaining about the WEF event. Case is talking about the absurdity of human nature.

I’ve written about this before, in the context of telling you there really is no secret awesome party that you’re missing. I mean, there may be something you’re not invited to or don’t know about that’s all A-list and aspirational in your head, but really, it’s probably just the same as the party you’re at. Same social behaviors, same insecurities, same level of joy and fun and not.

The other thing Case’s quote tells us, though, isn’t just that this feeling never goes away – we are all in junior high forever – but that this feeling may actually get more intense the more successful, the more near the epicenter of supposed cool, we are.

It’s like how you can halve something infinitely, but it will never really be gone. Success is like that in one direction — how sure is anyone of where the top of the mountain is? And insecurity is like that in the other — none of us ever get to be free from all shreds of it all the time.

Currently, I’m in the place I’m often in, in the month before Gallifrey One, a Doctor Who convention in Los Angeles. I’m excited, and I’m full of dread. The Whedonistas launch is rad, and I’ll get to see some friends I only get to see out there, and I have some business to attend to in LA proper (and some non-business, in the form of ElecTRONica, because I am a big screaming nerd).

But I’m also worried I won’t be cool because I’m probably not cosplaying much if at all this year (although Christian’s been informed he can bribe me into my Captain Jack duds with a pin he’s threatening to make up that’s both snarky and zen on the subject of our dear, departed Ianto Jones), am not really doing panels this go ’round, and will be away from the hotel during the event far more than I usually am (it’s not just about In-and-Out Burger anymore!). I’m also worried that — well, I could enumerate it further, but why, when it’s actually so simple? I’m worried I won’t be invited to sit at the cool kids table.

Which gets us back to Steve Case and his comments about Davos. At an event teaming with celebrities, world leaders, and the best of the best in business all in easy arms reach, Steve Case worries about not being cool enough to mingle with the people he’s already mingling with. In regard to a con that’s largely about not creating hierarchy between guests and fans, in a fandom that is known for very significant levels of fan/creator overlap (guess how many current DW writers wrote for DW fanzines in the ’80s) and genuine friendships developing over these supposed lines of demarcation and reverence, I am, apparently, worried about the con not being exactly what it is? I’m worried about me not doing what I’ve always gone there and experienced? I’m worried about not networking with people I want to chat and network with precisely because I’m chatting and networking with those people? What? Time for me to stop being Steve Case.

Because seriously, being Steve Case — normally a pretty good, if slightly weird, aspirational blueprint. Not the guy I would choose as a role model, but I get it certainly. But Steve Case re: Davos? Maybe not so much, although I’m certainly feeling his pain on this one.

Look, the cool party generally isn’t that interesting (or at least not any more interesting than where you are instead). It’s probably happening right where you are, and that’s not just feel good rhetoric. But even if I’m wrong, whatever you do, don’t use the fact that you are having an experience to suddenly become fearful that, that somehow means you’re not having that experience. Because that? Doesn’t make a lot of sense. It also tends to lead to highly tortured sentences.

Meanwhile, I? Cannot wait to get to L.A. It’s snowing here. Again.

truth + fiction doesn’t just = marketing

In the world of fanfiction there’s fictional person fiction (FPF) and real person fiction (RPF). While fanfiction is often viewed with skepticism from people outside of the fan community in general, despite humanity’s long tradition of telling and retelling stories as social currency, RPF is often met, instead, with skepticism from people within the fanfiction community itself, while people outside the community don’t even really seem register it as so specific a category.

And, to be fair, on a pure gut level, sometimes I can find RPF to be really, really weird. But then, I’ve stumbled over stories about a person I went to high school with who is now famous and one about a friend of a friend’s ex that I once had beers with and found to be remarkably unlikeable. RPF, which is arguably about personas and the packaging of fame — when people write RPF they it’s possible (even quite likely) that they aren’t writing about real people’s fictionalized private lives so much as real people’s publicly fictionalized persona’s private lives — sometimes appears to drop under that layer of fictional truth for me, not out of speculation but because Oh my god, I know those people.

I’ve heard all the arguments about the morality or ethics of writing and reading RPF, and it’s not that I don’t think these are fundamentally important conversations on some level (and yes, I’ve thought long and hard about “Well, how would you feel if someone did it to you?” The answer? “Well, like I’d probably have a lot more important things to be doing than reading wank about me on the Internet if I were known enough for that to be going on.”). It’s just that I’m not that interested in those discussions of how not to be an asshole. Not being an asshole is good, but I’m not all that qualified to tell anyone how to do that, despite various attempts I fully admit to having made. Besides, from a thinky thoughts perspective, on this one I’m really, really much more riveted by — and useful to — talking about the critical implications around RPF.

Perhaps the most irritating aspect of RPF-related discussions is the degree to which people dismiss it as, “Oh god, more creepy porn on the Internet.” I think it’s pretty toxic how often both fan community participants and critics dismiss sexualized-content for irrelevancy because it contains sex. Our collective libidos are, among other things, narrative tools, and chucking a lot of fanfiction into the sex bucket and saying it’s not worth looking at from a critical position for that reason isn’t just one of those high-/low- culture false divides moments; it’s a sloppy misuse and abuse of data. The stories people feel compelled to tell and witness and share, whether or not they’re well-written, or whether or not you’re personally interested in them, or whether or not that represent masturbatory material for some people, represent a cultural map that it’s foolish to dismiss (even if I won’t read anything published on fanfiction.net either — I never said I wasn’t a snob).

Now let’s be clear, not all fanfiction, and, I find, particularly not all RPF, is porn. And even when it is, that porn is usually there in service to the idea of the backstage story (which if you’ve been following the development of Dogboy & Justine you know is a particular fascination of mine). And, conversely, not all RPF is fanfiction (e.g., works created on a not-for-profit basis by enthusiasts). Note the erotic anthology StarF*cker, which is fiction about sex and real famous people, but very much not part of the fanfiction ethos. In the less sex, but still definitely RPF department, what do you think Primary Colors was? Or the forthcoming O (not to be confused, amusingly, with The Story Of O)? RPF. Totally, totally RPF.

And that doesn’t even begin to cover how pervasive this trend has become; Steve Erickson, for example, doesn’t just use both historical figures and himself as a fictional characters in his novels, but also included personal encounters with Sally Hemings (a particular obsession of Erickson’s; she shows up in his novels too) in Leap Year, his arguably non-fiction book on the 1988 presidential campaign season. Other examples include the Aaron Sorkin Jed Bartlet advises Obama piece from the last campaign season and an article The New York Times also did on the real people as fictional characters in novels phenomenon, although I’m having trouble finding the link (please leave comment if you’ve got it!).

RPF is a real, saleable thing, both in its smutty and not smutty versions. None of which necessarily makes it less uncomfortable for many readers (or, even, in the abstract for non-readers). Nor should it. Part of the charge of reading RPF, sexualized or not, is, I think, that it is so profoundly unsettling and messes with our boundaries regarding what is real and what is true (two of my favorite categories for making Venn diagrams about stories). Another part of the charge is, I think, the violative nature of reading something and realizing that a particular fantasy, daydream or fear you have harbored is shared, is part of our collective story in the dark. It is the guilty that can bring the pleasure when it comes to RPF.

In the midst of hanging about on Twitter the night Countdown went off the air, there was a tweet saying that AC360 was going to do a bit on the Countdown thing, which got fairly widely misinterpreted as “Olbermann’s going to be interviewed on Cooper’s show.” Which, in the world of the Internet, or at least the people I talk to on the Internet, led me to make a crack about how Olbermann/Cooper would make certain corners of the Internet very happy, which led someone to reply with, “Have you read this?” and a link.

Obviously, I read some RPF. I’ve written some RPF (some of which you’d even be able to track back to me with ease). Some of that I have mixed feelings about. Some of it I don’t. But there’s ton’s of RPF I won’t touch with a ten-foot pole for no other reason than it squicks me. It doesn’t mean the story is morally or ethically wrong (for me or anyone else) or not well-executed; it just means that for whatever reason, sometimes one I can’t even put my finger on, there are some RPF places I don’t want to go unless I have to for some sort of scholarly/critical thingy. For me, pundit slash, as the world of RPF about political talk show hosts is called, is one of those no-go zones for me. I’ve no idea why, but so it is. This surely seems like a perfectly rational choice to many of you.

But I had a headache, and I was in a bad mood, and people on Twitter were like “You have to read this story called ‘The 28th Amendment,'” and I recalled that, that Barack Obama/Rahm Emanuel piece from Yuletide a few years back was one of the smartest meditations on ambition I had ever read, even if I did find parts of the story really, really uncomfortable. So I decided to give the rec from Twitter a go, and that’s how I fell down the rabbit hole of pundit slash on a Friday night, and why I’m writing this post and have a linky or two to share with you now.

One of the biggest problems for me as a (critical) reader of RPF is that I often feel like people who are trying to use RPF for commentary don’t know how to write a story, and people who just want to write a (hot) story, don’t necessarily know how to add criticism into the mix. That both those things should happen in RPF aren’t, of course, anyone’s requirements but my own, but hey, my journal, my pickiness. What’s so remarkable about “The 28th Amendment” (which imagines a The Handmaid’s Tale-esque religious police state in the US under a President Huckabee with our intrepid pundits (Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Keith Olbermann and more) on the run), is that it knows how to do both. While I reflexively read it with an editorial eye (and there were things in there I would have changed or didn’t ring plausible for me even in the suspended-disbelief of the narrative, although it’s hard to say whether that was related to personal comfort or actual editorial consideration), the fact is, it was a well-told story that got under my skin for reasons that I am fairly sure were broader than liberal-paranoia and the fact that I read all sorts of stuff that freaks other people out on the Internet all the time.

Maybe, I decided, pundit slash wasn’t totally squicky. Maybe I should read more! So I started digging around on An Archive of Our Own and found a remarkable number of charming fictions about Rachel Maddow being a cool person to have drinks with, a BDSM-AU about various pundits, several high school AUs (a particular favorite of my partner’s), and an essentially general audiences Doctor Who/Rachel Maddow crossover. It’s a beautiful world out there on the Internet. Or something.

One of the views I have particularly little patience for is the idea that fanfiction isn’t real writing, that it is somehow “practice” for the “real” work you are obligated to aspire to do. Sure, writing fanfiction is one way to learn some craft skills, but to me original fiction and fanfiction are profoundly different endeavors that I engage in for profoundly different reasons. To me, fanfiction is something of an acting exercise: that is, how do I execute, in text, on a character whose blueprint has already been provided to me by a writer/director? While original fiction utilizes some of those acting tools, but also the structural components of the writerly and directorial eye. And I think it’s absurd to tell anyone they have to aspire to anything, especially when I’ve had so much experience turning something I love into a job — sometimes it’s still fun when you do that, and, sometimes, it really, really isn’t.

But I do think that people playing in the RPF sandbox — whether they be part of fan communities or not — would benefit from looking at the bigger picture. If you read Primary Colors, it’s absurd to snark on the existence of RPF in fan communities even if you’ve never read fanfiction and never plan to (because, guess what? In a way, other than that money was involved, you already have). And if you’re writing RPF and think it has to stay in the land of fanfiction but wish it didn’t? Well, sometimes it doesn’t have to stay there. And you should know that too (and I say this, particularly, to people writing historical RPF — have you read The Baroque Cycle? History is a playground! Although please, if we can avoid any more plays about six great minds from different time periods having a dinner party in Hell, I would love you forever).

Fiction appeals to many of us, often, because of the pieces with in it that could be or feel true, no matter how impossible or unlikely for us or for anyone. There is a reason, after all, why so many adults confess to still feeling at the back of wardrobes when they encounter them for the door to Narnia. So it makes just as much sense, really, no matter how discomforting it may be, that there is this not insignificant impulse to put not just truth in our fiction, but fiction in our truth. RPF is a corner of both the fanfiction and generalized fiction space that illuminates, with a sometimes queasy-making light, just why we read fiction and just how far away truth can seem.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a killer story sitting on my hard drive about once-was but no-more Ziggy Stardust David Bowie and Lady Gaga and matters of persona, mentorship, love and desire. Anyone want to buy it?

my own special comment

No matter how busy I am in my very hectic life, one of the few schedule things I try to do when Patty is away (when she’s home I certainly have other incentives to be home at a decent hour) is to get home in time to watch Keith Olbermann. I don’t always manage it, but I do try.

So imagine my surprise tonight when I got home ten minutes late for even the end of it to a stack of emails that basically boiled down to OMGWTFBBQ about the news-to-me announcement that tonight was the last edition of Countdown.

To be clear, because it needs to be said so as not to distract from the rest of this post, I didn’t always agree with Olbermann’s positions or the way he framed them. Sometimes, I found myself frustrated with him, both as an audience member and as someone who has worked in and about journalism. But, to be frank, it wasn’t strictly due to journalism that I had such an affection for Countdown. The reasons I did are complicated, personal, and often, a little bit silly.

I’m a lot more hesitant than I used to be to talk online about my education. The discussions tend to make other people angry, and me frustrated. But it suffices to say that I went to private school where an emphasis was put on all forms of communication. I wrote two-hour essay examinations in every subject but mathematics from sixth grade on, and took mandatory classes in subjects like rhetoric and Latin. Because of my education, I learned to speak in very specific ways that were designed to be assertive, excessively nuanced (sometimes for the express purpose of deception), and deeply attuned to cadence.

That mode of both speech and writing has been both my greatest asset and, often, a headache. It is a style that can make people bristle, both because it is sometimes somewhat impenetrable, and because it leaves little room for phrases like “in my opinion.” This education, this adherence to my education, has certainly gotten me into trouble more than once, and part of those occasions have also largely concerned the fact that I come in female form. This combination of gender expectations and personal delivery mechanisms hasn’t always been kind to me, and it is something I am, frankly, unwilling to modulate.

Countdown reliably riveted me because, for good or for ill, and whether or not I agreed him with on any given evening, Olbermann used language on that show in the manner I was taught to aspire to. The program was, especially in his finer “Special Comment” moments, the way I was told as a child the world was supposed to sound. As someone who has struggled with even the benefits of my education and the awkward way they intersected with the reality of the years I spent concurrent to that education in speech therapy, Olbermann’s rants often made me feel as if I am not as wrong to engage with language in the manner that I do, as I have often been encouraged to feel.

Many of the criticisms that seem to be flying about Olbermann with particular frequency in this immediate wake of the demise of Countdown also resonate for me. Olbermann is a celebrity celiac. And while he has noted on-air that he is lucky in that his symptoms are not as severe as many with the disease, and has generally been unspecific about those that he does endure, it is worth noting that my experience of celiac disease has been that I am subject to attacks of temper, cruelty and despair, particularly if I have been exposed to gluten (this is a recognized and common symptom). I spent decades of my life being labeled mercurial, unstable, angry, crazy, and dramatic, and huge swathes of that experience were related to my then-undiagnosed disease. Today, I can recognize the feeling of my mind and temperament being terrifying hijacked by any exposure to one of the world’s most common foods. I have no reason to know, and no comfort in speculating, as to whether Olbermann’s notoriously difficult temperament has any connection to the disease we share in common, but the mere possibility of it has been a private and awkward comfort to me, especially when I consider the more embarrassing and volatile moments of my personal history.

Finally, my affection for Countdown and my respect for Olbermann comes from my queerness. It’s not just that Olbermann did something significant when he delivered Special Comments wherein he, as a self-described straight man, choked up when speaking out about the wrongs of marriage inequality (although, that was pretty awesome). It’s that he has advocated for queer people from a presentation of not just heterosexuality, but of a somewhat classic (and yes, unfortunately at times misogynist) presentation of masculinity. I don’t like that the queer community needs allies that fit that blueprint — it shouldn’t be necessary — but in a world where it is, I’ve been glad that Olbermann has been that ally.

And that gladness has not just been because of Olbermann’s verbal agility, but because, and this is perhaps the silly part (although surely understood in its significance by other gender non-conforming people), he’s been one of my sartorial role models. Once I decided it was okay to present myself as male, masculine and/or in men’s clothing with some regular frequency in my day-to-day life, watching Countdown was a huge part of how I learned men’s style in terms of color, pattern mixing and cut in men’s suits, shirts and ties.

I truly am beside myself for, among other reasons, this loss of my nightly personally-queered fashion fix.

Snow-covered trash day

It’s really hard coming up with random adjectives for the weekly (good kind of) trash day. I just want you to know that. But it did snow here again last night. I don’t know if this is New York’s snowiest winter on record, but it sure does feel like it.

In personal news (let’s face it, it’s all personal news), I got to talk to Patty this week, in an entirely non-emergency situation. She’s doing great, and we’ll get to speak again this weekend. I’m not sure she entirely believes me about the snow, though — the winters she’s been here have been mild (the last bad one she was in Oman) and my capacity for dramatic narrative has never been low.

Last night Kali and I had one of the longest, and probably most hilariously inane, conversations we’ve ever had. I had to, for no discernible reason, know something about the sexual history of our main character, Arkady (whom I’ve written about in passing before, weirdly, in the context of DADT) before the start of the novel. She and I disagreed on a relatively minor point, but I needed to know, I needed us to be in agreement, and I needed to be convinced. 86 emails later, it’s finally okay, and I now know something that will probably never, ever even be mentioned in the book. Art: it’s not about efficiency.

And, on the subject of art, a friend of mine is making fantastical space terrariums with live plants. She says there are more coming soon. Explore the stars… in a jar!

Meanwhile, someone I’ve never met wrote something super sweet about Dogboy & Justine on their LJ today. This is why crowd funding matters for all participants (by the way, at least one of the projects I talked about supporting last week has achieved its funding goal!). I was particularly tickled that she framed her plans in regard to James Marsters. Because of the wonders of the alphabet, when we’ve both done the guest thing at the same con, we’ve tended to wind up right next to each other in the program book. That is, if my buddy Marrus doesn’t get between us. The whole thing always amuses me immeasurably.

And, speaking of cons, if you’ve been poking around at my relatively bare (I’m in scheduling limbo!) appearances page, you know that I’m participating in a book-launch event for Whedonistas at GallifreyOne next month. One of the authors who is supposed to be joining us, Teresa Jusino, is asking for help in getting there, as her original plans didn’t anticipate financial troubles before the trip. This is Teresa’s first easy-to-find hard-copy publication, so this is a pretty big deal for her. Check out her post and her stuff if you get a chance.

Speaking of hard copies, the first installment of Hold Something came, and I was the lucky winner of the bonus item this time. Weirdly, I knew it would be me when I saw Christian’s post, but we have a thing. Not a thing thing, but an affinity thing. Just… it’s a thing! Anyway, I won’t get reading time until this weekend, but it’s gorgeously produced, and I already know that Christian tells stories I want to hear.

On an entirely different note, my former roommate (and one of the people instrumental in getting Patty and I together so swiftly what with her exciting declaration of moving to China) has launched a blog called InsomniBake. She can’t sleep and so documents attempts to make a variety of treats often under weird and unideal conditions. Recipes, midnight musings, successes and failures. Apparently the blog’s pretty hot right now… you know, buzz and all that, but to tell the truth, I’ve not yet found the time to check it out myself, so I’m tasking you all with it to assuage my guilt.

Tonight, some web work and Sherlock analysis and then early to bed, as I’ve got to go to Costco before a script meeting tomorrow.

Finally, a late addition: Apparently, there’s a hawk in the main reading room of the Library of Congress and its somewhat peculiar presence is being blogged. Look, I care. Now you can too.