ase

I am back from my New Year's Chicago trip. The pork belly pastrami is eaten, and the Museum of Science and Technology t-shirt that says C-H-I-C-Ag-O with mass values has made a successful debut as part of my commute wardrobe.

Tomorrow is the SF bike party. I know what I'm wearing, so perhaps I should see about properly adjusting the headlight mount and sticking fresh AAA's in the tail-light, and maybe try strapping things to the cargo rack (Christmas present for me my bicycle me!). Or I could surf the internet. Decisions, decisions.

At some point I should write my 2011 retrospective / 2012 look-ahead. The placeholder version is: I regret almost nothing about 2011. 2012 is forecast to be demanding and rewarding all at once. A slice of real destiny, to paraphrase a favorite author. The material rewards are unlikely to manifest before 2013, but the important stuff - engaging work, community, a good exercise program, etc - are already in gear and moving me forward.

Oh yes, if someone's having problems commenting on LJ, PM me or comment on the DW version. I believe I have have invite codes if you need to create an account to comment.

Not a great month for fiction; guess it's time for a nonfiction binge.

The Exile Kiss (George Alec Effinger) (1992): Third book chronicling Marîd Audran's rise as Friedlander Bey's lieutenant and presumptive heir. This time, kingpin and lieutenant are thrown into Arabia's Empty Quarter and must restore themselves to the city while fighting a murder charge.

The Exile Kiss reminded me of Steven Brust's Teckla. For people who haven't read it, the relevant section is the professional assassin protagonist's awakening moral qualms about killing people for a living and his involvement in a criminal organization. Then he does the Omelas thing. In The Exile Kiss, Marîd questions his feelings about ordering an assassination, and while recognizing the sophistry of those around him, decides he doesn't feel that bad and orders people killed anyway. Something about lessons from Bedu nomads showing he must shoulder the burdens of leadership for the greater good. If the greater good means greater influence over others' lives and deaths, so be it.

One is cautioned to distinguish character ethics from author ethics, but either way, this one left a bad taste in my mouth.

The Magicians (Lev Grossman) (2009): This is so derivative. Or a commentary on other works, whatever. Brooklyn!Holden Caulfield is swept into not-Hogwarts and a world of magic, eventually to make his way into a Narnia-Oz-ish fantasy world. (What is this? "If Chabon can get out of the lit ghetto into the fruitful - ha! - fields of genre, I can too"?)

( tl;dr, lots of handwaving and minimal spoilers. )

The Magicians can be praised for its easy accessibility to audiences raised on guardian Lions and magical boarding school adventures, but it lacks novelty and compassion, reducing its appeal to the fading charms of faddish popularity and conceit.

The Child Garden (Geoff Ryman) (1989): Picked up on the strength of Air when I desperately needed a bus book. I wish I'd purchased the $2 copy of The Sharing Knife: Horizon instead.

The edition I read was published by Small Beer Press. It is littered with sloppy copy-edit errors, like tooth-rattling potholes in the road of narrative. So future purchases from Small Beer Press will include spot-checks for actual editing.

The copy-edit threw me out of a story I wasn't sure I liked. The premise - humanity in a post-industrial scarcity Earth; half-cocked science cured cancer, which is key to living past forty; a time-disjointed narrative, skipping around Milena's mostly-linear life - teetered on the edge of suspended disbelief. Sometimes I fell over the wrong side. (The "child garden" of the title is one of the orphanages that raises the many children who outlive their parents' twoscore.) Sixteen year olds agonizing about their forbidden lesbian impulses - Bad Grammar, according to the Party and Consensus of the world - and their short lives and their other neuroses is more misery than I usually sign up for in my fiction. A larger-than-life dramatization of Dante's Inferno, genetically engineered "polar bear" people, viral transmission of a singing disease, and the end-of-novel confirmation that Milena isn't that reliable a narrator were more my speed.

Ryman won a Clarke for this; I can see why. The cancer biology wasn't completely unlikely in the '80s; the male pregnancy thing probably was pretty shocking and novel. (I'm curious about the worldbuilding: it's implied male pregnancy is terribly uncomfortable and almost certainly fatal. So why does any man go through with it? If that's supposed to be Milena's unreliable narration and a comment on the value of human life per Ryman circa '89, I'm only vaguely catching it.) However, Berowne and Mike's nonstandard pregnancies ring distractingly close to May's in Air, as do some of the other narrative themes - the handling of the gravitational angels, for example - which retrospectively makes Air look less mind-blowingly novel and awesome. Overall, this was on the weak side of "okay", aggravated by the copy-edit problems.

Dzur (Steven Brust) (2006): Vlad Taltos returns to Adrilankha, dines at Valabar's, and solves a little Jhereg problem for his ex-wife.

Inspired by The Exile Kiss, I picked up the several Vlad novels that came out after I decided I wanted to graduate from college and cut back on the leisure reading. Dzur was the first to come out after this decision. Five years later, it was okay but not great reading; I didn't care much about the mystery, wasn't engaging my brain to figure out the thematic connections, and was creeped out by the Vlad/Issola spoiler. Whatever was going on with the qualities of the Dzur in Vlad's delicious meal and less delectable machinations with respect to the Jhereg (Right and Left Hand), I was thrown out of it every time Vlad caressed his Great Weapon. No, I am not editing that sentence, I am passing on the raised eyebrow quotient.

Numbers game: 4 total finished. 4 new, 0 rereads; 4 fiction.

I got into the school program I've been applying for; school starts in January 2012 and then I am in classes or internship rotations until March 2013. The rotations will be in East Bay and way East Bay; since rotations don't start until June '13, I'm boxing off the commute issues for future resolution. This month's project is accepting the financial aid I've already been offered (mostly loans, yikes), and applying for every grant and scholarship that looks applicable. And oh yes, giving myself a pat on the back for getting into a competitive program.

I finished FMA! I have come out on the other side of capslock of joy. Instead, I'm burbling at norabombay to read the manga, and wondering if (how many) FMA fanvids have been made with Set Fire to the Rain.

Since I have been slacking at posting, a hasty slice of life! Work is going okay. The person on maternity leave is still on leave, and has been vague on when she wants to come back to work, so it seems my summer job will continue until the end of September. This happily complicates other parts of my life: I'm interviewing for a one-year school-plus-internship program that starts in February, and ought to spend next month and a half doing internship tours. Instead I will have to take days off work to tour. My life, so hard.

To the east coasters caught between earthquakes and hurricanes: yikes! Hang in there. Or move to San Francisco; the Virginia quake was worse than anything I've experienced in the year and a half I've been in the Bay area. If we get a big quake in the next week, you are welcome to come back and mock this post.

Anonymous comments on LJ have become almost entirely spam, so anon commenting's been blocked. If this is a problem, DW allows open ID comments, and dreamwidth invite codes frequently posted to dreamwidth and/or dw_codesharing. Finally, LJ is free all the time.

---

Last weekend I watched Cowboys and Aliens and Captain America at the theater, and tried to distract myself from self-indulgent manga with a Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life. The distraction ploy backfired; the paragraph of strong feelings has been deleted. Cowboys and Aliens lived up to one review that it's the sum of its parts and no more. Captain America tried to be a faithfully gung-ho WW2 movie and succeeded admirably. To my shock, the black guy and the Asian-American guy lived. I'm assuming Red Skull will be back too.

I also watched Bride and Prejudice before a last-minute library return. I thought I hadn't seen it before, but I recognized most of the movie. So apparently it made very little impression last time I watched it, unfortunately.

( Still reading Fullmetal Alchemist on the commute. )

While most of these are novels new to me, it so happened that I had previous exposure to all three writers.

Kindred (Octavia Butler) (1979): Fiction. One minute Dana is at home, and a dizzying moment later she is on a riverbank, watching a boy drown. Ripped from 20th century Los Angeles to 19th century Maryland, Dana is compelled to keep alive Rufus Weylin, plantation heir and slaveowner - and direct ancestor of Dana's mother - in a time when a black woman is property to be kept in its place. Brutal and uncomfortable, compelling while not stretching my mind the way some of Butler's other novels have.

The Snow Queen (Joan Vinge) (1980): Reread, first pass since my teens. ( Now I have the tools to articulate my lukewarm reaction! )

This wasn't great. The narrative wandered across two planets and bifurcating subplots that eventually (mostly) drew back together thanks to author shepherding. Scientific extrapolation was entertainingly hand-wave-y. The prose put one foot in front of the other. The worldbuilding was enhanced by the narrative sprawl, a plus that kept me reading. As a teen I actually bought one of the sequels and eventually got rid of it unread. This year I figured out what I was missing and got around to World's End, see below.

The Matisse Stories (A.S. Byatt) (1993): Three stories inspired by or mentioning a Matisse painting. I've been using "mimetic fiction" as shorthand for "slice-of-life fiction, usually not that interesting to me". These stories were in that mold: they passed the time but rarely pressed themselves into my memory. "Medusa's Ankles" didn't do much for me one way or another. I could see the craft that had gone into it, but didn't care. I saw the twist coming in "Art Work". "The Chinese Lobster" pulled me in by way of the emotions under the surface. I liked the unfolding layers: it starts out about a student complaint and widens into questions of art, suffering, and death. One of three isn't a great average; these passed the time, but I'm not inclined to hunt out more of Byatt's short stories.

World's End (Joan Vinge) (1984): Sequel to The Snow Queen, companion volume to The Summer Queen. BZ Gundhalinu goes on a quest to rescue his two older brothers, falls in with wildcat prospectors on a jungle-and-desert trek, and gets his crazy on.

An enjoyable reading experience is all about expectations. When I first read The Snow Queen, I expected good fiction, and couldn't put a finger why I felt so ambivalent to it. This year I broke a rule and skipped to the end of The Summer Queen. All those petty concerns about agency, agenda, and multi-novel time-versus-reward were swept off the table when I found out a secondary character got the wormhole technology downloaded to his brain from a relict of the Ancients Old Empire and kicked off an arms race.

( Cut for space and incoherent spoilers. )

It should be noted, I was reading this the same week I was completing school applications. A little displaced stress seemed appropriate. So I can't say this was technically good, but it let me add sybil virus to Aurora chairs, needle grenades to your brother's chest, vodka and orange, and the snowglobe flashforward in the lexicon of so over your head, son. And I was vastly entertained in the process.

The Summer Queen (Joan Vinge) (1991): Co-sequel to The Snow Queen. Undomesticated equines could not keep me away from a whopping doorstop epic hinging on a economic/political scramble and one man's undeclared agenda. The core storyline - BZ, Moon, and the threat of empire - is pretty cool, but the execution was way too ambitious. Twenty years of storytelling are refracted through a Greek chorus of PoV characters scattered over five planets, in a Stephenson-sized novel, and somehow several character arcs still feel shortchanged. I anticipated several plot "twists", to my disappointment, and the Tammis-and-Merovy plot was an agenda trainwreck.

( Disjointed plot reactions. )

Numbers game: 5 total finished. 4 new, 1 reread; 5 fiction.

If x = desired number of hours in a day, then 24 < x.

Yesterday: sunny, sweaty 89 F outside the office doors, 53 F and a fog bank at home. This morning I cycled out of the fog San Francisco, greatness or awesome?

---

Two posts from divergent axes of my reading lists have popped up with discussions of the Rebecca Watson and Richard Dawkins thing (and another post, including original video with transcript.) Context: a woman posts in her blog that she felt uncomfortable with a situation alone with a man in an elevator, someone else writes a post on their blog responding to same, and in comments to the second post Dawkins, a noted biologist, atheist, and Old English White Guy, went out of his way to suggest Watson should STFU.

It reminded me of something that happened a couple of weeks ago, that I am not so happy about, either!



I don't think I communicated "oh? What? Huh? I'm sorry, this isn't a good time" very gracefully. On the other hand, I was working on a down-to-the-wire school application, hoping the train wouldn't jolt my laptop off its perch, and I had a soft-voiced 30something squinting across the bike racks at my book, trying to talk over my GPA math. Calculating cumulative GPA across four institutions before caffeine is enough effort without the little voice saying be nice to the man.

And after he'd gone away, I flipped my Lise Meitner biography spine-in.

This is the 21st century. I'm supposed to parse this as an isolated event. But it's not. Why are you talking to me? I wanted to ask. You're interrupting me. I didn't hear an 'excuse me'. Why am I feeling I'd be the rude one to say I'm busy? We're supposed to relate to other men and women as people first, but as a woman, I'm also fighting the voice asking, What does he want? Is this just awkwardness, or a more serious problem? Logically, no, but logic kicks in after your pulse has jumped.

This isn't fishing for sympathy. I think I overreacted and could have handled the situation better. Men don't have the monopoly on socially maladroit moments! An interruption by a man or woman would have irritated me at that GPA-calculating moment. However, a man trying to bend your lap-desk / biography into a conversation on nuclear war has an extra weight and shadow that he hopefully will keep in mind. Elevators and Caltrain baby bullet trains have one thing in common: when they're moving, it's your words that might be your first defense.

Feminism is Queer: the Intimate Connection Between Queer and Feminist Theory (Mimi Marinucci) (2010): Gender theory and I do best in small doses, so I like to check in every few years to see if my strong feelings on the importance of activism and the incestuous tedium of theory have abated. (Short answer: no.) I'd hoped for a survey of the current state of the field, but most of this slim volume is focused on getting readers up to speed on feminism and queer theory, devoting only the final chapter to Marinucci's analysis of their contemporary intersection. I liked that chapter, and I found the "Feminism Expanded and Explored" chapter useful as well, again as a reminder of the current state of the field from the author's perspective. For example, the reminder that feminism and LGBT are not intrinsically the same movement (see especially p90, on second-wave feminism "the personal is political" vs LGBT "in the privacy of my own house", and '70s arguments on constructed vs essentialist homosexuality in radical feminism vs gay circles). The book also does the "all answers are wrong" theory thing I dislike, finding reasons both gender-neutral and gender inclusive language are wrong (see especially p74). Good primer for a 101 or 201 level, but not what I was looking for.

Tales of the City (Armistead Maupin) (1978): A novel about a woman who comes to San Francisco on vacation and calls her parents to say she's not coming home. Note this was published in 1978, or I might have to change my username to Mary_Ann_Singleton.

The story follows Mary Ann's vacation, job search, and forays into the City social scene, expanding through her social circle, doubling back and rebounding. Part of the entertainment is tracking the inter-relationships: Mary Ann's boss's wife sees gynecologist Jon Fielding on the sly, after an extramarital affair; Jon has an affair with the boss, and used to date one of Mary Ann's housemates; the ex-boyfriend moves in and recognizes Mary Ann as the girl who hit on Jon in a previous chapter. And the entire novel is like that, a sense that within the city, there's some very small circles. Compared to that rich web of interrelationships, the characters themselves are sometimes thinly fleshed out, and there's a distinct element of "plot? What plot?" for much of the book. It made Tales very easy to pick up and put down, as I struggled with my own San Francisco, 2011, sometimes marvelling at the differences of 30 years, sometimes mapping locations against my own experience.

The Shadow Speaker (Nnedi Okorafor) (2007): YA fiction. Teenage Ejii has already seen one small revolution, when Jaa the Red Queen beheaded Ejii's father before his wives, children, and the rest of the village of Kwàmfa. When the shadows tell psychically-gifted Ejii she must leave Kwàmfa with Jaa to prevent a greater war, she packs her veil and goes on an adventure.

This is expanded from an earlier short story, or the short story was excerpted from The Shadow Speaker Either way, it inspired me to pick up one of Okorafor's other novels, Zarah the Windseeker. I liked it, and expected a similar colorful and semi-serious YA novel. The Shadow Speaker delivered, raising questions about the ambiguous powers of violence while keeping me entertained with the story of life after a world-altering event. It develops Ejii's character plausibly, as well as the character of her travel companion Dikeogu. Ejii begins the novel working through the uncertainties of life after a nominally Muslim patriarchy has been violently removed by a woman with a sword, and struggling with her Shadow Speaker gift, as well as her father's death. Jaa removed a tyrant by killing Ejii's father, while Ejii's mother, the chief's ex-wife, urges nonviolence as a key to lasting peace. As Ejii travels she learns more about her gifts, who she is, and the world around her. And what a world! Ginen's plant-tech makes another appearance, as does the future world history shaping Ejii's Africa. Slightly less lighthearted than Zarah the Windseeker, and perhaps more engaging for the older crowd because of that.

Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam (Zainab Salbi and Laurie Becklund) (2005): Nonfiction account of - well, read the (painfully unwieldly) title and subtitles. Salbi's parents were upper middle class socialities drawn into Saddam Hussein's social circle in the '70s, and compelled to stay there as Hussein drew more power, violence and corruption to him. Salbi narrates her experiences of living in physical comfort and emotional abuse in the wake of the Iraqi dictator's social circus, who she made herself into on international soil, and how she reconciled her childhood and experiences as an adult working with women survivors of war.

This is compelling like watching a snake, waiting for the moments when the terrors whispered at the edge of on-demand parties uncoil on center stage. Salbi's experiences are narrated through the double lens of a teenager's immediate and self-centered understanding of the world, refocused by answers elicited as an adult. It's a form of introspection I can empathize with. If anything, that's my significant criticism of the book. I expected I would have to reach more to understand where Salbi was coming from, but the narration is pitched for an American audience, and didn't stretch me the way I was expecting. Maybe not the best book to read on a gray San Francisco weekend, but compelling: a demand to bear witness to human suffering caused by the selfishness and greed of a few. This was published in 2005, when there was greater hope the US invasion of Iraq would have a quick, positive outcome; the thought of the last six years' events on the women and men of Baghdad mentioned in this book weigh on my heart.

Komarr (Lois McMaster Bujold) (1998): Fiction, reread. I didn't intend to burn through the entire novel, but compulsive readability and old habits sucked me in. This time around, I paid more attention to Ekaterin and Tien's relationship than Miles' antics. Trivia: Komarr was the first Bujold I bought new in hardcover.

Cryoburn (Lois McMaster Bujold) (2010): Fiction, reread. Usually, when I read a new novel by a favorite writer, I finish it, and dip back in over the next days or weeks to reread my favorite parts. Cryoburn is the only Bujold novel which I have finished and shelved with no "favorite bits" flip-through. It's not bad - at least, I liked it no less than Diplomatic Immunity, and more than the Sharing Knife novels - but I think the series had several very, very strong novels in short sequence - Mirror Dance, Memory, A Civil Campaign - and after expecting the giant spoiler since, oh, 1998, I was and am in shock at my lack of catharsis.

( Spoiler time! )

This isn't the book I wanted, so Cryoburn suffers a great deal from misplaced expectations. On a second reading, I can sort of hear the thematic chord of frozen para-death, versus living to the max, but I still don't hear it clearly. On the one hand, I can see why the story is constructed that way: life happens, not when you expected it. On the other hand, I still feel the book's lighthearted, right until the shocking moment it's not, and the difference throws me badly.

Weather of the San Francisco Bay Region, Second Edition (Harold Gillam) (2002): Nonfiction. An overview of why SF weather does the wacky things it does. After passing this up more than once at the bookstores, I came to my senses and put it on hold at the library.

The short answer to the weather question still isn't that short, invoking global weather patterns, trends, and oscillations, Pacific ocean currents, and a heavy dose of local geography. Pitched at a teens-and-up lay audience, this gives a neat overview of a complex system, which I found an enticing appetizer. I'm hoping the "further reading" suggested at the end of the book is just as interesting.

My Fight for Birth Control (Margaret Sanger) (1931): Nonfiction memoir covering Sanger's crusade up to 1931. Technically finished on June 1, but I spent most of May slogging through this, I'm counting it. Single-minded, and not always good writing, sometimes listing a paragraph of supporters whose significance readers might guess from their inclusion. It's also tinged with a very pre-WW2 pro-eugenics agenda calling for "unfit" couples to avoid having children, as well as casual talk of "the races" fit to raise the hackles of modern activists. A pervasive reminder of the differences between eras. The memoir is as relentlessly focused as the title suggests; Sanger's personal experiences with marriage, motherhood, divorce (in 1913!) and remarriage are touched on only in the context of her drive for contraception. WW1 is primarily a barrier to easy travel on Sanger's trans-Atlantic American and European tours. The 1929 stock market crash and creeping Great Depression don't make the cut, even to impact fundraising.

Today I believe there are three great tests to character: sudden wealth, sudden power, and sudden publicity. (p197, 1967 Pergamon Press edition)

My Fight for Birth Control illuminates Sanger's professional agenda up to 1931, but any more personal insights must be imputed between the lines. For example, Sanger's divorce gets a page or two, and then there's no mention of romance until she remarries nine years later; at least one website claims she had intimate relations with several men, including H.G. Wells. In her memoir, Sanger goes out of her way to suggest otherwise, at least in Wells' case. It's a splendid reminder that memoirs usually have a purpose other than the perfect truth.

Biology trivia: Margaret Sanger isn't (directly) related to Frederick Sanger, the biochemisty who got a Nobel for dideoxy sequencing, the workhorse DNA sequencing method for a quarter of a century or so.

Numbers game: 8 total finished. 6 new, 2 reread; 5 fiction, 3 nonfiction.

It looks like I have a summer job: lab work in Mountain View, covering a 4-month employee absence. The Caltrain plus cycling commute is far from ideal, but it's a far stronger option than the alternatives. (Alternatives: bus-bus-Caltrain-walk, or more succinctly commuter hell; getting a car, AKA fiscal misery.) Also, mandatory exercise makes me a better person, and this gives me the budget and reason to buy the bicycle I've wanted since I moved to San Francisco.

Today I tested seven bicycles at four cycling shops. Since bike quality is strongly correlated with bike cost, I found two very nice options at the very top of my price point. Then I found out REI bicycles are 15% off this week. The REI bike I tried - Scott SUB 45 - isn't as nice as the Trek 7.3 FX and Raleigh Alysa FT2 I tested elsewhere, but the price differential goes a long way toward accessories.

Under the hassle and test riding discomfort is a resurgent bubbling, because two very important concepts are in play:

work = money = more options = happiness
bicycle = increased transportation autonomy = happiness

Thus, happiness. As well as comparison shopping.