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Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned (Judd Winick): Comics artist and Real World contestant reflects on relationship with HIV-positive roommate Pedro Zamora in words and pictures. Fluffy; probably more meaningful if you're 1.) more into comics than I am or 2.) more familiar with pre-1996 Real World seasons than I am.

Shirahime-Syo (CLAMP): Noted manga collaborators do a collection of stories drawing on myths of the Snow Princess. Very pretty artwork, which is wasted on my manga-illiterate self. The theme of the collection is snowfall as the Snow Princess crying, but this gets turned on its head ( in spoilerland. ) I don't know what it means, but it looked really cool.

This and other forays into manga are an attempt to ride the phenomenon; suggestions for good intro manga encouraged, especially from my age cohorts. Some kind of "idiot's guide to manga" primer would be even more awesome; I'm pretty sure I'm missing genre markers left and right.

James Tiptree, Jr. : The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (Julie Phillips): Biography of the SF writer. I've read one of Tiptree's novels plus one or two of her short stories, and was underwhelmed, but Sheldon/Tiptree's actual life is fascinating. She did an amazing variety of stuff during her life: as a child, her parents took her to Africa, and her mother used her illustrations for a children's book on the experience; she eloped shortly after her coming-out party; she joined the Women's Army Corps during WWII; her second husband was significantly older than her; she ran a chicken farm; she was a depressed drug-addicted McLean housewife. And she wrote science fiction under two pseudonyms.

"...she is surely speaking for the many people who were passing in that decade: gays pretending to be straight, geniuses working as housewives, token women acting and thinking like men."

Philips gets in some pithy prose that speaks deeply to my issues: identity, self-esteems, parents. Science. One of my hardest classes this semester has about fourteen people in it, and three of us are not men.

I think I'm going to be terribly unbiased and just say that it was a fascinating biography, with a light hand on the feminist jargon. I'm not sure it was good for me, but I encourage everyone else to go read it so I have someone to talk to.

Random quotes:

Tiptree on life: " ' The puzzle of seeing those same hands grasping a pencil here, that grasped a horse's mane - was it a week ago or a century ago that one was fourteen? And yet that same crooked thumbnail continues, my same round shadow of a nose goes before me in the scene. ' " (p196)

What did Le Guin put on her letters to Tiptree? "...drawings of jellyfish and squid (because they hide in clouds of ink)" p267.

Pat Murphy & Karen Joy Fowler start the Tiptree award: "Because most science fiction writers can't live from their work, they decided their award should have a cash prize. Where would the money come from? From bake sales at science fiction conventions, ha-ha. What to call it? They named it after their favorite literary prankster. . . in making their decision, the judges often hold long discussions about what constitutes reenvisioning gender, a debate that in turn raises more questions about what science fiction is and can do." I feel the need to include this after this summer's Tiptree tempest in a teapot.

Notes that I never got around to expanding: "...questions about what science fiction is and can do." Well, sometimes; sometimes it starts blogfights. Turnabout: letter-writing => LJ; Tiptree as sockpuppet? SF - fiction as dialog (LMB quote). And now I'm having visions of j_tiptree_jr writing fan fiction.