freestyle horse

Girls hit the spot. (Thanks, Cindy.)

security cost-benefit analysis: terrorism

Bruce Schneier has news of a study (by Ohio State political science professor John Mueller. Titled "The Quixotic Quest for Invulnerability: Assessing the Costs, Benefits, and Probabilities of Protecting the Homeland,") that makes complete sense and yet will never be considered, probably never even read, by those who hold the purse strings:

This paper attempts to set out some general parameters for coming to grips with a central homeland security concern: the effort to make potential targets invulnerable, or at least notably less vulnerable, to terrorist attack. It argues that protection makes sense only when protection is feasible for an entire class of potential targets and when the destruction of something in that target set would have quite large physical, economic, psychological, and/or political consequences. There are a very large number of potential targets where protection is essentially a waste of resources and a much more limited one where it may be effective.

(Thanks, Cindy.)

I urge you to skim Shneier's precis and then read Mueller's paper (it's a .pdf, so all you lucky people with Kindles and Sony Readers and iPhones can download it to your spiffy device and read while you water the lawn or brush your teeth. For those with low stress/fear thresholds, I would not recommend reading while eating. The basic theme is: you can't stop terrorists. So if that's something that frightens you, just delete this now and go sit in the sun. Seriously, know yourself. Don't jack up your cortisol levels if this kind of stuff gets to you. I haven't watched TV news for a dozen years because it irritates me so much; if you choose not to read this, I understand.

high pucker factor

From: Janine

I don't know where else to post this (perhaps there's a better location?) but I thought this would be good for you and everyone else to see. It's my favorite slam poem about teachers as change-agents. I'm a bit biased, being a science teacher. I've listened to some of his other poems, and I have to salute him as another truth-teller.

I also have another question. I have a habit of sub-vocalizing while I read, and not being able to pronounce Kick's last name in Always is driving me crazy. Can you please help? :)

It's a Dutch name. I don't know how the Dutch pronounce it, but I pronounce it something like kigh-per. Thinking about this makes me realise I have a fondness for Dutch names (e.g. Lore Van de Oest, in Slow River).

Perhaps this is because I found Amsterdam to be such a wild and free city when I was there thirty years ago--at least when compared to Hull. And even to the young me it was clear that underneath all the boho relaxation lurked a Calvinist heart, a citizenry with a high pucker factor.)

It's pretty interesting to consider influences this way, so thanks for the question. Oh, and for future reference, the place to send questions is via email: asknicola2 at nicolgriffith dot com.

Friday audio: Draw Me Down

My audio for this week is a song, "Draw Me Down," that I made up one day in England while doing the dishes. It was early 1989. I was living with Carol (I'd been living with her for ten years). Kelley, whom I'd met in the summer of 1988, in the US, and I had been apart for months. My little sister, Helena, had recently died. Here's a passage from my memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, that explains how and why I wrote this.

Writers are not made to belong. We can't. Writing, all art, is the job of shamans. We travel to dangerous places, and explain them with story, so that that others need not. But being a writer is a choice. Except, of course, it isn't. For me it's about as much a chosen thing as being a dyke. I just am. The choice part of the equation is in being comfortable and happy and committing to it. I've never had a problem with committment, but choice is all about privileging one way over another. It's a closing of possible paths. This kind of choice was heading my way with regard to Kelley and Carol; I just wasn't prepared to admit it yet.

I was still walking two worlds: one in which I lived in Hull with Carol and had a real-world job, and pondered on and off the possibility of having children, and went on having sex with anyone who took my fancy, and one in which I lived with Kelley, only Kelley--no old friends, no family, no extra lovers--without the safety net of job or welfare state. The fork in the road lay ahead; I didn't want to see it.

Meanwhile everyone I knew in England began to pester me to "share" my grief; I couldn't. I didn't want to. Nor did I want to share my thoughts and feelings about Kelley. She was like a faint scent in an empty, stoppered bottle. The more the cork came out and the bottle got passed around, the less intense the sense memory would be. I hoarded her to myself, and guarded my conscious mind from the acknowledgement of the choice ahead. While talking to Carol about getting a better job and buying a bigger house, I also began a relentless drive to earn enough money to get back to the US.

[...]

That winter, my two worlds drew further apart. I began to find it impossible to walk in both at once.

I wrote to Kelley one day about my most recent conversation with Carol about money and careers and moving to a bigger house in a part of town where people had gardens and birds sang; then posted the letter and, as usual, started the next one. I'd finished the next one, and mailed it, a couple of days before I got a raw, shocked letter back saying: "So I'm totally confused. You've decided--you've chosen Carol? If so, you have to tell me, right now. Tell me plainly. Because I've been hoping and hoping, believing you were coming back. I want you to come back."

I immediately started a long explanatory letter, then thought, No, I can't let her think for another ten days that I'm not coming back. So I picked up the phone for the second time and called and left a message on Kelley's machine. "No," I said, "listen. You got the wrong end of the stick. All is well. My feelings for you haven't changed. I'm coming back soon, as soon as I have the money. There's a letter on the way. I love you."

Kelley told me later that she got home from work, heard the message, and burst into tears.

I wrote this song for her and sang it into the microphone grille of a boombox in the kitchen. I mailed the cassette with my next letter. The clearest truth I could give.

Enjoy:

a practically perfect day

Yesterday I had a wholly wonderful day. I'd planned to do the usual things--breakfast, stretch, email, work on Hild, lunch, work on Hild, beer, dinner--but the weather here was totally, spot-on perfect this morning, so after breakfast Kelley said, Hey, wanna go to the park?

We did. And the park was amazing. First of all, the sky was a hard, clear blue. The Olympics were out. The Sound was blue and green. And two ospreys were circling and diving for fish (and missing, all the time; must be young ones). The patterns on the underside of their wings was just, well, it was astonishing. And they were right there.

No, I didn't take this pic; it's a public domain photo from Wikipedia

And while we were being gobsmacked and delighted, we saw a chipmunk running along a fence. And we smiled. And then a marten exploded out of the bushes and the chipmunk zipped--I've never seen anything move as fast--along that rail and then started shrieking at that marten.

A marten.

ditto: photo by anonymous in public domain

Wow. I didn't even know there were martens here in Seattle. It was beautiful: small, tight, one long glossy predatory muscle. And then a pair of birds I'd never seen before started trading singing insults--oh you could tell they were insults. Seriously. Then I watched a zillion sand-burrowing wasps doing apparently pointless things, like piling on top of each other, and bumping into each other, and digging holes and scuttling backwards. It was like watching a flea circus. And all this entertainment was free.

At this point, we thought, Hey, the world is a marvel, let's go explore more. So we had lunch at a Moroccan place we'd never noticed before, rootled through the tat in an 'antiques'/consignment store, and had a latte in a new coffeehouse. Then we came home, smiling, and I suddenly thought of something I really wanted to add to Hild.

All in all a miraculous day. Nothing profound to say, I just wanted to share.

Tomorrow is audio day. I'm dithering between a song, something I wrote for Kelley while we were apart all those years ago, or a reading of a very short story for Australian radio. Decision, decisions...

mind meld: controversial books

The new Mind Meld it up at sfsignal.com:

There's plenty of recent controversy in the science fiction field, most of it having nothing to do with books themselves. So let's put the controversy limelight back where it belongs. We asked a panel of esteemed guests the following question:

Q: Which science fiction or fantasy novels, past and present, do you consider to be the most controversial? Why?

Different responses from a bunch o' writers including Ekaterina Sedia, Peter Watts, Sarah Beth Durst and me. Take a look.

Young Adult adventure, redux

I had so many suggestions on my last post about YA books, that I thought it might be nice to offer an update.

You've already seen my response to Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (recommended by Jill). Other suggested books I've read since are Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (recommended by Gwen) and Megan Wahlen Turner's ATTOLIA trilogy (recommended by mb).

The ATTOLIA books as a whole are, from a writerly perspective, all about point of view. In that respect, I was very much reminded of Dorothy Dunnett's LYMOND CHRONICLES. (The first one, The Game of Kings, is brilliant, and brilliantly funny. I recommend it wholeheartedly. The others, eh, there's a real drop-off.) Basically, once you understand the underlying paradigm of ATTOLIA--Eugenides will always win and finds it convenient to be underestimated--the narrative tension slackens, so it's important to increase the reader's distance from his internal process. (No, I'm not going to offer a plot summary. They abound elsewhere.) This leads to a series of very richly textured books. The first one, The Thief, is fun, but very much a writer learning her craft, with some tedium (or, as Kelley puts it, oh the Groundhog Dayness of it all...) But then, wow, there's a real gear change in book two, and book three is a knockout. And they're fabulous adventures. And beautifully published. Eos/Greenwillow have done a lovely job. The cover illustrations are delicious. Recommended without reservation.

I enjoyed the Doctorow, though it's a different animal. For one thing, the tone shifts wildly; I'm not always sure who it's aimed at or the level of wisdom intended for the narrator. Sometimes it tastes a little good-for-you-hectoring, sometimes genuinely, adolescently gauche. It was fun, and trundled along nicely, but felt thin. Mind you, if I'd read this as a teen I would, like the protagonist, have turned hacker in a hot second, which I imagine is the point, so in that sense it's a very successful book. It's just not my kind of book. Not anymore.

Winging their way to our house are Elizabeth Knox's Dreamhunter and Block's Weetzie Bat. I'm just not sure when I'll get to read them. I'm finally back in full Hild flood, getting some really good traction. No fiction for me for a while.

Anglo-Saxon porn

When I'm working on a novel, especially when I'm just feeling my way back into something after a break, I don't allow myself to read fiction. Instead I've been poring over delicious pictures of Anglo-Saxon jewellery, almost pornographic in their lusciousness. These web pix don't do justice to the brilliance of the stuff--Anglo-Saxons absolutely loved their sparklies--perhaps they'll give you an idea.

Here's something called the Kingston Brooch, mainly gold and cloisonne enamel.


a belt buckle (a belt buckle!)


necklace, in cabochon garnet and gold


and here's a detail of the ear flap on a helmet

This stuff makes me understand the A-S stories of dragons and their hoards. Just looking at it makes me feel all lustful and dragonish.

Oh, and I've just counted and realised this is my one hundredth blog post. I forget, sometimes, how young this venue is: just a little over three months. Thank you all for stopping by and joining in.

jedi gym

[via SFSignal]

Be sure to watch until at least Darth Vader appears--and discover the perils of True Fandom :)

breathing bubbles

Wow, want to spend $70 on the UK edition (an OOP mass market paperback) of Slow River? If so, here's the amazon.com link for you. Then go get your head examined. After all, you can get this edition from amazon.co.uk for about $6. Or, if you're truly crazy, from the same webpage you can choose to pay some lunatic vendor nearly $200. For a used copy. Of a mass market paperback. I know I lack the collector gene and so sometimes miss the finer points of book collecting but, seriously, can anyone explain this to me?

I don't think about Slow River often, but after seeing this cover for the first time in twelve years, I fished out a copy and reread the first page. I liked it (thank god). So I thought I'd share:

At four in the morning its cold, deep scent seeped through deserted streets and settled in the shadows between warehouses. I walked carefully, unwilling to disturb the quiet. The smell of the river thickened as I headed deeper into the warehouse district, the Old Town, where the street names changed: Dagger Lane, Silver Street, The Land of Green Ginger; the fifteenth century still echoing through the beginnings of the twenty-first.

Then there were no more buildings, no more alleys, only the river, sliding slow and wide under a bare sky. I stepped cautiously into the open, like a small mammal leaving the shelter of the trees for the exposed bank.

Rivers were the source of civilization, the scenes of all beginnings and endings in ancient times. Babies were carried to the banks to be washed, bodies were laid on biers and floated away. Births and deaths were usually communal affairs, but I was here alone.

Reading this brought back vivid memories of Hull--the city I never name in the novel--where I lived for more than ten years, where the Old Town really does have names like Silver Street and Dagger Lane. I've talked about those times before, of course (mainly in "Layered Cities," an essay, and in my memoir), but something about reading fiction brings it all back.

I didn't name the city in Slow River because I believed--still believe--no one in their right mind would buy a book set in Hull. It would be like reading a novel set in Poughkeepsie. What do you think?

Friday music

Every Friday I'll amuse myself by putting up something from my audio files. Sometimes it will be an interview, sometimes a reading, sometimes a song. Today it's one of my favourite interviews, with Jim Fleming on PRI's "To the Best of Our Knowledge," first broadcast in December 2006. You can play it from the sidebar. Let me know what you think, and if you have any requests...

holy shit!

I just saw this (thanks Sarah). A tiny bit of justice from the Bush administration. Who'd've thunk it?

fainting, shame, and obviousness

From John-Henri:

I read your blog entry on literary awards, and your findings seem quite obvious; in a fairly recent essay on women's sf and women in the sf world I counted the Hugos and Nebulas, with not terribly dissimilar results – although the Nebulas have tended during the last decades to be more inclusive. Even so, I suspect that the sf milieu is actually at least slightly more accepting than many others; if nothing else, sf people tend to at least want to view themselves as both open-minded and positive towards social change. In comparison, why not take a look at the literary Nobels, where a total of 11 out of 103 awards have now been given to women (5 of them in the last 17 years). And if women have generally been much too radical for Nobels, how about even weirder creatures – there is, I strongly suspect, a farily obvious reason why authors in their day as universally acclaimed as Willa Cather, H.D., W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Virginia Woolf, Allen Ginsberg, or Truman Capote seem never to have been seriously considered. Sad that not until around fifteen years ago did it become common knowledge (as at that point her previously sealed correspondence was published) that the first woman ever to receive the Nobel, Swedish non-realist novelist Selma Lagerlöf (the 1909 laureate), spent her entire adult life in a complex love triangle with two other women, novelist Sopie Elkan and teacher Valborg Olander. The Academy members who handed Lagerlöf her award would have fainted.

It struck me that if you haven't done the Hugo and Nebula counting, possibly you might be interested. This is how it goes*:

Hugos
1953-1960: 16 awards for works of literature, 0 to women (0%)
1961-1970: 29 awards for works of literature, 2 to women (6.9%)
1971-1980: 41 awards for works of literature, 10 to women (24.4%)
1981-1990: 41 awards for works of literature, 10 to women (24.4%)
1991-2000: 41 awards for works of literature, 12 to women (29.27%)
2001-2006: 24 awards for works of literature, 6 to women (25%)

Nebulas
1965-1970: 25 awards for works of literature, 3 to women (12%)
1971-1980: 40 awards for works of literature, 10 to women (25%)
1981-1990: 40 awards for works of literature, 15 to women (37.5%)
1991-2000: 40 awards for works of literature, 19 to women (47.5%)
2001-2007: 20 awards for works of literature, 12 to women (60%)

Even more importantly, I'd say, the Nebulas have also been given to non-mainstream work by women – you, Carol Emshwiller, Joanna Russ, Ellen Klages, Kelly Link, Leslie What, Joe Haldeman's Camouflage and many ceteras. While Hugos have been given to what I'd generally think is more traditional work (although by all means awards were given to Left Hand of Darkness and a couple of times to James Tiptree).

On the other hand, the great shame of us all must be that no award of any kind was given to The Female Man.

[* arithmetic mine--blame me for errors, not John-Henri]

Oh, yes, indeed. Fainting, great shame, and obviousness. Let me take them one at a time.

Obviousness. Absolutely. Men (and women) discriminate against women. In just about every arena: art, sport, politics, academics, employment, health care. Why should literature be different?

It all *should* be different, of course. It's just not. The context of my "Girl Cooties" blog post was the LitBlog Co-Op discussion of Always. Several of the participants had wondered at various points (and on various blogs) why my novel had not had more attention. To me the answer, as you say, was obvious, but clearly not so to some of the bloggers. Also not to some of my younger readers. In explaining the situation (at least as I see it) I wanted to tread gently. It's a cruel and difficult job, sometimes, to put on big nasty reality boots and trample through others' Eden.

For those to whom this kind of information--that, yes, Virginia, there really is discrimination in the literary world--is either new or unbelievable, read the best book ever on the topic, Joanna Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing.

The Academy fainting at news of Selma Lagerlöf and her love life? Oh, yep, no doubt. I'd heard rumours about the girlfriends, but not the specifics, so thanks for that. (And isn't it interesting that Wikipedia makes no mention of it? Though I see someone's managed to mention Daphne du Maurier's attachment to women. But, hey, she was just a genre writer...)

As for shame, absolutely. Russ should have won more than a retrospective Tiptree for The Female Man. But for most people it's a frightening book, and a difficult read; not at all like The Forever War which took the Hugo and Nebula that year. (For the record, I thoroughly enjoyed Haldeman's novel, and I look forward to the upcoming film adaptation.) Awards, though, are subjective; they reflect our taste. Our taste is formed by our milieu. Our milieu is sexist and heterosexist. In some parts of the world (geographically speaking, and in terms of cultural denominators like race, class, and religion) this is improving, in some it's getting worse. In most it swings back and forth across the vertical plumbline of whatever anti-discrimination laws a polity has on its books. (This is why passing the ERA, why ENDA and same-sex marriage legislation is so very important.)

The Nebula and Hugo stats broken down by decade are extremely interesting. Thank you. To me it looks like a steady progression towards equity--with, for the Hugo, the beginnings of a backlash (or maybe just a statistical anomaly). Here's a quote from Lisa Tuttle in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction :

Unfortunately, even after 30 years women are still considered "newcomers' by most men, and women who become too successful or break the unspoken rules and stretch the boundaries of sf, all too often arouse male hostility [...] Women writers are by now a well established presence within sf, but this situation may not last. In How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983) Russ has argued, polemically but effectively, that even the most popular and influential female writers have been peculiarly subject to excision from the male-controlled canons of literary history. An economic contraction, followed by redefinition of genre boundaries, might send written sf the way of Hollywood, where sf films are as narrowly confined to catering to the fears and desires of the adolescent US male as the old-fashioned pulp magazine ever were.
--Lisa Tuttle, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. Clute and Nicholls (St. Martin's, 1993)

The Nebulas, too, could be a statistical anomaly, or an overcompensation. Why is there such a gap between the two awards? Perhaps it's the difference between a writers' award and a readers' award. Perhaps (and, no, I have no data for this--if anyone does, please share) the ratio of women to men in voting terms is higher for SFWA/Nebula than Worldcon/Hugo. I'd love to hear opinions on the matter.

more canaries

This time a video (thanks to Janet), a hopeful, passionate tale of one woman's contribution to the urban environment:

queer canary marriage

Here's an interesting article from the Los Angeles Times (thanks, Cindy):

According to surveys, in developed countries discrimination against women and minorities is actually waning and gays remain the least tolerated "outgroup" in society. They are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. In most developed countries, the relative level of their acceptance or rejection is a sensitive indicator of that society's overall tolerance toward minorities. And -- here's the takeaway -- social tolerance "broadens the range of choices available to people," thereby enhancing happiness for both the tolerant and the intolerant alike.

It's based on a study conducted at the University of Michigan by a team led by Ronald Inglehart. They found that freedom of choice is apparently a universal aspiration--and the single most important basis of human happiness. Change the law to give more people more freedom, more choice (e.g. make marriage legal for same-sex couples) and more people, not just gay people, are happier. Go read the article. It's kind of cool.

I just realised something...

I was just rereading my essay, "Identity and SF: Story as Science and Fiction," to make sure it hadn't got scrambled in translation to the web, when I realised that it was writing this essay that helped push me towards writing my memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party. All that stuff about memory and freezing moments via diary entries or photographs...

After I wrote that essay, in 2005, I went to look at my photos and found an old diary I'd forgotten I'd had, and was absolutely wrenched into the past. And that past was different from the stories I'd told myself all my life. I started to want to understand the strange place between truth and memory, and the memories that had made me who I am. And so I started recalling specific incidents--such as the discovery of atoms--and rootling through my stuff to find corroborating evidence. Most of the time, there wasn't any (most of the time there just isn't; it doesn't mean it didn't happen, it just means I can't be sure). Sometimes there was. Sometimes the evidence contradicted the memories. Sometimes (astonishingly often), I willfully misread the evidence the first time around, and only after repeated viewing could I see what was actually there.

Here's a scan of a poem I wrote for a friend that might illustrate what I mean:

I don't know when I wrote the poem. (1983? 1987? Probably closer to the latter: the dragon looks a bit like something I drew for Kelley in 1988, and even that was probably stolen from somewhere else--it doesn't look like the kind of thing that comes from my own imagination--but after all this time I don't remember where.) It was for a friend called Katherine who was probably in her fifties--only I didn't know that at the time. I knew she was significantly older than me but had no clue that one could be over forty and still have a life (that's yoof for you). It was her birthday. She told me it was her fortieth. Perhaps she was being ironic, but I didn't know that (sigh) and took her seriously. I wrote this poem, and copied it out on nice paper and put it in an envelope covered in illustrations of dragons and dykes in shining armour (I forget if there was a princess; probably not). And then I gave the card to Katherine. And she was furious--absolutely shook with rage as she tore the envelope open: I was making her destroy beauty; I'd wasted all my talent on something disposable. I was puzzled and a bit hurt; to me it was a doodled poem, and a doodled picture, the kind of thing one jots on the phone pad while chatting--which only seemed to infuriate her further. Looking back, running the 'memory' through my mind over and over, I believe she was angry with herself for two reasons. One, she had lied to me about something she was ashamed to be ashamed about (second-wave feminists weren't supposed to care about age and beauty, patriarchal concepts). Two, she was jealous of the fact that to me a poem and picture meant nothing, I could pump them out all day without thinking. She wanted to be a writer, but found writing difficult. And there I was wasting stuff! But I don't know; that's just what I imagine (and the kind of attitude I'd run into from my teachers all my life). I'd love to meet her again and have a beer and find out the truth of the matter.

But there's no way to include something like that in a permanent medium like a book because it's largely about someone else and it's possible I could be imagining or at least wildly misinterpreting it all. For the memoir I generally opted to talk about the person I know best, me, and chose incidents and supporting artifacts very, very carefully.

Oh, and I've no idea where I got that doctors' freebie note pad advertising Daonil. Just another mystery, another reason not to include it in the book.

Anyway, now that my early life (selections of it, anyway) is all organised and labelled and explained I feel very clear, very grounded, very certain. It's a good feeling. And it all started with an essay... Life is strange.

separate but unequal

Sarah Schulman has a Soapbox piece in last week's issue of Publishers Weekly. It reads in part:

If you are a lesbian and you want to get married in California, you're in luck. But if you are a human being who would like to read novels with lesbian protagonists by openly lesbian authors, you'd better move to England....

...In the 1980s, the AIDS crisis forced America to admit that gay people exist, and for a brief period the vibrant but underground literature of authentic gay and lesbian experience was able to surface through corporate presses and hover on the margins of American letters. By the early 1990s the country's most powerful presses started presenting lesbian literature as an integrated part of U.S. intellectual life. But that's when cultural containment kicked in, in the form of niche marketing. Corporations began the process of transforming a political movement into a consumer group, by selecting particular products to be sold to queers alone. Chain bookstores literally took lesbian literature off of the Fiction shelves and tucked it away in newly formed Gay Book sections, which are usually found on the fourth floor in the back behind the potted plants. At the same time, lesbian writers who avoided protagonists as lesbian as they are were allowed to stay in Fiction. The industry created incentives for authors to avoid the specificity of their own experience, absurdly creating the only literature in the world in which the authors' actual lives are never recorded. The best known example of many would be Susan Sontag, who maintained her stature as a Major American Intellectual while never applying her prodigious intellectual gifts to a public analysis of her own condition. She even wrote a book analyzing AIDS stigma while staying in the closet.

In my opinion, lesbian fiction is shunned because not only does it have girl cooties, it has double girl cooties. (Gay fiction, on the other hand, gets a lot of mainstream respect in this country because gay boys are, y'know, boys.) But, hey, I've talked about this before in my LitBlog Co-op piece called, surprisingly, "Girl Cooties." (If you go read the article, be sure to read the discussion comments, too.)

Gender imbalance is also being discussed over at Mind Meld. I wonder if Clinton losing the Democratic nomination is dragging these concerns closer to the surface, closer to consciousness for many people. Or maybe, hey, the hot weather (we had amazing thunderstorms here last week) is just making everyone finally willing to Name That Crankiness. To which I say, Yay.

Here, too, is a new interview with Kelley talking about gender bias in f/sf.

But back to Sarah Schulman. We met in 1992, when I reviewed Empathy for Southern Voice. She did a reading at Charis Books and More, and looked a bit tired. (Touring for a book is brutal, exhausting, and confusing. In the bookshop you're a star and everyone loves you. But then everyone goes home and you go to your hotel room, cold and tired and lonely.) So Kelley and I took her out for dinner and then brought her back to our house for a bit of normalcy over a cup of tea. We had a wonderful conversation.

So, anyway, go read her piece in PW, then go buy one of her books. Go buy any lesbian's books, especially one with lesbian characters. Don't be afraid. Reading about it won't turn you queer. Unless, of course, you read Ammonite :)

las bandidas

2006 film with Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz: put Zorro and Xena and maybe a bit of Austin Powers in a blender. Lots of comedic pseudo lesbian subtext (Xena). Trained horses, bank robbing, viva Mexico (Zorro). Suggestive, adolescent camera angles (Austin Powers). It's a feel-good, lightweight, vaguely hormonal (lots of heaving breasts and high hip-to-waist ratios--yum) film with no educational value--yay! Can't believe I'd never heard of this. Definitely worth seeing, especially for free after three beers. Life is good.

Happy Fourth

Independence Day is not my holiday, but I admire the US Constitution, and that wouldn't have happened without the Declaration of Independence.

Have a wonderful weekend. I'll be back on Monday.

quotes, an occasional series, #4: native of sf

I am a native of sf, but not a resident.
-- William Gibson

Apparently this is something Gibson said at his induction into the SF Hall of Fame last month. It encapsulates beautifully how I feel about what I write.

I got the Gibson quote, above, from a conversation at our dinner party on Saturday--one of our guests had been at the induction--and I told the story I first told Cat Rambo at Suite101.com of the moment at WisCon 30 that I knew I really did belong in sf:

Q: Did you enjoy WisCon? What was the highest point for you? Are there conventions that are "can't miss" for you?

NG: The stand-out moment for me, no question, was a point in the Tiptree auction when what was under the hammer was a fan letter from Alice Sheldon (in her Tiptree persona) to Carol Emshwiller. I felt this enormous swelling under my breastbone, a vast bubble of history and connection. I thought: I'm here. I'm part of this continuum, this line of writers whose focus, cares, and struggles are linked to mine. I thought: I belong.

I've never much felt like part of a community; I've been a stranger in a strange land most of my life. I've moved a lot. I was a dyke in a Catholic girls school. I had a posh accent in a tough northern city when I left home. I was a writer among drug dealers and prostitutes and bikers. I have MS in a mostly able-bodied world. I'm English in America. But right there, right then, I belonged. It wasn't a sweet, misty feeling; it was fierce, hard, brilliant. It will sustain me.

Last year I wrote an essay, "Identity and SF: Story and Science as Fiction," about how and why I love sf. It was published in SciFi in the Mind's Eye (ed. Margret Grebowitz, Open Court, 2007) and I've just made it available for free on my website. Enjoy.