Last night, I happened to be in a hospital room with my mom and stepfather, and a nursing student joined us for a little while. He had a list of questions for his patient, and we all had a nice chat, finding out he shared a hometown with SF, and of course with my mom he had in common that she had some nurses’ training Lo Many Moons Ago, and that in many ways she’s been a frustrated nurse ever since. If it weren’t for the dagnab studying, by golly – she’d have been a stupendous caregiver, if she does say so herself.
I haven’t blogged a ton about my mom, but she is one of those surprising Little Southern Ladies who can be thoroughly awesome when she puts her mind to it. Last night, her mind was to it.
She was talking about nurses’ straining circa, I guess, about 1960 or so (I believe it was before her career days, but am not sure how soon out of high school her brief curriculum ensued). It seems the doctor coordinating the student nurses was a minimal fellow – no taller, no bigger, than my mom.
Mom, by the way, is 5’2” and had the nickname Razor Butt in those days. She was noticeably TINY. So this guy – not a bruiser.
She described to our friend the nursing student how this doctor would take them around, wearing his white coat and smoking a pipe (Oh the Places you could Smoke in that day and age … shew!), and concluded,
“He was a strutting little bantam.”
Let it be said, I could probably find a use or two for a strutting little bantam of a character – but, given my chosen eras, so many of these details would be lost. To all my writerly pals, I implore you – find the place where the Strutting Little Bantam fits, because he’s a plot bunny of a story element I can’t do justice to, and he deserves justice.
Or, perhaps (particularly if you write humor) a little injustice?
I give him to you gratis – formed, unformed, strutting, pipe, lab coat, and all. Use him in good health!
Or … as he’s a physician, after all … perhaps find some gripping ill health for him. It’s your story!
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Even Just an Interview ...
... with the Arrant Pedant is erudite, openminded, engaging, and worth reading. So go. I'll still be here.
There are ways to love language that don’t involve being lecturing people on their mistakes or otherwise being an insufferable pedant.
(I)t’s sad that people assume that being an editor or a grammar expert means you’re a jerk.
--Jonathon Owen
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Writing and Communicating
There is some irony, perhaps, in the fact that, though I’m a novelist and can barf out a block of text topping several hundred words in no time flat, when I’m at work and see an email consisting of more than about 200 words in paragraph form, with no formatting to highlight key points or organize information visually, messages are lost on me. It was a fun fact of life at my last job that “messaging” was commonly effected by the Giant Block O’ Text method, and sometimes I still find this true at the “new” (now nearly a year old!) employer. When working on communications with one of my own kids, I’ll massage a message (har) with at least a bit of formatting, especially when it comes to emails we’ve got to share with big groups.
When working on anything, ever, in PowerPoint, I’ll gnash my teeth and go mad at Giant Blocks O’ Text, flat out.
Perhaps precisely because I’m guilty of producing giant streams of NON-information in excess, when I see actual information treated to the essay format (or, Maud help us, novel lengths – which you all must have seen yourselves in pointless emails), seeing GBOTs in forms definitively unsuited to it (PowerPoint, I am looking at you) hurts my head.
GBOTs hurt *everyone’s* head. It is unkind and unproductive to try to stuff a Word document into PowerPoint or an email. PPT and email are visually and cognitively rotten vehicles for anything but the most high level media.
For pushing twelve years, let it be said, Mr. X and I have brought novel-length emails to the level of an art form – I won’t pretend that when options are limited, you use whatever medium you can. But even then, once there is any exchange, we have always reorganized big blocks into smaller chunks of dialogue, responding to each other point by point in a visual equivalent of real time. Sometimes, if we don’t read an entire email before responding, the results can be curious – amusing – even disastrous, of course. Limitations.
But the point is, given constraints, the only kindness to our fellow beings is to work within them.
Because PowerPoint, for instance, is theoretically designed as a presentation software (often used to present without an actual speaker or even a meeting involved, of course), it is optimally used to illustrate data, plans, concepts, or team information at the highest level, eschewing detail. The idea, again theoretically, is that a big-picture chart or bullet list allows a speaker to expound further than what’s on screen and make their speaking role relevant while perhaps more dynamic, with graphics and other visual/auditory information supporting them rather than the other way around.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever watched a presentation in which 100% of what a speaker said was emblazoned at great magnification directly behind them on a big screen.
Yeah. That. Or, really: NO ("noooooooooooooooooo!!!"). That.
It’s torture, waiting for a presenter to catch up with their plodding, hyper-pedantic slides.
It’s torture, too, going through email and getting a message the sender passionately believes is crucial for you to understand, and it’s half a screen of black-on-white prose in ten point font.
When we’re being paid to read and receive information, spelunking for it when it’s buried in paragraph form in a copious message can be bitter work and wasted time.
When we’re alone on a train or at home, reading a book we chose out of interest and hope – no matter how long – the same is still true. The nature of the reading, the working of our brains, the organization are completely different – but the need can be very similar:
“Give me the story.”
This doesn’t mean rich descriptions and context and world-building needs must be pithy – or that, literature forfend, prose should be organized in some other way than a wonderful block of text, perhaps even topping four hundred juicy, pulpy pages of reading goodness. It just means that everything contained in those pages ought to be serving something, ought to be accomplishing something (even if that something isn’t pushing out the sales figures for Q3).
The luxury for authors is that what we’re out to accomplish may be conveying something as subtle as the alluring turn of an ankle, the way a character’s walk romantically captivates another (or, as in “Pippin”, the arch of a foot!). We may need to place a reader in a moment of stillness which, redolent with some flower’s exotic scent and the soft, golden light of evening, may be broken at any moment. The need may be to leave our audience wondering whether we’d rather stay in the stillness or heedlessly throw ourselves into the next action, the next sound, the next rapture or disaster …
There just should always be some need. That “tension” our beta readers like to go on about, that agents get so excitable about. Even if the tension isn’t that of a spy rifling through a drawer just as the Russians are coming back to the office.
If we have a Giant Block O’ Text going, but its essential message isn’t apparent, we’re doing no better work than the Communications experts who bury the lead (lede, if you prefer …) and render it invisible with too much pointless verbiage.
Like this post, if you will. Which started with a 532-word intro before I revealed the point.
Was that clever context and tension … ? Or just torture?
When working on anything, ever, in PowerPoint, I’ll gnash my teeth and go mad at Giant Blocks O’ Text, flat out.
Perhaps precisely because I’m guilty of producing giant streams of NON-information in excess, when I see actual information treated to the essay format (or, Maud help us, novel lengths – which you all must have seen yourselves in pointless emails), seeing GBOTs in forms definitively unsuited to it (PowerPoint, I am looking at you) hurts my head.
GBOTs hurt *everyone’s* head. It is unkind and unproductive to try to stuff a Word document into PowerPoint or an email. PPT and email are visually and cognitively rotten vehicles for anything but the most high level media.
For pushing twelve years, let it be said, Mr. X and I have brought novel-length emails to the level of an art form – I won’t pretend that when options are limited, you use whatever medium you can. But even then, once there is any exchange, we have always reorganized big blocks into smaller chunks of dialogue, responding to each other point by point in a visual equivalent of real time. Sometimes, if we don’t read an entire email before responding, the results can be curious – amusing – even disastrous, of course. Limitations.
But the point is, given constraints, the only kindness to our fellow beings is to work within them.
Because PowerPoint, for instance, is theoretically designed as a presentation software (often used to present without an actual speaker or even a meeting involved, of course), it is optimally used to illustrate data, plans, concepts, or team information at the highest level, eschewing detail. The idea, again theoretically, is that a big-picture chart or bullet list allows a speaker to expound further than what’s on screen and make their speaking role relevant while perhaps more dynamic, with graphics and other visual/auditory information supporting them rather than the other way around.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever watched a presentation in which 100% of what a speaker said was emblazoned at great magnification directly behind them on a big screen.
Yeah. That. Or, really: NO ("noooooooooooooooooo!!!"). That.
It’s torture, waiting for a presenter to catch up with their plodding, hyper-pedantic slides.
It’s torture, too, going through email and getting a message the sender passionately believes is crucial for you to understand, and it’s half a screen of black-on-white prose in ten point font.
When we’re being paid to read and receive information, spelunking for it when it’s buried in paragraph form in a copious message can be bitter work and wasted time.
When we’re alone on a train or at home, reading a book we chose out of interest and hope – no matter how long – the same is still true. The nature of the reading, the working of our brains, the organization are completely different – but the need can be very similar:
“Give me the story.”
This doesn’t mean rich descriptions and context and world-building needs must be pithy – or that, literature forfend, prose should be organized in some other way than a wonderful block of text, perhaps even topping four hundred juicy, pulpy pages of reading goodness. It just means that everything contained in those pages ought to be serving something, ought to be accomplishing something (even if that something isn’t pushing out the sales figures for Q3).
The luxury for authors is that what we’re out to accomplish may be conveying something as subtle as the alluring turn of an ankle, the way a character’s walk romantically captivates another (or, as in “Pippin”, the arch of a foot!). We may need to place a reader in a moment of stillness which, redolent with some flower’s exotic scent and the soft, golden light of evening, may be broken at any moment. The need may be to leave our audience wondering whether we’d rather stay in the stillness or heedlessly throw ourselves into the next action, the next sound, the next rapture or disaster …
There just should always be some need. That “tension” our beta readers like to go on about, that agents get so excitable about. Even if the tension isn’t that of a spy rifling through a drawer just as the Russians are coming back to the office.
If we have a Giant Block O’ Text going, but its essential message isn’t apparent, we’re doing no better work than the Communications experts who bury the lead (lede, if you prefer …) and render it invisible with too much pointless verbiage.
Like this post, if you will. Which started with a 532-word intro before I revealed the point.
Was that clever context and tension … ? Or just torture?
Friday, November 7, 2014
Twit
“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
-- Blaise Pascal
Loving a good pun, this headline taking an opportunity to abbreviate “Twitter”– a veritable art form in condensed expression, sometimes – was too self-gratifying to resist.
Most contemporary writers know: the irony of editing is that reducing word count once the “actual writing” is barfed out can be much harder work. Revision can be so painstaking as to paralyze us outright. What research to remove, what scenes to sacrifice, what action to abbreviate? Down in the forests with our trusty butter knives, chasing dragons, it can get harder and harder to see the trees.
Beta readers, of course, are a wonderful thing. The great and inimitable Leila Gaskin (herself an expert on dragons) nearly got kissed, once, when she simply told me to jettison sixty pages. She’d been afraid to say it, but the instinct correct – AND shucking like that is a pretty easy job, compared to line-by-line word-shaving and migraine-by-migraine character analysis, scene analysis, structural retrofitting after deletions of same (lawzy, ask me how long it took to get rid of Clovis’ older sister, an historical figure by the way, who added nothing but bulk to our story!). In revision, continuity can become a pernicious problem!
In microcosm, a lot of Twitter users – especially amongst my writer friends, I know – suffer pangs of a similar sort, getting everything into 140 characters. I have witnessed that same Leila, sweating out a Tweet or three, sitting in panels at #JRW and sharing wisdom with the world. Watching the process of paring but preserving voice and conveying a point was not merely entertaining, it was instructive. I’ve felt that pain. I’ve REHEARSED Tweets – not because I’m that anal-retentive, but because I know exactly how I want something said, and the limitations on my loquatiousness.
“That awkward moment when you exceed 140 and have to choose which grammar crime to commit.”
Those limitations on my loquatiousness are damned useful little beasts, though. They keep you alert as hell, and, over the course of a couple years or so relearning how to communicate in microblog form (“Must! Leave! Room! For the BLOG LINK!”) illuminates for analytic eyes a new perspective. And I still use the two-spaces-after-a-period system in most of my Tweets. … Most …
Before I ever joined – and I only did so out of some curiosity about the medium, much-touted as one outlet to reach out to people as an author – I tended to stand with those snobs who pooh-pooh Twitter, under the idea that nothing worthwhile can possibly be shared in a 140-character entry. The name itself hardly dispels this notion, evoking nothing but the confused, crowded noise of a flock of birds, and onomotopoeically silly to boot. Much as I do with “secretary”, I intentionally call myself a Twit when mentioning my usage, because that’s what it sounds like the population should be called, for layered reasons.
It didn’t take me long, though, to come to appreciate both my friends there and the medium itself. It forces my yapping-puppy mode of communcation into a harness, a discipline I’ve come to appreciate. And it also affords me lines of communication with people who are almost universally intelligent and interesting. I jump in and chat with men and women both sharing my interests and ideas, and exposing me to new ones. Life there isn’t too hard to keep troll-free, and with the standard that anything I say online I would be willing to allow my mother or my nieces to read, I don’t think I’m too hard on anyone else, either.
The brevity of Twitter, too, means that even as your timeline rushes by – which, even with only about 700 followers, and following over 800 myself, provides quite the dizzying rush of links, observations, rallying cries, and incredibly funny posts and retweets – and conversations don’t get much bogged down. I once live-tweeted Highlander with a couple of pals, we had a good time, then it was over – and you can do much the same with television and so on. In much the same way I work crosswords with my mother over the phone, sharing entertainment virtually can be diverting, particularly when your IRL companionship is snuggly and furry, but still sub-verbal.
Twitter has provided moral support and encouragement under the #AmWriting, #AmEditing, and #AmQuerying hashtags more than once, and the occasional insight into the way I write. This is no advertisement nor exhortation to join; just an observation, because all this interests me, and anything that changes or even develops my use of our language does too.
Do you belong? (Let’s find each other there!) Have you found it crystallizes in your own eyes the way you express things and share them?
I’d have written a shorter post … but that is for Twitter.
Beautiful Princesses
For all the poets who’ve extolled beauty since the beginning of song and the written thought, beauty is not what keeps the human race alive.
It’s not a new fact, but an interesting one, that quite a few of the hallowed standards of feminine beauty are also indicators of lives of ease. In Europe, for centuries, “fair” or pale skin was an explicit description equating to prettiness. Obviously, there’s a powerful racial element here, but the main point of whiteness in a largely white world had to do with reflecting a life lived not working in fields but protected and at leisure relative to the peasantry.
Soft skin, white skin, shining hair, healthy teeth, clear eyes – even youthful looks – these appearances may be cultivated in the life of a noblewoman, as they cannot in lesser social strata. A peasant girl who starts out plump-armed and pretty deteriorates more quickly if her life is lived on a farm or in a factory. But a princess, who may have duties and learning to do, is physically protected from elements and exertion to the effect of preserving these things rather better.
When you read descriptions of princesses and queens, beauty comes up an awful lot. Most sources have one form of political agenda or other – decrying one woman for being physically lovely but morally bankrupt, or praising to the heavens some saintly paragon. Wealth, as we can see even today on any television set, predisposes many to fulsome praises of a lady – even if only through her clothes. Wealth can also purchase some approximation of whatever signifiers appear to represent beauty in a given day – certainly in rich garments, jewels, and hairdressing, but also in cosmetic applications, shaping devices, and profounder bodily modifications, culminating in today’s booming plastic surgery industry worldwide.
Returning to the ethnic aspect –for many in the west, the main exposure too many had to any skin color other than their own was predominantly to those in servile positions, including slaves. What to us is ugliness in a different sense, was once ugliness in its social-definition-of-beauty sense. This continues to this day, with women of color suffering discrimination for wearing their natural hair, or religiously observant clothing, and subjected to demonization or sexual exotification simply for being Asian, subcontinental, Pacific Islander, Black, and so on. Asian women who personify – or “fail” to – the “China doll” standard of allure fight a constant battle just to be seen as human, or professional people, in the face (har) of men and women alike seeking to find in them a mystical kind of beauty that goes beyond their own faces, and sinks into all manner of cultural prejudices, expectations, and lurid fantasies.
“DON’T YOU EXOTICIZE ME!” an early contestant on America’s Next Top Model, YaYa, once famously said.
I never forgot that, because – frankly, I realized I found YaYa quite exotically beautiful. Like an awful lot of white folks, I had always thought my finding Black beauty so arresting and powerful … as some sort of enlightened attitude.
Take a LOOK at it for a second. “Oh, look at that beautiful little Black child” – “Oh look at that beautiful Black woman or man” … It’s all about the eye of the beholder, it’s the racial equivalent of The Male Gaze – in which finding some woman attractive is considered to be the ultimate compliment to her, and still misses completely that she’s a human being and in fact someone’s attraction to her is almost certainly irrelevant to her real, full life in every possible way.
Looking at a strikingly elegant and dazzling Black or Asian or Indian or multi-ethnic woman in admiration of her beauty is not a dynamic about “I find beauty even outside the Cultural(/Corporate) Norm! I’m so open-minded!”, but about failing to SEE humanity because we’re too busy LOOKING at it, staying outside, gazing as if the object gazed upon: is an OBJECT.
YaYa was right, and it’s the most important thing I ever learned thanks to Tyra Banks, of all people, whose own investment in a career as the object of a gaze is a whole ball of wax we won’t get into. One wonders about YaYa’s being ON a show dedicated to objectification, particularly as a platform to say, “I am not an object”, and going on to a career in acting, one step to the left of modeling in terms of the gazes of strangers. But she got a point through my privileged head, and that was what she meant to do. Success. Go YaYa!
Anyway, princesses and prettiness.
Perhaps the key element in the fact that beauty is defined by parameters so well connected with a pampered life, is that above all it demonstrates that a girl PROTECTED is somehow the ideal. Purity, even , is something of an indicator here – virginity. Girls who are protected are often “jealously” protected. Preserving not just youth and nice skin, but sexual inexperience, inevitably feeds into this ideal, and becomes one of the most powerful aspects of the theme. This girl is so protected that her skin is unmarked, she is wealthy enough to enjoy physical luxury and health, her diet is of the best foods, her teeth and bones are preserved, her nails and hair are strong and pretty. And this girl is so protected she’s not even a woman (you’ll notice my word choice throughout this paragraph). She is so thoroughly safeguarded she’s untouched – but, even more, she may also have been “protected” from ever even learning anything about sex at all.
Obviously, we reach a point where the ideals of beauty not only contradict the biological basis of attraction – sex – but where beauty is meant actually to be a denier, even as it’s supposed to also be an inducement, of sexuality, of sexual allure.
And so, in the finest Not all men tradition, we have a world populated by people who no longer even can subscribe to “beauty” – and this is where things get truly interesting. We rebel.
It is not possible, either in the binary of heteronormative humanity, or in all our glorious permutations between, for “all men” (or all women, or all hooloovoos) to conform their actual, real attractions to what we’re told is “beauty.” Probably never has been – so feminine beauty, and masculine charm for that matter, are not necessarily linked to *attraction*. Plenty of men find strength irresistible, and there are those amongst us (I’ve known a few) who are carried away by scars, or features which might stack up as weak against the going standard of a time. Me, I’ve got a thing for a crooked tooth or two (blame David Bowie, whom I’ve never forgiven for getting braces several years ago). My brother loves the look of women with natural grey or white hair. Once I have “enough” white in my hair – and it won’t be long – I’m hoping to emulate a kind of Erica Orloff style. Tell me that isn’t beauty surpassing the “standard” ….
So, it’s a funny thing. Feminine beauty has been systematically removed from what biologically “does it” for us, is and has long been another thing – and not just in American or Western culture, either. Almost universally, feminine beauty is a signifier of a different kind, that speaks to very literal *value* in a market distinct from sexual attraction, yet inextricably linked to procration, over millennia and across cultures.
And, really, left entirely to the hormones, what human body wouldn’t prefer to just get what they physically desire – without having to worry about money and eternity and politics and family and warfare and religion, and all those things we have attached to marital alliances throughout history? Henry VIII is the most famous example, perhaps, of the contradiction between honest urges and subjective consequences we’ve adopted as “necessities” …
Which leaves us with the problem and the ideal. Princesses being a major commodity – they had to be beautiful, to be desirable in a way ultimately practical, but which we felt an emotional need to tie to the spiritual and artistic.
Most of the “ugly” people in the world have managed to pair off in their lifetimes, even if not in a standard lifelong monogamous bond (though, perhaps predominantly, in that form after all). Certainly, sex has never been limited only to the rich and rarefied flowers, protected from human experience and retarded in physical deterioration as much as possible. Indeed, over the past century or so, a mythology has built up around The Pretty Girl who can’t get a date, or a mate. Wide swaths of the television and movie industries are dedicated to telling this story over and over again, and lucrativegame shows reality shows make millions in reinforcing, without ever actually exploring, the perplexion of the telegenic girl who can’t get a man – or who can, but only for the span of such time as it takes for her to lose a competition and/or to whore her life out to participate in it.
Over time – even over my lifetime – feminine beauty has become a stranger and stranger phenomenon; always building on the same ideals we set up generations and centuries ago, yet ever more distended and rarefied. Just as fashion has nothing to do with attraction and sex, really beauty doesn’t anymore either. The pneumatic ideals set forth by designers, surgeons, and advertisers are ever more removed from human impulses, subverted and appropriated by concerns less and less human, and less and less individual.
If Anne of Cleves’ first job was to marry and enchant a king, now the princess’ job is to persuade the masses she embodies, and lives, in fairy tales that never existed in reality, and she’s now tasked to realize. Ever-more preposterous bodily features and architecture and clothing and (ugly) jewelry are deployed to represent fantasies further and further removed from personal appeal and ever more heavily invested in making somebody a buck or million. To age is unthinkable, to do so naturally an outrage. Fiber-intensive extruded “food” products exhort us to obsess over our excretions in order to attain thigh gaps and acceptable waistlines. “Luxury” brands emblazon their logos on remarkably shoddy, ethically dubious products so that discount stores can pretend to be secret distribution streams for items theoretically exclusive to the elite and wealthy.
Even in an economy enduring one of the longest and most profound depressions in history, the beauty industry booms – as it always has. Some say this is because women feel the one thing they can indulge in bad times is a foolishly expensive lipstick, which makes them feel good. Others point to the investment value of primping, as a poor girl looking a certain way might parlay appearance into a lucrative alliance, or professional livelihood. Watch a single episode of The Bachelor and see if one or the other of the feminine competitors doesn’t mention “fairy tale” or “princess” at least two or three times in a single episode. (Apart from “this journey”, “connection” and the personal pronoun, these two are the most frequently used language in any example I’ve ever seen of ANY such show.)
Do you conform to what industry calls “beauty” right now … ? Do you want to? Can you imagine bedding anyone who does?
Where and how does “beauty” (by standardized terms) live in your life, day to day?
It’s not a new fact, but an interesting one, that quite a few of the hallowed standards of feminine beauty are also indicators of lives of ease. In Europe, for centuries, “fair” or pale skin was an explicit description equating to prettiness. Obviously, there’s a powerful racial element here, but the main point of whiteness in a largely white world had to do with reflecting a life lived not working in fields but protected and at leisure relative to the peasantry.
Soft skin, white skin, shining hair, healthy teeth, clear eyes – even youthful looks – these appearances may be cultivated in the life of a noblewoman, as they cannot in lesser social strata. A peasant girl who starts out plump-armed and pretty deteriorates more quickly if her life is lived on a farm or in a factory. But a princess, who may have duties and learning to do, is physically protected from elements and exertion to the effect of preserving these things rather better.
When you read descriptions of princesses and queens, beauty comes up an awful lot. Most sources have one form of political agenda or other – decrying one woman for being physically lovely but morally bankrupt, or praising to the heavens some saintly paragon. Wealth, as we can see even today on any television set, predisposes many to fulsome praises of a lady – even if only through her clothes. Wealth can also purchase some approximation of whatever signifiers appear to represent beauty in a given day – certainly in rich garments, jewels, and hairdressing, but also in cosmetic applications, shaping devices, and profounder bodily modifications, culminating in today’s booming plastic surgery industry worldwide.
Returning to the ethnic aspect –for many in the west, the main exposure too many had to any skin color other than their own was predominantly to those in servile positions, including slaves. What to us is ugliness in a different sense, was once ugliness in its social-definition-of-beauty sense. This continues to this day, with women of color suffering discrimination for wearing their natural hair, or religiously observant clothing, and subjected to demonization or sexual exotification simply for being Asian, subcontinental, Pacific Islander, Black, and so on. Asian women who personify – or “fail” to – the “China doll” standard of allure fight a constant battle just to be seen as human, or professional people, in the face (har) of men and women alike seeking to find in them a mystical kind of beauty that goes beyond their own faces, and sinks into all manner of cultural prejudices, expectations, and lurid fantasies.
“DON’T YOU EXOTICIZE ME!” an early contestant on America’s Next Top Model, YaYa, once famously said.
I never forgot that, because – frankly, I realized I found YaYa quite exotically beautiful. Like an awful lot of white folks, I had always thought my finding Black beauty so arresting and powerful … as some sort of enlightened attitude.
Take a LOOK at it for a second. “Oh, look at that beautiful little Black child” – “Oh look at that beautiful Black woman or man” … It’s all about the eye of the beholder, it’s the racial equivalent of The Male Gaze – in which finding some woman attractive is considered to be the ultimate compliment to her, and still misses completely that she’s a human being and in fact someone’s attraction to her is almost certainly irrelevant to her real, full life in every possible way.
Looking at a strikingly elegant and dazzling Black or Asian or Indian or multi-ethnic woman in admiration of her beauty is not a dynamic about “I find beauty even outside the Cultural(/Corporate) Norm! I’m so open-minded!”, but about failing to SEE humanity because we’re too busy LOOKING at it, staying outside, gazing as if the object gazed upon: is an OBJECT.
YaYa was right, and it’s the most important thing I ever learned thanks to Tyra Banks, of all people, whose own investment in a career as the object of a gaze is a whole ball of wax we won’t get into. One wonders about YaYa’s being ON a show dedicated to objectification, particularly as a platform to say, “I am not an object”, and going on to a career in acting, one step to the left of modeling in terms of the gazes of strangers. But she got a point through my privileged head, and that was what she meant to do. Success. Go YaYa!
Anyway, princesses and prettiness.
Perhaps the key element in the fact that beauty is defined by parameters so well connected with a pampered life, is that above all it demonstrates that a girl PROTECTED is somehow the ideal. Purity, even , is something of an indicator here – virginity. Girls who are protected are often “jealously” protected. Preserving not just youth and nice skin, but sexual inexperience, inevitably feeds into this ideal, and becomes one of the most powerful aspects of the theme. This girl is so protected that her skin is unmarked, she is wealthy enough to enjoy physical luxury and health, her diet is of the best foods, her teeth and bones are preserved, her nails and hair are strong and pretty. And this girl is so protected she’s not even a woman (you’ll notice my word choice throughout this paragraph). She is so thoroughly safeguarded she’s untouched – but, even more, she may also have been “protected” from ever even learning anything about sex at all.
Obviously, we reach a point where the ideals of beauty not only contradict the biological basis of attraction – sex – but where beauty is meant actually to be a denier, even as it’s supposed to also be an inducement, of sexuality, of sexual allure.
And so, in the finest Not all men tradition, we have a world populated by people who no longer even can subscribe to “beauty” – and this is where things get truly interesting. We rebel.
It is not possible, either in the binary of heteronormative humanity, or in all our glorious permutations between, for “all men” (or all women, or all hooloovoos) to conform their actual, real attractions to what we’re told is “beauty.” Probably never has been – so feminine beauty, and masculine charm for that matter, are not necessarily linked to *attraction*. Plenty of men find strength irresistible, and there are those amongst us (I’ve known a few) who are carried away by scars, or features which might stack up as weak against the going standard of a time. Me, I’ve got a thing for a crooked tooth or two (blame David Bowie, whom I’ve never forgiven for getting braces several years ago). My brother loves the look of women with natural grey or white hair. Once I have “enough” white in my hair – and it won’t be long – I’m hoping to emulate a kind of Erica Orloff style. Tell me that isn’t beauty surpassing the “standard” ….
So, it’s a funny thing. Feminine beauty has been systematically removed from what biologically “does it” for us, is and has long been another thing – and not just in American or Western culture, either. Almost universally, feminine beauty is a signifier of a different kind, that speaks to very literal *value* in a market distinct from sexual attraction, yet inextricably linked to procration, over millennia and across cultures.
And, really, left entirely to the hormones, what human body wouldn’t prefer to just get what they physically desire – without having to worry about money and eternity and politics and family and warfare and religion, and all those things we have attached to marital alliances throughout history? Henry VIII is the most famous example, perhaps, of the contradiction between honest urges and subjective consequences we’ve adopted as “necessities” …
Which leaves us with the problem and the ideal. Princesses being a major commodity – they had to be beautiful, to be desirable in a way ultimately practical, but which we felt an emotional need to tie to the spiritual and artistic.
Most of the “ugly” people in the world have managed to pair off in their lifetimes, even if not in a standard lifelong monogamous bond (though, perhaps predominantly, in that form after all). Certainly, sex has never been limited only to the rich and rarefied flowers, protected from human experience and retarded in physical deterioration as much as possible. Indeed, over the past century or so, a mythology has built up around The Pretty Girl who can’t get a date, or a mate. Wide swaths of the television and movie industries are dedicated to telling this story over and over again, and lucrative
Over time – even over my lifetime – feminine beauty has become a stranger and stranger phenomenon; always building on the same ideals we set up generations and centuries ago, yet ever more distended and rarefied. Just as fashion has nothing to do with attraction and sex, really beauty doesn’t anymore either. The pneumatic ideals set forth by designers, surgeons, and advertisers are ever more removed from human impulses, subverted and appropriated by concerns less and less human, and less and less individual.
If Anne of Cleves’ first job was to marry and enchant a king, now the princess’ job is to persuade the masses she embodies, and lives, in fairy tales that never existed in reality, and she’s now tasked to realize. Ever-more preposterous bodily features and architecture and clothing and (ugly) jewelry are deployed to represent fantasies further and further removed from personal appeal and ever more heavily invested in making somebody a buck or million. To age is unthinkable, to do so naturally an outrage. Fiber-intensive extruded “food” products exhort us to obsess over our excretions in order to attain thigh gaps and acceptable waistlines. “Luxury” brands emblazon their logos on remarkably shoddy, ethically dubious products so that discount stores can pretend to be secret distribution streams for items theoretically exclusive to the elite and wealthy.
Even in an economy enduring one of the longest and most profound depressions in history, the beauty industry booms – as it always has. Some say this is because women feel the one thing they can indulge in bad times is a foolishly expensive lipstick, which makes them feel good. Others point to the investment value of primping, as a poor girl looking a certain way might parlay appearance into a lucrative alliance, or professional livelihood. Watch a single episode of The Bachelor and see if one or the other of the feminine competitors doesn’t mention “fairy tale” or “princess” at least two or three times in a single episode. (Apart from “this journey”, “connection” and the personal pronoun, these two are the most frequently used language in any example I’ve ever seen of ANY such show.)
Do you conform to what industry calls “beauty” right now … ? Do you want to? Can you imagine bedding anyone who does?
Where and how does “beauty” (by standardized terms) live in your life, day to day?
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Linguis...Tics
My lunchtime reading recently has been an author I’m revisiting, who gained huge popularity in the 80s and 90s, but whose career began in the 70s and continues today. This is someone who could frustrate with “get ready for the sequel” novels, but who also has an undeniable gift with language.
The problem with a certain level of publishing success is that, so often, it leads to a certain level of creative control that ends up meaning an author can eschew editing. Colleen McCullough is an example of this, and her works for some years sank deeper and deeper into the “if a fact or anecdote can be told once, it can be told SEVENTY times” and the corollary, “if it can be told in twenty words, it can also be told in seven pages.”
The books I’m revisiting of late suffer a lack of editorial presence, too, and have me looking at my linguistic habits pretty coldly. I have a thing for adverbs, and “just” and “actually” are, for reasons I can’t explain, constantly present in my writing. And, of course, the overlocutive, unnecessarily complex sentence issues. Reading this author’s work, though, has me finding previously-unnoticed habits in my writing as well. “Almost”, for some reason pulls a lot of punches throughout my own work. Given the first-person voice in The Ax and the Vase, this requires some review – Clovis is not the most likely punch-puller in the world.
It’s “and” and serial commas that seem to be a problem for this author. She puts no comma where a new clause begins, and creates paragraph-long sentences with both lists and multiple clauses, with “and” between every element and commas following no apparent logic. It feels like none of this writing was ever read out loud, and it also muddies the voice.
This author writes from the perspectives of very large casts of characters in many novels, and even from vantage points in time spanning literally hundreds of years. And every character sounds the same. And every second sentence begins with “and”, too.
Now, obviously – I’m not one of those purists who shudders and pearl-clutches at the very idea of beginning a sentence with the word “and” or “but”. However (hah!), I don’t want to see it fifteen times in a single page. AND this author does that. It’s so painfully obtrusive (and punch-pulling, at that – it sucks drama out of moments and statements time and again) it’s impossible to ignore.
SO (hah), it becomes impossible to lose yourself in the novel – or in a single character’s story – because not only does every character in every individual novel sound alike, but every character in ALL this author’s MANY novels sound exactly the same.
This is why writers must read so much.
The good news is, this has me looking pretty mercilessly at my own writing. I’m aware that parenthesis, hyphens, difficult constructions, and “pretty” are recurrent with me. The words and patterns that seem to hover throughout my work, I try to at least SEE – even when I don’t necessarily choose to “correct” them.
To a degree, it is my own voice that makes me a writer. The degree MUST be limited and regulated, I know that. But it’s also true that some part of the charm of reading some particular author is *their* way of expressing things – even through the filter of POV and characters’ voices and so on. It feels like it’s okay to infuse ourselves into the way a story gets told.
But (hah) it’s important, too, that the author’s presence should be a support, not part of the story in an obtrusive way. In a way, this is like research – you have to do enough to know your period, but you can only put into the work what really needs to be there. You have to know your story and be involved (even “passionate”!) about it, but most of the time – the author doesn’t need to “be there” …
Ever read a novel where the author felt like an uninvited guest at the party? Or do you know works where the author’s palpable presence helped rather than hindered … ??
The problem with a certain level of publishing success is that, so often, it leads to a certain level of creative control that ends up meaning an author can eschew editing. Colleen McCullough is an example of this, and her works for some years sank deeper and deeper into the “if a fact or anecdote can be told once, it can be told SEVENTY times” and the corollary, “if it can be told in twenty words, it can also be told in seven pages.”
The books I’m revisiting of late suffer a lack of editorial presence, too, and have me looking at my linguistic habits pretty coldly. I have a thing for adverbs, and “just” and “actually” are, for reasons I can’t explain, constantly present in my writing. And, of course, the overlocutive, unnecessarily complex sentence issues. Reading this author’s work, though, has me finding previously-unnoticed habits in my writing as well. “Almost”, for some reason pulls a lot of punches throughout my own work. Given the first-person voice in The Ax and the Vase, this requires some review – Clovis is not the most likely punch-puller in the world.
It’s “and” and serial commas that seem to be a problem for this author. She puts no comma where a new clause begins, and creates paragraph-long sentences with both lists and multiple clauses, with “and” between every element and commas following no apparent logic. It feels like none of this writing was ever read out loud, and it also muddies the voice.
This author writes from the perspectives of very large casts of characters in many novels, and even from vantage points in time spanning literally hundreds of years. And every character sounds the same. And every second sentence begins with “and”, too.
Now, obviously – I’m not one of those purists who shudders and pearl-clutches at the very idea of beginning a sentence with the word “and” or “but”. However (hah!), I don’t want to see it fifteen times in a single page. AND this author does that. It’s so painfully obtrusive (and punch-pulling, at that – it sucks drama out of moments and statements time and again) it’s impossible to ignore.
SO (hah), it becomes impossible to lose yourself in the novel – or in a single character’s story – because not only does every character in every individual novel sound alike, but every character in ALL this author’s MANY novels sound exactly the same.
This is why writers must read so much.
The good news is, this has me looking pretty mercilessly at my own writing. I’m aware that parenthesis, hyphens, difficult constructions, and “pretty” are recurrent with me. The words and patterns that seem to hover throughout my work, I try to at least SEE – even when I don’t necessarily choose to “correct” them.
To a degree, it is my own voice that makes me a writer. The degree MUST be limited and regulated, I know that. But it’s also true that some part of the charm of reading some particular author is *their* way of expressing things – even through the filter of POV and characters’ voices and so on. It feels like it’s okay to infuse ourselves into the way a story gets told.
But (hah) it’s important, too, that the author’s presence should be a support, not part of the story in an obtrusive way. In a way, this is like research – you have to do enough to know your period, but you can only put into the work what really needs to be there. You have to know your story and be involved (even “passionate”!) about it, but most of the time – the author doesn’t need to “be there” …
Ever read a novel where the author felt like an uninvited guest at the party? Or do you know works where the author’s palpable presence helped rather than hindered … ??
There are Sad Songs, and Then There are Sad Songs ...
Since the local “we play anything” radio station shifted to the far right side of the dial and doesn’t come in on my wee transistor radio anymore at work, I’ve been forced to listen to the rock station morning show every day (it’s either that or silence, easy listening hell, or KUNTRY). Fortunately, they don’t have a political agenda, but it tends to be a good three hours of screamy opinions on inconsequential horsefeathers, but oddly enough they do tend to choose pretty good incidental music when they play a tune between blitherings. Fortunately too, I listen quietly enough that few of the actual words come through my pitiful hearing.
But today there was a moment where the DJ asked his co-host or whatever, “What’s your saddest song?” and went onto a tangent “It’s supposed to make you feel good – but hearing sad songs doesn’t make me feel GOOD, it makes me all blubbery!”
My saddest song was very definitely not written sad in its day, nor is the particular version that makes me weep performed and recorded in a tearjerker style, but the things in life that generate our most powerful emotions are rarely ever those pieces of art and entertainment specifically designed to engender reactions. Sure, a good tearjerker of a movie gets me gooey, but the emotion tends to be fleeting, gone once I change the channel or go to bed or read something funny or talk to another human being. It’s real and personal associations, particularly ones of long standing, that “get us.”
When my brother and I were kids, it was a fact that sometimes we found ourselves more enthusiastic about our pillows than our classrooms. Yes, strange but true. On such days as he found it difficult to get us out of bed, dad would take out his Switched-On Bach album (then credited to Walter Carlos), put it on the HiFi, and turn up the volume as loud as it would go – playing the Brandenberg Concerto.
Such a rousing piece of music, very much enhanced by the early Moog synthesizer and a liberal, bracing sense of experimentation, was difficult to sleep through. Challenging, too, for me in partiuclar, was dad’s habit of following this wake-up call by picking up my whole leg by the big toe (for temperature regulation, I used to sleep with one foot or even an entire leg out from under the covers) and SHAKING IT.
“UP AND AT ‘EM!” he’d bluster, sometimes even being so bitterly cruel as to take our covers away. A terrible thing, just when you’ve got both the protection of a cover and the temperature regulation of the bare leg. He loused up a delicate balance, mean thing that he was. And the music was a challenge to ignore, even without the disruptions to bed-snuggling.
Sigh.
Meanwhile, the Moog hurtled through the massive music, shaking the walls, probably alerting every neighbor for a five-house radius that The Major Kids were having a hard time getting out of bed again. We did like the raucous, rousing music, but not always its timing.
Of course, forty years on, and dad having died nearly twelve years ago now, that recording – those memories and associations – mean something entirely different, and, oddly enough, it’s possible to curl down into the sweeping sound of synthesized Bach in a whole different way. It’ll never be so soft as to be cozy, but the music and the memory can wrap you up quite completely – and, especially when it gets to that triumphal bombast, the intentionally-emotional part, the mental image of dad WHISTLING this music (a recording my brother and I have only in our heads now) is engulfing and heartbreaking and wonderful all at once.
We miss him so much, yet the gratitude that we got the dad we did is always there. He could hardly have planned a better remembrance for himself. Classical music but a modern, almost scientific experimentalism, chest-swelling triumph, and a pair of kids he invested all his heart and mind into raising, loving him and each other and not sunk into mourning.
Sadness done right DOES feel good. Even when it makes you all blubbery.
But today there was a moment where the DJ asked his co-host or whatever, “What’s your saddest song?” and went onto a tangent “It’s supposed to make you feel good – but hearing sad songs doesn’t make me feel GOOD, it makes me all blubbery!”
My saddest song was very definitely not written sad in its day, nor is the particular version that makes me weep performed and recorded in a tearjerker style, but the things in life that generate our most powerful emotions are rarely ever those pieces of art and entertainment specifically designed to engender reactions. Sure, a good tearjerker of a movie gets me gooey, but the emotion tends to be fleeting, gone once I change the channel or go to bed or read something funny or talk to another human being. It’s real and personal associations, particularly ones of long standing, that “get us.”
When my brother and I were kids, it was a fact that sometimes we found ourselves more enthusiastic about our pillows than our classrooms. Yes, strange but true. On such days as he found it difficult to get us out of bed, dad would take out his Switched-On Bach album (then credited to Walter Carlos), put it on the HiFi, and turn up the volume as loud as it would go – playing the Brandenberg Concerto.
Such a rousing piece of music, very much enhanced by the early Moog synthesizer and a liberal, bracing sense of experimentation, was difficult to sleep through. Challenging, too, for me in partiuclar, was dad’s habit of following this wake-up call by picking up my whole leg by the big toe (for temperature regulation, I used to sleep with one foot or even an entire leg out from under the covers) and SHAKING IT.
“UP AND AT ‘EM!” he’d bluster, sometimes even being so bitterly cruel as to take our covers away. A terrible thing, just when you’ve got both the protection of a cover and the temperature regulation of the bare leg. He loused up a delicate balance, mean thing that he was. And the music was a challenge to ignore, even without the disruptions to bed-snuggling.
Sigh.
Meanwhile, the Moog hurtled through the massive music, shaking the walls, probably alerting every neighbor for a five-house radius that The Major Kids were having a hard time getting out of bed again. We did like the raucous, rousing music, but not always its timing.
Of course, forty years on, and dad having died nearly twelve years ago now, that recording – those memories and associations – mean something entirely different, and, oddly enough, it’s possible to curl down into the sweeping sound of synthesized Bach in a whole different way. It’ll never be so soft as to be cozy, but the music and the memory can wrap you up quite completely – and, especially when it gets to that triumphal bombast, the intentionally-emotional part, the mental image of dad WHISTLING this music (a recording my brother and I have only in our heads now) is engulfing and heartbreaking and wonderful all at once.
We miss him so much, yet the gratitude that we got the dad we did is always there. He could hardly have planned a better remembrance for himself. Classical music but a modern, almost scientific experimentalism, chest-swelling triumph, and a pair of kids he invested all his heart and mind into raising, loving him and each other and not sunk into mourning.
Sadness done right DOES feel good. Even when it makes you all blubbery.
Monday, November 3, 2014
Agent Oopsy!
"(Q)uivered with gentility" is the dirtiest thing I've read in years that had nothing whatever to do with actual genitals.
Also: I love Janet Reid.
Also: I love Janet Reid.
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Greyface
It's a completely new thing for me (even at ten months on the job) to work for a place that celebrates Hallowe'en in a pretty big way. My office held costume contests and a cube-decorating contest.
In the Things That Don't Happen in Financial Services or Utilities department, we have: this! In the 28 years I've been working, the most I've ever seen anyone "do" Hallowe'en at any job was the time my boss came in wearing "hillbilly teeth" - which he had in for about ten minutes, probably.
So I heard for a week or so how they really do it up, and I thought about what I'd like to do, and I decided to go as a sort of day-wear flapper. Long straight skirt, little skinny belt, cute vintage shoes, that sort of thing.
Then I saw the greyscale couple and realized - hey, I have some theatrical makeup, I could do that.
It was remarkably easy (easier than going white is), and a trick I want to try again so I can do it better. The job I did in half an hour at six o'clock in the morning, as compared to the job I'd do when I was more awake, and with a couple hours to spend on getting ready - I didn't do badly, but I could do it better. (Like matching my neck and shoulders, ahem.)
I did learn this - that makeup on the hands is an extremely tricky thing. I've done it before, but usually not aiming for true opacity, and not using Ben Nye's clown white, which is pigment-intensive to the point it gets on EVERYTHING (hence my job yesterday sort of stopping short of the white sweater, which I had to wear during application - a trick in itself). So my hands did not last well at all, though the manicure worked (silver on the moons, gunmetal grey on the rest).
I also learned that what at night just looks like a cool special effect, in broad daylight really reads more corpselike and creepy. My boss had a real shock-take, and I think I kind of scared one of the other admins, and several folks commented it was gothy or scary or creepy and so on. Worked fine, I mean it's Hallowe'en. But I could have gone easier on the dark eye, and the constraints of work clothes sort of buried the lede - the "flapper" part of the look - and I'd like to try to put my best effort in on this look.
What'd you do for Hallowe'en? I know of an Indy, a Maleficent, a witch, one of my trick-or-treaters had the single best gore makeup I've ever seen, and at work we had a Superman, a deviled egg, and an entire team playing out the worst fears from Shark Week ... Tell me more!
In the Things That Don't Happen in Financial Services or Utilities department, we have: this! In the 28 years I've been working, the most I've ever seen anyone "do" Hallowe'en at any job was the time my boss came in wearing "hillbilly teeth" - which he had in for about ten minutes, probably.
So I heard for a week or so how they really do it up, and I thought about what I'd like to do, and I decided to go as a sort of day-wear flapper. Long straight skirt, little skinny belt, cute vintage shoes, that sort of thing.
Then I saw the greyscale couple and realized - hey, I have some theatrical makeup, I could do that.
It was remarkably easy (easier than going white is), and a trick I want to try again so I can do it better. The job I did in half an hour at six o'clock in the morning, as compared to the job I'd do when I was more awake, and with a couple hours to spend on getting ready - I didn't do badly, but I could do it better. (Like matching my neck and shoulders, ahem.)
I did learn this - that makeup on the hands is an extremely tricky thing. I've done it before, but usually not aiming for true opacity, and not using Ben Nye's clown white, which is pigment-intensive to the point it gets on EVERYTHING (hence my job yesterday sort of stopping short of the white sweater, which I had to wear during application - a trick in itself). So my hands did not last well at all, though the manicure worked (silver on the moons, gunmetal grey on the rest).
I also learned that what at night just looks like a cool special effect, in broad daylight really reads more corpselike and creepy. My boss had a real shock-take, and I think I kind of scared one of the other admins, and several folks commented it was gothy or scary or creepy and so on. Worked fine, I mean it's Hallowe'en. But I could have gone easier on the dark eye, and the constraints of work clothes sort of buried the lede - the "flapper" part of the look - and I'd like to try to put my best effort in on this look.
What'd you do for Hallowe'en? I know of an Indy, a Maleficent, a witch, one of my trick-or-treaters had the single best gore makeup I've ever seen, and at work we had a Superman, a deviled egg, and an entire team playing out the worst fears from Shark Week ... Tell me more!
Random ... NESS
So, I give my pets a whole lotta nicknames. It's not like they connect any name with some sense of identity in any case - so I just count on them recognizing "eat", "treat", "come" and so on, and know the rest is pretty much for me.
In this house, the pets are their own essences. So Gossamer is The Goss-ness. Before him, Smikey the cat was Smike-ness. Siddy was Sidness.
Now. Let us all speculate.
Why is it Penelope does not get this treatment ... ?
In this house, the pets are their own essences. So Gossamer is The Goss-ness. Before him, Smikey the cat was Smike-ness. Siddy was Sidness.
Now. Let us all speculate.
Why is it Penelope does not get this treatment ... ?
Thursday, October 30, 2014
The KID
"You don't see what I see."
Today, talking with a woman I've worked with for a while now, but never had the privilege to meet face-to-face, she said this to me as we were talking about how we each aged, and our general sense of self. It was by no means a Meep and Deaningful, but it was certainly an insightful conversation. We were just discussing how we get along well with one another, and sometimes have a harder time with others.
It's easy for me to forget that my apparent personality (it's not a put-on, but it's by no means all there is to me, my general demeanor) gets in other people's way, and this is not what they see ...
See now, for ALL of us - we don't forget our Liddle Kid inside. We scarcely remember we are anything else, some days: but nobody else sees the Liddle Kid. Most of us get taken at face value all day long, day in and day out, to the point where an objective view of how we seem to others is all but impossible - because WE know our own past, our insecurities, those things we don't share, or try not to, all the sausage-making of the daily process of being amongst others (yes, even if only online).
I often have to contend with the fact that people find me "intense" and a very strong personality. From the inside, not only is there that little overexposed tot half hiding behind a shoulder and one knee, but there's also the simple fact that, being comfortable in my apparently-tough skin, the experience of wearing it is pretty chill overall. Being myself didn't come easily, but it's also the only option I've ever entertained, so it's not a hectic feeling, containing my exuberance, my volume, all the "intense" things-and-stuff that go into making Diane. I may joke about faking it till you make it - and I make no bones about how carefully calibrated my visible behavior is - but there's no pretense in the calibration, and whatever manipulation is involved is generally, as I say in all seriousness, the passive-aggression I employ in order to get my job done. When I say "if there is anything I may do or provide" to get X or Y done or delivered at my job, it's both a way of requesting clarity and trying to get balls in play that may not be in my court at some given moment. It also is a highly effective phrase, assuming onus instead of throwing it around. (You'd be amazed how frequently people go, "Oh, look! Some onus! I think I'm going to take that on myself!" - seriously, it's astounding.)
But for all the refined calibration and arch posing, the kid up there is LISTENING to the performance coming out of her own galdarned middle-aged mouth, and just marveling at how totally believable it all sounds. And realizing - you know what, there's reason to believe.
All this is to say ... this week at my job has been pretty great. Not 100% easy, and not without irritations. But a series of events that all seem to underline how grateful I am to *have* said job, to work with those I do - and to have met a wide swath of my team at last.
At moments - that kid came gibbering dangerously toward the fore. But nobody seems to have seen her. Overall, I came off as I usually do - competent, perhaps a bit strong - and, crucially, *competent*.
So, after several days with huge chunks of OT, I'm looking forward to a bit of celebratory fun tomorrow, at my first job ever where apparently Hallowe'en is seriously celebrated. And an afternoon off. I'll take photos of my costume and share them here, if I get a good shot.
Even with half a work day still to go, I'm enjoying the weekend already. Hope you will get to as well!
Today, talking with a woman I've worked with for a while now, but never had the privilege to meet face-to-face, she said this to me as we were talking about how we each aged, and our general sense of self. It was by no means a Meep and Deaningful, but it was certainly an insightful conversation. We were just discussing how we get along well with one another, and sometimes have a harder time with others.
It's easy for me to forget that my apparent personality (it's not a put-on, but it's by no means all there is to me, my general demeanor) gets in other people's way, and this is not what they see ...
See now, for ALL of us - we don't forget our Liddle Kid inside. We scarcely remember we are anything else, some days: but nobody else sees the Liddle Kid. Most of us get taken at face value all day long, day in and day out, to the point where an objective view of how we seem to others is all but impossible - because WE know our own past, our insecurities, those things we don't share, or try not to, all the sausage-making of the daily process of being amongst others (yes, even if only online).
I often have to contend with the fact that people find me "intense" and a very strong personality. From the inside, not only is there that little overexposed tot half hiding behind a shoulder and one knee, but there's also the simple fact that, being comfortable in my apparently-tough skin, the experience of wearing it is pretty chill overall. Being myself didn't come easily, but it's also the only option I've ever entertained, so it's not a hectic feeling, containing my exuberance, my volume, all the "intense" things-and-stuff that go into making Diane. I may joke about faking it till you make it - and I make no bones about how carefully calibrated my visible behavior is - but there's no pretense in the calibration, and whatever manipulation is involved is generally, as I say in all seriousness, the passive-aggression I employ in order to get my job done. When I say "if there is anything I may do or provide" to get X or Y done or delivered at my job, it's both a way of requesting clarity and trying to get balls in play that may not be in my court at some given moment. It also is a highly effective phrase, assuming onus instead of throwing it around. (You'd be amazed how frequently people go, "Oh, look! Some onus! I think I'm going to take that on myself!" - seriously, it's astounding.)
But for all the refined calibration and arch posing, the kid up there is LISTENING to the performance coming out of her own galdarned middle-aged mouth, and just marveling at how totally believable it all sounds. And realizing - you know what, there's reason to believe.
All this is to say ... this week at my job has been pretty great. Not 100% easy, and not without irritations. But a series of events that all seem to underline how grateful I am to *have* said job, to work with those I do - and to have met a wide swath of my team at last.
At moments - that kid came gibbering dangerously toward the fore. But nobody seems to have seen her. Overall, I came off as I usually do - competent, perhaps a bit strong - and, crucially, *competent*.
So, after several days with huge chunks of OT, I'm looking forward to a bit of celebratory fun tomorrow, at my first job ever where apparently Hallowe'en is seriously celebrated. And an afternoon off. I'll take photos of my costume and share them here, if I get a good shot.
Even with half a work day still to go, I'm enjoying the weekend already. Hope you will get to as well!
Not Being John Malkovich
Sandro Miller has teamed as a photographer with John Malkovich as model, to recreate some of the most disturbing, affecting, and enduring photographs in history. I think the aim was true here, the images are an engrossing mix, and there's little that feels parodic (a feat, considering that Malkovich appears as Marilyn Monroe at least twice).
The Dorothea Lange is a standout in its own right and as homage. The Einstein is almost indistinguishable from the original!
Not to go all rarefied-arty-talk or anything, but the dialogue between these images and the original portraits is definitely arresting. Worth a look even if you DO find these parodic. There's value in that as well.
The Dorothea Lange is a standout in its own right and as homage. The Einstein is almost indistinguishable from the original!
Not to go all rarefied-arty-talk or anything, but the dialogue between these images and the original portraits is definitely arresting. Worth a look even if you DO find these parodic. There's value in that as well.
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Collection
Today was about an eleven hour day at work, and tomorrow should be about the same, but I could not resist sharing two links from my daily reading.
First, the HB interviews Brian Willson of Three Islands Press font design. (Worth the side trip of a separate click: Janet Stephens' historical hair designs, but I've posted her before, so back to the subject at hand.) Willson creates historical handwriting fonts. How enchanting!
Next, take a look at Elizabeth Chadwick's possibly-Elizabethan chair, which is art, furniture, artifact, and a tantalizing clue to an architectural aspect of English ecclesiastical history. If I weren't about to go to bed, I'd be researching Victorian restorations right now to see if the "junk" heirloom might have come from one of these refurbishments. But I am probably late to sign off and get ready for bed as it is, so will leave you all to it!
First, the HB interviews Brian Willson of Three Islands Press font design. (Worth the side trip of a separate click: Janet Stephens' historical hair designs, but I've posted her before, so back to the subject at hand.) Willson creates historical handwriting fonts. How enchanting!
Next, take a look at Elizabeth Chadwick's possibly-Elizabethan chair, which is art, furniture, artifact, and a tantalizing clue to an architectural aspect of English ecclesiastical history. If I weren't about to go to bed, I'd be researching Victorian restorations right now to see if the "junk" heirloom might have come from one of these refurbishments. But I am probably late to sign off and get ready for bed as it is, so will leave you all to it!
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
T-Minus Seven Minutes ...
... I've got the binoculars out tonight. It'll be interesting to see how tonight's launch compares to last night's!
6 minutes after liftoff, no visual. Supsect too much cloud cover, it's a hazy, hot summer night in these parts. (Which: ridiculous.)
Verdict: last night's launch was better.
Still. Watching a rocket take off on my laptop WHILE watching the skies for its trajectory - that's pretty space-age, and seeing the sight again after as many years as it's been since we used to gather and watch a rocket (or the Shuttle) take off brings back good memories.
6 minutes after liftoff, no visual. Supsect too much cloud cover, it's a hazy, hot summer night in these parts. (Which: ridiculous.)
Verdict: last night's launch was better.
Still. Watching a rocket take off on my laptop WHILE watching the skies for its trajectory - that's pretty space-age, and seeing the sight again after as many years as it's been since we used to gather and watch a rocket (or the Shuttle) take off brings back good memories.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Lunatic with the Vote?
And, following on the heels of the rather unsettling implications of the last post, it may be less than exciting for anyone to realize - I plan to vote next Tuesday.
But, see: I found someone I really want to vote FOR ...
But, see: I found someone I really want to vote FOR ...
Wallop Rocket
I just stood in my back yard and watched a rocket take flight over Virginia. Kind of exciting, for reasons beyond the tiny, bright light in the twilight sky - and I am kicking myself for not taking my binoculars outside.
Once I saw it, though - no question of going inside and missing a moment. It was just neato-spedito, to use the term of excitement popularized by my bro closer to a certain moon landing I caught as an infant, but don't properly recall.
On the phone with my mom waiting for something to appear, she and I were frustrated by multiple airplanes - but, once I did see it, there was no mistaking the tiny, but unmistakably vastly distant, fiery light in the sky. Smaller than a plane, but more vivid, and with the barest visible (for my eyes, not what they once were) trail of light.
As it arced from the south in what may have been a curved trajectory eastward and away from the Earth, the steady light appeared in the minutest way to flicker - from the puny vantage point of a woman in a backyard, it looked like it was turning away and perhaps the irregularity of its afterburners "face on" (or bum on, more like) allowed the intensity of the faraway fire to show its dim, distant flares from the different angle.
The speeding star of light started out farther south than I expected to see it, my catching it when I did was almost by chance. Its distance was impossible to quantify in description, but this light was clearly not on a plane with the planes; something ineffable communicated that it was very far off - and its speed was clear, given that.
It stayed bright for a minute, but once it took its turn, fairly close to my own parallel, for the east, it diminished VERY quickly. Even the flaring light that appeared at this point shrunk in my vision bewilderingly fast.
Dad would have enjoyed this. We'd have come inside and maybe had popcorn - or made it and taken it out with us. Or chocolate pudding.
Mom and her neighbors didn't really see it, it sounded like, but I'm happy I got to.
***
Here is the really amazing thing about the whole event, though. I came inside, pulled up this post, wrote it, and even put the link in above ... before I finally went to the NASA Wallops Island site and decided to look at footage or images or the story.
And the launch was scrubbed for tonight. Ten minutes before the 6:45 Eastern liftoff, the thing was canceled.
It didn't happen.
***
Very recently, I learned something in my life that is profoundly and deeply important, which I appear to have blocked out completely.
Tonight, I witnessed something that didn't happen.
The power of the human brain can be breathtaking and beautiful, but its power to do crap like this is seriously disturbing. I wanted to tell my brother, my nieces all about this. I did tell my mom.
And it never happened.
I'm not persuaded I'm losing my mind, but am open to the possibility I"m alone there.
Once I saw it, though - no question of going inside and missing a moment. It was just neato-spedito, to use the term of excitement popularized by my bro closer to a certain moon landing I caught as an infant, but don't properly recall.
On the phone with my mom waiting for something to appear, she and I were frustrated by multiple airplanes - but, once I did see it, there was no mistaking the tiny, but unmistakably vastly distant, fiery light in the sky. Smaller than a plane, but more vivid, and with the barest visible (for my eyes, not what they once were) trail of light.
As it arced from the south in what may have been a curved trajectory eastward and away from the Earth, the steady light appeared in the minutest way to flicker - from the puny vantage point of a woman in a backyard, it looked like it was turning away and perhaps the irregularity of its afterburners "face on" (or bum on, more like) allowed the intensity of the faraway fire to show its dim, distant flares from the different angle.
The speeding star of light started out farther south than I expected to see it, my catching it when I did was almost by chance. Its distance was impossible to quantify in description, but this light was clearly not on a plane with the planes; something ineffable communicated that it was very far off - and its speed was clear, given that.
It stayed bright for a minute, but once it took its turn, fairly close to my own parallel, for the east, it diminished VERY quickly. Even the flaring light that appeared at this point shrunk in my vision bewilderingly fast.
Dad would have enjoyed this. We'd have come inside and maybe had popcorn - or made it and taken it out with us. Or chocolate pudding.
Mom and her neighbors didn't really see it, it sounded like, but I'm happy I got to.
***
Here is the really amazing thing about the whole event, though. I came inside, pulled up this post, wrote it, and even put the link in above ... before I finally went to the NASA Wallops Island site and decided to look at footage or images or the story.
And the launch was scrubbed for tonight. Ten minutes before the 6:45 Eastern liftoff, the thing was canceled.
It didn't happen.
***
Very recently, I learned something in my life that is profoundly and deeply important, which I appear to have blocked out completely.
Tonight, I witnessed something that didn't happen.
The power of the human brain can be breathtaking and beautiful, but its power to do crap like this is seriously disturbing. I wanted to tell my brother, my nieces all about this. I did tell my mom.
And it never happened.
I'm not persuaded I'm losing my mind, but am open to the possibility I"m alone there.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Reasearch is Funny
It can be odd, the things you find yourself having to research as a historical fiction author (or the things you just want to research, whethery they have a place in a manuscript or not – research can be a labyrinth of rabbit holes teeming with plot bunnies). Reading up on pattern welded steel swordmaking, brickmaking and architecture, and horse breeding/horseshoes is one thing, but then you find yourself needing to answer the question of whether and what type of scissors may have existed in your period, and confounded as to what exactly such tools might have looked like in use – not as artifacts, but as a part of regimens of toilette long lost to history, because they were *not* historical, and not recorded.
I know that Clovis was one of the reges criniti, the Long-Haired Kings, and I know from grave goods that Franks and so-called barbarians (get a load of the Swabian knot) took meticulous care of their hair and hygeine, even if without suds and “product”. What I don’t know is what the *ritual* looked like. I feel safe in assuming the king had body slaves, that this was not self-administered primping such as I indulge in the morning at my pretty little vanity table. Though there once were scenes of Clovis’ mother, Queen Basina, tending to his hair almost as if it were his power and ambition itself, those are gone – and I cannot say I know that such “service” and personal interaction would align with the real picture of a Frankish queen and the familial interactions of the time. I used the time spent thus to develop the difficult relationship of queen and prince, mother and son, and to draw in broad strokes the character of a woman Clovis wants nothing more than to shed, yet whose influence upon him was at least as powerful – if not moreso – than his father, Childeric.
It is possible that the court of the time was sophisticated and rarefied enough the idea of this kind of tending and touching would have been unthinkable. Yet this sort of maternal “indoctrination” feels authentic to me in a way that, as an author, I just beg off further research and write the story – because, sooner or later, *that* is the point, and (as we have noted before) I am NOT a(n) historian. This is the limit of my responsibility, and my writing is always couched in service to the story above authenticity.
This is not to say I want to have Theodoric nattering away, say, while getting a haircut and receiving dignitaries; or to portray childbirth with willful inaccuracy – which is where those damned bunnies start hopping, and I find my prodigious ass lodged in a burrow too small for my ambitions, and get stuck.
As one of the more irresistibly charming agents I’ve met along my journey so far has insisted, I need to have food in the kitchen and furniture in the rooms. I also need to know when to stop describing every stick of it, and when the recipes are not required.
One of the truisms of historical fiction and other authors working with much research must keep in mind is that research is like an iceberg. Of the mass of what we learn along the way, really only the smallest tip should show itself; the rest is just what we need to gain authority in a period or world we’re building, unseen by any but us as we build it. “Your research is showing” is a dreadful reminder that “show, don’t tell” has limitations.
It may be this that creates the sort of odd dissonance (resonance) between what we look into and what we end up writing. In a way, the tension can be interesting. Mostly, it makes you giddy as a writer – what to do, where to go? You kind of turn into a rabbit yourself, or at least The March Hare, a bit frayed, a bit at loose ends, learning and then having to be your own arbiter: “What, of what I have learned, should I share?”
I think most of us simultaneously love this part – and hate its implications. There can be so much inspiration, yet not all of it is part of The Story … and we are, all of us, in service to The Story …
I know that Clovis was one of the reges criniti, the Long-Haired Kings, and I know from grave goods that Franks and so-called barbarians (get a load of the Swabian knot) took meticulous care of their hair and hygeine, even if without suds and “product”. What I don’t know is what the *ritual* looked like. I feel safe in assuming the king had body slaves, that this was not self-administered primping such as I indulge in the morning at my pretty little vanity table. Though there once were scenes of Clovis’ mother, Queen Basina, tending to his hair almost as if it were his power and ambition itself, those are gone – and I cannot say I know that such “service” and personal interaction would align with the real picture of a Frankish queen and the familial interactions of the time. I used the time spent thus to develop the difficult relationship of queen and prince, mother and son, and to draw in broad strokes the character of a woman Clovis wants nothing more than to shed, yet whose influence upon him was at least as powerful – if not moreso – than his father, Childeric.
It is possible that the court of the time was sophisticated and rarefied enough the idea of this kind of tending and touching would have been unthinkable. Yet this sort of maternal “indoctrination” feels authentic to me in a way that, as an author, I just beg off further research and write the story – because, sooner or later, *that* is the point, and (as we have noted before) I am NOT a(n) historian. This is the limit of my responsibility, and my writing is always couched in service to the story above authenticity.
This is not to say I want to have Theodoric nattering away, say, while getting a haircut and receiving dignitaries; or to portray childbirth with willful inaccuracy – which is where those damned bunnies start hopping, and I find my prodigious ass lodged in a burrow too small for my ambitions, and get stuck.
As one of the more irresistibly charming agents I’ve met along my journey so far has insisted, I need to have food in the kitchen and furniture in the rooms. I also need to know when to stop describing every stick of it, and when the recipes are not required.
One of the truisms of historical fiction and other authors working with much research must keep in mind is that research is like an iceberg. Of the mass of what we learn along the way, really only the smallest tip should show itself; the rest is just what we need to gain authority in a period or world we’re building, unseen by any but us as we build it. “Your research is showing” is a dreadful reminder that “show, don’t tell” has limitations.
It may be this that creates the sort of odd dissonance (resonance) between what we look into and what we end up writing. In a way, the tension can be interesting. Mostly, it makes you giddy as a writer – what to do, where to go? You kind of turn into a rabbit yourself, or at least The March Hare, a bit frayed, a bit at loose ends, learning and then having to be your own arbiter: “What, of what I have learned, should I share?”
I think most of us simultaneously love this part – and hate its implications. There can be so much inspiration, yet not all of it is part of The Story … and we are, all of us, in service to The Story …
Collection
The History Girls take a long look at a mural and ask, "Who IS that crowned man?" The answers are scholastically engaging, and the list of other answers tells us so much about the eyes of the beholders.
Gary Corby has an answer about another, more ancient piece of art - it was Persephone.
I found out this week someone I work with is a writer as well. Who could resist "Nobody Craves Celery" (so to speak)? I can't. Bookmarked, perused, approved.
And, finally, please enjoy this charmingly odd, sweet clip inspired by The Rochester Bestiary. Not your typical interneTV, this.
Gary Corby has an answer about another, more ancient piece of art - it was Persephone.
I found out this week someone I work with is a writer as well. Who could resist "Nobody Craves Celery" (so to speak)? I can't. Bookmarked, perused, approved.
And, finally, please enjoy this charmingly odd, sweet clip inspired by The Rochester Bestiary. Not your typical interneTV, this.
Friday, October 24, 2014
Collection
Just two mourning posts today. I've got a post archived, but this just is not the time.
For anyone in reach, the Met has an exhibition of mourning gowns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I would love to see this, but though I'm on the correct coast, "in reach" just now has a proportion that keeps this event off my social calendar.
Pour La Victoire, always meticulous and fascinating, with copious detail photos, also has a look at just one mourning gown, but a fascinating look it is. In this case, too, the comments add to the post. Take a look at a rare and endangered silk dress, circa 1867.
For anyone in reach, the Met has an exhibition of mourning gowns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I would love to see this, but though I'm on the correct coast, "in reach" just now has a proportion that keeps this event off my social calendar.
Pour La Victoire, always meticulous and fascinating, with copious detail photos, also has a look at just one mourning gown, but a fascinating look it is. In this case, too, the comments add to the post. Take a look at a rare and endangered silk dress, circa 1867.
Shootings
Another human tragedy today. Someone at work said, "What is WRONG with the world?"
Same thing that's always been wrong with it. We let everyone in.
Same thing that's always been wrong with it. We let everyone in.
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