Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in susansugarspun's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Monday, July 6th, 2009
1:55 pm	Shakespeare in the Park Even though vacation usually means you can sleep in, I woke up at some crazy hour — earlier than I normally wake up for work! — so that I could go sit in Central Park all morning, in the hopes of getting tickets to see Twelfth Night.  Unless you can pay the $170/person for “summer supporter” reserved seats, this is how you get tickets to Shakespeare in the Park. I joined the line at around seven in the morning, and it was already huge.  The people at the head of the line had clearly been there all night; one group even had inflatable air mattresses.  Around eight-thirty, one of the women sitting near me in the line took a walk up to the ticket office and back.  By her count, there were four hundred and fifteen people ahead of us on line.  We started doing some math.  There are about 1800 seats in the theater.  People waiting in line can only get a maximum of two tickets per person, so the 415 people ahead of us could account for no more than 830 tickets.  There were a handful of senior citizens in a separate line that we hadn’t counted, but it didn’t seem likely that there would be more than thirty or forty of them.  Some number of tickets go to the online ticket lottery, and some to the distribution points in the boroughs, and a bunch to corporate sponsors and summer supporters.  Still, we felt hopeful. A little after nine, a staff member from the theater came around making announcements.  He said that our chances of getting tickets were iffy, but it was definitely possible.  (”If you’re going to scream and complain if you don’t get tickets, though, you should just go home now and save us all the trouble.  We can’t make any promises.”)  Two hundred feet back, he started telling people that they might as well go home, but most of them chose to stay anyway. Even with my ticket chances officially pronounced “iffy”, I didn’t mind staying.  It was a gorgeous day to be hanging out in the park.  I had somewhere grassy and shady to sit, I had a lot of good reading, and I even had pleasant company.  (One of the women sitting near me, as it turns out, just finished a Ph.D. in history of science.  Weird coincidences abound.) Ticket distribution officially starts at 1pm.  At around quarter of, everyone started packing up their blankets and chairs, and eventually the line started moving. This is a picture of the line as it extended -behind- where I was standing.  It just kept going, and going, and going.  I had been feeling pretty zen about the whole experience–I would love to see the show, but if it didn’t work, it didn’t work, and I still had a nice morning–but the closer we got to the ticket window, the more anxious I started to get.  If you just don’t get anywhere near the distribution before they run out, that’s one thing.  But what if you get close?  What if you don’t get a ticket, but you -could- have gotten a ticket if you’d just walked a little faster from the subway?  Or if you hadn’t taken five minutes to figure out how to find the theater once you entered the park?  That would be sort of horrible. This isn’t one of those happy-ending stories.  They ran out of tickets well before I got to the window, and the last person to get a ticket joined the line about forty-five minutes before I did.  And, well, I’m not going to pretend I’m not disappointed, because Twelfth Night closes next weekend and I don’t know that I’ll be able to try for tickets again this week.  But at the risk of sounding repetitive, I had a really great morning, even if it didn’t end with play tickets. Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Sunday, July 5th, 2009
12:28 pm	bored now. I feel like this is the kind of thing I shouldn’t admit, but honestly, I’m in kind of a reading slump where science fiction is concerned. You know those moments where you’re casting about for something to read?  It used to be that my first impulse in those moments was always towards the science fiction or fantasy reading, and that isn’t true anymore.  When I’m in a bookstore, I give the SF section a cursory once-over, but the history and mystery and general non-fiction sections are where I’m spending most of my time. As far as the bookstore side of things goes, it’s really a feeling of mental exhaustion.  There’s one moment that stands out very clearly for me: I was on a trip last winter, and burning through my reading material a little faster than expected, so I stopped at a Barnes and Noble to pick up another book or two.  I stood there, looking at the SF/F New Releases bay, and just became tired of the whole thing.  I remember just staring at the cover of some anthology from Baen, the cover of which prominently featured a big cat holding a machine gun, and trying to figure out why I’ve spent so much time and energy being interested in this industry. Ever since then, whenever I look at the science fiction section in a bookstore, I’m practically not even seeing individual books.  The shelves just look like a blur of fantasy forests and space armor and leather-clad women’s butts. The worst part of this is, I know that I’m being unfair!  I’m being totally unfair.  When I do manage to rummage up the interest in sf/f books, I still love them.  I read Alaya Dawn Johnson’s Racing the Dark recently and adored it.  The first three chapters of Greg van Eekhout’s Norse Code were awesome and have me absolutely wanting to read the rest.  (Soon!  I’ll buy it soon, Greg!)  And Shelter!  Oh, my god, Susan Palwick’s Shelter was hands-down one of the best books I’ve read in years.  So it’s not that I’m not capable of enjoying the genre.  I just don’t have the level of interest that I used to. Which brings me to another symptom: my stack of unread digest magazines.  I’ve had a subscription to Asimov’s since I was in high school, and a subscription to F&SF for almost as long.  I used to read them cover-to-cover, usually within days of when they arrived.  This is no longer true.  The magazines still show up every month at my house (well, almost every month–the mail delivery is a little dicey in Brooklyn sometimes), but I haven’t read one in well over a year.  Probably closer to two.  (See, this is absolutely the kind of thing I think I’m not supposed to admit.)  It’s really not that I have any problem with short fiction.  I’m still finding plenty of things in the Strange Horizons incoming submissions that I enjoy reading.  (That’s half of what’s so weird about this bored-with-SF situation, for me.  I work for a science fiction magazine! And I love what we’re publishing!  So how does it even make sense that I’m bored with the genre?)  I’ve just developed this weird mental block about reading the digests–it feels like the same mental exhaustion from the bookstore.  I look at this stack of magazines and think, eh, why bother. (See previous statement re: unfair! I’m being totally unfair.) The magazines problem has gotten to the point where I’m not sure I’ll renew my subscriptions.  Just saying that feels a little bit like crazy talk–I have such a history with reading these magazines!  I have shelf after shelf of archived issues in my office!  How on earth could I not renew?  But if I’m not -reading- them, what’s the point?  So here’s the plan: I’m going to work through my backlog, starting with the January 2008 issues, and see how I feel about them. In the meantime, does anyone have any good SF/F book recommendations for me?  It’s maybe a tough question, in light of all the discussion about how I’m finding the genre boring, but y’all like a challenge, right?  (You also gave me excellent suggestions on the mystery novels a few months ago–I’ve burned through most of Linda Barnes and Donna Andrews’s series, and loved them.)  What should I read to get me un-bored? Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Friday, June 19th, 2009
2:58 pm	hello, northside. Oh, I know I’ve been absent from the blog.  It’s not just the blog.  I’ve been absent from everything.  There was the school year, all that grading to be done, and then WisCon, and then I went to Colorado to grade AP exams, and then the end of the school year, including even more grading, and then graduation, and then I think I slept for about a week. One nice thing about summer vacation, so far, is that I’m rediscovering my neighborhood.  It’s a great time of year to do that–on Saturdays, Bedford is closed to cars, as part of the Williamsburg Walks program.  We’ve been getting visits from the fancy ice cream truck, too, and there’s finally something other than root vegetables at the McCarren Park Greenmarket. Even better, last weekend was the Northside Festival.  Four days of music, art, and related events, all within about a mile of my apartment.  The furthest we had to travel was up to Greenpoint for a Bishop Allen show, but most of what we saw was within just a few blocks.  (Including the Hold Steady! Who put on a fabulous show, despite the audience’s inexplicable tendency to throw half-full cups of beer around!)  The best surprise of the weekend, though, was the benefit for the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls.  I think we were expecting, I don’t know, performances by alumne or supporters.  What we were definitely not expecting to see were a bunch of ten-year-old girls totally rocking out in the back room of the Lovin’ Cup Cafe.  I’m completely serious about this–we saw one group of pre-teen girls who were better performers (in terms of both stage presence and musical skill) than at least one or two of the other bands we saw during the Northside Festival. Music festivals and gourmet ice cream aside, though, I’m just enjoying the day-to-day of my neighborhood.  It’s almost a full year since we moved, and I feel at home here.  So that’s something. Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Monday, March 9th, 2009
8:51 am	frames of reference. For what it’s worth, I don’t actually think that it’s fair to characterize this whole “RaceFail” situation as a fight.  It has aspects that contain fighting, this is undoubtedly true.  But I think that pleas for people to just stop fighting, or dismissals of the whole thing as a crazy internet mess, are missing something important.  To try and clarify, I’m going to try and draw a parallel to another situation in the SF community: the Harlan Ellison thing. Calling it “the Harlan Ellison thing” is unfortunate, for reasons that I hope will soon become clear, but that’s what we’re stuck with.  The Harlan Ellison thing started at the 2006 WorldCon, when Ellison “jokingly” assaulted Connie Willis during the Hugo Award ceremony.  As news of the event filtered out into the webjournals and weblogs and message boards, it led to a huge outpouring of anger and frustration and ranting, largely from the women in the science fiction community.   This was, as far as I can tell, baffling and a little frightening to a largish part of the old guard.  “That’s Harlan, what can you expect?” some of them said.  Or, “That’s just Harlan being Harlan.”  As the days went on and the outflow of anger and frustration and ranting seemed to have no end, you started to see people asking a different question: “Isn’t this reaction a little out of proportion?  It’s not like Harlan is the devil, you know.  One guy did one dumb thing, can everyone calm the hell down already?” That was the point where I wanted to start shouting at people, because whatever was going on, it wasn’t actually about Harlan.  Or, more precisely, it wasn’t only about Harlan, not by a long shot.  If what you thought you were seeing was a whole bunch of people flipping out because one guy did one dumb thing, then yeah, the reaction was out of proportion and everyone should have just taken a deep breath and calmed the hell down.  But that wasn’t what was going on.  Here’s what was going on: the women in the SF world had been putting up with a lot of unacceptable nonsense for a really long time.  Each of our individual stories, each small stupid thing, didn’t seem worth making a fuss over.   Who wants to be the one who makes a fuss, right?  So some well-respected pro author grabbed your butt at a party, is that really serious enough to complain about?  Do you really want to cause a big scene just because some guy in your writing workshop said that women don’t write hard SF even though you know he just finished reading your story about quantum computing?  You do realize, don’t you, that people will think you’re difficult if you complain just because some guy at a convention told you that you’re too pretty to be a science fiction fan.  And so we’d all been keeping our damn mouths shut for years, while the anger and irritation and frustration just simmered away beneath the surface.  What Harlan did when he treated Connie that way, on stage in front of hundreds of people?  He didn’t just insult her and upset a lot of people.  He unlocked the door to that hidden storage closet where we’d all been keeping our outrage.  That’s why it wasn’t about Harlan–it was about the whole community.  It was about the fact that so many women felt that the SF world was hostile territory, and finally we were all talking about it openly. I don’t know that there’s actually a clear parallel between that situation and the current one, but I think there probably is.  From what I can tell, this whole “RaceFail” situation isn’t really (or only) about any specific incident.  It’s about the fact that so many people of color feel that the SF world is hostile territory.  They’re trying to talk about this, openly and honestly, and too many people are interrupting or not listening or otherwise behaving poorly.  And that’s what I mean when I say it’s not a fight, at least not anymore–it’s a complicated conversation that was maybe started as a fight and has certainly contained some fights, but by this point it’s a lot more than a fight. The people who are actually having this conversation are, undoubtedly, getting a lot of different things out of it, and I don’t presume to make broad statements on behalf of a group that I haven’t even managed to be a part of.  All I’m saying is, everyone who’s tempted to dismiss this as a witch-hunt or a mob (or another stupid blogfight), I would just ask you to try thinking of it as a messy and difficult conversation instead.  (Messy and difficult, but also useful and productive for a lot of the people involved.)  People are talking about things they’ve been needing to talk about, and when you ask them to take a deep breath or take a step back or take it down a notch, you’re telling them to go back to being quiet.  And that’s not acceptable. As I’ve been writing this, I’ve been trying to put “the Harlan thing” into a kind of historical context.  I don’t know if it changed anything signficant or tangible.  I do know that it was really valuable for me, in a personal and perhaps intangible way, to get a lot of that out in the open.  I think a lot of other people found it valuable in the same way.  The science fiction community as a whole might not be any better on gender stuff than it used to be, but I feel like it’s no longer acceptable to claim that there aren’t any problems.  I think RaceFail ‘09 has already accomplished at least that much, and people aren’t even done talking yet. Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Sunday, March 8th, 2009
1:05 pm	things we say and don’t say. I first started working with Strange Horizons in the fall of 2000, not long after I moved to California and started graduate school.  Working with the magazine has changed a lot of things in my life, but the change that was the hardest to come to terms with was the change in the way I relate to the rest of the science fiction community.  It’s been eight and a half years, and it’s still weird to me that strangers try to schmooze me at conventions, but that’s actually the least part of it. Sometime in that first year that I was with SH, I got into an argument with someone.  It was one of those weird petty little blogfights–I made a post about a book that I loved, the other person made a post about the same book, saying that it was terrible, and we said a few snippy things back and forth at each other about what makes for a good or bad book, in the context of this particular book.  At the time it was happening, I don’t think I would even have called it a fight, it was more like some irritated bickering. Totally not a big deal. Except.  Except that this person’s spouse emailed the fiction department at Strange Horizons, withdrawing a submitted story, saying that I had created an environment that made it uncomfortable to have fiction under consideration.  The person and their spouse then started posting on various writers-resource websites, warning writers not to submit to Strange Horizons because of the risk that I would use my position as an editor to attack them.  A whole series of emails were sent back and forth, mostly “what the eff?” on my side and “how dare you” on theirs. I was stunned by the whole thing–these weren’t strangers I knew only online, these were people I considered friends, people I’d spent time with socially.  We’d exchanged birthday presents, I’d been over to their house for dinner, we’d lent each other books.  But it was explained to me, in great detail and at extraordinary length, that the fact that I was an editor at a professional magazine meant that everything I said had to be placed in a professional context. The idea that my “editor” identity overrode any other identity I might have seemed frankly bizarre and more than a little troubling–had their friendship with me also just been about my editor status?  Were they really saying that I couldn’t ever have non-professional relationships with other people in the field? Even years later, I think they were wrong.  They were wrong, they were acting crazy, and they were acting inappropriately.  But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter.  Even if I had done absolutely nothing wrong, it wouldn’t matter.  What mattered was that I put the name and reputation of the magazine at risk.  What mattered was that my public statements and actions were going to be framed by other people in the context of my position at the magazine.  Strange Horizons is, and always has been, dependent on the goodwill of the community–not just financially, although obviously our ability to be donor-supported depends on the goodwill of the community.  If we really want to be a magazine that showcases new voices in the field, if we want to be a welcoming and encouraging home for underrepresented viewpoints in speculative fiction, if we want to live up to our potential as a fabulous, vital, important, and relevant force in science fiction publishing, then we have to be very careful about our public image and public presentation. People who knew me in college knew me as someone who was always willing, often too willing, to get into a fight.  That’s not true anymore.  Part of it is the normal process of becoming a grown-up, right?  But part of it is the realization that my involvement with Strange Horizons means that I do not have the freedom I used to have.  Any stupid fight I might get involved with — and let’s all be very honest about this, the science fiction community is packed full of people who have a hair-trigger for starting stupid fights — carries with it the very real possibility of reflecting back on the magazine, and that’s a risk I’m no longer willing to take.  (This feeling has only intensified as a result of my new job, by the way.  I don’t want anything reflecting back on my school or my professional integrity as a teacher, either.) Over time, this has extended beyond the threat of stupid fights, to the threat of any fights at all.  Whatever is going on, anywhere in the community, I don’t want to get involved.  Whatever “it” is, it isn’t my business, you know?  This position has become such second nature, so ingrained in my behavior that I don’t even really think about it anymore. I’m thinking about it now, though, and I’m becoming kind of disturbed, because this extreme non-involvement feels more than a little bit like cowardice.  Over the last few years, I have bit my tongue and smiled politely when crazy old men said patronizing and sexist things to me. I have waited for someone else to deal with it while friends of mine were insulted and had their professional integrity challenged.  (And, while we’re being honest, I’ve also let friends of mine get away with sloppy reasoning and bad behavior, because it was too much hassle to call them on it, which makes me a bad friend, I think.)  I don’t know that these were all wrong decisions.  I do know that the overall pattern isn’t one I’m comfortable with anymore. * This whole journey of introspection started, for me, with this post.  I’ve been following the whole RaceFail imbroglio from the beginning, with the same mixture of horror (for the stupidness and lack of awareness of some of my colleagues in the SF world) and admiration (for the eloquence and bravery of so many participants) that I think a lot of other people are feeling as well.  There are a lot of reasons why I haven’t gotten involved–I didn’t think that another voice of white privilege would contribute very much, I didn’t think I had anything as smart to say as what other people were already saying, and, of course, I didn’t want to get involved.  But Mely’s closing sentences there felt like a physical blow, and at first I couldn’t understand why.  And then Nora’s post made me actually ashamed of myself, and I started to understand. Staying out of some fights, the stupid petty ego-driven fights, is just basic common sense.  Staying out of other fights, though, is an act of cowardice.  And so I want to apologize to writers and readers and fans of color, and to all of the other people who’ve been fighting this fight rather than sitting on the sidelines, because in my attempt to just stay out of this, I’ve contributed to an environment that makes you feel silenced and marginalized.  This isn’t a stupid fight.  This is a huge and difficult and layered and fraught conversation about things that actually matter, a conversation that’s been punctuated with outbursts of shameful and embarrassing behavior on the part of people who really ought to know better but inexplicably don’t. Anyway.  My point is, brilliant and articulate and fabulous people have been made to feel alone and under siege, and that’s not right.  My silence has been a kind of complicity, and that’s also not right. Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Saturday, March 7th, 2009
9:21 am	well then. This recent post from Ben made me laugh, partly because it’s a conversation I need to have with myself!  So here’s to turning off the internal editor and actually having some conversation.  A few points of interest, to start it off: I recently had the pleasure of participating in a discussion on the New York Times’ “Room for Debate” blog.  The topic was asteroids, “The Lure of Rocks From Outer Space.”  I didn’t realize until after it went live that I was going to be sharing discussion space with Neil deGrasse Tyson!  How cool! Thank you all for the mystery series suggestions!  I’ve been reading a lot of the suggested authors, and while I’m enjoying all of them, I’m totally loving Linda Barnes.  (Except for the bit where one character, noticing that another character has nothing in her kitchen that can be used to cook breakfast, suggests that they go out to Charlie’s Kitchen for breakfast.  But that’s a tiny thing in the middle of a string of really enjoyable books.) Random bullet of consumerism: there’s this new(ish) store in my neighborhood that sells (among other things) Betsey Johnson and Jessica McClintock cocktail dresses for $40-$60.  It’s called Peachfrog, it’s on North 10th between Bedford and Berry.  (I don’t know why I suddenly decided that readers of this blog could use a dress-shopping PSA, but there you have it.) The sun is out, it’s around sixty degrees, and I’m heading out to see Watchmen.  Good weekend so far. Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Monday, January 19th, 2009
3:37 pm	island of snow. Looking out the window, Manhattan is gone–the whole rest of the world is gone, covered in a blanket of snow clouds and fog, and we’re floating on a little island, here in Brooklyn. Today was a quiet day, mixed between working and taking care of myself.  Spent the morning grading while watching Battlestar Galactica, a combination more pleasant than efficient.  Spent the afternoon cooking, making a beef stew that’s still cooking.  We cook pretty often, but usually weeknight-style cooking, toss a spice rub on some chicken breasts and whip up a spicy garlic sauce for some sauteed broccoli, that kind of thing.  The beef stew is a little more time-consuming, the kind of cooking I save for long afternoons like this one.  Meditative cooking. I have three sources for the recipe.  It’s a blend of Mark Bittman’s basic beef stew and my ex-boyfriend’s mother’s recipe, which I think originally sourced from Sunset Magazine anyway.  I also kept the guide to stews that Cooks Illustrated ran a year or so ago, which isn’t a recipe so much as a guide to techniques and equipment.  I prefer the ingredient ratio in Dr. Miller’s recipe–way more carrots and parsnips than Bittman calls for, relative to the amount of beef–but take the cooking process from Bittman, which is mostly validated by Cooks Illustrated.  This is one of those things I find fascinating, the trends in cooking processes.  Who ever thought of brining turkeys ten or fifteen years ago?  That kind of thing.  I’m taking the more modern process, I guess. It starts with the beef, as I suppose beef stew usually does.  Chuck roast, trimmed of fat and cut into cubes, and I was struck as I cut it by how beautiful it seemed.  I usually don’t like dealing with meat when cooking, but FreshDirect sent us some nice chuck, very little fat and a gorgeous deep-ruby color.  Three-and-a-half or four pounds, cut into inch cubes, more or less, and then tossed with some salt and pepper and put back in the refrigerator under plastic wrap while I prep the aromatics.  (Aromatics!  I first saw this term, applied to a category of cooking ingredients, in my favorite Chinese cookbook, bought just after college.  It makes so much sense.)  Three big onions, diced, a few cloves of garlic, a few stalks of celery.  I don’t know if celery properly belongs with the aromatics, but I didn’t want to put it with the vegetables, and I’m resigned to having to include it. Aromatics prepped, the beef comes out of the refrigerator, and browned.  Dr. Miller’s recipe says to toss the beef with flour and spices before browning, but CI says that coating the beef in flour, while traditional, is actually a problem, because it masks uneven browning.  Bittman says you can skip browning altogether, but I like it–I feel like browned beef can get more tender on the inside without falling apart.  The beef gets browned in three batches, each batch removed to a plate to wait once it’s cooked, and then the onion mix goes into the leftover beef fat and sauteed.  And this is where the technique or process question comes into play–Dr. Miller’s recipe says to just drop everything into the pot at this point, onion and vegetables and broth, all together with the browned beef, and cook the whole mess together for three hours.  I think this is typical, or traditional, stewing behavior.  But CI says to saute the aromatics separately, in order to better develop their flavors, and Bittman says the same.  So the onions and garlic and celery go into the pot alone and cook for ten minutes or so, until softened.  Then I add a few tablespoons of flour, at Bittman’s advice, and the onion mix froths up while I stir.  Pop back in the beef, add three cups of wine–red wine is common to both recipes, and at CI’s suggestion I’ve gone with a Cote du Rhone, eleven dollars at the shop on the first floor.  Three cups into the stew means there’s just one glass left in the bottle, so I take that glass for myself. Stir (with the sturdy maple-wood spoon, part of a set I bought for my first kitchen in Oakland), bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat to low.  The pot needs to sit, undisturbed and simmering, for about forty minutes, so I set to chopping the vegetables.  The radio is on, first “Fresh Air” and then “All Things Considered,” both of them celebrating today’s holiday and preparing for tomorrow’s.  Congressman John Lewis, on “Fresh Air”, has an amazing story to tell, and by the time he starts talking about how he sees marriage equality as just another branch of the fight against discrimination he’s been fighting his whole life, I find that I’m grinning as I work.  All the stories of people travelling to Washington, too, make me happy.  Matt and I were there Friday night (long story) and it looks like a town gearing up for both a big party and a lot of hard work.  I peel and chop my vegetables, four or five potatoes, four or five parsnips, a big handful of carrots.  By the time I’m done, there’s still another twenty minutes before they can go in the stew, so I sit down with my glass of wine and a mystery novel, and I watch the snow fall for a while longer. Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Thursday, January 8th, 2009
7:12 pm	city lights. I’d like to take less blurry pictures.  Working on it. Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009
8:28 pm	sunnier days. For the last couple of months, I haven’t been able to find the cable for my digital camera.  I found it recently, in a very obvious place, and no I don’t want to talk about how I could lose an item that was in a very obvious place.  The point is, I found it, and as a result I’ve rediscovered a bunch of pictures I took over the summer. This picture was taken at the East River State Park, just a few blocks from my house, in August.  We had a friend visiting from out of town, and we found the park while we were showing him around the neighborhood.  It was a perfect afternoon for sitting around in the sun and looking at the Manhattan skyline. Looking at these pictures now, it’s like a window on a different world. It’s cold here, and grey, and we haven’t seen much sun recently.  I’m not complaining, not really, because it hasn’t been all that cold most of the time and it’s pretty when it snows and anyway I knew what I was getting into.  But that bright green-and-gold blue-skies summer day was a little startling nonetheless. Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009
6:11 pm	curtain. Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Monday, January 5th, 2009
7:04 pm	historical work. The annual meeting of the AHA was, as I’d suspected it might be, much more pleasant for me this year than previous years.  I spent a lot of time in the book room, saw a lot of grad school friends (most of whom had interviews! hooray!), and got some grading done.  (Most of the grading happened in a solitary interlude on Sunday afternoon, after the hotel Starbucks had officially closed but before they started kicking people out.  Semi-abandoned coffeeshops turn out to be surprisingly effective workplaces.) Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Sunday, January 4th, 2009
7:13 am	The Post-Christmas Bedford Avenue Blues. Frohe Tötentannenbäumenabfallentsorgungtag 2009!  (cf. Jackie M.) Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
6:09 pm	natural history. It turns out that dinosaur nuggets are not unlike chocolate rabbits, in that it’s a lot of fun to eat their heads first. Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Friday, January 2nd, 2009
6:40 pm	wee subway people. Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Thursday, January 1st, 2009
3:04 pm	Seeds. Happy New Year! Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
1:47 pm	2008: everything changed. I had a dream last night that Berkeley finally got around to giving me my course schedule for the spring semester, and that I was irritated that they’d put it off until practically the last minute.  I mean, really, if the semester starts in two or three weeks, this isn’t enough time to pull together a good syllabus and get the book orders in.  I was going to refuse to even teach the classes, especially because my time is much less flexible these days, but then I noticed that they’d assigned me some pretty good classes.  One was a seminar on, I think, representations of robots and women (or maybe just robot women?) in science fiction, and what that can tell us about social attitudes towards technology.  The other was a basic academic writing class, but they’d attached the class roster, and a few of my favorite students from previous years had signed up.  And then I noticed that they’d made an effort to schedule these classes around my schedule at my current job, which was particularly thoughtful.  Right before I woke up, I was trying to work out a commuting schedule–if I’m remembering this correctly, in my dream the university was somewhere around where Yankee Stadium is in the real world, and that’s only a couple of miles from my school, so it probably could have worked out.  Except that, you know.  The University of California does not actually have a Bronx campus, and I do not actually have time to teach any additional classes this year.  My subconscious appears to be slow on the uptake. 2008 feels like it was at least two or three years long.  In a good way, though–the “wow, all of that was just this year?” sense, not the “good lord, that dragged on forever” sense.  I live in Brooklyn!  I teach high school!  Go figure. Between the holidays and the AHA being in town, I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently with people I hadn’t talked to for a while.  Everyone has two questions: Do you like your new job? Do you miss California? The first one is easy, because I love my new job, and my friends have started figuring out (to their dismay, I imagine) that I can talk about it just about forever.  (Except not here on the blog, of course.  Sorry.) The second question, though?  Do I miss California?  I keep saying no, emphatically.  But I’ve realized that this is because I’m answering a different question–what I’m saying when I saw I don’t miss California is that I don’t regret leaving California.  But I do miss California.  I miss having a supermarket where I can buy bulk spices.  I miss being able to have lunch with Heather every week or two.  (All of my California friends I miss more than I like to think about, but I figured that part was obvious.)  I miss the way the sunlight is kind of golden, and how absolutely beautiful the campus is at Berkeley.  I miss being able to drive up to Napa, I miss having a charming and well-supplied fabric store on my way home from work, and there are days when I almost desperately miss the guacamole and carnitas tacos at Picante.  I miss my doctor in Berkeley, who was fabulous, and my hairstylist, equally fabulous, and the fact that the owner at Fellini knew our names and always found a table for us even when it was crowded.  I miss the weird stay-at-home Christmas traditions Matt and I had developed.  I miss all the flowers all year round, and seeing the fog banks roll across the bay, and the citrus selection at the Berkeley Bowl, and getting lunch at Intermezzo, and always having that possibility of heading down to Hearst Castle for the weekend, and the guy at the coffeeshop who remembered my order, and the smell of the eucalyptus grove, and okay, I guess, I do miss California. I like New York, though, quite a bit, even if I still haven’t found a place to buy spices.  (Seriously, grocery stores, how hard would it be to carry bulk spices?)  And I’m glad to be here.  So, goodbye to 2008, when everything changed, and hello to 2009, which is still just mystery and surprise. Happy New Year, everyone. Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Friday, December 12th, 2008
6:00 am	scene from the life of two people who are only beginning to readjust to life in the northeast. “I heard a weather report on the radio, and it used the words ’slushy accumulation’ in reference to tomorrow.” “Slushy accumulation?” “Yeah.” “Ick.” “Yeah.” “That doesn’t even sound like weather, it sounds like a medical condition.” “Something painful but not life-threatening.” “Exactly.”  [points to left shoulder] “Doctor, I think I’ve got a slushy accumulation up here, is there anything you can do?” Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Sunday, November 9th, 2008
9:28 am	the mystery of mystery. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been reading more and more mystery novels, and I’m curious about the genre.  (Also, totally enjoying the genre, which is why I’m curious.) It actually all started about five or six years ago, on one of the long driving trips.  I was staying overnight in Wall, South Dakota, and spent much of my evening at the famous Wall Drug.  One of the shops at Wall Drug had a special display of books about South Dakota, and I figured that I should get into the spirit of things and buy one.  The book I picked up was a mystery novel, part of a series set in a small South Dakota town.  (Mourning Shift by Kathleen Taylor, to be more specific.)  It turned out to be a really entertaining book, and I thought it also gave me some insight into the nature of mystery series–the crimes and the detective work are part of the fun, but a lot more of the appeal comes from the characters and the setting.   (This is the kind of “insight” that I’m sure is absolutely stupidly obvious to people who read a lot of mystery novels, but be kind to me!  I was coming to this entirely oblivious.)  Mourning Shift had a good mystery puzzle, one that (fabulously) genuinely hinged on the distinctive nature of the small-town experience, but more than that, it had the feeling that the reader was stopping by to visit some old friends for a while.  I found that really compelling. Since then, I’ve been seeking out mystery series.  Some of the ones that I know are really popular didn’t really work for me–I liked the first couple Stephanie Plum books, but they grated on my nerves after a while, and I just never managed to get into Sue Grafton.  But I’ve read my way through Donna Leon’s books as fast as I could find them, and the same with the Nero Wolfe books.  (I also have a guilty-pleasure weakness for the Eve Dallas books by Nora Roberts, excuse me, J.D. Robb.  Her real strength as a writer, I think, is how she builds networks of relationships between her characters, and she does that as well in the Eve Dallas books as she does in her romance novels.  The futuristic-crime-novel aspect is maybe not as much her strength, because they feel a little trashy, but still a lot of fun.)   In all of these, I think my theory about the appeal of the characters stands: readers talk about Stephanie Plum books, Guido Brunetti books, Torey Bauer books, Eve Dallas books, Nero Wolfe books.  They’re books defined by the main characters more than the authors, by the person who solves the mystery more than the mystery. So this is part of my question for you, O Internet Hivemind.  I know that there are a lot of different ways to define “mystery” novels, and I’m resisting the temptation to use the term “category mystery” because I know that I don’t understand what makes a book “category mystery” in the same way that I know what makes a book “category romance”. But let’s say that this is the type of book I’m looking for: a mystery series, the kind that’s about the detective and setting as much as the mystery puzzle.  I know there’s a huge contemporary publishing industry in these, I see shelves and shelves of them at Barnes and Noble, but I have no idea how to get oriented.  Who are the major players?  Who should I be reading if I want to get a sense of what’s being published today? Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
8:30 pm	election night. I voted this morning, in a crowded and confusing elementary school cafeteria.  It took about forty-five minutes, start to finish.  It was one of those old-fashioned voting machines, with curtains and levers and clanking noises. Now, at the other end of the day, I’m watching the returns at home, sitting on the couch with my electoral map and colored pencils while Matt paces and refreshes the blogs. We were going to go to a party, share the tension and excitement with some friends.  In the end, we couldn’t go out, because I’m sick.  This is a significant moment in history, and years from now, when people talk about what they were doing tonight, I’m going to have to say that I was too sick to leave my apartment. As we watch the commentators on television I’m pressing my fingertips into my face, trying to ease the pressure in my sinuses, and when I try to spout some amateur analysis of the election process, it comes out in a sad raspy croak. There’s an election-watching party at a bar down the street, and we can hear them cheering when states are called for Obama.  I think they’re watching the same television channels we are, because the happy roar from outside often coincides with Matt’s victory shouts.  For weeks now, I’ve been afraid to feel too confident, but when MSNBC projected New Mexico for Obama, we opened up the bottle of New Mexico champagne that we bought in Alberquerque over the summer. The last few days, I’ve been re-reading Joan Didion’s political essays, which have heightened my sense of what an incredible historical moment this is.  I would love to see her reaction to this campaign. I’ve been missing Tim Russert, too.  I feel like there are things happening here, things with larger implications–someone has finally successfully harnessed the disenchanted youth vote, and there’s an enthusiasm for voting that’s crossing all demographic lines in a way that I think would have been unimaginable even four years ago.  Defying all conventional wisdom, negative campaigning has hurt rather than helped, and the “culture wars” may have finally been laid bare as the cheap rhetorical device that they always were.  But I want someone to help interpret all of this, and I’m not sure where to look. Anyrate.  There’s not much I can say that isn’t being said elsewhere, and better.  I’m just glad to be a part of this, even if tonight my part of it is limited to nursing a cold and listening to the party through open windows. Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
6:17 pm	a new york scene. We’re sitting around in the living room, talking, when suddenly D. jumps a little in his seat. “Did you hear that?  It sounded like someone crying.” I’d heard it, but it had barely registered.  “It’s probably just street noise. There’s always someone crying.” As the words leave my mouth, I feel like a jerk.  Isn’t that a bad stereotype about city dwellers?  Shouldn’t I care more?  But D. just nods.  “It was like that when I lived on Madison Avenue,” he says.  “There would always be someone out on the street screaming and crying, shouting for help.” I’m convinced he’s making fun of me, but he says he’s completely serious.  “The first week I was there, I woke up at three in the morning because someone outside was screaming ‘Oh God, help, please, why won’t anyone help me?’  And I’m jumping out of bed, grabbing my glasses and the phone and running for the window to see what’s wrong, and then I realize that I’ve just called 911 to report that some drunk a–hole can’t find a cab.  The next five or six times it happened, I at least checked out the window to see if it really was someone getting murdered.  I used to hear those stories, that Kitty woman?  Where no one helped her?  I used to hear those stories and think, god, New Yorkers must be such heartless bastards.  But eventually you learn that when you hear someone screaming for help, it’s just a drunk a–hole looking for a cab.” Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.