Looking at looking

Late Wednesday SFSignal published short essays by me and some other writers on viewpoint in genre.  Timmi joined an online discussion of what we'd said, adding:

"I've--more times than I can count--written a second version of a story in first (if the first version was in third) or in third (if the first version was in first)--when unsure of which would best serve the story. It's an illuminating exercise in any case. And sometimes the second version really is the correct one (and brings out different sorts of details that collectively change the reader's affect)."

She rewrites entire stories to make sure she's using the correct viewpoint?  That is some mondo literary muscle.  That is the authorial equivalent of hauling pianos around with your teeth--but much more useful.



 I wish one of those SFSignal essays had been by Timmi.  I bet she would have revealed more surprises and amazements.  And I wish I'd said more in my essay about the choice of narrator, not just about styles of narration.

The story I'm revising today took me twice as long to write as I'd scheduled for it in my calendar.  Midway through the notes I kept during the writing process I recorded serious doubts about my protagonist.  "What does Trill do?" I asked myself.  "What can she do?"  And on another line, "Is this really Dola's story?"

I get into a haze when I write sometimes.  Too much sawdust in the air--I can't see what I've done.  If it's the deadline, though, I turn in what I've got.  The editors read what is actually there on the page--not the lumber of words and phrases I cut and sanded away or discarded before the glue set.  In this case they pronounced what I'd given them whole, a complete instrument.  A story.  One in need of some polish, but all there.

In the discussion after my pov essay got posted I declared that my choice of Trill as the story's pov character had worked because Dola was unconscious for the rape scene, whereas Trill was able to witness and describe it.

But if I'd written the story from Dola's perspective, maybe that scene would have arrived on the page another way?  Or maybe that plot point would have been reached without it?

I'm going to leave this particular piano where it is.  But future ones could get pulled around.  By my teeth, if that's what it takes.

Just a Sunday afternoon in spring

It's been a long time since I've posted here: sorry about that! My allergies have been in high gear for the last few weeks, compounded, alas, by a persistent sinus infection. As a result, I've spent little time online, except for doing stuff that absolutely had to be done. Today actually seems to be headache-free, probably for the first time in two or three weeks. In fact, I dared to visit the Lake Union Fill to look at birds this afternoon, thinking I'd probably be sake, for the sky is heavily overcast, the air very still, and the air so heavy with water that I swear I could feel tiny, invisible drops brushing my face. And lo, I didn't start sneezing, my eyes didn't run, and a headache didn't start up in my left eye! Yay!

We saw few ducks today (though we did see a spectacular cinnamon teal), but Vaux's swifts were to be seen everywhere, swooping and darting, red-winged blackbirds (of course), and--Great Blue Herons, in the most definite plural. My first sight was of one in a tree, then of several roosting in another tree. And of another one, which looked on the small size, standing in the reeds at the edge of the lake, darting forward and pulling a fish out of the water. That one then took to the air and flew off, to relocate in another set of reeds near the stadium, as we discovered when we continued our walk. We then saw another, much larger blue heron in the southwest pond, standing very still, peering down into the water. Everywhere across the expanse of the fill we passed photographers with huge cameras set on tripods-- a typical of any spring Sunday at the Fill. I heard various warblers, but never managed to actually see any. I was amused to pass a small boy shakily riding his bicycle followed by his father, jogging along behind him: a fortuitous arrangement that probably won't last more than a few months more, since even shaky as he was, the boy already had his father running at a good clip. A robin atop a thin trunk of a dead tree about twice as tall as I caught my amused attention because he wasn't perched on it, as one might expect, but lying on it such that he looked as though the trunk had been thrust through his breast. Since he was singing quite lustily, it was clear that no such thing had happened. We were getting out our cameras in the hope of taking his picture when he flew off, annoyed at us for staring at him.

Bird life in our own yard continues to be interesting. A Stellar's jay, beautiful even in profile, spends most of his time in the tree facing the windows of my office and also likes to forage in the turned-up garden plot in our back yard. The humming bird that visits our yard as part of its routine in the summer has begun making occasional appearances. And sometimes, in the morning, when I look out the window over the kitchen sink, I see black-capped chickadees perching in the kiwi vines below my neighbors' bay window.

I won't speak of the crows, the seagulls, or the geese. No doubt they consider themselves the city's true rulers. They can be seen--and heard-- everywhere.

2011 Tipree Award is announced

Thrilling news! Andrea Hairston's Redwood and Wildfire has won the James Tiptree Jr. Award! Here's the low-down from the James Tiptree Jr. Award website:

Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston (Aqueduct Press, 2011) is the winner of the 2011 James Tiptree Jr. Award.

Redwood and Wildfire was a favorite of the jurors from the moment they read it. They reported: “This vivid and emotionally satisfying novel encompasses the life of Redwood, a hoodoo woman, as she migrates from rural Georgia to Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. While Redwood’s romance with Aidan Wildfire is central to the novel, female friendship is also a major theme, without deferring to the romance. Hairston incorporates romantic love into a constellation, rather than portraying it as a solo shining star. Her characters invoke a sky where it can shine; they live and love without losing themselves in cultural expectations, prejudices and stereotypes, all within a lovingly sketched historical frame.

“Intersections of race, class, and gender encompass these characters’ entire lives. They struggle with external and internal forces around questions of gender roles, love, identity, and sexuality. This challenge drives how they move through the world and how it sees them. The characters in Redwood and Wildfire deftly negotiate freedom and integrity in a society where it’s difficult to hold true to these things.”

Honor List:

In addition to selecting the winner, the jury chose a Tiptree Award Honor List. The Honor List is a strong part of the award’s identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list for the rest of the year. This year’s Honor List is:

Libba Bray, Beauty Queens (Scholastic Press 2011) — In this atypically comedic Tiptree candidate, a cast of iconic characters trapped on a hostile island (populated by the capitalist analog of Doctor No) illuminates the limited palette of roles for women and offers the hope of more rewarding and rounded lives.

L. Timmel Duchamp, “The Nones of Quintilus” (in her collection Never at Home, Aqueduct Press 2011) — This standout story addresses the relationships between mothers and daughters and how the world looks different when you become (or intend to become) pregnant.

Kameron Hurley, God’s War (Night Shade Books 2011) — Set on a marginally habitable world divided by a common religion with diverse interpretations, this engaging work explores a militaristic matriarchal society.

Gwyneth Jones, The Universe of Things (Aqueduct Press 2011) — Running through these gorgeous stories is a fierce awareness of how gender roles and other social power imbalances are always factors in how we think, how we approach one another, how we see the world. The author questions the status quo, and then questions the questioning, so what emerges is a mature, honest, thoughtful complexity.

Alice Sola Kim, “The Other Graces” (Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2010) — This elegantly written short story revisits the role of mirroring in self-actualization and casts that path in a new and skiffy light as its heroine, Grace, is mentored by her older alternate selves. It also depicts racial/cultural intersections with gender roles.

Sandra McDonald, “Seven Sexy Cowboy Robots” (Strange Horizons, 2010.10.04) — A surreal and subversive take on human-AI relations. An older female character exploring her sexuality is a rare thing in science fiction, and it is refreshing to see it handled here with such a deft hand.

Maureen F. McHugh, “After the Apocalypse” (in her collection After the Apocalypse, Small Beer Press 2011) — This title story of an impressive collection brings to the foreground gender expectations concerning the practice of motherhood in extreme situations and then completely and matter-of-factly upends them.

Delia Sherman, The Freedom Maze (Big Mouth House 2011) — A clear-hearted, magically immersive time travel story that explores powerful ideas. Thrown back through time to an antebellum plantation, a thirteen-year-old comes to understand how women’s experience is shaped by cultural expectations as they interweave with social, economic, and racial truths.

Kim Westwood, The Courier’s New Bicycle (Harper Voyager Australia 2011) — This compelling novel depicts a variety of sexually transgressive characters and looks at themes of fertility and alternate family structures through a dystopic lens.

Planned Parenthood and Me

Since the Susan G. Komen Foundation lost its reputation for being "apolitical" when its decision to de-fund Planned Parenthood's breast cancer screening program for low-income women came to light last week, I've spent time recalling, with gratitude, my own long-ago personal acquaintance with Planned Parenthood. It began in 1971, during the months that I received food stamps. I was working then as a cleaning woman, and Tom (who had started back to graduate school) and I were living on my earnings cleaning houses and a small student loan that with all the scrimping in the world couldn't be made to cover our living expenses. (We just made it with the food stamps, $54 a month, as I recall.) Since I had dropped out of school, I had no access to the university's student health center. I had never heard of Planned Parenthood until a friend, learning that I couldn't afford to see a gynecologist to get a prescription for oral contraceptives, told me about their clinic-- and that they had a sliding scale.

I remember bicycling to the clinic, in Urbana. It was in the basement of a building and distinctly makeshift-- the person doing reception sat at a card table (and indeed, all the "desks" were folding tables of one sort or another), the examination cubicles had curtains rather than doors, and the amenities were nothing like any doctor's office I had ever been in. But the doctor, a woman with a heavy German accent, astounded me with her deftness and gentleness with the speculuum. (I'd had only a few experiences with pelvic exams before that one, and they had all been painful.) Most astonishing, though, was that she did something that has now become standard practice, but certainly wasn't back then: she told me everything she was going to do before she did it, and what she was doing as she did it. And she explained why. She made me--all of me-- part of the process (unlike the male doctors I'd previously had who talked about the weather or a skiiing trip they'd recently taken or else just breathed hard or grunted as they poked around inside my body). I hadn't yet encountered Our Bodies, Ourselves, but when I later did finally see it in the bookstore and buy it, I recognized the attitude and approach to women's health care. It is an approach that puts the woman herself at the center of the process, and seeks to increase her sense of agency. My experiences in that clinic gave me a different idea of what gynecological examinations could be like. When two years later I resumed my undergraduate course work and had the option of getting my health care from the university's student health center, I never gave doing that a thought. And that's probably a good thing, since it was through my annual exams at Planned Parenthood that I learned that estrogen was raising my blood pressure.  When lowering the dosage, which was the first response to the problem, wasn't sufficient to lower my blood pressure, the doctor discussed other options with me, and then introduced me to my first diaphragm. She did this in a way that countered my dismay and sense of helplessnes at learning that oral contraceptives would be deleterious to my health. The people at the clinic also, of course, taught me self-breast examinations. Back in the 1970s, this was unusual. Certainly it wasn't something that was ever done in an ordinary gynecologist's office. I only stopped going to Planned Parenthood when I moved to another city.

My gratitude for the good care of me taken by the people at that clinic is only part of the reason I've been a long-time monthly supporter of Planned Parenthood. As the attack on women and women's agency has escalated over the last few years, Planned Parenthood has been a primary target. The attitude of those attacking the organization is: How dare they give women options? How dare they educate and care for low-income women? At a time of escalating costs of health care and an ongoing campaign of dis- and misinformation about women's contraception, abortion, and women's health issues generally, Planned Parenthood is a bulwark we cannot afford to lose.

The Komen Foundation has (temporarily at least) restored the funding it had been providing for the breast cancer-screening program at Planned Parenthood. But Planned Parenthood is under attack on other fronts. If you can afford to make a contribution to them, please do. This is no time for Planned Parenthood to be forced to cut back its services. I am fortunate that they were there for me when I needed them.

A word with such a sulfurous reputation

This morning I read a poignant essay on Anna Banti's Artemisia by Susan Sontag. (It is reprinted in At the Same Time, a posthumous collection edited by Sontag's son.) I suspect at least partly because Banti repeatedly addresses the protagonist of her historical novel, bringing in a few carefully circumscribed details about her own life, Sontag's essay ventures into the area of Banti's life as a scholar and writer and her vehement disavowal of feminism. While speaking specifically about Banti, Sontag takes up the phenomenon of intellectual and creative women expressing hostility to feminism more generally. This has always been an interesting issue for me, one strewn with pitfalls for the feminist faced with an apparent contradiction, and so I read this passage with great interest:

To refuse, vehemently (even scorfully) refuse, a reputation as a feminist was, of course, a common move for the most brilliant and independent women of her generation-- Woolf being the glorious exception. Think of Hannah Arendt. Or of Colette, who once declared that women who were so stupid as to want the vote deserved "the whip and the harem." (La Vagabonde, her novel-manifesto about a woman choosing her career and a single life over the love of a worthy man and emotional dependence, was translated into Italian by Banti.) Feminism has meant many things; many unnecessary things. It can be defined as a position-- about justice and dignity and liberty-- to which almost all independent women would adhere if they did not fear the retaliation that accompanies a word with such a sulfurous reputation. Or it can be defined as a position easier to disavow or quarrel with, as it was by Banti (and Arendt and Colette). That version of feminism suggests that there is a war against men, which was anathema to such women; that feminism suggests an avowal of strength-- and a denial of the difficulty and the cost for women in being strong (above all, the cost in masculine support and affection); more, it proclaims pride in being a woman, it even affirms the superiority of women-- all attitudes that felt alien to the many independent women who were proud of their accomplishments and who knew the sacrifices and the compromises they entailed.

Artemesia is full of affirmations of the pathos of female identity: women's weakness, women's dependence, women's solitariness (should they want to be anything but daughters, wives, and mothers), women's sorrows, women's grief. To be a woman is to be incarcerated, and to struggole against incarceration, and to long for it. "'If only I were not a woman,' that futile lament," Banti's Artemisia reflects. "Far better to ally herself with the sacrificed and imprisoned, participate in their veiled, momentous fate, share their feelings, their plans, their truths; secrets from which the privileged, men, were barred." But of course, Artemisia's achievement-- her genius-- banishes her from this home. (53)

Interestingly, Sontag then observes the simliarities between historical and "fantastic fiction":

Artemisia is a tragic reflection on the condition of being a woman and of defying the norms of one's sex--as opposed to the comic, triumphalist, tender fable that is Orlando. As an account of exemplary tribulations that follow from being independent, an artist, and a woman, Banti's novel is also exemplary in its depair and its defiance: the merit of Artemisia's choice is never in doubt.

Read only as a feminist novel, which Artemisia certainly is, it confirms what we know (or think we know; or want others to know). But its power as literature is also that of an encounter with what we don't know or fully understand. The feeling of strangeness is a particular effect of that branch of literature tamed by the label "historical fiction." To write well about the past is to write something like fantastic fiction. It is the strangeness of the past, rendered with piercing concreteness, that gives the effect of realism.(54-55)

Sontag writes more about the book as a historical novel, all of which I found deeply interesting. She concludes by remarking "Anna Banti did not want to lose her manuscript in the battle for Florence in early August 1944. No writer could welcome such a destiny. But there can be no doubt that what makes Artemisia a great book--and unique in Banti's work-- is this double destiny, a book lost and re-created. A book that by being posthumous, rewritten, resurrected, gained incalculably in emotional reach and moral authority."(55-56)

I have often, in the past, reminded myself of this-- to remember that first versions, however complete they might seem, are not necessarily the only or best versions of the story one wants to tell: and more particularly, of the kind of book that resulted from Banti's having lost the first completed version of her novel and, in re-creating it, had found it necessary to haunt her re-telling of Artemisia's story with the pain of that loss. Her insertion of that loss into the novel, rather than being self-indulgent, is painfully spare, resonating with the others sorts of painful losses that Banti perceived in the brilliant Artemisia Gentilleschi's life.

I've written about Anna Banti's work before on this blog, here.

The 2012 Galactic Suburbia Award

Have you heard? The f/sf field now has a feminist award! It's called The Galactic Suburbia Award for activism and/or communication that advances the feminist conversation in the field of speculative fiction in 2011. The women of Galactic Suburbia, Tansy, Alex, and Alisa, have just announced the first year's winner and Honours List.


Honours List"

Carrie Goldman ad her daughter Katie, for sharing their story about how Katie was bullied at school for liking Star Wars, and opening up a massive worldwide conversation about gender binaries and gender-related bullying among very young children http://www.chicagonow.com/portrait-of-an-adoption/2010/11/anti-bullying-starts-in-first-grade/

Cheryl Morgan for "Female Invisibility Bingo" ( http://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=10805 ), associated blogging and podcasting, and basically fighting the good fight

Helen Merrick, for the "Feminism" article on the SF Encyclopedia: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/feminism (i think its a rewrite not new)

Jim C Hines for “Jane C Hines” and associated blogging, raising awareness of feminist issues in the SF/Fantasy publishing field. - http://www.jimchines.com/2011/09/jane-c-hines/

Julia Rios, Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond for episode 11 of the Outer Alliance podcast (The Writer and the Critic special episode)

http://blog.outeralliance.org/archives/875

L. Timmel Duchamp - for continuing to raise issues of importance on the Ambling Down the Aqueduct blog [I'm sure they mean Ambling Along the Aqueduct--td] and various Aqueduct Press projects
http://aqueductpress.blogspot.com/


Michelle Lee for the blog post “A 7-year-old girl responds to DC Comics’ sexed-up reboot of Starfire” http://io9.com/5844355/a-7+year+old-girl-responds-to-dc-comics-sexed+up-reboot-of-starfire


Winner

Nicola Griffith - for the Russ Pledge, and associated blogging http://asknicola.blogspot.com/2011/06/taking-russ-pledge.html

The winner will receive a Deepings Doll (www.deepingsdolls.com) hand-painted figurine of a suffragette with a Galactic Suburbia placard.

Congratulations, Nicola!

If you have ideas for the Honours list for 2012, please email Tansy, Alex, and Alisa at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com or tweet @galacticsuburbs

Middle-aged protagonists and ducks that aren't dead

I didn't go out yesterday but sat tight, waiting out yet another storm. I'd never seen Admiralty Inlet so white with chop before. Today, though, has been calm. And when I walked down to the beach a little after one, there was actually beach to walk on. Best of all, the waterfowl busy in the water were many and varied. I saw my first marbled murrelet, black scoters, and Pacific loons, in addition to the more usual ducks-- buffleheads, common golden-eyes, and hooded mergansers. I spent about ten minutes standing in one place, binoculars lifted to my eyes, watching a duck off by himself-- probably the same one I saw last week, also solitary-- which I eventually identified as a juvenile common golden-eye. Why did I watch him for so long? Because he was dabbling, with his head underwater, for such a long time that I began to wonder if he were dead. (I wasn't sure at that point if it was the juvenile golden-eye because all I could see was his body and some spiky black feathers sticking up.) And then, finally, as I began to think about moving on, he lifted his head out of the water. It made me happy to see he wasn't a dead duck after all. And then I found myself wondering why I've never see a dead duck in the water or on shore yet. Where do they go when they die? Do they wash up on the shore? Do their carcasses get scavegened? Or do they go someplace sheltered when they know they're dying?

It was warm enough that when I reached Point Wilson I was able to sit down on a log, take my gloves off, and jot a few thoughts in a notebook. (Until, of course, my fingers got too stiff to continue writing.) Here's what I jotted:

I've been watching the gray green waves roll in so near to the Point, right where the land curves sharply. No matter one's viewpoint, the waves seem inevitably to come in crooked even if they don't always collide at an angle with the ones rolling in a little further south. It occurs to me that so, too, my character's limits are by this point in the novel all too clearly established. The land, unlike the wind, tide, and currents, is a given. Some days the waves comming in at an angle to the the straight line of the beach and waves south of them do collide, with great turbulence--the wind, tide, and currents create a variety of possibilities. Today, though, the difference that the curve of the beach just there makes in the waves seems a thing in itself, without relation to the waves coming in along the straight line of the beach-- perhaps because the latter are barely perceptible as surf. Under these conditions, the collision between the waves coming in at different angles is below the threshold of my perception.

M. is middle-aged. And my ms is at 85,000 words. It is easy to see that her younger self would have scorned her for having gotten into the situation she's in. It's not a matter, in this story, of her being comfortable and not wanting to give up her comfort-- no one would judge her exactly "comfortable" (except by the most moralistic standards). Though certainly one could argue that she's looking for a way to make her life more comfortable. It's more a matter of her having made, for most of her life, one compromise after another, as each new crisis befell her. She began making these compromises by thinking she was being practical and doing what was sensible. But having done so time and again has put her into a state in which compromise is the preferred-- learned-- response to every demand for a decision.

This is the problem with writing middle-aged protagonists who haven't lived their lives in a constant state of self-actualization. Oh sure, a middle-aged character can undergo a conversion experience and be swept out of her inertia. And then, of course, there's the cliche of the midlife crisis. But midlife crises usually result in an attempt to turn back the clock, to shed social and personal responsibility. As someone holding on by her fingernails, that's just not an option for my character. The challenge here, for me, is to find a path that avoids her defeat but is nevertheless true to her character and is not a magical resolution. I have a very clear sense of her limits. But what I need to have now is a better sense of the possiblities within those limits. (She did, after all, start life with some solid resources. Utilizing those resources-- arguably dormant-- must suggest a horizon for the possible.) I hate it when writers suddenly gift their characters with possiblities that ignore their limits, as though when it comes to individuals in fiction, it is an act of good faith to believe in miracles. I know a lot of people insist on this as a sort of moral good. But when I read such stories, I'm left with an unpleasant taste in my mouth, as though I'd been eating saccharine.I damned sure don't want to find myself feeling that way about this novel.

The cry of an eagle is not exactly what I expected it would be

All weekend it stormed-- first rain and later powerful winds battering the cabin almost without pause. I got out on Saturday for a walk, during a pause in the rain, but not yesterday. And then this morning, when I woke, I saw the sun rise as a bright line on the horizon, behind an amazingly calm sea. And then sun flooded my cabin, annoying, actually, since for most of the morning I couldn't seem to get it out of my eyes and my back-lit screens were tough to read. As I prepared, after lunch, to go out for my walk, I laughed at the sight of the REI-style gadgets Tom brought me, which are to hiking boots what chains are to tires. I'm feeling fairly confident I'm safe from ice and snow for this week, at least. Unlike some people, I'm not eager to try out those kinds of toys.

Wow. As I typed those last words, sitting in the work room in my cabin facing an eastern window, a bald eagle flying past caught my gaze. Now I'm watching it pass and pass again, flying just above the trees. I saw it earlier, as I set out for my walk. And then I saw it again, when I walked up from the beach and was only yards from my cabin. In both cases, I pointed my camera at the sky and pushed the button, doubtful the eagle would show up (particularly since with the sun slanting sidelong into my eyes I couldn't see a thing in my viewfinder). But it did, in all four takes. What delighted me most, though, was that the eagle was producing its very strange call-- not a trumpet shriek, but a sort of bassoon-like gulping sound. A comical sound that I doubted could be coming from the eagle (until I went inside and opened a nifty app called Chirp USA and discovered that yes, indeed, that is what eagles are supposed to sound like). My surprise reminded me of the first time I heard the call of a Great Blue Heron-- an ugly hoking sound that seems crazily mismatched with the grace of its form. Its flight, I should add, is nowhere near as graceful as an eagle's-- their liftoff looks impossible, and their flight ungainly. It always seems a miracle they can stay aloft.

The daylight tides this week are too high for extensive beach walking. I'm thinking that maybe one or two days this week I might walk up into the woods behind the cabin. Likely to be pretty muddy. But also likely to have a different set of birds.

I finished reading the Ranciere, which contained an afterward by Slavov Zizek asserting that politics and economics are mutually exclusive focuses for understanding our world. Most of my time, now, is going straight to the novel. The idea of writing epigraphs with fictious sources is concentrating my mind wonderfully. I'm wondering if assigning the writing such epigraphs for one's fiction should be added to my pedagogical toolbox. They could be discarded, afterwards, the way alternative endings can be when I ask students to write at least three different endings for their stories.

Epigraphs with Fictitious Sources

All day the snow has been melting. I've been watching it from the windows of my cabin, sliding off the steeply-pitched cabin roofs neighboring my own, exposing patches of grass, creating icy slush on the park's streets. The temperature's risen, and a wind from the south is whipping the trees into a dance mostly stately, sometimes frenzied. I'm keeping my fingers crossed --again-- that the power doesn't go out. Oh, and it's also lightly raining. Again, sadly, I've forgone my walk on the beach. It's so slushy and slippery out that I'm worried about getting down the slope to the beach without mishap.

Working on the novel, which includes, of course, thinking its thinkier thoughts, continues more or less steadily. This morning it came to me that this novel wants epigraphs from fictional sources. I think I've provided such epigraphs in only one of my (unpublished) novels (The Asymptoptic Woman, which I consider a "private" novel not intended for publication). If done well (as in Andrea Hairston's Mindscape), such epigraphs can add another dimension to the novel's world and its stories. I'm sure readers of this blog will be able to think of half a dozen or a dozen examples of it done well just off the top of their heads. It's one of the devices in writers' technical toolboxes that are especially sf's own. Why this thought came to me isn't fully clear yet. But I hope that once I've got the epigraphs in place, I'll understand why it now seems so necessary.

Ranciere continues to provoke me to thought. This morning I encountered this gem: "The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought." I'm tempted to take that as an epigraph for the novel as a whole. (With all the fictious-sourced epigraphs reserved for chapters.)

Tomorrow, weather permitting, Tom will visit-- and bring the box of books and office supplies we forgot to load into the car last Sunday and take me shopping to the local food co-op (which I like very much). We will walk on the beach. And then I'll return to my low-speech state.

The magic of writing longhand

So much for my regimen. Though I made it to the wifi building, I am probably not going to get down to the beach today. Yesterday I didn't go out at all. Partially because I decided to refrain from posting in support of the strike calling attention to the perniciousness of SOPA and PIPA, and partially because I didn't feel up to facing the slipperiness on slopes and hills, notwithstanding my walking sticks. (Now if they had spikes on the ends...) Not many people are stirring in Fort Worden, today. Some workers were out putting sand on the steepest street through the park. But mostly the snow is marked by deer tracks. 

Suffice it to say that I've been drafting new material for insertion into the earliest chapters. Although I do most of my fresh writing at the keyboard, when I'm writing material to be inserted I usually write it longhand first and then type it into the file. That is what I've been doing here. I have an idea that I feel a need to write such passages longhand because it allows me to slip past a psychological barrier created (for me, at least) by the seeming solidity of hundreds of pages of printed text. Somehow, it is one thing to tweak drafted text with elaborate line-edits, but quite another to insert new (however little) stories into it. It's as if I'm playing god with an already existing world (even if it's a world I've created-- a world in which I am, in a sense, god).

And now I'm reminded of how, before we had personal computers and before we had personal computers we had "word processors," every new iteration-- whether an edit or a major revision-- of a story required substantial retyping, whether from the beginning of the ms or the beginning of a chapter. Back then, whenever I wasn't sure where the story was going, I would retype the entirety of the scene I was working on, to give me a sort of running start. It never failed. I didn't feel I could do that when I switched to a word processor. So then I'd write out some of it longhand, and continue from there.

Writing longhand has thus come to seem a sort of magic. Some writing still work that way. (Tanith Lee, for one.) All writers, pre-typewriters, worked that way (perforce)-- unless, of course, they dictated it aloud to a secretary. Which makes me wonder if writing longhand is magical only for those of us who habitually write at the keyboard.

Speaking of technology: I hope, should a forecast of freezing rain come to pass for Port Townsend, that the power in my cabin doesn't fail. I brought three candles with me (two of them votive size) and a flashlight. I have lots of tablets and pens. And I'm keeping the batteries of all my battery-powered tech charged up. None of that stuff will keep me warm, though, should an ice- or snow-laden branch of a tree takes the wrong powerline down. I once survived a winter power outage at Kath's house for three days: but then she has a woodstove (and lots and lots of oil lamps). Now that was kind of romantic. (In retrospect, anyway.)

Snow, sun, and killdeer on the beach

Thinking about Day 2 of my artist's residency, I'm finding it difficult to integrate all that has so fare happened into the scope of a single day. This morning now feels like... yesterday? (Only not the yesterday that actually happened.) When I woke this morning, the quality of the silence made me suspect it might have snowed. When I went to the window and pushed back the curtains, I beheld a muffled gray and white world of snow, as monochromatic as a black and white film. While I made coffee, I spent a few minutes on the Internet via my iPad. Then I took my coffee back to my nice warm bed and settled in to read Ranciere's "The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics." This gave me much to think about vis-a-vis the interests I mentioned in my post yesterday. But then I asked myself what it might have to tell me about the world and technologies of my novel. Asking this brought me a dazzling insight, one that made me realize that I want/need to insert a new element into the story from its beginning. What a challenge! I've never done that before-- tried to introduce new material and all the perturbations that might follow from it at a such an advanced point of the story. I'm daunted, but also excited. Excited about what this new element can add to the story, excited at facing a new technical challenge. (Understand, I'm not the kind of writer that works from an outline. I generally undergo my conceptual brainstorms as I go.)

Because of the first brainstrom, I was late taking my shower. While I was in it, loving all that deliciously hot water pounding my shoulders and back, I had a second breakthrough anent the novel, again thanks to Ranciere's essay. I was so excited by this point that I decided to have an early lunch of hot, hearty soup and do my walk early. Not only did I want to spend some time outdoors doing something physical, but I figured it would help me begin mulling over these new ideas the easy way-- i.e., in the back of my mind, while the rest of me busied its attention with the world around me. (It's the form of thinking I love best: it's virtually effortless!)

As if to applaud my decision, while I was down on the beach, the snow stopped falling and the sun came out, drenching the landscape (and me) with light. The wind was bitter. But the beauty of the scene ravished me. Six killdeer were hanging out at the south end of the north beach, and one of them enacted a sort of dance with me-- flying past me to settle onto beach a little ahead of me, and then flee with hysterical cries every time I caught up with it, flying in the opposite direction, only to circle around and fly ahead of me on the other side, to settle on the beach a little ahead of me, only to again, yes, circle around behind me and fly again ahead of me... and so on. Also saw a few ducks fairly close to the beach, including a solitary golden-eye (a juvenile male, I think, judging by the size and shape of his white collar) who was doing a lot of diving.

While I was walking on the beach, I found myself thinking about Joan Slonczewski's The Highest Frontier, which I read last week, vis-a-vis Ranciere's essay. I realized that I really liked the inclusion of snippets from main character Jenny's Politics class discussing Aristotle's Politics-- but that I wished that discussion had been a bit sharper and its resonance in the novel's events consequently a bit more powerful. I know full well that though I amplified those resonances in the way that I frequently filled in things that went unspoken by the characters, things that for a reader like me have a ghostly presence (however weak) in such novels, readers who haven't already spent some time engaged in thinking critically about such things would not even have noticed them.

But then so much culture is like that now-- providing the basis for an audience inferring meanings they are always looking for while also providing a comfortable read/viewing for those who miss them entirely because they live in one of this world's many alternate realities where the basis for making such meanings does not exist.

By the time I got home, my cabin was lit up, the kitchen and front room positively peachy. But it's clouded over now, which probably means more snow. Worse, the snowmelt has re-frozen into icy patches, making walking on pavement treacherous. Have I said how glad I am to have my walking sticks with me?

Horned Puffins yes! Snow, no!

Today is Day One of my artist's residency at Centrum. It's been a little more than a year since I was here last. But I resumed the regimen I follow when I'm here as though I'd never stopped. Last year,  heavy snowfall and accumulation of snow marked my first day, and howling winds my second night. But this first day was marked by the absence of snow-- remarkably, since Seattle, which is south of Port Townsend, had snow when I left yesterday morning and was snowbound when Tom returned last night. But though snow has been and is forecast, I've seen nothing of it here. The sun at its low winter angle (does it rise as high as 20 degrees in the sky now?) lit up my cabin on and off all day and encouraged me to wear sunglasses when I went out for my daily walk on the beach. As for that walk-- there will probably not be as low a tide again during my stay here as we enjoyed today. I could have walked along the south beach all the way to town, if I'd wanted to. (Thought I'd better not press my luck with the tendon in my heel, even though my boots and walking sticks minimized the stress both standing and walking puts on it.) I wondered, as I caught my first glimpse of the water, whether I'd still be able to find ducks out there, since they almost never swim near the beach. Sure enough, sensing their presence came back to me (like riding a bicycle?), and I knew when to check out something I thought might be there but couldn't really distinguish from the sea at the distance, with the binoculars. What is it that my eyes pick up on? It's not a color, or a blob, but perhaps some subliminal thing that cues me that the waves are in some inarticulable way perturbed.

My heart leaped when I saw that again, this year, horned puffins were hanging out in Admiralty Bay. What is it with me about puffins? I took a lot of pleasure in watching eighteen beautiful graceful swans swimming in Lake Washington last month. But seeing puffins-- not beautiful at all, maybe even a bit comically grotesque-- gives me more of a charge. As they did last year, they swam in formation, back and forth, back and forth, giving an impression of avian discipline.

The rest of my day is less interesting to tell. I did some thought-provoking reading for part of the morning and then began reading/line-editing the ms of the novel I intend to finish before leaving here. I was a bit wary when I turned to page one of the ms. I always am, when I pick up something I haven't worked on for a long time. Often such work will read to me as though it had been written by a stranger, though this is more likely to be the case if it's been published (as though my unconscious mind never lets go until a piece of writing is beyond my power to revise). This morning I found that although I had a certain distance from the words on the page (leading me to line-edit them as though they had been written by an Aqueduct author), my mind nevertheless clicked into a certain kind of memory I'm certain all writers must have of the many layers of moments that go into any given sentence or paragraph of a text. It's almost like a body memory. That's perhaps not so off-the-wall, given that what happens as we write is a highly complicated physical process that includes but is not limited to the organ of the brain. It involves not just what our hand or hands are doing during the process, but pulse, blood pressure, breath, hormonal surges, even, perhaps, our very metabolism.

As for my "thought-provoking" reading-- at 8:30 this morning I opened one of the books I'd brought with me-- Jacques Ranciere's The Politics of Aesthetics-- and began with the translator's Preface, subtitled "The Reconfiguration of Meaning." (Yeah, I always read front and backmatter: you never know what gems you might find in the proper margins of the main text.) In his Preface, translator Gabriel Rockhill discusses a subject Ranciere has been working away at for some time. I talked about one aspect of the subject, the aspect I call the problem of intelligibility, in my WisCon 32 GoH speech. I'm also intensely interested in another aspect of the subject (which I wrote about in my essay "Old Pictures: the Discursive Instability of Feminist SF"), discursive instability. Rockhill introduces the subject by way of talking about translation in general as well as his translation of Ranciere's text in particular.

"Translation," he writes, "is not simply a form of mediation between two distinct languages. It is a relational reconfiguration of meaning via a logic of signification that is rendered possible by a socio-historical situaiton. This process can, in fact, take place within a single language, which does not however mean that understanding itself is an act of translation or that we are condemned to endlessly paraphrasing our original ideas. An alternate logic of signification can actually use the same words to mean something entirely different because it determines the very structure of meaning, the horizon of what is qualified as language, the modus operandi of words and sentences, the entire network that defines the process of signification."

It was in "Old Pictures" that I talked about how meanings and connotation of certain words and phrases can shift significantly over a period of decades. Lately I've been thinking a lot about just how radical a shift I can see in my own "logic of signification," as Rockhill (and Ranciere) puts it, from, say, the 1970s through today. It's the "horizon" Rockhill gestures to in that passage that is what each of us who write are perhaps most concerned with. Most of the time we aren't as acutely conscious of our "logic of signification" as we are of that horizon.

Over the last year I've had occasion to read numerous letters (I wrote many and many) and journals from the 1980s, and have been increasingly becoming conscious of feeling as though I need, in a sense, to translate them to the self that I am today-- and of suspecting that much that they are saying is now, crazy as this may sound, unintelligible to me. Would it be possible for me, with effort, to reacquire meanings that now elude me? More interesting for me, perhaps, is another question that's occurred to me because of this shocking gap (that person who wrote all those words, after all, was in a sense-- certainly in legal terms-- me): can any historian read documents produced even a generation or two before and ever fully, richly, understand them as they would have been understood at the time of production?

It's probably not surprising that I'm already finding some of these concerns running through my novel in progress.

Now it's time to go back to my cabin make a vegeatble soup with lots of garlic, ginger, and red pepper. I'm ravenous, and the building I'm visiting to use its wifi is frigid. (My fingers and nose are frozen!)