replayable

This is mostly a test post to see if the upgrade has solved the evil spam problem.

On the bright side, I can also post to officially announce that I did 125 pushups last night, in five sets. That’s an average of 25 pushups per set, though I actually did two sets of 30 and then three shorter sets. I had no idea how strong and competent I would feel. Rock and roll!

I hear I’ve been hacked by a blog spammer, which for some reason isn’t visible to me. I think it may only show up for people using RSS?

In any case, this is

a) an apology; I didn’t realize you were seeing it!

b) a warning; I’m going to be messing around with my setup to see if I can fix this problem after Shabbat, and the site may be down for a bit.

c) an inquiry; can anyone recommend good sites on how to cope with this, and how to stop it happening again?

Thanks, and shabbat shalom!

This week’s reading:

In the Teeth of the Evidence, Dorothy L. Sayers
The Emperor of Ocean Park, Stephen L. Carter
New England White, Stephen L. Carter
A Bait of Dreams, Jo Clayton
Then We Came To The End, Joshua Ferris
The Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin

What a terrific reading week! First, I found a collection of non-Wimsey Sayers short stories, which helped ease me back into reading other things. (Otherwise I might have just started the series again. No. Seriously.) They weren’t nearly as good as the Wimsey books, but still totally delightful. I particularly liked the one about the hairdresser who must deal with a criminal client ….

Next I plowed through the two Carter books, which were somehow immensely dense without being boring. I was particularly impressed with Carter’s ability to flesh out realistic characters in the context of legal mystery-thrillers. The Emperor of Ocean Park made Julia Carlyle human and compelling and flawed and totally believable; more, she reminded me profoundly of women in the community where I grew up, and I found reading about her to be an exercise in empathy and understanding.

I also thought Carter did a wonderful job conveying the nuances of the different worlds he describes: academic culture, high-end law firms, upper-class black society, politics, you name it. I found myself recognizing things about my own (religious Jewish) upbringing reflected in the black culture he describes, and it made me wonder about all the different pockets of culture that are outside what we portray as the American mainstream. Just to choose an example, everywhere his heroes go, they look for evidence of the “darker nation” - in the same way I grew up with a profound consciousness of where Jews go and where they don’t, where we’d be accepted and where we’d always be outsiders, where our achievements counted and where they didn’t matter. Is this the way that wealthy, respectable, powerful but not-quite-assimilated minorities function in general? I’d love to read (or hear!) about how this works for other groups, too.

Jo Clayton is someone I fell in love with in middle school, and I picked up a bunch of her books for cheap at a yard sale. A Bait of Dreams is the only one that wasn’t part of a series; it was okay, but especially by comparison to the rest of this reading week, not extraordinary. Three misfits must go on a quest in a science-fantasy world … but I felt like the story didn’t really get interesting until the end of the book, when the characters make a major change to the political balance of the world. I would have liked the story to start there - not finish!

Finally, there are the two books I was really looking forward to talking about, and ones that I absolutely must recommend to all of you.

Then We Came To The End is one of those books that I was avoiding reading, because I expected it to be self-absorbed, overblown, I-must-justify-my-MFA crap. (The jacket blurb from Nick Hornby did NOT help.) When I picked it up, though, I got a wonderful surprise! It’s by turns hilarious, insightful, depressing, surprising, disturbing and profound. He uses office culture to reflect on the Big Questions - what we live for, how we deal with death, what it means to know another human being, what it means to be human in the first place - and the first-person-plural writing was actually very effective rather than just gimmicky. I especially loved the stories-within-stories structure of the novel, as the office is driven by rumor and gossip that nonetheless has the collective effect of a cut-rate Scheherazade. Read this today.

The Trouble with Physics isn’t a novel at all; it’s a science book about, well, the trouble with physics. Smolin is a bit of a bomb-thrower, using his book to question the received wisdom of string theory and to explore where exactly it’s gotten us. However, he manages to explain the Big Questions facing physics today in a surprisingly understandable way, and to show why string theory hasn’t been nearly successful enough at answering them.

The really important part of the book, though, is his last few chapters, where he talks about why the problem is not string theory but rather the larger social and cultural structures around the study and practice of physics. If you’re intimidated by sentences like “M-theory must be background-independent because the five superstring theories, with all their different manifolds and geometries, are supposed to be a part of M-theory,” you can skip straight to chapter 16 and still follow his argument. (Though personally, I found his overview of bizarre physics results that demand investigation, in chapters 13-15, to be really compelling!)

In any case, he tackles the sociology of physics, and tries to use it to explain why string theory has a) become immensely popular, to the detriment of other approaches and b) has not been successful in answering the fundamental questions of physics. According to Smolin, there are really two kinds of scientists: craftspeople, who are good at doing normal science, and seers, who are visionaries and go off in new directions. With the increasing professionalization of science, he argues (and I’d agree) that craftspeople are disproportionately favored in terms of getting hired, getting grants, getting published, and generally getting ahead. Someone working on the big questions may apparently do nothing for ten years, and then invent something brilliant. In an academic system that rewards consistent publications and relies on the approval of one’s superiors to get ahead, seers have to find other paths to success.

I also like his frank assessment of the continued role that flat-out discrimination plays, not only in keeping women and minorities out of physics, but also in keeping out people whose intellectual opinions don’t agree with the received wisdom of the time.

Smolin clearly writes from a place of love for science, and he doesn’t let science’s human messiness drive him away from believing in it as a worthwhile enterprise. I found his arguments compelling and his call to action inspiring. Although I’m not a physicist, I’m a woman and, maybe, a seer. I can take Smolin’s lessons into my own domain in trying to support people doing good work, and in doing seerific science myself.

I didn’t post about this, because I was too damn upset. But now you get the retroactive de-upsetted version.

See, I’ve been working on this research project for the past two years. I’m right on the verge of publishing, with some very cool results. (Yes, yes, you can have details, but that’s another post.) Then, last week, I caught an error on my data analysis which voided all the results I’d discovered. The paper, it seemed, was junk. Two years of effort went out the window, along with a research direction I really believed in.

First, I panicked. Then, I panicked some more. After that I was able to move on to some more productive approaches. I asked for help, both academically from my mentors and personally from my family and friends. I tried to remember that I have other research projects on the burner, and that not having all my eggs in one basket is actually the upside of my sometimes-scattered research agenda. I took a lot of deep breaths.

Which is not to say it was fun. Despite all the relatively good coping on my part, it was still pretty awful. I know that I’m supposed to be learning to do research, and that means I’m likely to make mistakes as I learn, but really, two years? That’s an awful lot of time to waste.

Then today I discovered that the error I found? Was itself an error. I had transposed two columns in the data while revising the analysis for publication. Everything was okay; my results were actually stronger than I’d originally realized; the paper is absolutely still publishable, if not even more so.

I’m hugely relieved and totally thrilled, of course. But part of me is also saying, “Hey, check that out! Something really important fell apart, and you survived. Even if the error had been for real, you totally would have made it, and that’s good to know.”

Still, universe, could you make the next lesson a little less panic-worthy? I’m really capable of learning from less drastic measures. I swear.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been following the One Hundred Pushups program. It’s basically a six-week training course that takes A NINETY NINE POUND WEAKLING AND TURNS YOU INTO … oh, wait. Mostly the program just gets you to the point where you can do a hundred pushups in a row.

While I’m not in terrible shape, this is not exactly something I felt that I could realistically do. That’s why, even though I’ve been following the program, it’s been with half-held breath, just waiting to fail. (Let’s just say that I am not known for my upper-body strength!)

Then, last night (week two, day two), I did twenty-five pushups. Twenty-five! As my last set! Okay, admittedly I wasn’t exactly touching my chest to the ground, but I was getting a good ninety-degree angle on my arms. I never thought I’d be able to do twenty-five, so even if the program doesn’t get me to the full hundred, I’m pretty damn pleased.

I’ll post again if and when I hit fifty. According to the program, it should be just a couple of weeks!

This week’s reading:

Whose Body?, Dorothy L. Sayers
Clouds of Witness, Dorothy L. Sayers
Unnatural Death, Dorothy L. Sayers
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Dorothy L. Sayers
Strong Poison, Dorothy L. Sayers
Five Red Herrings, Dorothy L. Sayers
Have His Carcase, Dorothy L. Sayers
Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy L. Sayers
The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers
Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers
Busman’s Honeymoon, Dorothy L. Sayers
Thrones, Dominations, Dorothy L. Sayers & Jill Paton Walsh
Lord Peter, Dorothy L. Sayers

Goodness, I love Dorothy L. Sayers. Or, more accurately, I love Lord Peter Wimsey. He’s witty and vulnerable, brilliant and erratic, and he makes me weak in my fucking knees if I think about him too long.

The books in this series range from good to magnificent, with the early novels and the Wimsey-Vane outings being my favorites. The Five Red Herrings is the sort of mystery I roundly dislike, full of maps and train time-tables and other ephemera, though her tongue-in-cheek attitude rescues the novel. Murder Must Advertise has a wonderful premise, but bogs down in a morass of copy-writers who all sound alike. The Wimsey-Vane mysteries, on the other hand, had me reading the same scenes over and over to savor the dialogue and the wonderful characterization, which is something I rarely do.

I think my favorite part about the series is how smart it is, and how smart it assumes you’ll be. While I myself don’t have a particularly quotational intelligence, even I recognized how every scene is peppered with allusions and quotes from Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, the Bible, Tennyson, you name it. I admit to being bitterly jealous that no matter how much I read, I’ll never have that particular facility in either my writing or my speech, but it does make a wonderful novel for a passionate reader to enjoy. If nothing else, I’ve come away from the series resolved to memorize some Donne!

If you’ve never encountered Sayers, you ought to go read these books - or, if you have limited time, at least the three books of the Wimsey-Vane courtship. Strong Poison is the best-constructed of the three, I think, and the first one where Harriet Vane is introduced. Peter has to save her from being convicted of murdering her lover in the face of some rather strong evidence that she did, and the solution to the mystery is quite neat indeed. At the same time, the romance between them is believable and sharp, and totally gripping from the first scene where they meet in the jail. Have His Carcase has the best character insights of the three, though, with Harriet struggling with the fact that Peter saved her life; I’d tend to agree with her that healthy relationships can’t begin out of a sense of obligation. Finally, Gaudy Night is often considered one of Sayers’ best works, and her portrayal of life at a women’s college at Oxford is absolutely compelling. (It made me want to throw everything over and rush off to study at Oxford myself!) I found the novel a bit frustrating, as Harriet spends most of the novel investigating, only to have Peter swoop in and solve the case. Still, the characters and the world she sets up are wonderful, and the development of the Wimsey-Vane relationship is both believable and affecting.

I only wish I had more of these books to read. Still, I have some wonderful reading coming up this weekend, so hopefully I can be consoled!

Checking my email this afternoon, after a long morning with my wireless virtuously off, I find three different rejection notices. A conference paper I wanted to present has been turned down; a paper I wrote didn’t make it into a journal; my application for a mentoring program was rejected.

This is the kind of thing I might ordinarily be upset about, but I notice that what I’m mostly feeling is relief. I tend to take on more commitments than I can handle, and I’m a pretty bad estimator of how long it takes me to actually do things - which means I often let the non-urgent but important things slide. The idea of having some projects fall through, for reasons that have nothing to do with my capabilities, is actually pretty liberating. There’ll be other opportunities for me to present and write and mentor. More important, though, it means that I have more time and energy to focus on the opportunities that I already have.

Although I’m inundated with academic and professional opportunities, I think I still operate from a model of scarcity: I feel that I have to make the most of every chance that comes along, because I’ll never get an opportunity again if I don’t. I often find myself overwhelmed, and it’s not fun; worse, it kills my ability to focus when I’m always running around putting out fires. I’m damn glad that all these rejections came in on the same day. It’s helping me remember that doing less sometimes means accomplishing more.

Note to self: you WILL have more opportunities, and you don’t have to take advantage of them all if you don’t want to. Now we’ll just see if I can stick to that.

So, it just occurred to me that not all of you can read my mind, and that I probably should point out that the boy and I are jointly offering an item in the Live Long And Marry Livejournal auction. For a donation to the cause of marriage equality, he and I will write you a role-playing scenario, suitable for play with your home group, at a con, or wherever else you like.

I know some of you have expressed particular interest in our one-on-one play, so I want to explicitly offer: if you want us to write a one-on-one game for you and your partner, we would totally jump at the chance. We’ll do it in your favorite system, or we’ll write a short primer on gaming in our inimitable (and totally awesome) style for you.

If you want to know why our work is worth the money, you should go read Naiomi’s lovely review of a tabletop Nobilis game we ran at Origins 2008. We make good gaming, oh yes we do.

You have until the 15th to bid, so go to, go to!

This week’s reading:

Daddy’s Girl, Lisa Scottoline
Consent to Kill, Vince Flynn
Act of Treason, Vince Flynn
Out of the Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis
Perelandra, C. S. Lewis
That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis
Foundation, Isaac Asimov
Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov
Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov
Northwest of Earth, C. L. Moore
The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Chris Hedges
Black God’s Kiss, C. L. Moore

Go forth, my friends! Go forth and read C. L. Moore as soon as you can possibly manage it, thanks to the Planet Stories reissue collections of her short stories. I’m very torn as to whether I preferred Black God’s Kiss, featuring Jirel of Joiry, or Northwest of Earth, featuring Northwest Smith. Jirel is a seriously badass medieval French warrior woman, who has to cope with all sorts of black magic in the course of her average day. She’s fierce and bloody-minded and ruthless and profoundly determined, and if only I were a redhead I might have to set out to be her right now. Northwest, on the other hand, is a smuggler and thief of the spaceways - think Han Solo crossed with Roland Deschain - who generally gets his ass handed to him but looks damn good doing it. Both collections feature the heroes getting involved with Lovecraftian horror, and one story even gets them together thanks to a magical dimensional gateway.

My favorite single story is probably the Northwest Smith “Mountains of Madness” homage, in which Northwest and his partner get sent to the remote mountains of Mars in order to retrieve the magical dust of the black god Pharol. In a Lovecraft story, they’d come back gibbering; in a Moore story, they end up having to face the question of whether they’re actually willing to hand over vast mystical power to the kook who’s offering to pay them. It’s really terrific, and I’ll be reading any more of her reissues I can get my hands on.

As you can tell, I also spent a bunch of time reading C. S. Lewis. I was cataloging books and came across my old copy of “Out of the Silent Planet” that I’d read in fourth grade, and not again since then. My impressions were of being terribly excited by them, and also of being rather afraid of space aliens showing up in my bedroom afterwards. Clearly I had to read them again as an adult.

Sadly, they did not survive re-reading particularly well. Part of it is that not all that much happens, at least not in the first two books. Ransom’s trips to Mars and Venus, respectively, seem like a would-be anthropological text and a travelogue. Dramatic suspense was, shall we say, limited? The third book had the advantage of being a remarkably funny satire of academic and business life, set against Lewis’s theological warfare, and it was actually quite a good read.

I could have simply enjoyed the books for what they were, even the slower-paced first two, if I had found them less profoundly disturbing. They were pretty clearly written with a theological message, but I’m okay reading books that are about a religion that isn’t mine. My problem was the content of the message. I’m hardly the first one to say so, but I found Lewis’s moral and theological approach to be really problematic.

For example: in the middle of Perelandra, Ransom encounters a guy who seems to be trying to tempt another character into doing a bad thing. He hangs about, trying to prevent it by argument. Okay, fine, good - I can even tolerate the sexism expressed by both characters toward the female tempt-ee. But then one night, he’s lying in bed when he has this idea that he ought to kill the other guy. Kill him! And through the whole internal dialogue that follows, the message is “Follow your feelings,” not “Do what is right.” In order to prevent a harm that Ransom only guesses at because of his internal feelings, we-the-readers are meant to believe that it’s acceptable for him to murder another human being. Worse, Ransom ends up not even feeling conflicted about it because of the “sense of rightness” that washes over him once he decides to kill. In my world, only a psychopath decides to kill someone in the absence of evident harm because of how it makes him feel inside; I hate that Lewis wants us to admire this guy for making that choice.

The worst part is that Lewis combines his poisonous ideas with moving and profound ones, particularly in The Screwtape Letters. He alternates between being very wise and very hateful. I don’t understand how, in the same book, he shows profound wisdom about how people can love each other without sacrifice, and also makes it clear that he thinks it is better to die than to live. I just wanted to rip out about a third of the letters and pretend they didn’t exist.

Anyhow, I then had to go read Hedges’ book on the fascist tendencies of the Christian right, and the stories he cites are pretty frightening, so I’m all freaked out here. On the bright side, Hedges’ book got me thinking about what I can do to preserve what I love about America - its pluralism, its openness, its optimism - and fight against those who want to make it a religious state. I’ve had what I think is a rather good idea … sufficiently good that I’m debating taking some time off grad school to pursue it. I’m not really ready to talk about it in public, but I’m hopeful that I might actually be able to put my talents to use in the service of causes I believe in, someday.

This week’s reading:

The Economic Naturalist, Thomas Frank
Prophet, Mike Resnick
What Dreams May Come, Richard Matheson
Prospero’s Children, Jan Siegel
The Dragon Charmer, Jan Siegel
The Witch Queen, Jan Siegel
One Door Away From Heaven, Dean Koontz
The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Louis Stevenson
Whodunit, ed. Philip Pullman
Appointment with Death, Agatha Christie
Term Limits, Vince Flynn
Transfer of Power, Vince Flynn
The Third Option, Vince Flynn
Separation of Power, Vince Flynn
Executive Power, Vince Flynn
Memorial Day, Vince Flynn

On the bright side, I managed not to leave this for one minute before Shabbat. On the down side, I’m still not sure I can write about them all - not when I’ve got two weeks’ reading to get through!

I suppose I should start by explaining myself for reading Vince Flynn. Yes, the books were sufficiently bad that I feel I need to apologize for them - particularly as I rather enjoyed them despite their badness. I ought to qualify that, actually: I enjoyed all the books except the first one, which I found profoundly disturbing. Books “Terrorists attack the White House” through “Nuclear bomb defused just in time” read much like 24, without the twenty-four-hour gimmick. (Though the books do have pretty compressed time-frames!) There’s at least one well-detailed special ops mission in each book, which are generally both clever and believable. The best part of the books are definitely the D.C. politics, though - in The Third Option and Separation of Power Flynn actually manages to create a compelling bad guy with a reasonable plan, and what makes the character come alive is how well he plays bureaucratic power games. The books where terrorists are the enemy are much less interesting!

The first book in the series, though, was sufficiently troubling that it actually got me to read the next one, just to find out whether the author really meant the stuff he was spewing. (The answer: maybe?) See, when ex-Navy SEALs murder four congressmen because they refuse to balance the budget it’s okay, but when the bad guys do it to advance their political careers it’s morally reprehensible and they deserve to die. I kept trying to read irony into the book - “Wait, are these really supposed to be the good guys? What the fuck did they just do? Are they blackmailing the fucking president?” - but no, I think Flynn wrote this one straight. Maybe Flynn just didn’t do a good job making flawed heroes - a theory I’d buy, because he simply can’t differentiate between most of his characters at all. They’re mostly cardboard cutouts with different adjectives attached to them, acting in deeply predictable ways. But if what we see in this book reflects the author’s straight-up point of view, I can’t help thinking there’s some serious moral tunnel-vision going on.

If you skip the first book, though, these are decent military-fetish, politically-oriented espionage thrillers. The writing isn’t great and the characters lack depth, but hey, they’re a fun summer-afternoon read. The main reason I’ve stopped reading them - and yes, there are two more in the series - is because the promo blurb for the next book revealed something that just pisses me off. How do you motivate the main male character to go kill more terrorists? Guess!

No, really, guess. You’re probably right, because every fricking bad thriller out there does this.

Guessed it yet?

That’s right - you kill off the woman in his life. Bonus points if she’s pregnant, which she evidently is in Flynn’s book. Then proceed to explore how important this was for the dude in question, without empathy, compassion or insight beyond how it makes the man go Become A Hero Because Of His Pain. Flynn should stick to politics and not try to provide his hero with a personality, especially if this is his idea of how to go about it. Believe me, the books work even without one.

Aaaand, er, that was a long rant. I feel like I ought to counterbalance it with some very positive thoughts, but I read a lot of rather questionable stuff over these two weeks. Take One Door Away From Heaven, for example - which I actually really love, but also really pisses me off. It’s an cleverly plotted book, with some nice twists and likable characters. But the message is, “If you don’t believe in God, then you may as well brutally murder brilliant, adorable, charming crippled children.” Seriously. Still, I decided to keep my copy because of characters like the gun-toting, RV-driving, detective-novel-reading stripper twins from Vegas, and for the moment when you figure out exactly why assorted bad guys are chasing a ten-year-old boy across America, and most of all for clever, brave, resourceful Leilani Klonk. She’s no Lyra Belacqua, but she’s a character who’s stayed with me for years. In fact, she’s the reason why I make Dean Koontz my go-to airport reading; most of his thrillers aren’t this good, but I’m hoping for another Leilani.

I guess I can say unadulterated good things about the Stevenson stories, which were a delightful surprise. I don’t tend to like his Scottish books - too much struggling with the dialect! - and I didn’t know what else he’d written beyond Treasure Island. These stories are big, bold and plot-ful, though, and I enjoyed almost every one. I particularly liked the New Arabian Nights section of the book, which tell stories of cunning, coincidence and charm set in Victorian London. “The Suicide Club,” for example, has the Haroun-al-Rashid character uncover a club where would-be suicides agree to murder each other, then chase its ringleader halfway across Europe amid assorted gruesome and romantic hijinks. These are the kinds of stories I’d like to be writing - unafraid to have Big Shit Happen, but without sacrificing character and nuance entirely.

I also really liked the Siegel series, which avoids the flaws of many urban fantasies. The main character isn’t lame, for one thing - there’s nothing I hate more than “Look, I’m a giant loser, but in URBAN FANTASY LAND I am actually a hero” urban fantasies. The antagonists are wonderfully drawn, including the ones who become quasi-allies from time to time, and the mythical allusions are clever rather than ponderous. Plus there’s time travel, and you know that’ll sell me on almost anything! Best of all, the main character is believably traumatized by her experiences; it’s not that I particularly wanted her to suffer, but it really supported the reality of the story and the world.

Each book has a distinctly different feel to it, which is something to keep in mind if you read the whole thing. The first book reminded me of Susan Cooper, for example, with Fern and her brother looking for the Magic McGuffin which must be kept out of the hands of ill-intentioned adults. The second book, though, jumps more than a decade ahead in time, and its mythic and mysterious feel reminded me more of Patricia McKillip (but without being nearly as overwritten and unreadable). Finally, the third book almost had a “Sex and the Urban Fantasy City” feel, though it did a nice job of keeping the magic at the heart of things. If you want the exact same thing over and over, I wouldn’t read this series - but if you like a series that grows and changes as the protagonist does, give this one a try!

… aaaand I’m heading out for Shabbat. Shabbat Shalom, folks!