the message in the bottle is the booze

I'm currently reading The Prospect Before Her by Olwen Hufton, a hefty piece of historical non-fiction on the lives of women in western Europe from 1500-1800. The scope is so broad that the author can hardly give any aspect of their lives the attention that they deserve, but it's very interesting so far.

There are some common threads, some expected and some not:

1. The need to prepare for marriage economically, i.e. by amassing a dowry - which many women wouldn't get from their families. They had to work and save up for it, frequently for a period of 12-15 years.

2. The types of jobs that women could get didn't dictate that they stay home. In fact, staying at home and working for the family could be disadvantageous, because the family didn't pay wages. Young women were surprisingly mobile! They often had to leave home to seek work as domestic servants or workers in allowable trades/proto-industries.

I'm not even a quarter of a way through the book yet, but the second point has gotten me thinking about the excuses people make for most protagonists in fantasy or historical fiction being men. One excuse is that it's harder to get a woman involved in a plot since her job is to stay at home. But that's not at all what life was like for most women during this time period.

And man, when your future hinges on your ability to save up a dowry, that's a pretty strong motivation to get involved in some shit.

I really need to change my icons - but what to? I made my default icon years ago. I'm not a huge fan of The Knife, but I liked the photoshoot - and here we are years later with this weird picture being my "face" on this site. M

(Maybe I should go full-out Sailor Moon, because that's been a constant.)

So, a little while ago I realized that I hadn't finished a book in a year. I can say it's because I've been really busy with my dissertation, but the real reason is that I just haven't been making time. A couple days ago, I decided to start fixing this, by imposing a simple rule: No electronic devices in the bathroom. Since I like to take long baths regularly, this creates a lot of time for reading.

I'm already well into a reread of Perdido Street Station by Mieville. I read it so long ago that I remembered almost nothing about it. In the meantime, I've read other books by him.

And the reread is... really interesting. Mieville hasn't matured yet. He packs every paragraph with descriptors that hammer home the chaotic and filthily organic nature of his setting. He tries to draw your attention to every repulsive little detail... I finish a page and I don't wonder, at all, how Mieville created such an atmosphere because the method is so transparent. He's constantly showing his hand.

He learns to tone it down in later books. You come out of those books with the sense of a strange, lived-in world that, yes, has its repulsive side (whether physical or metaphysical) - but it's done so much more deftly.

I'm having fun with this reread. I like seeing a skilled author in the process of getting made into an even more skilled author.

I should have known that a book I found clumsy and amateurish when I was a teenager would be even worse now.

Yes, I am talking about Wraeththu. Why did I pick it up again? Curiosity, I suppose. Despite the bad writing, I did enjoy it enough to finish it back then--and that's saying something because the thing is damn long. I can still see the appeal now.

But oh my God, I somehow managed to block out the floofy fantasy name syndrome even though it's right in the title. I did remember the hilariously flowery portrayal of everything sexual, though.

(Icon so totally appropriate for this post.)

See if you can spot the pattern:

In Cameron's Avatar, Jake Sully, an outsider, becomes the champion of the Na'vi, and fights for them against his own people.

In Frank Herbert's Dune, Paul Atriedes, an outsider, joins the Fremen and becomes their tragic messianic figure.

In Robin Hobb's Shaman's Crossing trilogy, Nevare Burvelle, an outsider, becomes magically connected to the Specks, a people who are under attack by his government's attempt to build a road through their land.

In more Star Trek episodes than I can name, the crew of the Enterprise, outsiders, discover that their influence on cultures that they meet is doing them harm.

...

Okay, I'm sure you can spot more than one pattern here, but what I'm getting at is from whose perspective these stories are written. The protagonists are all part of the dominant culture in their universes, and the story of the marginalized culture whose struggle they join is told through their eyes.

Even when the setting is totally invented, when authors have the most freedom, this pattern is still everywhere. I know I'm not pointing out anything new.

Summer is coming up soon, which means that I have time to read books. But instead of reading more of the same, I'd like to read science fiction or fantasy stories where the other viewpoint is the neutral one.

So, does anyone have recommendations? I'm especially interested in stories where both cultures are invented.

[I erased and rewrote several times a tangent about how this is a subset of outsider stories, which don't always involve a conflict with the outsider's culture. Harry Potter would be a different story if the protagonist was a member of Wizarding culture to begin with; Harry's outsider perspective introduces Muggle readers to the Wizarding world with a sense of wonder.

But it's worth asking why one culture is viewed from the outside and the other from the inside so frequently when that conflict does exist. The benefits of an "outsider perspective" can carry their own assumptions, including that the marginalized culture, often "inspired by" real-world cultures, is the one that is the most exotic and most needing to be explained from the outside.]

I finished The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party -- what a title.

I didn't know what to expect, because by the time I picked it up I had forgotten why I had put it on my list to begin with, but by the time I finished it, I was very impressed. I went to Barnes & Noble the next day to pick up the sequel.

The story begins with the boy Octavian, who is growing up in a house where everyone but he and his mother are given numbers instead of names. It's the years immediately prior to the Revolutionary War, in New England. The house is the Novanglian College of Lucidity, a collection of intellectuals who are interested in all of the aspects of science.

I'm not sure how much I can say without ruining some of the impact, so consider the rest of this post to contain spoilers.

( Spoiler cut. )I was surprised when the man at Barnes & Noble helped me find the sequel in the teen fiction section. The themes are difficult. Not that I think that makes them unsuitable for teens; quite the opposite, really. The questions it raises about the early history of the United States are worth raising, and most teens won't get that elsewhere.

This is definitely on my recommended list, and I don't even like historical fiction much.

I'm currently reading the first book in the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher. Most of what I've heard about it is the same: It's good paranormal-detective fun, but the first book is pretty bad. It gets better as the series progresses.

I don't mind the prose. It's not good, but it's not obtrusively bad either; it sort of fades into the background most of the time and only jumps out to go "BLARRRHGH" at you when there is a clumsy info-dump. I'm not far enough along to really judge the plot.

What does stand out is the sexism.

Harry Dresden, the protagonist, is a self-proclaimed "old fashioned" man. For example, he holds doors open for women--not something I would blame him for, but he continues to do it even after they tell him that they don't appreciate it.

In his own words, "men ought to treat women like something other than just shorter, weaker men with breasts." Women should be treated differently, regardless of their feelings on the matter. And this is portrayed as if it makes Dresden more noble.

I'm alright with flawed protagonists--in fact, I love them, but when it seems like those flaws are reflections of the author's prejudices, I'm uncomfortable. I don't like it when an author's racism, sexism, or other -ism is showing. I could accept that this was Harry Dresden's problem, not Jim Butcher's, if not for how sexism suffuses the portrayal of women in the book, which can't always be explained away as being due to Dresden's point of view.

( And then it gets worse. )

So, Harry Dresden's old-fashioned values:

Women should be treated differently than men regardless of their opinions about it. Women are more hateful than men, and more subtle than men. It's unexpected if an attractive one has a traditionally male job. They love romance novels land chocolate, and what they're looking for in a man is money. Using a mind-altering substance to get a woman to fall in love with (read: sleep with) is bad because it makes you look desperate.

There has been a lot of discussion on metafandom about Patricia Wrede's new book, which Jo Walton summarized thus: "This is an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America ('Columbia') was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical."

I don't like it either, for reasons that other people have rather eloquently pointed out. Patricia Wrede is, like it or not, the cultural heir of a genocide. The beneficiary. Writing the victims out of existence, when their descendants still struggle for recognition and rights, is problematic to say the least.

Our colonial history is presented as a heroic adventure. Columbus, pilgrims, cowboys, pioneers. The Little House on the Praire. We learn about Native Americans as well - but as supporting characters, or worse, props. The national myth that many of us have instilled in us as young children is one of discovery, exploration, and settlement. That history is about the victors.

It's natural that some writers are drawn towards it. Re-imagining myths, especially ones that are part of your own cultural identity, is one of the oldest storytelling traditions.

But in no way does that mean it's okay to create a world where Native Americans never existed, freeing the Americas for your white characters to explore and populate without any resistance or raising uncomfortable issues about your own history.

There are other ways to write that magical exploration story. There are other re-imaginings. The first, and most obvious, is that white people don't have to be the protagonists.

That isn't as obvious as it should be, unfortunately.

God, I have so many ideas for stories I will never get around to writing as a result of this whole thing.

I know I said that I would be studying, but someone left a book here, hopefully as a joke, called How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill- and it's hilarious.

It purports to be the story of an former ad executive who was let go for not being young and hip enough, and ends up working on the floor at a Starbucks, where he learns all sort of useful life lessons, such as "being black and working class is different than being white and rich" and "Starbucks can give you the authenticity you crave."

The reviews on Amazon.com seem to think that it's genuine, but whether or not it is, Gill's advertising experience shines through. Some choice quotes, pulled at random:

"Crystal's passion for Starbucks was an integral part of her life."

"Starbucks was not something people decided for or against in a casual way. It was obviously a key part of their lives, an important destination for them every single day."

"Crystal and Starbucks had freed me to be me."

"I could be sincere at Starbucks because I was finally in a work environment that valued those precious moments of truly human interaction."

The writing is so corporate it hurts. Customers are called "Guests" - yes, capitalized. Nearly every other page has dialogue that seems to be Starbucks copy, just slightly modified so that it could plausibly come out of a real person's mouth.

Who in the world left this book at a non-Starbucks shop, and why? I'm tempted to put it in the deposit bag and let whoever does the counting downtown get a laugh out of it too, but if it's something a customer left behind on accident,... I guess I could tell them that I burned it.