My Home Town

Current t-shirt: actually a gray sweater (went to church this morning)
Current music: Abba (blame my husband)

Yes, you read right. I got up and went to an Episcopalian service this morning. Dad says' Episcopalianism's a great religion 'cause it doesn't interfere with your politics or your religion. Actually his dad said that, too. But the family was Protestant back when it was badass. Got kicked out of France for it. (Actually, our venerable ancestor dressed up in many disguises, including as a woman, to protect himself. He thought he made a good woman.)

The peace talks were held in my home town. Was down there at the time, but thought nothing of this except that a)there might be roadblocks, which is difficult in a town on a penninsula and b) I might not be able to get to one of the two pubs worth frequenting in the town. (Reynold's Tavern and Middleton Tavern. People say the Ram's Head is good. Don't believe them.)

Mostly I was bothered by the brand spankin' new Starbucks in the basement of the building where the Treaty of Paris, the document ending the Revolutionary War was signed. Something's wrong with that.


But with an article in The Guardian today about Al-Zawahiri (Taliban - scary) saying that the Annapolis talks will do nothing, I realized something frightening. Thanks to George Bush, Al-Qaeda now has my home address.

Before this, I could always think to myself "New York might be blown up, riot itself to death, or die spiritually of a sort of cancer due to exponential real estate prices, but my home town will always remain. I'll always have a place to go back to.

Now, maybe not.

Thanks, George.

(I used to like the name George. George Plimpton. George of the Jungle. George the Third thinking he was a teapot. It was a sound, wholesome name.)

Love and a different zip code,
The Red Pooka!

Day of quiet

Current t-shirt: green with tentacles
Current music: Sleep Station "After the War"

My internet went out yesterday. Time Warner sent someone out fairly quickly. They don't know why things go out. I believe that, had I suggested fairies or acts of God, the cable woman wouldn't have disagreed.

But it was so quiet. Mentally quiet. I got things done. I was aware of where I was. I went to bed that night and slept.

I think I'm going to restrict my time online to specific blocks. Some surfing, because I need to, but to do it in blocks. It's like something's picketing my mind, having the internet always at my fingertips.

Dean Young and Mary Jo Salter have books coming out. Dean Young's book is good, (January). I haven't seen the Mary Jo Salter yet (March).

NY Anime fest is this weekend. Anime overlaps with what I do, but I'm far from an expert. So I'll have to do some research, see what's up. The horrible thing is that, while I don't know anime as well as I should, I know conventions. Looking on the schedule, I see the usual suspects. I'll know how to talk to them. This knowledge feels like false knowledge. Something that lets you coast through the world without being real. It's not real, I'm not real. Ghosts all around.

Love n' silent spooks,

The Red Pooka!

Thoughts about fat... and other things.

Recently finished "Big Fat Manifesto," by Susan Vaught, for a review. It's about a teenage girl who writes a column, Fat Girl, about the way society treats you when you're overweight.

I don't know what to think of the book. The author has a point, and it's well-written, but it's supposed to be a YA book for and about kids. These kids don't talk like kids. They don't think like kids. They think like grownups - wish - they had thought when they were kids. Plus, Vaught, whom the book publicist assures me has had weight issues herself, makes the lead character come off like some brassy, opinionated, loud stereotype of a fat person.

I don't have an either way on the issue. I'm fairly thin. Breathing has always been more of an issue for me. I know about discrimination (translation: people acting like asses because something about you disrupts the way they think the world should be) from having learning disabilities and having to advocate for myself in grad school.

It got kinda funny when I was teaching and had a pregnant student who wouldn't fit behind the chair desks. The professor I answered to said something like 'pregnant women shouldn't be in school,' and when I finally got a chair that fit her, some other prof stole it from me for an AV presentation to prop up something.

Meanwhile, I was going to the same people asking for special recs for myself and, except for a few eye rolls, had no problem. Then I went Ivy League. Ivy League means you're supposed to be perfect. The moment I said 'learning disability accomodations,' they looked at me as if I'd escaped from a mental asylum.

I hear it's better now. I mean for LD people in grad school. I hope careers of administrators were damaged in the process. (If they haven't, and someone needs an aggressive ax behind the passive voice, I'll volunteer.) I received some first class hell over the issue.

But the book. It had a nice pace, but is a bit formulaic. Plus, the author is obviously from an era before iPod, and probably before personal computers. If the subject means so much to her, I wonder why she didn't do the research/soul-searching/google-searches necessary to make the book credible. I'm not sure God is in the details, but when novelists sweat the small stuff, they've usually sweated the large stuff, too.

So the book feels more like a personal rant, perhaps a necessary venting session, than a work of art, or even of activism. The personal has to take a step or two to be effective politically. She may have an agent, and Vaught can write a decent sentence, but it feels as though she's never left the therapy session.

I've a close friend whose girlfriend is overweight. R suffers horribly because of it, and she's a nice person. Excellent writer. Sweet lady. But then, I have the feeling fat women rarely dare to be other than sweet, the world already hates them so. R is a nuanced person. One problem with politics in books is that it often strips people of nuance. Some people lack nuance—perhaps the author is one—but stripping people of nuance is one of the things discrimination does.

I remember struggling to get into the disability office at Columbia (on an upper floor, with a non-motorized door that even I had trouble opening) and having a mean woman in owl glasses with a scowl that would sour not only milk, but an entire cow, look at my paperwork, and attempt to turn all my hopes dreams, struggles, and reasonable writing samples into a heap of unnecessary bother that she could write away. "We have standards here, you know." So why haven't they fired you yet?

But of course, I'll give the book a good review because it's for a certain sort of magazine, and that's what is required.

Love and that fuck-you attitude,

The Red Pooka!

Torture book

Current t-shirt: Narwhale, red and cream on gray.
Current music: Tilly and the Wall (yes, I'm obsessed).

I'm doing Darius Rejali's book, "Democracy and Torture" for the LAT (Princeton U Press, Dec.). Rejali is a political sci prof at Reed and rather canny. Because governments tend to open their more embarrassing archives sometime after the twelvth of never, you're never going to get the full story on torture according to the paper trail.

Well, we know a lot about peoples who didn't leave a paper trail: the Celts, Powhattan Indians, the Maya. We know these things because we use anthropology to examine and trace traditions, which tells us what comes from where and who was influencing whom.

Rejali does this with torture.

Creepy, eh?

Never knew anthropology could be so bad-ass.

Love and enemies of the state,

The Red Pooka!