mckinley's dragonhaven & the cultural generation gap in social debate

∞ Robin McKinley's Dragonhaven and why it's not a "Dragon Book"

I spent most of yesterday reading Robin McKinley's Dragonhaven. It was engrossing but my least favourite of her books I've read in years (passionate Sunshine, Deerskin and fairytale-McKinley devotee, here). Partly, I think, I was surprised that it's not a ~Dragon Book~ á la Anne McCaffrey or Naomi Novik, or Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, or Bruce Coville's YA Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher (which, btw, is recommended, because Coville does good YA modern fantasy, and it has thoughtfulness although not the scope and humour of Wrede's high fantasy). (I am aware of the existence of highly notable Jane Yolen YA dragon books and I think Andre Norton ones as well, but I never really read them.) It's not, subgenre-wise, a dragon fantasy, but a first contact story. As such I was reminded most strongly of CJ Cherryh's Foreigner, Vonda McIntyre's Starfarers series, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman's 2006 Philip K Dick award-nominee Catalyst: A Novel of Alien Contact. These are the first contact stories that have stood out the most in my mind. Even though Dragonhaven is about half JT, Dragon Hatcher-type story (or like that US kids' picture book where the boy rescues a baby loch ness monster and keeps it in his baththub and then the public pool), and half first contact, it still struck me as a contact story overall. A slight source of disappointment was the fact the protagonist was male. I've grown to be able to count on good female protagonists from McKinley. I guess most women will feel like writing a dude story every now and then (Diana Wynne Jones and CJ Cherryh do it all the time), but I kept comparing it to the vaguely-imagined outline of what such a story with a female POV-character could have been. And then there's this, I don't know, generation issue that I think might be at work, because the protagonist starts out a child and then grows up, and his age just... didn't ever ring right. (There are extenuating circumstances in the book - the kid is homeschooled on a wilderness preserve and isolated from a great deal of technology as well as from a peer group his age - but then again, he does have TV. And books. And plenty of face-to-face contact with people from outside. I'm still discussing it with myself.) And that brings me to

∞ The Generation Gap

I've been thinking about it a lot over the last few months: I belong to a generation that is just settling into its adulthood, and the conflicts with the last generation are beginning. It's not just in sff either: it's hard to explain the social life, the day-to-day wired reality, and the social consciousness of someone of my generation to someone brought up prior to the 1960s (there seems to be a grace period there, perhaps because those people are our parents, perhaps because society started changing when they were still young adults and so some of them managed to follow).

I felt this sense when I read that long essay by Elizabeth Moon, VP of the Science Fiction Writers of America, fertile producer of woman-centric military space opera books during my childhood and icon to my mother: she chronicles all her lower-class cred and childhood relationships with latin@ culture, then characterises the increasingly widespread call in the sff blogosphere for pros to speak out against institutionalised racism in the genre as "guilting", dismissing the passionate expressions of people's social consciences, the pain of their social realities and the voices of cultural movement as "tactics" which she states are wrongheaded and strongly implies are dishonest. This is the unintentionally-silencing voice of my grandparents' generation (though she's not quite that old), the ideological appeal to the individualism so saturated through their formative years that they don't necessarily realise that it is individualism or that there's anything in it to problematise. I see this thought as related to the thought put forth by veejane here although by "old guard" I think she means book fandom versus media fandom to some extent, and not a question of age.

I've felt it when trying to explain to psychologists, parents' friends, and casual middle-aged acquaintances about them thar newfangled intartubes or more significantly about the relationships we make on them and how yes, they really are really real. Simultaneous real-time interaction, or e-correspondence, or a friendly acquaintanceship built up through occasional comment interactions in blog posts. We've all felt it in the years-long lagtime between social reality and reality as seen on tv, between consumer electronics demand and the first manufacturers bringing a supply of mp3 players, webphones, pocket computers, ebook readers. And we've all felt it when we read slash written decades ago, that aura of otherness that a lot of us call "Old Slash" or "Classic Slash". Many of us have felt it in books set in the future and pervaded with the ethos of the past: golden age and pulp sf, Star Trek with its charming reflections of Cold War culture, and New Wave 70s-80s sf and its pre-Internet predictions of what the future would be like. I suspect it's just that some of this is more obvious, that's all. Oftentimes there's a recognisable flavour to books written by members of my parents' generation (that is, people who started to publish around the time I was born, with a little leeway to either side), one that I've only now started to recognise - quite naturally because until recently there wasn't any newer generation around. And hey, that's not exactly a bad flavour. I like most of my parents' friends most of the time. But every now and then one of the Things That Makes Us Different will come up, and I'll find myself on one side of the dinner table ranged against all their friends on the other (my parents usually just try to change the subject at this point). And sometimes it's just a kind of impatient or off feeling and I can't even put my finger on the source of it, but I know it's because they're old.

There are some things that it's better to talk about with your agemates, and I even I, raised with an amazing amount of over-identification with my parents and almost entirely shunning folks my own age, got this from a young age. It's not only whiny teenagers who have the sense that their parents just don't get it. As we get older, selecting for generation-mates gets easier to do: I mean, some day I'll HAVE be given a shrink who knows as much about the Internet as I do and I won't have to say that I am not substituting "fake" relationships for "real ones". If I just wait. Hey, that time on the Internet makes it a lot easier to engage in my generation's dialogues instead of rehashing the dialogues of my parents' (Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull &WS) and grandparents' (Elizabeth Moon) generations that are never going to be finished, for some of them. (If you ever meet either one of my grandfathers, and I will tell you this for FREE although you don't know their names so it won't help much - DON'T TALK ABOUT RACE WITH THEM. You're just wasting your time. If they try, you should ask if he's read anything else interesting lately or what is his latest mad scientist scheme for turning the farm into a golf course, respectively.)

sneakers of the day

The second pair are Rocket Dog's "Geek Squad". I love the brilliant colours, the elastic laces making them pull-ons, the upturned toe, the Purcell-reminsicent rubber trim. The first pair are the (deep breath)"Piera" by Heidi Klum for Papillio which is part of Birkenstock, in olive (I mention the colour only when it might be necessary to clear up confusion, like when the name of the colour actually describes a concept mutually exclusive with the actual colour. These shoes are sort of tan, maybe khaki, not olive, which is green. If you folks at Papillio are reading this - or is it Heidi herself who names it? - you should be taking notes).

noauuuughhhhhh

I was mourning the fact that we're out of milk and drinking my second tea of the day when I happened to glance to the side and, to my horror, identify on wax_jism's monitor a story about the Right Nite Owl curing poor woobie Rorschach's psychoness with his healing cock. (Sugar doesn't support that and neither do I.) At least, I didn't glimpse the cock, but I glimpsed "fumbling" and "belt-buckle", and now I am scarred. So there you have it, internet: my other half reads Rorschach slash. Don't let her deny it.

cultural appropriation in my life

Here's the last time real life smacked me in the face with cultural appropriation and I had to think about it.

The internal documentation of a major Swedish clothing chain talks about their new advertising campaign for spring/summer called "Marrakech." The documentation explains that the campaign consists of a little video loop of their blonde and blue-eyed Swedish spokesmodel walking through the streets of Marrakech (one of the most famous cities in the North African Kingdom of Morocco) - surrounded by local colour - wandering up into and through the ruins of a Moroccan castle - dressed in ethnic garments. (Now, these are items from the Swedish megachain's line, so I need hardly say that while they are probably "ethnic", the chances are vanishingly small that they are either of Moroccan style or manufacture). That's right: we've taken this super-blond Viking chick who represents SWEDEN (even though Sweden and the rest of the Nordic countries have significant immigrant populations from Africa and the Middle East, not to mention that they then sell their shit all up and down Eastern Europe where nobody is remotely Swedish) - and then we have dressed this chick in vague "ethnic" garments that seem exotic to us although we don't actually know where there from, because all of you non-Northern-Europeans are really the same, right? And then we have flown her in a plane to actual Africa to appeal to your desire to vacation somewhere warm, to take advantage of the natural romance of the exotic - but don't worry, we have cleared all the icky or scary foreign and African things about Morocco away, like for example, actual residents of Marrakech!

Yay, right? Well, strangely enough, I was bitching about this to Brother Windows the other day and he seemed to totally get it, but just now when Wax said that she didn't want to see anything called Slumdog Millionaire because hello, SLUM DOG? and her Indian-American best friend, he said "What?" and "So, what, are you mad because it was made by white people?" and when she tried to explain that hate speech is never okay and it's too late to go in "reclaiming it" (which, protip, you can't do unless you are OF THE GROUP IN QUESTION) after you've introduced yourself with "HATE SPEECH MILLIONAIRE"... yeah, when she said that, remarkably concisely, he said... "Yawn." Oh, and also that you can't judge whether it was okay for them to use hate speech or not until you watch the movie, to see if they use it respectfully enough or something, I assume. I don't know. I don't get it.

ancient berber & tifinagh (written tuareg)

Tuareg or Tamasheq is the most common variety of Berber (or Tamazight, a term for the language group which is gaining ground over "Berber", which was borrowed from Arabic in the middle ages and bears no relation to the native terms). Tuareg is spoken by the Tuareg in approximately the middle third of the protruding Western part of northern Africa, between Algeria (N)/ Niger (S)/ Mali (SW)/ Libya (NE). Arabic script has been used to write Tuareg for a couple of thousand years now, but the consonantal alphabet of Ancient Berber - derived from Phoenician! - survived by some strange miracle, and a recognisable descendant of it is still used by the Tuareg colloquially (not for formal writing). Check out the awesome.