Cimorene

There's board elections coming up for the OTW and some unfunny business emerging. I have seen comments to the effect that people *would* have considered involvement/not shunning the name of OTW and spreading malicious sniping about AO3 but now that they've seen how extra-wanky it supposedly is they should instead run away. ( But honestly, OTW's just a large volunteer organization having a periodic but by no means unprecedented flare-up of dysfunction and infighting due to conflicting views and growth/change, and that isn't so different from other such organizations. Every now and then everybody involved wants to rip their hair out and they try to work that shit out and the only way to do that is for members to continue to push for what they believe in. It's not a special evil unique to the OTW. )

The people I see posting meta about this are doing their best: honestly airing their thoughts and talking to each other and sometimes having large alcoholic or tannin-laden drinks, which looks like an exemplary handling of the situation.

I didn't check the syllabus before taking the 1-hr trip to suburb Pargas yesterday for the weekly meeting of my course for teacher's assistants, and so didn't realize that it was, in fact, Multiculturalism (aimed at Extremely White Non-Academic People from Finland AKA A Country That's 98% Insular and Racially and Ethnically Homogenous).

I immediately correctly guessed that I should have executively exempted myself, considering that I studied Sociology through all the Bachelor's level courses and quit only when it was time to write an undergraduate thesis, and that I was raised Unitarian Universalist on my English professor grandmother's considerable collections of world folklore (not to mention educated in America where in school I learned more about world religions than the Finns, which is hilarious considering Finland has the best secondary education in the world and America places 14th) (of course, that isn't universal in the US, where considerable latitude is given to state governments, city governments, and individual schools).

When I saw the first Powerpoint slide said "WHAT IS CULTURE?" I was like, Oh shit, and started ripping up my handout to make a series of progressively smaller origami cranes, which has been my habit whenever reading a novel through a boring class isn't possible, starting in 9th grade. (I had seven at the end of the class, four of which had small allover patterns drawn in ballpoint on both sides of the paper, and the smallest of which I folded using the tip of the pen when my pinky nail could no longer fit into the folds. I threw them all away on my way out.)

(LOL. This was entirely my own fault, by the way. Some of the class probably DID need the lecture and all of the lectures are optional.)

My dad, 3/4 Jew and 100% naturally and genetically irreligious, was raised in the Ethical Culture Society and UU congregations because his parents wanted people to have dinner parties and nature hikes with, and summer camps to send their children to. My mom was raised Catholic and didn't like it, and my parents were happily sleeping in on Sunday until they moved to Alabama when I turned 6 and I was plunged head-first into the Alabama public school system, and consequently exposed to Christianity enough to notice it for the first time.

At age five, I was impressed by Buddhism and used to tell people when asked that I was Buddhist based on children's books on the subject. But everyone (everyone vocal at least) in my new school was a Southern Baptist. They were all talking about Jesus all the time, as well as telling so many stories from Bubble Camp (their accents were very thick and it was several years before I realized that "Bubble Camp" was actually Bible Camp) that I wished to take part. When people asked, I said I was Baptist for a while. Even though it was clear I didn't know what it entailed, my parents decided I needed a positive influence, so they joined the local Unitarian Universalist group - today a Congregation, back then a Fellowship - which, at the time, was renting space from the local synagogue.

For the first few years, there were few volunteers to teach Children's Religious Education (CRE), which takes place during the service for UUs and thus denies those volunteers adult company. The debate raged on the CRE Committee over which UU CRE curriculum to use: the one based on Bible stories that we did my first year, or the World Religions one. For a while I think there was a time-share policy in place, but somehow I managed to almost completely miss any Bible-story learning. Most of my childhood Sundays were given over to World Religions. I also went to the adult services because I felt like clinging to my parents' arms a fair amount in the years my mom wasn't teaching, or whenever the topic of the sermon looked interesting. The adult "sermons" were usually not actually sermons; our group didn't hire a full-time minister until I was in high school. They were generally on current events, philosophy, science, civil rights, or history, and the last quarter to half hour or so would be given over to a congregation-wide open debate.

By the end of my third year in Alabama public schools (3rd grade, 1992), I had learned all the salient features of trying to argue about religion with crazy Christians (aka the futility of arguing with trolls, even though I didn't know the word 'troll'). This isn't to say that I completely stopped, but I put more effort into, for example, contradicting the Bush Sr propaganda perpetrated by Weekly Reader and the American History propaganda about Washington and Columbus perpetrated by our textbooks, and pro-choice arguments when my 4th grade teacher tried to preach anti-abortion during math lessons, and campaigning for Clinton on the playground.

There were gay couples, Hindus, practicing Jews and recovering Christians in the congregation when we joined. Over the years, my home congregation has had a handful of practicing Buddhists and Native Americans and provided a meeting place for the local university's pagan group (my mother took me to several meetings in middle school, but they weren't as exciting as fantasy novels had led me to expect, even if I did get to jump over a burning candle). None of these acquaintances were very much more than superficial, but at least they were there. Tokenism, privilege, Nice White Ladies: it's practically my native culture. True inclusivity often (usually?) starts with the well-meaning majority being accidentally insensitive (it took my parents and the practicing Canadian Jews several years to part the fellowship from its "Thanksgiving Seder" in favor of a truly multicultural Thanksgiving that made factually correct references to Sukkot and none to Passover, which is about freedom and fighting for it, and thanks for, you know, the plagues as opposed to for the HARVEST. Although this concept was not too difficult to get across to a congregation of college-educated former Christians, they still held onto it for several years because it was "fun" and "everybody liked it").

The guest lecturer was a MA in Psychology who teaches World Religions in secondary school (hilariously - or maybe it's just me - Wax's good friend Sofia is a Doctor of Religion who teaches Psychology in secondary school). She was highly animated, and included a number of anecdotes from her international travels, so the class wasn't mind-numbingly boring, even if the only new information I learned was that no other books may be placed on top of the Qur'an (but this applies only to the Arabic; translations aren't holy); Indians throw dead bodies into the Ganges; in the Orthodox neighborhoods in Jerusalem high-rise elevators stop on each floor automatically on the Sabbath so residents don't have to push any buttons, and men can't go before the Wailing Wall with their heads uncovered; and that Hare Krishna used to be the Swedish government's #1 Threatening Religion because they encourage people to cut off all ties.

This week saw one of the loudest and wankiest outbreaks in the last year or two of the endless fight between people who support constructive criticism and people who think that if you can't say anything nice, you shouldn't say anything at all.

This iteration was a bit more entertaining than usual, however, because the issue had gotten pretty thoroughly mixed up with the separate but related issue of reviews and recs. I don't mean that the issues were conflated by participants who failed to distinguish between them, but that the discussion, especially in lamardeuse's anti-concrit post, was divided between discussion of concrit and discussion of reviews, frequently explicitly separated by people on both sides of the argument, but then (apparently) conflated again just a few inches away, or even within the same comment - treated, although they were labelled as separate issues, as connected ones if not two sides of the same one. And I'd argue that that's not wrong.

Feedback and reviews are two separate things, but they are also two sides of the same issue: the interactions between the reader, the text, and the writer. (I put them in that order deliberately - fiction is at most a mediated interaction between reader and writer, and more properly an interaction between reader and text. The author doesn't have to be dead for that to be true. The author is simply irrelevant, at least until later when it's time to interact with her as two individual community members and not in your roles in relation to her story, because the author's not there in your head when you read.)

The conflation of feedback and reviews is a strange and fascinating issue for me in itself, something present in the comments of the post and something which I have encountered several times recently. There's a wavery line in fandom between the public (which recs and reviews by nature are) and the private (which feedback is generally considered to be, even though it is frequently performed in public, in which case it is often more a social ritual than a private communication).

i. the public and the private spheres

Most of us in lj-based media fandom generally regard as personal spaces the arenas where we interact with our personal friends which are frequently not, in fact, friendslocked. People also feel a natural sense of ownership of their own journals even when the contact is explicitly public, i.e. addressed to the public. Perhaps it is this and the journal-based fandom model's ability to fine-tune and filter privacy and participation for each individual user that causes this conflation?

( Livejournal's multiple functions have done for that web 1.0 culture what the mobile phone did for our physical lives: erased the physical delineations for our spheres of interaction. )

Why I hate postmodernism, courtesy of xkcd!

Also see "a momentary functional condensation of the SPACE".

"No straight man would [wear that shirt, move his hips like that, cuddle a man like that, stand like that, like that music, wear that eyeliner]" is a lamentably common refrain in fandom. It's probably popular for all the right reasons, usually, because gay is a compliment from the fannish point of view.

It's also something I'll forever associate with tinhats (ie: slash fans who believe their RPS pairings are Really And Truly Real), because this was the favourite argument of the most famous tinhats of all - the Domlijah True Believers back in Lord of the Rings RPS fandom. The favourite arguments of the tinhats had to do with body language, despite the fact that they purported to have actual contact with a secret Source close to the happy couple who fed them messages of comradeship. Pictures of actors standing close together or looking at each other or standing in the same pose are purported to be incontrovertible proof of long-term coupleship, or sexual attraction: it's a So-Married pose, it's the kind of unconscious mirroring that grows up naturally after years of being Soulmates, etc.

But the argument in a more general sense usually has to do with gayness, and we see it a lot nowadays. But this statement is wrong.

A straight man could wear eyeliner, or a pink shirt, or stand like that. And would.

Because the only thing that no straight man would do is be in a sexual relationship with another man. That's it. They can cuddle, cry, talk about their feelings, dress how they want to, gesticulate, sound swishy, wear pink. These are all cultural prohibitions - they aren't naturally or genetically associated with sexual orientation at all. They're things that many men avoid in our culture (not, for example, in Japan) because they are frightened of being characterised as gay.

So if you're calling guys gay because they cuddle and kiss their friends, wear feather boas, cry, love shoes, talk with their hands, love showtunes - even if you're saying it because you LOVE them for it, because you love that they're that gay - you're reinforcing the very cultural norms and stereotypes which they're fighting against.

That people look at one another and are jealous of one another; that they exchange letters or dine together; that irrespective of all tangible interests they strike one another as pleasant or unpleasant; that gratitude for altruistic acts makes for inseparable union; that one asks another man after a certain street, and that people dress and adorn themselves for one another - the whole gamut of relations that play from one person to another and that may be momentary or permanent, conscious or unconscious, ephemeral or of grave consequence (and from which these illustrations are quite casually chosen), all these incessantly tie men together. Here are the interactions among the atoms of society.

- The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff

He's like Durkheim only more emo! ♥

This textbook pre-digests the classics of sociology for us because the professors in the department don't agree with me and isilya that it's pretty ridiculous to allow someone to get a master's degree in sociology without making sure they've read [some of] the texts of the founding fathers of the discipline in an original non-pre-digested form. But I digress. /rant

So in the beginning of the section on Marx, it's all, "Marx's partner, Engels -" and, well, I know they were compadres and frequent co-authors and they worked out their theories together, but partner? I was like, what, was Marx gay and no one's ever mentioned that to me before...? But no, it's a linguistic nuance, a whimsy of expression, or a personal blip in my own brain.

However, if you were curious, there is one google hit for "Marx/Engels slash". But it's more like epistolary posthumous unrequited longing, so does that make it Marx/Engels gen?


PS. I hate reading about Marx. It's like I'm allergic: as soon as he comes up my brain starts itching with boredom and irritation. I'd probably be as annoyed if there were some slash stashed away in there.

there was a powersurge last night and when i woke up this morning, there was no electricity anywhere but the kitchen. i lit a candle and flipped the switch in the circuit box and then read thud! through breakfast and never even had time to turn on my computer, until now, after a leisurely lunch -

- it won't turn on. i made several attempts. Brother Windows confirms my conjecture that the problem is likely the powersource.

we were at the computer store (which is like 20 minutes' walk from here, and remember, there are snowdrifts to my knees out there right now and it's -10 C) the day before yesterday for wax_jism to buy 300 more gigs of harddrive that she doesn't need and she was all "are you SURE there's nothing you need?" and bought me a cheapass new keyboard and everything. also, i don't even know how to go about replacing the power source so there's definitely no point in going when she isn't home. but i mean. WHAT. WHAT.

aöslkdjföaskkdjföasdf.

to make the computer situation better, before the end of tomorrow i have to write about three pages in swedish of pointless rambling. that might as well have been the assignment word-for-word. ( why cim now hates Professor Surprise and hopes she will be visited in her nightmares by the vengeful ghosts of anthropology textbooks that prominently mention Jane Goodall. )

a new course in folkloristics today.

Professor Surprise¹: what do you think about when you hear the word "fieldwork"? anyone?
me: jane goodall.
[silence]
Professor Surprise: who?
me: you know, that woman - with the chimpanzees?
Professor Surprise: oh - i don't know, but i'll just write "chimpanzees", okay?

[Poll #902689]


1. Professor Surprise is wee and perky and seems nice. her name results from her very short and wide-set, rather high eyebrows. she looks perpetually surprised, or at least very, very intent.

we saw casino royale on saturday night. i take back everything unflattering i ever said about daniel craig's hair colour. mads mikkelsen was exactly right: "they will shut up when they see this." it was really entertaining - exciting and funny, well-acted, pretty and generally awesome. i could totally see that again. it made me want to put up the poster, but we don't have any rooms where that much blue would be appropriate.

what was kind of disturbing - though i wouldn't say it actually ruined the experience - was that the guy behind me had an (epileptic?) seizure in the theatre which went on for probably twenty minutes at least. i realise it would have been a giant pain to get him out, especially a full-grown guy like that, it's not like you could just pick him up or anything, but still, there wasn't really room to have a seizure comfortably there - i mean, he was twitching constantly and hitting his feet, and he kept making these kinda scary choking noises - i think he vomited (wax says he did). although he didn't actually choke; after the seizure he did leave. i don't think i've ever seen a seizure in person before. well, it was memorable.

also, the department chair gave another lecture on swedish-speaking finns today; she was talking about the "language border", both geographical and societal. she's kind of old and evidently a staunch member of the swedish people's party and kind of conservative and paranoid about the language dying out - well, she's from åland besides being old, so i don't know. but she told us that you shouldn't go out and speak swedish on the streets late at night in places like turku/åbo because it isn't safe; that the swedish people's party has the support of almost all swedish-speaking finns but that the overly-liberal helsinki swedish-speakers are out of touch with the rest of the population which is why the chief swedish paper, hufvudstadsbladet, is so unreasonably supportive of bilingualism (because bilingualism is just the fast way to language death); that children with one finnish-speaking and one swedish-speaking parent speak "bad" swedish akin to the english learnt in school by non-native speakers because they "just put swedish words" into finnish expressions and even structures (i bit my tongue to keep from pointing out she'd just told us herself a few minutes ago how strongly swedish-influenced western and southern finnish is); that a language cannot survive if it is not officially protected and used in the society at large; and that the future basically looks really bleak for swedish in finland. her prognosis is radically different from that of the bilingualism specialist from helsinki who gave us a lecture a couple of weeks ago, but then, i guess she's one of those liberal helsinki bilinguals. she finished the lecture half an hour early and she was kind of desperate for people to talk, but, well... ahh, i'm an academic coward. if i were rodney mckay i'd've just picked a fight, but i like her; she's a quavery harmless grandmother type, with an earnest face and huge eyes.