From now on until some as yet unknown time in the future, I will be crossposting between Dreamwidth and LJ and reading in both places, though as people become securely established over on DW I will probably trim the lj list down quite a lot to avoid duplication.

If this is our first introduction, hi!

You may want to read my DW profile before deciding if you mean to keep me or to toss me back. I find that over the years I have been holding house on Livejournal I have developed strong Opinions about how I want my journal to work, so unlike my lj profile, which sort of grew haphazardly, this time I have actually written a position paper of sorts.

Also, I am the sort of person who thinks this is funny:

(This journal is queer. And friendly.)

Spread the Net: Donate ten dollars. Buy one mosquito net. Save three people from malaria.

Got a couple of hours? Volunteer in the developing world from your own computer desk.

Got 25 dollars to spare? Donating money once is good. Lending it over and over is better. Microcredit from microlenders. Like you.

pecunium speaking at the Torture is a Moral Issue conference.

It's ten minutes. It's well worth watching. But if you really really don't have time?

Torture: still wrong, still doesn't work. Ticking bomb scenario: still complete and utter bullshit. In other news, water is wet, the sky is up there, and dogs have been known to return to their vomit.

... When Irwin Cotler stood up in the fourth slot in Question Period and challenged the government once again to bring Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik home from years of exile in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum, we waited for the predictable response ... [c]harged once again with responding, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson stood in his place and said simply: “The government will comply with the court order,” and then sat down. For an instant it was almost like you could hear a whooshing sound in the place, then many of us stood up and applauded in total shock

...

Irwin Cotler was a lion in the exile’s defense, rising repeatedly in the house, faced by countless heckles from the Conservatives, and holding true to the belief that law is law and that you can’t keep a Canadian citizen interned when there is no evidentiary base for such a practice

...

Joanne Deschamps from the Bloc deserves full credit for marshaling her party’s response and reminding everyone in the House that the Bloc have been pathfinders in the realm of human rights and that they need not take a back seat to any party on that issue.

But the one person who stuck on this file and deserves full praise for the victory yesterday was the NDP’s Paul Dewar

...

Against all odds, Dewar exhausted every parliamentarian option, time after time, not just in an attempt to exonerate an innocent citizen, but to prove that the Canadian parliament could be relevant in such a case. I watched as the government members of the committee fought him vociferously. But he worked the system - very well. In key votes on the case, the three opposition parties worked together and won by one vote each time, Paul’s example being the key cause.

Paul Dewar is my MP, and I am very, very proud of him. I was lucky enough to run into him for a few minutes on Friday to tell him so.

Note: Mostly, when I say "I", I mean "we" because I have a cowriter and a steady editor, and with a few exceptions what I post, whether it's under my name and damned_colonial's or just mine, is the product of a shared universe with shared assumptions and agreements between me, her, and fairestcat, and the only really reliable functional difference between what I post as just me and what we post as us is who did the actual plot-generation.

Mostly, but not always, so I shall use "I". This is not true in reverse: Skud has written quite a lot of stuff that I had little or nothing to do with. Also, she may or may not agree with anything I say here and I do not speak for her. But she has been a huge influence on my thinking, as has fairestcat.

Warnings, my general philosophy on:

In most ways, I am the anti-labelling ficcer. I don't write summaries. I generally don't give pairings. My notes tend toward the terse or nonexistent. I'm not going to tell you if you're getting slash or het or both or none. Those are plot points, and I work reasonably hard at not telegraphing them. I don't use rating systems that involve suggested ages, because I think that's an awful, stupid system and I refuse to perpetuate it.

In general, I label things according to sexual explicitness or otherwise, and explicit or otherwise violence, and that's that.

But I firmly believe in warnings. I can't make you use them, but I can think that if you deliberately don't use them in general that you're being somewhere between sort of thoughtless and a right jerk.

If you go out of your way not to use them on fics with a lot of triggery content I can think that you actively enjoy luring people in to be triggered and that you're not someone I want to read, or indeed know. I can also think that if you really think your artistic freedom is threatened by warnings then you're badly confused about either 'art' or 'freedom' and should consult a dictionary.

I will particularly think this if you post pairings, summaries, notes and slash/het/both tags and yet refuse to give warnings because somebody somewhere is asking you to and that makes it automatically an assault on your integrity. As Blessed Saint Dorothy of Oxford hath truly said^[1]: "Some consideration for others is necessary in community life".

This is not an exception to my general approach, it's an intrinsic part of it. If I'm going to ask people to read stuff based entirely on a fandom, a list of characters, and the fact that it's me writing it, I need to make sure that they can trust me to do my best to make sure that that experience of diving into a story to see what happens isn't going to be triggering or damaging for them. We're going for enjoyable uncertainty, here.

A Small Digression:

"But Marna, hardly any of your stuff has warnings!"

Well, true. This is one reason I'm writing this post, actually. I don't want to be mistaken for someone who refuses to warn.

The paucity of warnings on my fic to date is because I largely don't write fic that seems to me to need warnings, barring the one where 18th C and 21st C definitions of 'underage' ended up in conflict and the Shakespearean dubious consent one - both of which I warned for.

In general though, I'm on the romance end of things, my sex scenes tend to involve not only consent but enthusiastic cooperation, my violence tends to be offscreen or inexplicit, and I don't expect that to change.

Warnings, my general philosophy on, some practical applications of:

Slash/Het/Both: Does not get a warning, a label, or whatever you want to call it. Ever. Don't ask.

Violence: gets a warning, with a note as to explicitness.

Dubious consent/Non-Consent/Sexual Assault: Damned well gets warned for if it's going to happen onscreen. Probably gets warned for if it's going to happen offscreen but during the period of the narrative. Probably gets warned for if it's in the past but is going to be discussed in any detail. Is slightly less likely to be warned for if it's canon. Questionable consent due to impairment: judgement call. The only time I've written really drunken sex it was between two people who'd already established a baseline of mutual knowledge and trust such that presuming consent was in the situation as written reasonable in my mind.

And really, those two are roughly it; the rest is details of how those two work out.

Significant Age Difference/Underage: The age of consent in Canada is 16. I am extremely unlikely to ever write or want to write any fiction in which sex involving a person under 16 is dealt with explicitly, but if I do, I shall warn for it very clearly indeed. If the age of consent is different where you are and you have concerns, email me and I'll tell you how old the youngest character involved in a sex scene is.

Age difference: if everybody is over 21, there will never be a warning. Sixteen to twenty-one with a significantly older partner or partners is a grey area. If in my opinion the age difference makes it Dubious Consent/Non-Consensual/Assault, both warnings will appear. If in my opinion it does not but the age difference is eroticised, or is accompanied by a power differential, or if for some other reasons it seems to me to be potentially problematic, I will warn for it. If the age difference is just a function of circumstance/time/place/culture, I'm just going to note that it's there.

(I hope this is far clearer than what I originally posted)

Death: ( Not "character death". If someone dies in a piece of fiction, they were a character, ne'st pas?)

If someone dies in their bed, after a long and happy, I won't warn you. If they die offscreen, ditto. If they die onscreen but without any detail being given, I won't warn you.

If I am warning for explicit violence in the fic and said violence results in death, I'll tell you, but I won't tell you whether it's your favourite main character or Midshipman Redshirt.

It has, however, been pointed out to me that for some people - especially people dealing with recent or imminent death in their own lives - death in fiction is actually a trigger (and of course, for others in similar situations it's a valued catharsis). So - if you need to know if a fic has death in it, ask me, and I'll tell you. If you need to know if it's a particular character's death, ask me that as well, as I won't give out more info than I'm directly asked for.

Incest: If it would be potentially actionable in a court of law in 2009, I'll warn you (and probably also warn for dubious/non/assault, because incest generally is). The fact that some cultures at some times have considered, for example, marrying your brother's widow to be incest, or the fact that everybody in Shakespeare's history plays calls everybody else "cousin", does not, in my mind, constitute a reason for me to warn should I write such a thing, even if the scandalous nature of it is discussed in the fic.

Consensual BDSM: Is consensual and not violence, and will not be warned for. I'm aware that reading about it is a problem for some people, and if you ask me if it's in there I'll happily tell you - but don't ask me by emailing me to say "Is this 'violent pornography'?" Just ask me if there's BDSM, and any additional details you need to know. And when I write it, I will always do my very best to make the consent transparently visible.

Gory medical details: I am, in the matter of medical/surgical/bodily details, almost completely unsquickable. Keeping this in mind, if I ever have an overwhelming urge to write a fic that contains a detailed discussion of the proper treatment of sucking chest wounds or kidney stones, I will warn for this as my personal "well, wouldn't bother me" is known to be completely unreliable.

Animals: violence/abuse/death will get the same treatment as with humans.

Potentially triggery things that are also canon: will be warned for if they would otherwise be warned for. I used to think otherwise about this, but, really, if it's canon it's not exactly a big spoiler for the fic, right? Generally dark themes in a fic with generally dark canon, no, but if I retell a violent or potentially triggery bit of canon I'll warn.

Language: if it's merely crass, crude, rude, or explicit, no warning. Sexism, homophobia, racism, bigotry (in character speech or actions: I hope to refrain from committing such things in narrative voice entirely): contextual.

I'll warn for anything that refers to a group still dealing with oppression today, not otherwise. In short: characters expressing anti-American sentiments, no warning. Characters expressing Anti-Semitic sentiments, warning.

People with unusual or idiosyncratic triggers: are invited to email me using the address in my profile, or send me a private message, or jump to the bottom of the post and hit reply or go to another post and hit reply and ask me straight out if the thing they need to avoid is in my fic, whereupon I will tell them. Seriously. I'm happy to. I like being read and am pleased to make reading me as easy as possible. I may sometimes put in a warning for a non-standard trigger because I happen to already know that someone who reads me has it. If you have a different trigger, or you have that one and are concerned about a different fic, please ask me anyway; I'm not perfect, but I am happy to answer.

Squicks-that-are-not-triggers: Sure, ask me. As long as it's something reasonably specific, I'll do my best.

Don't ask me if I've 'made the [male]characters into girls/women'. Unless you either specifically mean genderswop because that's a squick or you're prepared for me to reply "do you mean like Joan of Arc, or like Grendel's Mother, or what?"

I'm not really open to discussing the pro-warnings anti-warnings thing. I mean, if you want to tell me how you feel about it all you may, but there's a fair chance I won't really answer, because my mind's pretty extensively made up.

I am absolutely and emphatically open to discussing my particular approach and how it's working well or could be improved. Specific suggestions for specific warnings on fics I have already posted will be received with gratitude, considered with care, and acted on promptly.

[1] In Gaudy Night.

The American State Department has issued travel advisories for Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia and Haiti — but will it issue one for Vancouver?

An American couple living in False Creek North says they’ve alerted their government that the neighbourhood is unsafe for visitors, and is requesting it issue a travel advisory during the 2010 Games.

Deirdre Barlow, who is part of a group called Concerned Citizens of False Creek North, said residents are on edge after the city opened a shelter nearby, which she said has attracted violence, prostitution and drug use.

Ok, that's IT, people. NO MORE APOLOGISING FOR DAVID FRUM FROM THIS CANUCK. NO MORE. Not unless y'all come GET THESE MUPPETS.

ETA: Yes, it's a media stunt. I just think it's an incredibly lame one, and therefore I point and I laugh. Nastily.

Made for tiferet, in response to this.

Via random:

I am FRYING BRATS FOR SUPPER.

pecunium assures me that IN AMERICA THIS IS PERFECTLY LEGAL. THE WAYS OF HIS PEOPLE ARE STRANGE INDEED.

Also, Fritos are made with ALL NATURAL OIL. The mind refuses to contemplate origins of UNnatural oils...

Ottawa Sun, via seanchaidh.

This story takes place at a private birthday party held at City Hall this week in honour of an acquaintance and friend of many who work there.

He's not a politician, and as such, he's not going to be named here.

One of those in attendance was Rideau-Goulbourn Coun. Glenn Brooks, a man who's been a municipal politician longer than most can remember.

Brooks' gift to the senior, marking his 80th birthday, was a curious sight -- an armless mannequin sporting a blue bikini top and something flowered.

Brooks, in presenting the gift, suggested the birthday boy had a reputation as a bit of a ladies' man, so the gift was perfect for him -- a woman who couldn't fight him off and couldn't say a thing.

Cue the awkward silence.

I look forward to Coun. Brooks' apology. And by "apology" I mean "sufficiently copious personal donation to SASC that it actually cuts into his personal spending money for a month or so".

ETA email I just sent him:

Dear Sir,

Your reported behaviour at a recent City Hall party, as discussed here -

http://www.ottawasun.com/news/columnists/susan_sherring/2009/05/30/9621301-sun.html

is appalling.

I'm sure that you will be making a suitably political apology for "any offense you may have unintentionally, etc, etc", in the coming days.

May I suggest that while you're at it you apologise, in a genuinely meaningful way, to the women of your city and of your riding who "couldn't fight and couldn't say a thing"?

A personal donation to the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Ottawa, of a sufficient size that you will actually notice the shortfall in your discretionary income for a month or so - nothing extreme, regular coffees instead of lattes, perhaps - would be an excellent sign of a willingness to make amends.

I enclose a link to their web page for your convenience:

http://www.sascottawa.org/

Though were I you I'd drop by there in person and see where your money is going, and to whom, as it seems as if what they do would be news to you, and it ought not to be.

In other words, Councillor, don't bother apologising for having made the joke. Apologise for having made it to your present age and stature without ever having taken the trouble to understand why it is not, never was, and never could be, funny.

Marna Nightingale,
Ward 14, Somerset.

He can be reached via http://www.glennbrooks.ca, should anyone else feel so moved.

Poll #1409632 Faith and Poly Poll Two: The one where everyone can play!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

I am taking this poll

The description that best matches me is:

The description that best matches me is:

The description that best matches me is:

I am a member of a World Religion, and I identify as

More specifically, I identify as a member of a World Religion and my denomination/tradition/sect is:

I identify as a member of a world religion and as

I am a member of a smaller religious group or organised religion, and its name is:

I identify as a member of a smaller religious group or organised religion and as

I am a solitary practitioner and would describe my beliefs and practice as

I am a solitary practitioner and identify as

Also:

I am in Tennessee with pecunium, and have had two decent nights' sleep. I feel mostly recovered from the Greyhound Trip Of Doooom, so comments on the WisCon Take Back The SF panel are now reopened (a day late) at both DW and LJ.

If you've been linked here, welcome! Please take a look at my DW profile for a sense of how things generally work around here.

An Open Letter To The Songwriters of the World.

Dear Musicians Who I Basically Really Like, Including But Not Limited To Bruce Springsteen and Mark Knopfler:

It is hereby requested that you stop messing up otherwise perfectly good songs about love, sex, and romance with the following words:

1) Baby.

2) Little Girl.

3) Daddy.

Because

A) We see what you did there, and

B) Ew. Just ew.

By the way, "Mama"" is also pretty questionable. Seriously, think about that for a moment, will you?

Thanking you in advance for your attention to this matter,

Marna Nightingale.

I am doing a long post which might take a few days, but I want to get some stuff about Take Back SF and Porn Crushes the Patriarchy out there now.

I committed ... I hope not Fail, but certainly Flail, around this panel.

First, I went into it in a vaccuum. I had no panels on Sunday and I really didn't pay any attention to programming. This was in retrospect unwise.

If I am ever again on a panel on a potentially tricky or controversial subject which is scheduled for late in the con, I will By God, even if I can't make it to related panels, at least keep track of what happens in them. Had I known anything about what went down at the Take Back SF Panel, I would have probably talked about the same stuff, but I'd have gotten a panel report out of someone and tipped the mod and my co-panellists off and generally taken a slightly different approach to things.

In particular, if anyone either saw/heard my impatience during some parts of the panel or heard me grumping after the panel about how attempts to talk about women's roles as producers and consumers of erotic materials always seem to get derailed by Talking About Rape and about Women as Victims, or both, please forgive me for any impression of being an insensitive jerk I may have given. I am (I hope) only a disorganised and foolish jerk.

I'm not going to do an Imitation Of A Woman Expressing Eternal Repentance In Seven Positions here, because a) I did not know and b) by Monday I was not just out of spoons but reduced to one lonely bendy straw fished out of the bottom of the cutlery drawer for all my basic and extraordinary needs, but next time I will know better and I hope do better.

As I was not at the Take Back SF panel, I can't speak to it, but there is both discussion from an attendee and a whole pile of links here.

I do want to say this: I have said before that I think feminists need to be ready to make and enforce firm boundaries around how men participate in discussions of rape. I still believe that, and you will hear me say it again, but this? This is not that. And this I am not good with. At all. Being ready with the mic to cut off a man - or woman - who derails, victim blames, slut shames, or demands a whole bag of cookies for not being a rapist once it is plain that that is what they are doing is one thing. Assuming that no man is going to open his mouth in a rape discussion to either make a positive contribution or disclose information about how rape has affected his life is quite another and I am not there for that, not ever.

ETA: Ok, so. This has gotten heated and I have a problem.

Basic principles of this journal:

Everyone gets to be heard.

Everyone gets to have their dignity and safety respected and protected.

Making these things happen is my responsibility.

On difficult threads this requires careful, thoughtful modding.

Here's the thing: I have to be on a bus to Tennessee tomorrow night, and at the moment I'm starting to think I'm going to get there with a bag full of dirty laundry and a mild case of sleep-dep psychosis. Oh, and a sore throat and a cough.

I cannot mod this thread right now, and if I can't mod it I can't let it run, because it is my responsibility to ensure that people are not treated disrespectfully or abusively here. So I am disabling comments until I get to Oak Ridge and can give this decent attention again.

This post will reopen SOMETIME AROUND (I'm human and travel is tiring) noon on Saturday, EST, with its comments intact.

Posts reopened; sorry about the delay. I had a sleepy.

Random Idea Of the Day, inspired by the dumb remark:

"Watts would have been better off writing [instead of Blindsight] a nonfiction book or essays on the ideas that he was trying to convey in this novel. To me they are theories that he has formed based on various nonfiction articles, reviews and literature that he has researched on sociopathic behavior, pyschological disorders, and/or autism.

To which, Hell no he would not have, but I wouldn't mind reading said book AS WELL, either. Therefore:

Leftover Research Quarterly.

A journal of articles and essays, in styles both academic and popular, written by fiction writers who want to say more about Cool Shit they found while working on a story and then didn't really get to use.

There will of course also be a fannish version for ficwriters.

Any hypothetical person who wishes to grab this idea and run may be assured that I will happily and utterly give up any theoretically enforceable rights I may have in said idea in exchange for a lifetime subscription.

ETA: I maded us a community.

Quoth Ther Cat:

"[She]'s Episcopalian AND poly! How common is that?"

Me: "[Names several examples]. Hmmm. Actually, maybe pretty common."

Therefore, a poll.

Poll #1403250 The Devil finds poll questions for idle minds
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Episcopalian/Anglican/Church of England/Anglo-Catholic?

Poly?

Episcopalian/Anglican/Church of England/Anglo-Catholic AND Poly?

ETA Cat: "Ours is a welcoming church."

Via lightcastle

ObAWeakDisclaimerIsNobody'sFriend: This is not really about Racefail in general or any iteration thereof in particular. It is decidedly not intended to derail either any current discussion of racism nor any other current discussion touching on any other aspect of anti-oppression work. The only particular relationship it possesses to Racefail is that related reading is what got me thinking about it this time, and the only reason that I am not holding on to it until a better time presents itself is because increasingly I am persuaded that there isn't going to BE a universally "good time". At most, this is a sideline, presented for whatever use it may have. Mostly, it's a general comment on something I am seeing in a lot of discussions of oppression[s]. Particularly, please do not link people here as a way of derailing or dismissing what they have to say about a topic.

Also, fairestcat very kindly read this over for me, as did another friend who prefers not to be named. The good bits are due to them; the idiocies are all mine. damned_colonial contributed a metaphor, but has no other involvement with this post.

I'm bothered by the expression "showing one's ass", as used to denote racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or otherwise bigoted or just plain nasty behaviour.

And yes, I know it's a metaphor. That's why I don't like it. I don't like it because metaphors have contingencies, and it's the contingencies that cause the trouble.

(What I mean by contingencies, and I'd use a not-jargon-y word if I had one handy, is this: the meaning of the words we use to build a metaphor tends to leak into our concept of the thing we're describing, and vice-versa. The Lord Is My Shepherd: I am a sheep. I would be tasty with mint sauce. And, less obviously: shepherds are sort of holy, and sheep have something to say about innocence, because meaning leaks both ways.)

So, yeah, we use "showing one's ass" to mean "going out in public [behaving] in ways which are not meant to be seen." It's an appealing phrase in a lot of ways. It's a bit funny. It's pretty self-explanatory. It hooks in to all those anxiety dreams about ending up naked in public. And when we use it to talk about behaviour that's silly, or inappropriate to its context, or foolishly impulsive, it's really kind of a great metaphor.

But it has all these contingencies, and when we use it to talk about truly bad behaviour, behaviour that is just never okay, then I think those contingencies become really problematic. Bear with me while I take this metaphor waaaaay more literally than it was ever meant to be taken.

The problem is, it equates two things that aren't actually like one another in ways that I think mess with our understanding of both.

The first one, the one that my anti-oppression stuff gets twitchy about, is this: asses are not meant to be directly seen in public, but there are lots of contexts where it is perfectly okay, even desireable, for them to be seen, even displayed. Oppressive ugly is not fit to be seen, in public or anywhere. I don't save my ugly oppressive stuff for my partners and close friends and then run around flashing it blithely, and if I did I hope I'd wake up single and friendless pretty damned quick.

My ass can be rendered perfectly acceptable, or even sort of fascinatingly interesting, in any company, exactly as it is, simply by me draping it with a bit of fairly opaque fabric. My oppressive ugly is not acceptable, and cannot be made so. At most, it can be made slightly less obviously unpleasant in the short term; it cannot be made in any way "better" simply by covering it up.

You can try to sort of save the metaphor by extending it: obviously, what my ass oppressive ugly needs to do is shrink, and ultimately wither away. I have ugly, ergo I need to ... diet.

And then the meanings start to leak the other way. And my body-acceptance and sex-activist and woman-loving and indeed -liking stuff goes "Oh Dear."

Asses are sort of funny. They can be sort of embarrassing. They're sort of attractive, too. They produce a lot of anxiety, of a lot of sorts. They stick out. They refuse to fit into our (non-metaphorical) pants. Dogs find them fascinating, reminding us that no matter how often we shower, we're not made of sugar and spice. Lovers and potential lovers sometimes find them entrancing. They're near stuff that produces even more anxiety. They occasionally produce embarrassing noises. We get anxious about their size, their shape, and their general acceptability. We check out other people's, competitively, admiringly, lustfully, and just plain curiously.

Asses, or more accurately their owners, get kind of a rough ride in Western Culture, especially when said owners are female. Especially especially when said owners are female and have asses not shaped the shape of the current "fashionable" ass.

I don't think leaking all of the meaning we attach to asses onto oppressive ugliness is especially helpful in correctly identifying what it is, what it does, and who it harms. And I'm pretty sure that dumping all of the hideous weight of oppressive ugliness onto our asses, onto each other's asses, is ultimately at least a little bit toxic to our ability to live in our bodies with dignity, pleasure, and joy, and I'm pretty sure that that is the case whether we're the ones using the phrase or the ones hearing it, even though we don't mean it that way - and we generally don't.

It's not my desire to tell anyone what they may or may not say. At the same time, I think that this usage is problematic enough for me to not just drop it myself, but to publically present the case for not using it, and to do so as persuasively as I can. So here it is; think about it, if you will, and thank you for reading.

For myself, because metaphors, for all of their dangers, are intensely useful things, from now on I will be adopting damned_colonial's excellent suggested alternative: when I see someone blundering into a conversation and unthinkingly flashing their inner oppressive ugly, I will tell them that they appear to have stepped in the cowshit. I will tell them that they have shit on their shoe, and that it's making them unpleasant and difficult to be around or converse with. And I will suggest that they get out a brush, clean off their shoe, and be more careful where they put their feet in the future. And possibly even that they get to work at processing the shit in their personal pasture so that some day it will be something useful, like compost, no longer offensive and even useful for growing good things in. Those are contingencies I can live with.

ETA: I have splendid, smart, and generous commenters, who point out things I miss. Over on LJ, nojojojo and spiral_sheep are being especially good value, and pointing out a number of contingencies I either missed or didn't give adequate weight to.

Pat MacDonald (Formerly of TimBuk3) and Melanie Jane:

Thursday, May 21, 2009

5:00 - 7:00 PM

Overture Hall Lobby

FREE.

"FREE happy hour music at Overture Center for the Arts!
Overture invites you to stop down after work for live music in a casual setting. Each monthly performance features some of the area's best blues, jazz, country, soul and funk musicians. Cash bar and appetizers available for purchase. "

It's been a Day. I've managed, barely, to meet my absolute Minimum Responsibilities to the Universe, but just barely and by the time fairestcat got home I was more or less gibbering and squeaking like the sheeted dead in the streets.

Then I remembered that lovelokest and chaotic_nipple are both Officially Done School today and that I had promised them Cake.

So fairestcat and I just made two identical cakes, one for Sci Fi Friday and one for when chaotic_nipple gets home from work. And it is really quite astonishing how much better I feel about the general situation now. I must remember this trick.

What we made was Peg Bracken's Cockeyed Cake, which I have been making since I was about thirteen or so.

It is cheap, fast, vegan, foolproof, endlessly variable, incredibly easy, and nearly mess-free, because you mix it in the pan. It is also rich, moist, tasty, and just to make it even easier, best without icing or elaborate toppings of any kind.

The basic recipe is this:

Preheat oven to 350 F, and go find an 8" round pan (9" will do) or an 8x8 square. Grease it lightly even if it is non-stick.

Then dump in:

1 1/2 level cups flour, unsifted.
1 cup sugar
3 T cocoa [1]
1 t baking soda
1/2 t salt

and muddle it around with a knife until it's a fairly uniform colour. Then make three grooves in the mixture, and over the first one pour:

5 T. cooking oil

Over the third one pour:

1 T. vinegar

And over the middle one pour:

1 t. vanilla

Then, over the whole thing, pour:

1 cup COLD water (make sure it's cold; using warm or hot liquid is the only way I've ever screwed this up)

And mix it all up gently with your knife until you've got all the dry spots and the colour evens out (the bits where the vinegar hit the baking soda will be lighter at first)

Bake for 30 minutes. Then poke it with a toothpick, and if it comes out clean you're done. If it comes out damp, put it back in for five minutes, poke it again, and keep doing that until it DOES come out clean.

Eat it plain or decorate it with fresh berries, scattered icing sugar, or both.

Variations are more-or-less endless. You can substitute COLD coffee for the water. You can substitute rum, or brandy, for the vanilla, or use both. You can add spices. You can substitute spices for the cocoa. You can add dried fruit, or nuts, or both. If you know how to compensate for the extra liquid, you can use honey instead of sugar, or add mashed bananas or sift fruit. You can use brown sugar, in which case make the cup level and loosely packed.

Today's version has strong cold coffee instead of water, and then in addition to the ingredients called for:

1 C dried cherries
1 t cinnamon
1/2 t cayenne

Based on how the batter tasted, should be really good.

[1] T = tablespoon; t = teaspoon.

And so must I:

Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.

Oh, yeah, and it's Beltane too.

Back in February, I suggested the making of Autobiographical Concept Albums to my friends.

benet's is here.

pecunium's is here.

And here is mine: one song for every year of my life, vaguely chronological, yousendit links appended, terse liner notes included, longer liner notes available on request (pick a song and ask me a question, or just pick a song and I'll tell you a story[1].)

I got thrown around hallways and bedrooms and towns: 1969-2009

Now We Are Six:

The City Of New Orleans, Arlo Guthrie
Canadian Railroad Trilogy, Gordon Lightfoot
Probably the first two songs I ever really heard. My grandfather was an engineer, and I still wave at trains sometimes.

We Are Ten:

Your Mother and I, Loudon Wainwright
I don't actually like this song very much. But then, I didn't really like 1980 very much.

We Are Twelve:

When I Was a Boy, Dar Williams
Puberty and I didn't really get along.

Breaking Glass, David Bowie
I had this album on tape when I was 13 or so, and listened to it a lot for several years.

We are Sixteen:

Northwest Passage, Stan Rogers
I was madly in love with a man named Steve, who was madly in love with the music of Stan Rogers. It's not the best turn Steve did me, but it's close.

Train Song, Eliza Carthy
Boys Are Interesting.

Paint By Number Heart, Martha And The Muffins
But Kind Of Difficult.

We are Seventeen:

Me And A Gun, Tori Amos
"Do you think there's a heaven where some screams have gone?"

We are Eighteen and In Toronto:

Love These Hands, The Northern Pikes
Learning stagecraft, in love with a carpenter, and to all appearances Just Fine.

Kayleigh, Marillion
Girls are also interesting. And difficult.

Linus And Lucy, Built To Spill
This was the only tolerable song on the Christmas Muzak at World's Biggest Bookstore. There was Synchronised Bopping on the cash desks, every 90 minutes, in December.

The Coldest Night Of The Year, Bruce Cockburn
New Year's Eve, Yonge Street.

Rosy and Grey, Lowest of the Low
And January on Queen Street.

Native Son, Oysterband
1991 was my first trip back to BC on my own. I've always moved around. I've always travelled. I exist in a permanent state of mild homesickness, complicated by an equally permanent case of itchy feet.

Life Is A Highway, Tom Cochrane
God. I loved touring. LOVED it.

Hopes Go Astray The Northern Pikes
I moved back to St Thomas in 1992, because my grandparents needed more help than my mother alone could give them. It was hard. And wonderful.

After a while I moved to London, got a job, and got to be friends with benet, which has shaped pretty much every single thing that's happened since. Followed much hopping between London and Toronto:

The Story Shawn Colvin
London, Mexicali Rosa's, June.

Till I Am Myself Again Blue Rodeo

All This Useless Beauty June Tabor
There are so many kinds of awful men...

Second Hand News, Tonic
... one can't avoid them all.

Tango Til They're Sore Holly Cole
Beats the Hell out of card games, though.

My Affair Kirsty MacColl
There's nothing like a solid dose of the sort of monogamy that leads to hard to explain holes in the walls and noise complaints to make a Grrl, if already so inclined, start writing her own Declaration Of Independence.

We are Twenty-Seven and Have Moved to Ottawa:

Cold Fire Rush
Marriage is hard. Poly marriage is also hard.

It Must Be Love Madness
And then I met my wife.

Sacred Depeche Mode
The good news: I found my vocation. The bad news: it doesn't exactly pay.

We Are Thirty and Sort Of Single Again:

Confession Richard Shindell
Living in The Impossible Flat, with all of the broken that had been chasing me around since 1988, and, though I did not know it, a chronic illness. Trying to put it all together, with the help of some good friends and some less good doctors. Didn't get that sorted out until late 2004. Dr McQuakerty's Happy Pills: I love them, I hate them, and I am so glad they exist. If you deal with me, you should be glad too.

Anthem Leonard Cohen
Yeah, I'm a bit broken. Just don't joggle the bits where the glue's wet and it'll all be fine. Mostly.

Meet On The Ledge Fairport Convention
Dammit, when did my friends start dying?

Cynical Timbuk 3
I wasn't planning on getting married again. Certainly not so soon. But, see, it's like this...

This is sort of where we get into real-time reporting:

Life During Wartime Talking Heads
2001: a pretty good year personally, not that I had much time to notice. FTAA in April, we all know what in September...

The Trouble With Normal Bruce Cockburn
"It's my flag too and and I want it back

Mercy Of The Fallen Dar Williams
My friends started going off to war. My husband lost a kidney. We sort of lost our minds.

Fall at Your Feet Crowded House
And in the middle of it all, I lost my heart to fairestcat.

You Can Come From Here Bourbon Tabernacle Choir
While I was still unpacking from the UK we got an email: could we take in a couple of war resisters for a couple of weeks? We could. We did.

Teenagers My Chemical Romance.
It wasn't a couple of weeks. "No, there are no more Rice Krispies. I need your laundry in the hamper if you want it done this week. Then we have to go see the lawyer about your refugee application and the shrink about your PTSD. Christ Jesus, would it kill you to take the damned trash out once in awhile?" It's not that I don't love them. It's just that I love them more when there's gin in the house.

I Don't Need A Hero Concrete Blonde
When it comes to falling in love, my taste is as impeccable as my timing is vile. It just doesn't always look that way at first.

Our House Madness
My family is normal. We're just not average.

We are Not Quite Forty:

Don't Forget to Dance The Kinks
wotthell wotthehell, there's a dance in the old dame yet toujours gai toujours gai

[1]Which might not be strictly factual, because many of the individuals involved are still around, and deserve privacy, as do I myself, but it will be as true as I can make it.

Various people are discussing the implications of the subscribe/access thing on DW.

But nobody has yet pointed out that "has ... mutual access with" and "also gives access to" sounds kind of filthy.

Or maybe that's just me. At any rate, I regard it as a feature, which I am sure shocks nobody. OTOH, I am no longer regularly invited to Modify My Friends, but let's face it, that trick never works.

iclysdale should be on the bus between Toronto and Ottawa soon, after a Hair-Raising Last-Minute Escape from the Madison-Chicago Greyhound Void last night.

HUZBAND CAN HAZ!

*scuttles off to hide the wine bottles, lingerie not in my size, pizza boxes, and similar evidence of Debauchery. Oh, and change the sheets.*

We weren't allowed to acknowledge the existence of MI6 until 1994. The cloak-and-dagger air was slightly ruined by bus conductors who used to say, "Lambeth tube station. All spies alight here."

Paddy Ashdown.

ABOVE Zero :-)



I'm off to go buy cheese for a party, then muck about with the garden a bit, then get ready for said party.

You?

damned_colonial played this for me in 2004. It might even have been on Anzac Day.

So I was talking[1] last night about various aspects of fanfic and women's erotic writing/art[2] in general and the topic of clichefic came up. Specifically the much-committed and almost as much derided rape/(sometimes) revenge/recovery plotline, with Bonus Magic Healing Through The Power Of True Love And/Or Amazing Sex that so many people love to hate.

A plot I will happily read, btw, if the story wrapped around it is good. Hell, I've even written it, more or less.

It's not everyone's thing, nor should it be.

But, really:

I cannot for the life of me imagine why the world is full of women[3] who are more-or-less erotically and creatively preoccupied with the fantasy that one really really good fuck from one really nice person with whom you are deeply and reciprocally in love can wipe out the effects of one or more traumatic sexual assaults, can you?

[1] I may have been ranting, actually.
[2] Hereafter defined as "that genre of work which is produced by many women and some men, and which appeals, by design, to many women and some men, instead of the genre which appeals to many men and some women." IOW, if you don't feel comfortable in this box as it is presented, I'll happily cut a window for you; no essentialism or exclusion intended or implied.
[3] And people who love women, and a few men.

Poll #1387126 All God's Children Need Shoes. All God's Children Got Shoes. All God's Children Post About Shoes.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

These shoes:

When Karl Marx
Found the phrase 'financial sharks,'
He sang a Te Deum
In the British Museum.

*

When the young Kant
Was told to kiss his aunt,
He obeyed the Categorical Must
But only just.

*

Lord Byron
Once succumbed to a Siren:
His flesh was weak,
Hers Greek.

~ WH Auden

This entry was originally posted at http://commodorified.dreamwidth.org/13064.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Advancing down the road from Nineveh
Death paused a while and said 'Now listen here.

You see the names of places roundabout?
They're mine now, and I've turned them inside out.

Take Eden, further south: At dawn today
I ordered up my troops to tear away

Its walls and gates so everyone can see
That gorgeous fruit which dangles from its tree.

You want it, don't you? Go and eat it then,
And lick your lips, and pick the same again.

Take Tigris and Euphrates; once they ran
Through childhood-coloured slats of sand and sun.

Not any more they don't; I've filled them up
With countless different kinds of human crap.

Take Babylon, the palace sprouting flowers
Which sweetened empires in their peaceful hours -

I've found a different way to scent the air:
Already it's a by-word for despair.

Which leaves Baghdad - the star-tipped minarets,
The marble courts and halls, the mirage-heat.

These places, and the ancient things you know,
You won't know soon. I'm working on it now.'

-- Andrew Motion

1 PATRIOTIC

May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
I didn't lay down my life in World War II
so that you could borrow my wheelbarrow.

2 SNOBBISH

May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
Unfortunately Lord Goodman is using it.

3 OVERWEENING

May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
It is too mighty a conveyance to be wielded
by any mortal save myself.

4 PIOUS

May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
My wheelbarrow is reserved for religious ceremonies.

5 MELODRAMATIC

May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
I would sooner be broken on its wheel
and buried in its barrow.

6 PATHETIC

May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
I am dying of schizophrenia
and all you can talk about is wheelbarrows.

7 DEFENSIVE

May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
Do you think I'm made of wheelbarrows?

8 SINISTER

May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
It is full of blood.

9 LECHEROUS

May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
Only if I can fuck your wife in it.

10 PHILOSOPHICAL

May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
What is a wheelbarrow?

-- Adrian Mitchell

Utah Phillips quotes, just because.

... I have a good friend in the East. A good singer, and a good folksinger, a good song collector, who comes and listens to my shows and says, "You sing a lot about the past. You always sing about the past; you can't live in the past, you know." And I say to him, "I can go outside and pick up a rock that's older than the oldest song you know and bring it back here and drop it on your foot." Now, the past didn't go anywhere, did it? It's right here, right now - I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn't live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered it would get 'em in serious trouble.


...


At the onset, those of you who may have heard me should probably turn to those who may have not and calmly reassure them that this is in fact what happens when I sit onstage. Not much more. This is about it. You'll notice no sudden or dramatic change in neither my instrumental or vocal attack, as it were.

This is nonetheless an American folk song. Did you recognize it as such? Of course you would, you're folkies. You don't hear 'em much anymore, don't hear 'em on your AM radio, huh? Folksingers hardly ever sing 'em. That's cause they're boring. Folk music is boring. "Black fall, the die doe, blow ye winds high ho," hell, that's boring, but! I am a folksinger; this is a folk music organization; you are ostensibly the folk, nest pas? That means we own this song together, right? We have thereby incurred certain social obligations
which we will faithfully discharge, right? We're gonna sing this damn song together, boring or not!


...


I'm open to all those things. If you live in California, you've got to be open; if you're not they pry you open.


...


We got narps, you got narps around here? New-age rural professionals? Out cruising the backroads in their old green carryalls with their car stereos, blaring meditation music out into the wilderness. It's a conscience. Whole place lightning-struck by the peripatetic ruminations of the Tibetan ruling class in exile, ahh. Lot of Buddhists around there.
...
Meanwhile this very minute, old Jesse McVay the welldigger - no one knows how old he is, lived in that county all of his life - is sitting at the bar of the national hotel this very minute, looking at the freaks out in the street, and muttering under his breath:

"No matter how new-age you get, old age gonna kick your ass."


...


I learned in Korea that I would never again in my life abdicate to somebody else my right and my ability to decide who the enemy is.


...


He said, "You got to be a pacifist." I said, "Why?" He said, "It'll save your life." And my behavior was very violent then. I said, "What is it?" And he said, "Well I can't give you a book by Gandhi - you wouldn't understand it. I can't give you a list of rules that if you sign
it you're a pacifist." He said, "You look at it like booze. You know, alcoholism will kill somebody, until they finally get the courage to sit in a circle of people like that and put their hand up in the air and say, 'Hi, my name's Utah, I'm an alcoholic.' And then you can begin to deal with the behavior, you see, and have the people define it for you whose lives you've destroyed."
...
And Ritter'd say, "What's an anarchist, Hennessy?" and Ammon would say, "Why an anarchist is anybody who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do." Kind of a fundamentalist anarchist, huh? And Ritter'd say, "But Ammon, you broke the law, what about that?" and Ammon'd say, "Oh, Judge, your damn laws the good people don't need 'em and the bad people don't obey 'em so what use are they?"

Well I lived there for eight years, and I watched him, really watched him, and I discovered watching him that anarchy is not a noun, but an adjective. It describes the tension between moral autonomy and political authority, especially in the area of combinations, whether they're going to be voluntary or coercive. The most destructive, coercive combinations are arrived at through force.

Like Ammon said, "Force is the weapon of the weak."


...


[H]e said, "I told myself in '27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work." ... He said, "I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it's true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?"

...


Morrigan starts punching me in the side, and said - yelling at me! - she said, "Why can't you be normal?"

And old Miss Brownell rapped Morrigan on her shin - rudely - with her cane, and said: "He is normal - what you meant to say is 'average.'"


...


I was invited to the State Young Writers' Conference out at Cheney, which was a Eastern Washington university. And I didn't want to embarrass my son, you know, and I was gonna behave myself cause I had to live there then - it was a chore. But I got on the stage - it was an enormous auditorium; there were twenty-seven hundred young faces out there, none of them with any prospects
anybody could detect - and off to the side of the stage was the suit-and-tie crowd of people from the school district and the principals, and the, the main speaker following me was from the Chamber of Commerce.

Well something inside of me snapped.

And I got to the microphone, and I looked out over that multitude of faces and I said something to the effect of:

"You're about to be told one more time that you're America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources? Have you seen them strip mine? Have you seen a clear-cut in a forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're gonna strip mine your soul! They're gonna clear-cut your
best thoughts for the sake of profit, unless you learn to resist, cause the profit system follows the path of least resistance, and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked! Hmph!"

Well there was great gnashing of teeth and rending of garments - mine. I was borne to the door, screaming epithets over my shoulder, something to the effect of: "Make a break for it, kids!" "Flee to the wilderness!" The one within, if
you can find it.


...


Like old Campbell said, freedom is something you assume; then you wait for somebody to try to take it away from you. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.


...


Well, they surrounded the boat, and when they lowered the gangplank, Sheriff McGray walked to the end of it and said, "Who are your leaders here?" And they shouted back with one voice: "We are all leaders here."

Well that scared the tar out of the law, you know, and they began shooting; those deputies began shooting. A lot of those Wobblies were killed. Some of the deputies were killed in the crossfire, though, so when the Wobblies - those that survived - made it back to Seattle, they were arrested, and they were thrown in the [local] County Jail on the charge of murder. Whole bunch of 'em.

Well, that jail was an all-steel jail - it was the newest affair, all made out of steel. It had just barely opened, so the heat wasn't on and there was no blankets and you couldn't get any smokes. So, those Wobblies, they passed a note from one cell block to the other, and then by common consent, the next day, they were all gathered in the middle of each cell block. And when the noon whistle blew, they began to jump up and down simultaneously; up and down, up and down, singing all the time, and finally they hit the resonating frequency of that jail and cracked the south wall. They broke the jail.

And Jack Miller said, "Thus proving, everlastingly, what a union is: a way to get things done together that you can't get done alone."

"Armed only with our sense of degradation as human beings, we came together and organized, and changed the condition of our lives."


...


[I]f I wanted a true history of where I came from, as a member of the working class, I had to go to my elders. Many of them, their best working years before pensions or Social Security, gave their whole lives to the mines, to the wheat harvest, to the logging camps, to the railroad. Got nothing for it, just fetched up on the skids living on short money, mostly drunk all the time. But
they led those extraordinary lives that can never be lived again, and in the living of them, they gave me a history that is more profound, more beautiful, more powerful, more passionate, and ultimately more useful than the best damn
history book I ever read.


...


One time I said over the phone, "Tom, I'm in a debate over here at the Unitarian Church on bringing back the military draft; they're going to try to bring back the military draft so I'm debating it. Now, you tell me what you think."

Well, there was a long pause. Then the voice come back at me over the wires. "Nnuh. When I started in the forest, most of my workmates was Scandahoovians: Norwegians, Danes, Fins, Swedes. Most of 'em left the old country fleeing conscription to fight another dumb European war. Yeah, the wealth of the West was built on the backs of draft dodgers. It's an American institution -
deserves to be honored."

Whose Western Civ students are presently, based on their exams, defying the wisdom of Gandhi^[1] and embodying the adage that those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it^[2].




[1] i.e. they do not seem to think that Western Civilisation is a good idea.
[2] In the fall semester.

Apropos of Making Light...

So Much Depends

'and another thing: I gave in far too easily over William Carlos Williams'

I can't remember what you said about him.
Was it thumbs down or the big hurrah?
When it comes to William Carlos Williams,
I've no idea what your opinions are.

I argued with you? That seems most unlikely.
I may have looked attentive for a while.
I've searched my head for William Carlos Williams
And there is very little in the file.

I'll fight with you about important issues
Like who should buy the bread or clean the sink
But when it comes to William Carlos Williams
Dearest, I really don't mind what you think.

Yes, mutter darkly, 'Well, perhaps you ought to,'
And fire offensive weapons from those eyes.
When it comes to William Carlos Williams,
It won't do any good. I will not rise.

~ Wendy Cope

Musee des Beaux Arts
W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Bruegel

pecunium on torture, the torture memos, what torture is, and why torture is not only wrong, illegal, and idiotic, but also idiotic, illegal, and wrong.

pecunium on what decent people should do about it right now.

I have Fallen Behind again, so here's the rest of Part II:

Don Juan was a mixer and no doubt
Would find this century as good as any
For getting hostesses to ask him out,
And mistresses that need not cost a penny.
Indeed our ways to waste time are so many,
Thanks to technology, a list of these
Would make a longer book than Ulysses.

Yes, in the smart set he would know his way
By second nature with no tips from me.
Tennis and Golf have come in since your day;
But those who are as good at games as he
Acquire the back-hand quite instinctively,
Take to the steel.-shaft and hole out in one,
Master the books of Ely Culbertson.

I see his face in every magazine.
‘Don Juan at lunch with one of Cochran’s ladies.’
‘Don Juan with his red setter May MacQueen.’
‘Don Juan, who’s just been wintering in Cadiz,
Caught at the wheel of his maroon Mercedes.’
‘Don Juan at Croydon Aerodrome.’ ‘Don Juan
Snapped in the paddock with the Aga Khan.’

But if in highbrow circles he would sally
It’s just as well to warn him there’s no stain on
Picasso, all-in-wrestling, or the Ballet.
Sibelius is the man. To get a pain on
Listening to Elgar is a sine qua non.
A second-hand acquaintance of Pareto’s
Ranks higher than an intimate of Plato’s.

The vogue for Black Mass and the cult of devils
Has sunk. The Good, the Beautiful, the True
Still fluctuate about the lower levels.
Joyces are firm and there there’s nothing new.
Eliots have hardened just a point or two.
Hopkins are brisk, thanks to some recent boosts.
There’s been some further weakening in Prousts.

I’m saying this to tell you who’s the rage,
And not to loose a sneer from my interior.
Because there’s snobbery in every age,
Because some names are loved by the superior,
It does nor follow they’re the least inferior:
For all I know the Beatific Vision’s
On view at all Surrealist Exhibitions.

Now for the spirit of the people. Here
I know I’m treading on more dangerous ground:
I know there’re many changes in the air,
But know my data too slight to be sound,
I know, too, I’m inviting the renowned
Retort of all who love the Status Quo:
‘you can’t change human nature, don’t you know!’

We’ve still, it’s true, the same shape and appearance,
We haven’t changed the way that kissing’s done;
The average man still hates all interference,
Is just as proud still of his new-born son:
Still, like a hen, he likes his private run,
Scratches for self-esteem, and slyly pecks
A good deal in the neighbourhood of sex.

But he’s another man in many ways:
Ask the cartoonist first, for he knows best.
Where is the John Bull of the good old days,
The swaggering bully with the clumsy jest?
His meaty neck has long been laid to rest,
His acres of self-confidence for sale;
He passed away at Ypres and Passchendaele.

Turn to the work of Disney or of Strube;
There stands our hero in his threadbare seams;
The bowler hat who strap-hangs in the tube,
And kicks the tyrant only in his dreams,
Trading on pathos, dreading all extremes;
The little Mickey with the hidden grudge;
Which is the better, I leave you to judge.

Begot on Hire Purchase by Insurance,
Forms at his christening worshipped and adored;
A season ticket schooled him in endurance,
A tax collector and a waterboard
Admonished him. In boyhood he was awed
By a matric, and complex apparatuses
Keep his heart conscious of Divine Afflatuses.

‘I am like you,’ he says, ‘and you, and you,
I love my life, I love the home-fires, have
To keep them burning. Heroes never do.
Heroes are sent by ogres to the grave.
I may not be courageous, but I save.
I am the one who somehow turns the corner,
I may perhaps be fortunate Jack Horner.

I am the ogre’s private secretary;
I’ve felt his stature and his powers, learned
To give his ogreship the raspberry
Only when his gigantic back is turned.
One day, who knows, I’ll do as I have yearned.
The short man, all his fingers on the door,
With repartee shall send him to the floor.’

One day, which day? O any other day,
But not today. The ogre knows his man.
To kill the ogre that would take away
The fear in which his happy dreams began,
And with his life he’ll guard dreams while he can.
Those who would really kill his dream’s contentment
He hates with real implacable resentment.

He dreads the ogre, but he dreads yet more
Those who conceivably might set him free,
Those the cartoonist has no time to draw.
Without his bondage he’d be all at sea;
The ogre need but shout ‘Security’,
To make this man, so lovable, so mild,
As madly cruel as a frightened child.

Byron, thou should’st be living at this hour!
What would you do, I wonder, if you were?
Britannia’s lost prestige and cash and power,
Her middle classes show some wear and tear,
We’ve learned to bomb each other from the air;
I can’t imagine what the Duke of Wellington
Would say about the music of Duke Ellington.

Suggestions have been made that the Teutonic
Führer-Prinzip would have appealed to you
As being the true heir to the Byronic—
In keeping with your social status too
(It has its English converts, fit and few),
That you would, hearing honest Oswald’s call,
Be gleichgeschaltet in the Albert Hall.

‘Lord Byron at the head of his storm-troopers!’
Nothing, says science, is impossible:
The Pope may quit to join the Oxford Groupers,
Nuffield may leave one farthing in his Will,
There may be someone who trusts Baldwin still,
Someone may think that Empire wines are nice,
There may be people who hear Tauber twice,

You liked to be the centre of attention,
The gay Prince Charming of the fairy story,
Who tamed the Dragon by his intervention.
In modern warfare though it’s just as gory,
There isn’t any individual glory;
The Prince must be anonymous, observant,
A kind of lab—boy, or a civil servant,

You never were an Isolationist;
Injustice you had always hatred for,
And we can hardly blame you, if you missed
Injustice just outside your lordship’s door:
Nearer than Greece were cotton and the poor.
Today you might have seen them, might indeed
Have walked in the United Front with Gide,

Against the ogre, dragon, what you will;
His many shapes and names all turn us pale,
For he’s immortal, and today he still
Swinges the horror of his scaly tail.
Sometimes he seems to sleep, but will not fail
In every age to rear up to defend
Each dying force of history to the end.

Milton beheld him on the English throne,
And Bunyan sitting in the Papal chair;
The hermits fought him in their caves alone,
At the first Empire he was also there,
Dangling his Pax Romana in the air:
He comes in dreams at puberty to man,
To scare him back to childhood if he can.

Banker or landlord, booking-clerk or Pope,
Whenever he’s lost faith in choice and thought,
When a man sees the future without hope,
Whenever he endorses Hobbes’ report
‘The life of man is nasty, brutish, short,’
The dragon rises from his garden border
And promises to set up law and order.

He that in Athens murdered Socrates,
And Plato then seduced, prepares to make
A desolation and to call it peace
Today for dying magnates, for the sake
Of generals who can scarcely keep awake,
And for that doughy mass in great and small
That doesn’t want to stir itself at all.

Forgive me for inflicting all this on you,
For asking you to hold the baby for us;
It’s easy to forget that where you’ve gone, you
May only want to chat with Set and Horus,
Bored to extinction with our earthly chorus:
Perhaps it sounds to you like a trunk-call,
Urgent, it seems, but quite inaudible.

Yet though the choice of what is to be done
Remains with the alive, the rigid nation
Is supple still within the breathing one;
Its sentinels yet keep their sleepless station,
And every man in every generation,
Tossing in his dilemma on his bed,
Cries to the shadows of the noble dead.

We’re out at sea now, and I wish we weren’t;
The sea is rough, I don’t care if it’s blue;
I’d like to have a quick one, but I daren’t.
And I must interrupt this screed to you,
For I’ve some other little jobs to do;
I must write home or mother will be vexed,
So this must be continued in our next.

iclysdale: So, how're you doing? :)
commodorifed: So far so good, but I just woke up.
iclysdale: Lots of time for things to go downhill then, you're saying? :)
iclysdale: Love ther Puddleglum.

Changed status to Offline (11:19 AM)

Changed status to Online (13:02 PM)

commodorifed: THE FRIDGE I CLEANS IT
iclysdale: YAY.
commodorifed: THAT IS LOVE Y'ALL
iclysdale: YAY LOVE. :)

iclysdale: So, has the day taken its dramatic turn for the worse yet? :)
commodorifed: THAT WAS WHEN I FOUND THE SOUR CREAM MONSTER
iclysdale: DID IT EAT YOU?
iclysdale: AM I TALKING TO ZOMBIE MONKEY?
commodorifed: NO I BEAT IT TO DEATH
iclysdale: a likely story.
commodorifed: braaaaaaaai.... I don't know what you're talking about. Silly Monkey!
iclysdale: you should not make me laugh in the library.
iclysdale: silly Monkey.
commodorifed: You should come home soon I miss your brai... I MISS YOU I LOVE YOU SO MUCH

iclysdale: I am holding my nose to stop laughing in the library now, silly zombie Monkey!

commodorifed: THEY WILL THINK YOU ARE LOOKING AT CLOWN PORN
iclysdale: That's in another tab.
commodorifed: Of COURSE it is.
iclysdale: Although that's really sort of more theatre of cruelty than funny.
commodorifed: depends on the clowns. there could be sweet wistful clownsex!
iclysdale: no. it's all hurt/comfort.
commodorifed: *sadface*
iclysdale: i will comfort you now, zombie Monkey.
commodorifed: *EYES YOU*
iclysdale: oh god, this is going to end up on LJ too, isn't it?
commodorifed: *clicks away from textedit hastily* Who, me?

iclysdale: http://iclysdale.livejournal.com/116416.html
commodorifed: BAD MONKEY I HAD THE POST ALL READY TO GO!
iclysdale: HA.
commodorifed: And of course you locked it :-)
commodorifed: HAH I CAN POST IT ANYWAY
iclysdale: You can post it too, sure. :)
commodorifed: NOT ANYWAYS. ANYWAY.

The government has unveiled new and unprecedented reasons barring the return of Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik, claiming every country he might fly over on the way home from Khartoum needed to give explicit permission.

In a federal-court filing, the government says its hands are tied and that neither Mr. Abdelrazik's Charter right as a citizen to enter Canada nor the UN's specific travel-ban exemption permitting those on its terrorist blacklist to return home requires it to let him fly back to his family in Montreal.

It says the UN travel ban "prohibits other states" from allowing Mr. Abdelrazik or anyone else on what's called the 1267 list of al-Qaeda suspects "to enter into and travel through their territories which includes land, airspace and territorial waters."

But that claim, filed in federal court by Justice Department lawyers, is seemingly at odds with the reality of UN rules.

Unlike Mr. Abdelrazik, who has never been charged with anything in Canada or Sudan, and who was cleared by both CSIS and the RCMP, Maxamed Cabdullaah Ciise, a Somali citizen, had served five years in an Italian prison for "criminal association for terrorist purposes" before being flown back to Britain in November of 2008.
...
[The Harper Government] claims the right to return to Canada, enshrined in the Charter, applies only to citizens who present themselves at a border post.

Let's look at that last bit again, shall we?

[The Harper government] claims the right to return to Canada, enshrined in the Charter, applies only to citizens who present themselves at a border post.

There is no possible comment I could make that would be more damning than that. If you choose to travel overseas, you come home again at the sole gift and discretion of The Right Honourable Stephen Harper and his pack of tame ministers.

In discussion at james_nicoll's lj, I opined that I think I am a Kinsey

3.1415926535897932384264338
327950288419716939937510582
097494459230781640628620899
862803482534211706798214808
651328230664709384460955058
223172535940812848111745028
410270193852110555964462294
895493038196442881097566593
344612847564823378678316527
120190914564856692346034861
045432664821339360726024914
127372458700660631558817488
152092096282925409171536436
789259036001133053054882046
6521384146951941511609...

Clearly, therefore, I am ...

Pisexual. :-)

Via gcrumb, who says:

Very, very rarely, the inherent cynicism of reality television is subverted by the presence of truly remarkable talent. This is one of those times.

Vaguely via BoingBoing

Mine is:

Science/Religion/Art: Sun 8:30 - 9:59

(Argh. Skud, can I crash in your room Saturday night?)
Time to fish out the Anth textbooks.

Porn Crushes The Patriarchy, The Sequel: Sun 10:00 - 11:29

Anyone got notes from last year? I think I had a conflict with the first panel. At any rate, I missed it.

Not Exactly What We Expected: Bastard Gods in Chalion, Terre d'Ange, and Elsewhere: Sun 4:00 - 5:29

Oh, look, I might actually be awake for this one. Anyone want to help me catch up on my reading for this panel? Suggestions welcome... [ETA: Aside from the Bujold books, which I have read, and the Carey books, which clearly I need to start, like, tomorrow.)

iclysdale is in Madison.

iclysdale: But I'm not necessarily the best advice on this.
iclysdale: Not really being any equity-seeking groups myself.
commodorified: straight boy ;-)
iclysdale: ;-)
iclysdale: I AM SO OPPRESSED TOO MARNA OMG.
commodorified: Are you?
commodorified: who by?
iclysdale: THE PATRIARCHY. IT HURTS ME TOOOOOOOOOOOO.

commodorified: I need a favour.
fairestcat: yes?
commodorified: Can you a) go thwap ian, b) yell THE PATRIARCHY HURTS MEN TOOOOOO! and c) run away? ;-)
commodorified: he says he is oppressed
fairestcat: possibly not with the running, so I don't fall on the slick floors
commodorified: point!

iclysdale: Second-hand abuse? That's not love, y'awl.
commodorified: NO IT IS THER PATRIARCHY
commodorified: see? it hurts men TOOOOOOO!
iclysdale: ouch.
commodorified: poor patriarchal iclysdale
iclysdale: fairestcat says she is not the patriarchy.

commodorified: FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
WE ARE ALL THE PATRIARCHY
commodorified: :-)
fairestcat: THAT'S WHAT I TOLD HIM
commodorified: HAH!

fairestcat: I suppose I might be a tool OF the patriarchy
fairestcat: as are we all
fairestcat: in our own ways
commodorified: come here, my little adjustable wench...

iclysdale: damn your perpetuating systems of oppression anyways.
iclysdale: hrmph.
commodorified: It's not MY system.
commodorified: I AM OPPRESSED. fairestcat IS OPPRESSED. YOU ARE COMPLICIT.
iclysdale: riiiiiight.

commodorified: this is so ending up on lj :-)
fairestcat: *thwaps*
commodorified: NOW YOU SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM!

... I need advice on Coming Out. :-)

[organisation I really really really want to work for] is an employment equity employer. Women, persons of colour, Aboriginal persons, persons with disabilities, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons are encouraged to apply for this position.

If you are a member of an equity-seeking group, you may choose to identify as such in your application.

Right. How do I go about announcing that I'm female (you can admittedly tell this from my name) and queer (which is fairly obvious from some of the jobs I've listed, but anyway) in a cover letter?

OH HAI BTW I IZ BIG DYKE seems a bit off, somehow.

Thoughts? Especially from those who have applied to such organisations within Canada?

(If you have ISSUES with Employment Equity initiatives, please be entitled to your opinion somewhere else or at a later time. I am trying to write a really stressful job app here, and I do not have the time or the spoons to either discuss this or moderate a discussion of it at the moment. Thanks)

ETA: I have listed both women's and queer organisations in my resume. I suspect that in order for EE considerations to come into play I have to explicitly choose to identify as such in [my] application. I may be wrong about this.

Yes, my name is Marna Rae Nightingale.

And yes, that is the name on my birth certificate.

Just. Sayin'. ;-)

And I haz a dilemma. See, back when I started this lj, I named it Commodorified mostly because I'd already started two lj accounts before that, and so marna and marnan were taken. (Note to self; delete marna, someone probably wants it).

Poll #1381469 By any Other Gnome
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Marna's Dreamwidth account name should be:

I voted for commodorified and wish to explain why:

I voted for marna and wish to explain why:

I voted for marnanightingale and wish to explain why:

You all knew that my name was Marna Nightingale, right?

I feel compelled to lecture you about the foolishness of women using their real names on the 'net.

But you want facts, not sighs. I’ll do my best
To give a few; you can’t expect them all.
To start with, on the whole we’re better dressed;
For chic the difference to-day is small
Of barmaid from my lady at the Hall.
It’s sad to spoil this democratic vision
With millions suffering from malnutrition.

Again, our age is highly educated;
There is no lie our children cannot read,
And as MacDonald might so well have stated
We’re growing up and up and up indeed.
Advertisements can teach us all we need;
And death is better, as the millions know,
Than dandruff, night-starvation, or B.O.

We’ve always had a penchant for field sports,
But what do you think has grown up in our towns?
A passion for the open air and shorts;
The sun is one of our emotive nouns.
Go down by chara’ to the Sussex Downs,
Watch the manoeuvres of the week-end hikers
Massed on parade with Kodaks or with Leicas.

Those movements signify our age-long role
Of insularity has lost its powers;
The cult of salads and the swimming pool
Comes from a climate sunnier than ours,
And lands which never heard of licensed hours,
The south of England before very long
Will look no different from the Continong.

You lived and moved among the best society
And so could introduce your hero to it
Without the slightest tremor of anxiety;
Because he was your hero and you knew it,
He’d know instinctively what’s done, and do it.
He’d find our day more difficult than yours
For industry has mixed the social drawers.

We’ve grown, you see, a lot more democratic,
And Fortune’s ladder is for all to climb;
Carnegie on this point was must emphatic.
A humble grandfather is not a crime,
At least, if father made enough in time!
Today, thank God, we’ve got no snobbish feeling
Against the more efficient modes of stealing.

The porter at the Carlton is my brother,
He’ll wish me a good evening if I pay,
For tips and men are equal to each other.
I’m sure that Vogue would be the first to say
Que le Beau Monde is socialist today;
And many a bandit, nor so gently born
Kills vermin every winter with the Quorn.

Adventurers, though, must take things as they find them
And look for pickings where the pickings are.
The drives of love and hunger are behind them,
They can’t afford to be particular:
And these who like good cooking and a car,
A certain kind of costume or of face,
Must seek them in a certain kind of place.