Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 11

Minicon

It's been so long since I input anything that I forgot how to get to my blog. Either that, or Google changed its system.

Spring is arriving. Local facebook friends are posting photos of flowers. I just got back from Minicon. I was a bit tense, because I was getting interviewed for a publication. One of the reasons I am a writer is I like to control things. You can't really control an interview. This one especially was very fluid. The interviewer assures me that he will be able to turn it into something coherent.

Spam

Gee, I have been getting a lot of spam comments. I just went down the blog and deleted the most recent ones. It's so discouraging. Why do people do this?

I have mixed feelings about the food product named Spam. I've been to the Spam Museum in southern Minnesota a couple of times. Museum volunteers hand around plates of Spam canapes, and they are pretty good. But the few times I've bought Spam and tried to make it edible, things did not work out. The museum is terrific, however.

February

There is snow on the ground right now, but the temps this week are going to be above freezing, and rain is predicted. The ice sculptures in Rice Park, done every year for the St. Paul Winter Carnival, were half-melted when I saw them; and ice fishing events have been cancelled in many places in Minnesota, because the ice on lakes is too thin.

Minnesota has always been a winter state. It looks best -- most natural and like itself -- with ice and snow. But that's ending. I wonder what it will do to the Minnesota personality, which has been shaped by the weather. Minnesotans tend to co-operate, because winter forced them to. Traditionally, we've had one big enemy, and it was weather, not other people.

The Last Two Months

It's been over two months since I last posted. My rule is, I should post something at least once a week, so readers know I am still alive. I'm not sure why I took a break from posting...

I went east to visit family for Christmas, which was nice, even though it rained most of the time. It should not be raining in late December in the mountains of New York. Should I mention global warming, or do you all know about it?

When I got back, I finished proofing the collection of hwarhath stories. If all goes well, it will be out in May from Aqueduct Press. Now I have to move on to unfinished stories. There are seven of these at the moment. I still plan a collection of Lydia Duluth stories. I figure I have enough to keep me busy all year.

January was not a good month in many ways. David Hartwell, who edited two of my novels, died in a freak accident. He was moving a bookcase up or down a flight of stairs, fell and hit his head. I knew David for at least 25 years. A bright and interesting man, who was passionate about science fiction. I always enjoyed chatting with him at conventions. I'm going to miss him a lot, even though we only met once a year or so.

David Bowie and Alan Rickman died. I didn't know them, of course, but I enjoyed their work. I was especially fond of Rickman in Galaxy Quest and Sense and Sensibility. They were working class guys who made good in the arts, did good work and pushed limits, Bowie especially.

The Marxist biologist Richard Levins died, also the Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood. I have been reading both for years.

I am hoping, now that we are in February, that the deaths will stop. But my generation is reaching the age when mortality catches up. David was 74 and should not have been moving furniture up and down stairs. Bowie and Rickman were both 69. Ellen Meiksins Wood was 74. Richard Levins was 86.

I need to start paying more attention to young people.

Update

Autumn continues, unnaturally warm. Greenhouse Effect, anyone? The trees in the park are almost leafless. There may be a few flowers hanging on. At the moment it's sunny, but rain in predicted in the afternoon. I'm a bit sad about that. Originally it looked as it we going to have an all-day rain. I would love a long, steady rain.

I am currently proofreading the manuscript for the hwarhath story collection, plus two essays. The collection is set to come out next spring. After that, most likely, I will move on to putting together a collection of Lydia Duluth stories.

I'm still trying to come to terms with Kathe's death. I am angry -- very angry -- at her for not taking better care of herself. I am furious at her Chinese doctor, who could see K crumbling in front of her, but kept treating her chi, instead of finding out what was really wrong. In fairness to the doctor, K was pig-stubborn and wouldn't have listened to the doctor if she'd said anything K did not want to hear. 40 years ago K went to Ruth Berman's father, a traditional Western doctor, to find out why she had aches and paints. Dr. Berman said she had arthritis. There was no cure. She should take aspirin. K did not like this diagnosis, and so began -- as far as I can remember -- her exploration of Chinese medicine.

She wore the same glasses for decades, never getting a new prescription, because she didn't believe in western opticians. In the end, she had great trouble seeing. You have to negotiate with reality. You cannot bend it to your will, and your beliefs do not change it. (It's possible that she couldn't afford new glasses, but I don't think that was the reason.)

I'm angry at myself for not realizing how ill she was. I could have been a better friend, more compassionate. She never asked for help or understanding. She wouldn't, being intensely private, and I knew that. I should have seen this was a person who was failing mentally and physically and who should be treated with the kindness with which one would treat (I hope) anyone old and frail and dying. But she was my own age, almost exactly, and I didn't want to admit she was old and dying. What would that say about me?

My father had a doctor in his later years, who screwed up a bit in diagnosing and treating my father -- I think because my father was a professional person, like the doc, and about the doc's age. The doctor couldn't face the reality of my father's condition, because he could see himself in my father. Only my theory, and it didn't matter, because it didn't change what happened to my father.

I was stand-offish, in part because K had become difficult to deal with, but mostly because I couldn't deal with her aging and especially her increasing mental oddness. Like most people who work with my mind, I'm terrified of anything that damages the mind. Patrick has told me that when he worked in lock psych units, blue collar families would say, "At least it isn't his back," when a family member went around the bend. Of course, the prognosis for many forms of mental illness is good, while serious back problems tend to be permanent.

Anyway, a lot of food for thought. My hwarhath collection includes three stories about the hwarhath actor Dapple, one set when she is a baby, one when she is 20 and one when she is 40. I have a fourth story set when she is 60 and beginning to worry about old age. (The hwarhath live longer than humans do at present, but Dapple's profession is highly physical. Hwarhath actors do a lot of dancing and tumbling.) The story is also about the death of the Ettin matriarch, Ettin Taiin's mother, and about Taiin growing old. I should finish it. I think I need to write about old age.

Writing

This is a facebook comment on other writers discussing how much they enjoy writing:

I am not sure I love writing. Mostly I notice how hard it is and how the end result is never what I imagined and wanted. I think I spent too much time around avant garde artists as a child. I seem to believe an artist must suffer for his or her art, which is almost certainly BS. I grant that sometimes stories flow out as if they came from somewhere else. The muse, maybe. And sometimes the ideas are so neat and funny that I hug myself. But mostly it's work. The payback is great, however: bringing a story to my workshop and having the other members like it, sending it out and having it accepted.

Baggage

I had a dream about packing. I was traveling with several people in several cars and it was time to go. We had an amazing amount of baggage. I had maybe ten bags and was trying to get everything into them. When I was almost done, and part of my baggage was already stuffed into a car, I realized some of my bags were mostly empty. I was going to have to repack. And I realized that some of the things I was going to need -- I think for a one night stay somewhere on the road --were in the bags already in the car and unreachable.

I think I was permanently scarred by traveling across Asia when I was 16. Eight countries in three months. I was always packing and unpacking and hauling baggage. It was worth it, but I don't like baggage or flying.

A Freudian would focus on the word 'baggage.' Do I feel I have too much emotional baggage? Yes. I have a lifetime's worth of memories, feelings and thoughts. That's a lot to haul around. Good material for writing, though.

Kathe Kelly

My friend Kathe Kelly died sometime in the past week, alone in her apartment. She had been increasingly frail and seemed to me to be failing mentally, so I am not surprised. But it's a huge loss.

I first met her when we were both 17 and freshmen in college. My dorm at an expensive, elite college had cockroaches -- the big American ones that called water bugs. The first time I saw one, I freaked out. I had never seen a roach before and had no idea what to do. I went down the dorm hall looking for help and found Kathe. She put on a pair of cowboy boots, came to my room and stomped the roach. I don't think she had ever seen a cockroach before -- she was from Darien, Connecticut, an expensive suburb of New York -- but she was tougher than I was.

I remember her as a slim young woman, dressed all in black like a beatnik, and with the cowboy boots, of course. She was the oldest child of Walt Kelly, who drew Pogo, a very famous comic strip at the time. Like her father, she was a writer and artist.

We became friends, both of us becoming involved with the Student Peace Union and the political activists around the SPU. She dropped out of the college after two years, moved to Philly and got a job with the American Friends Service Committee. We stayed in touch while I plugged on at school.

This was in the early 1960s, when the country was about to catch fire. Kathe was involved with Civil Rights as well as the peace movement, and she got arrested and thrown in jail during a demonstration against the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. That was in Chicago. I was living in the Twin Cities by then, having moved back after college. Kathe and I stayed in touch.

In 1967, I moved to New York. Kathe was there. We roomed together in Brooklyn. After the 1967 Rebellion in Detroit, we moved to the Motor City. Kathe knew some people there, and the city sounded interesting to me. We roomed together in Detroit for several years. There was one point, after we stopped rooming together, when we had separate apartments in the same building, so we could run down the hall to talk.

At another point, Kathe was living in a house with two other women. I moved in, after spending a month putting up paneling and painting, in an attempt to make the attic look something like a bedroom. The first night I slept there, I woke to the sound of screaming. The house was a side-by-side duplex, and I thought the screaming was coming from next door. I came down the stairs to get Kathe, so we could figure out what to do. As I came down, I heard footsteps going down to the first floor. It turned out the screaming was Kathe. She had a hook and eye lock on her bedroom door, so our roommates' cats couldn't get in. She woke when the lock clicked. Someone was trying to get in. She began screaming at once. She was alway good in an emergency.

We found a window on the ground floor open and called the police. They arrived with drawn guns -- you have no idea how big and bright a nickel-plated revolver seems, when it's shining in the light -- and decided that we had dreamed the whole thing. There was no intruder. When our roommates came home, they couldn't understand the need for better security. They had left the ground floor window unlocked, because one of them had lost her keys. Kathe and I talked about the need for better locks on all the windows, plus the need to make sure no one was home alone. They were busy working on prisoners' rights for the inmates of Jackson State Prison. They simply didn't get the idea of working to protect women.

Kathe and I moved out. I got a new apartment, and Kathe stayed there until she left for California, driving her big Dodge van. A week after we moved out, a woman down the block from our old house was raped at knife point in her bedroom. The cops then wanted to talk to Kathe, but she was about go to California and didn't want any distractions.

There was a period in the late 1960s when alienated young middle class people decided to join the working class. Kathe and I both did this. But Kathe did a more complete job. I worked as a clerk in offices. Kathe worked in warehouses and was even a tool and die maker for a while. The guys she worked with were sexist pigs, but she managed to handle their hassling with relative calm.

Kathe was still writing. The two of us (and our friend Ruth Berman) published stories in the same issue of New Worlds in the early 1970s. This was a late version of the magazine, which came out as a paperback book. It didn't last long.

Neither of us could drive when we arrived in Detroit. I continued to not learn. But Kathe took driving classes, bought a big Dodge van and then took more classes, so she could do all the ordinary maintenance herself.

I met my life partner, Patrick, in Detroit. In 1974 Patrick and I moved to Minneapolis. I wanted to be in a city that was safer than Detroit, but was still affordable. I knew I wanted to write and was going to continue working office jobs and never have much money. Safe and affordable seemed like a good idea. The Twin Cities, which I knew well, fit the bill. Kathe stayed in Detroit. As usual we kept in touch. She wrote wonderful letters, sometimes with illustrations. I still have them, though she asked me to destroy them. I will have to do this now.

The car plants began to move out of the city, and Detroit became a harder place to live. Kathe said there came a time when no one in the community had jobs or was getting unemployment. There was no one to ask for a loan. The city got really tough then. This is where my memory fails me, and Kathe is no longer around to ask. I know she was in Boston for several years, but I don't remember if she first moved to the Twin Cities, then to Boston, then back to the Twin Cities, or if she went first to Boston and then here.

We both stayed in the Twin Cities. Kathe moved from working blue collar jobs to office jobs. She lost interest in politics for the most part and studied Zen Buddhism, becoming a Zen nun. I stayed interested in politics, but not especially active. I was involved in the National Writers Union in the 1980s, but that was about it-- except for my writing which is almost always political. I was a fairly serious writer by this time, though still working office jobs to make a living. Kathe continued to write, mostly poetry, but made no effort to place the poems anywhere. She and I were in the same poetry writing group, which put out an anthology: Lady Poetesses from Hell. The group does reading at science fiction conventions and sells copies of the book. Kathe's best poetry is really fine.

Somewhere along the line Kathe became interested in alternative health. She was on a brown rice macrobiotic diet for a long time and took up traditional Chinese medicine. She refused to have anything to do with Western medicine, instead relying on a traditional Chinese doc here in Minneapolis. Over time, she developed the worst case of osteoporosis I have ever seen. She ended bent double, walking with a staff. It seemed to me I was watching her crumble.

I believe in Western med, and I think she could have gotten help. But it was never possible to argue with Kathe.

We met roughly twice a month -- at the poetry group and for lunch at a local Chinese restaurant, which I didn't like. Kathe could eat the food there. She had odd (to me) dietary needs, due to the advice of her Chinese doctor. I subscribe to New Scientist and I always kept copies to give her, because she was interested in science. I just looked at my magazine and catalog pile and realized I no longer need to keep the copies.

This year we stopped meeting for lunch, and Kathe missed a lot of meetings of the writing group. I think it was simply too hard to get around. She was obviously in pain. I saw her last about three months ago at a meeting of the poetry group. After that, I called her several times to tell her where the next meeting of the group was and to ask her if she wanted to go out to lunch. She said yes about lunch, but not now.

Then she died.

In the last few years, I found it increasingly hard to deal with Kathe. She had always been eccentric, a bohemian, a free spirit. As she aged, she became more and more eccentric and rigid. I don't think the Chinese medicine helped. If she had gotten treatment for the osteoporosis and her pain, she made have done better. But that is only my opinion. For a long, long time we had wonderful conversations. She read a lot. She was observant. She was bright as hell. Then the conversations became less and less interesting, as she became less and less well. I don't think she should have died at 72. However, she lived life as she wanted do and died the way she wanted to, at home. She was terrified of ending in a hospital or nursing home.

She always had a touch of paranoia, which came from being an activist in the 1960s. The police in Detroit were clearly an army of occupation. It was perfectly reasonable to think they might frame you or kill you. But the paranoia remained after there was less reason for it. Maybe this came -- at least in part -- from growing old and living alone. As you age, you become vulnerable, and if you are alone, you are likely to feel very vulnerable.

As fragile as she seemed to me, she was also stoic and fiercely independent and very private. My mother was a New Englander like Kathe. These traits were very familiar to me.

Sometime along the way, she had her name legally changed from Kathe Kelly to Cassandra O'Malley. I didn't understand why, and I don't know how the bright, gifted, energetic young woman I met in college turned into the prickly, paranoid, fragile crone I knew at the end. This society wears people down.

I Have To Do Some 'Splaining

First of all, Marc... I wasn't trying to argue that Germany was responsible for US postwar behavior, either in reality or in Captain America 2. We apparently see the movie very differently. To me, when Cap discovers that Hydra has taken over SHIELD and the entire US government, he is discovering that there is no moral difference between the US and the enemy he fought in Cap 1. For a patriot like Cap, a guy of superhuman moral purity, this is one hell of a discovery. The scene between Cap and the crazed Nazi scientist in the mainframe is based on reality. The US did recruit Nazis at the end of WWII, and some of these guys were very nasty. Recruiting them does not say good things about the US government.

Cap 1 is about a struggle between good Yanks and bad Germans, and it has much of appearance and feeling of American movies made during the war. Even the colors -- sepia brown, black and white and gray -- look like a 1940s B&W movie. But the moral divisions didn't run cleanly along national boundaries, as I am sure you know. There were collaborators in all the occupied countries, and there were people in the US and UK who had no problem recruiting Nazis for postwar work at the same time that Allied troops were going into the death camps and finding bodies stacked like cordwood.

Before the war, there were people in the US and Europe who liked the fascists, because they saw them as allies against the USSR, communism, socialism and the labor movement. And before the war ended, the US and UK were moving to a confrontation with their wartime ally the USSR and with the European communists who had been a lot of the resistance against fascism. (See the history of Greece right after WWII.)

(I am not saying that the USSR was a socialist or communist society. I think it was a state capitalist society and a nasty police state. But it had dangerous rhetoric.)

So this is the way I see the two Captain Americas. Cap 1 is the popular history: good Yanks and bad Germans. Cap 2 is a much more ambiguous reality. Cap realizes that the US government is the same as Hydra. In fact, the US government is Hydra. Everything he has believed in and stood for is untrue.

I may give the Marvel movies too much credit, because I enjoy them. They cost a mint to make, which means they have to please the people with the money to fund them and a gigantic, diverse audience. So they need story lines that everyone likes, and that is not likely to be an honest story line.

Now, Foxessa... I can't justify my dislike of the American professional middle class and fiction about them. I clearly suffer from a prejudice. I'm not sure where it comes from. (Though the period of my childhood, when professional people were falling over each other to denounce their neighbors as communists may have something to do with my prejudice. I can remember that period just a little. It was a time of fear and cowardice, and I think it has left deep marks on American society and culture.) In addition, speaking as an artist, I am much less interested in personal problems than in social problems. Many of my stories -- possibly most -- are about people in conflict with their social roles.

More on Diversity

An article in The Guardian on whether one should represent marginalized people in fiction.

I am of several minds re this. I do agree that all art has an agenda. You learn this in art history. But I also support the romantic (I think it is) idea of self-expression and truth to oneself. A very 19th and early 20th century idea. Finally, I am uncomfortable with the stories I have written in an effort to be multicultural. Not the future stories where I make human society non-racist and a mix of cultures, not the future stories where I make everyone black. Those are fun. But the stories where I try to write an existing nonwhite culture from the inside. I am not drawing on my own experience and I worry about treating other cultures dishonestly or disrespectfully. It's not worth the psychic wear and tear for me.