Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 23

A Good Mood

More from facebook:

Another sunny day. I have exercise and an hour+ of dental work today. However, when the work is done, I will be free of dentistry for half a year, except for flossing and paying the bill. I have decided to try gratitude practice again. Three things that make me happy: 1) The weather, which is bright and not too hot. 2) Toasted muffins, marmalade and coffee. 3) Being a writer, which is not a bad thing to be. Bonus cause for happiness: The Riverdell group is discussing the Moomin books on Saturday. I am reading them for the first time. They are gentle fun.

I knew I wanted to be a writer in junior high, and I actually did it. I've never been able to make a living at writing, which has meant I've had a lot of low-prestige jobs, most of them low-paying. I liked many of them. (I stayed away from food and retail.) But I actually did manage to do the writing and get it published and get some good reviews, though wealth and have eluded me. Well, I never made a serious try at wealth and fame. Mostly I wanted to write and be published and have some people like what I wrote. I told John Douglas 30 years ago that I wanted to be respected by the people in the field I respected. He made a polite, dubious, Canadian noise. Ha, ha, John. I did it.

Boy, I wrote something that is triumphant. That makes me nervous. We don't do triumph here in Minnesota. Let me rephrase the above. "It could be worse."

This ties in with Nick Mamatas's essay on success and failure. You are more likely to succeed if you set goals you can achieve. Most of us set huge goals when we are young. I wanted to be a writer, a space cadet and someone who changed the world and helped create a better society. As I have aged, I have moved the goals in. Now, I am relatively happy to write science fiction, to critique the old society and create images of a better world. But I am in a really good mood this morning, in spite of the impending dentistry. Later this afternoon, my mouth sore and my face numb, I may have a darker vision.

Failure

This link goes to a brief essay by Nick Mamatas on success and failure for a writer.

Once again I am mining my facebook comments for the blog. Here are a couple of thing I said about Nick's essay:

I used to do a panel at Minicon titled "Psychological Survival for SF Writers," which was about ways to deal with failure. (Exercise, eat well, be moderate in your use of alcohol and drugs, drink tea, find other things to care about... The usual...) I had to give the panel up, because people left the room in tears. They did not want to think about the possibility of failure.

What Nick is talking about is not failure leading to success, but failure leading to more failure. There is a novel by Halldor Laxness about an Icelandic peasant who devotes his life to poetry, suffering poverty, misery and failure. It's titled Heimljos, which means Light of the World. The guy is a bad poet. He is never going to have success of any kind. My sister-in-law gave the book to me, because she found it unbearably depressing. I thought it sounded funny, though I haven't read it yet. Some day when I am up for a really grim joke.

I can't speak to the novel, since I haven't read it. But one of the things Laxness admires about his characters is how indomitable they are, as the same time that they are often absurd. Absurd is not the right word. They have big ideas. They see themselves in terms of the saga heroes, even though they may be peasants just barely scraping by. The hero of Heimljos makes the same sacrifices (it seems to me) as van Gogh did, but he is not a great artist.

Laxness's characters are always (or often) trying to pull themselves free from dire poverty and misery, to live great lives, though they are not -- in fact -- saga heroes or great artists. Not having read the novel, I cannot say if Laxness thinks this particular character is admirable or pathetic.

Hard SF

This is a neat essay on women and science fiction by Vandana Singh. She writes in specific about women and hard SF, the manly stories about physics and engineering, which women writers tend to avoid, because they can't do the math. Singh is a physicist and can do the math, and she is concerned that women become more comfortable with hard SF.

As far as I can tell, she is absolutely right about everything she says, but I added a comment anyway. And because I like to use what I write more than once, if I can, here is what I wrote:

A couple of comments on hard science fiction. For the most part, it has been based on engineering and physics, also (I suppose) chemistry and materials science. (I am not entirely sure what materials science is, but I run across it in New Scientist, mostly in articles on research on the properties of materials.) Hard SF can include biology, though SF based on biology and evolutionary theory begins to look a bit soft. SF based on the "human sciences" -- history, anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology and maybe economics, though I'm not sure economics is any kind of science -- is completely soft and squishy. Hard SF writers mostly ignore the squishy sciences. As a result, they create far-future societies that are exactly like current American society, populated with people whose names are "Bob Smith" and "Joe Jones." They appear to have no idea that societies change and evolve, and that new technologies change societies. If you have FTL, then you have far different physics. What else is changed, besides space travel?

So that is one point. I find most hard SF contains really bad soft science and that makes it unconvincing.

Second, what about paradigm shifts? One technique I use is to figure out how far into the future my society is, then look back a comparable distance into the past. If the story is set 200 years in the future, how much has science changed since 1814? How much of our current science could have been predicted in 1814? What this means is -- a current hard SF story that is set in the future is going to be using way out of date science, unless it is set in the near future or assumes a static or regressing society, that has produced no new science. The better -- the truer -- the current science is, the more out of date it will be in a story set far-out. I think there's an argument for far-distant stories using the science we have now. What else do we have, after all? And Newton still works when dealing with large bodies. But hard SF writers who get all self-righteous about how scientific their work is are silly.

None of this is a reason to give up on hard SF. We need to build a new kind of hard SF, that recognizes the soft sciences and the history of science. I think I'm saying pretty much what you have said above. So I will stop.

Bad Language

This comes from a facebook discussion of whether Guardian of the Galaxy's use of the words "whore" and "bitch" made the movie misogynist. The conversation started with an article in Dailydot. I wrote:

Well, I finally went and read the article. How do you make a movie about low lifers who behave badly and use bad language WITHOUT showing them behaving badly and using bad language? Peter grew up among criminals. In many ways he is a jerk. Rocket is a criminal. Gamorra is a trained killer. We meet Drax in prison. These are not nice people. Only the plant is nice, but the plant has gotten into bad company. The person who wrote the article appears to have missed the fact that these are not nice people and is complaining that they are not nice. This is not a good criticism.

The language did not bother me, because the characters in the movie use street language. They are thugs, after all, living in a criminal subculture. I'm not sure they are misogynist. The culture obviously has a streak of misogyny, since the words have remained in use.

Lyda Morehouse disagreed with me, pointing out that the Marvel comics and the other Marvel movies have not used bad language, and I wrote:

I defer to your knowledge of Marvel, Lyda. But I think -- in this one movie -- the sleaziness, including the language, works. They could have pulled all the bad language, and the movie would have still worked. But it would not have been as sleazy. Peter's forgotten date and the Collector's slave girl would also have to go, if we want to get rid of sleaze. You'd end with something like the WWII war movie flavor of the first Captain America. Clean violence. Clean evil.

Thor is clean evil too. As far as we know, frost giants aren't misogynistic. In fact, they don't seem to have any women, which makes it hard to explain Loki. What could be cleaner than all that ice and snow?

I will also add that I am increasingly reluctant to use bad language in my own writing, which means it reads as if an editor came through with a bar of soap. The ultimate test is the n-word, which I never use. If a movie was about racism and racists, would it be possible to use the n-word? Yes, if the movie was Blazing Saddles, but that was made a long time ago. In science fiction, this could be handled by making up a racist word. "You vile human! You Earthie! You skwilk!"

But does it really make sense to remove bad language -- and bad behavior -- from art, because we loath it? And why is killing still acceptable? There is a lot of killing in Guardians of the Galaxy and no one is objecting to this.

Blogging

I Googled the names of a number of SF writersI like last night. I decided I wanted recent news about them, so I checked their blogs. They all had blogs, but almost none were up-to-date. All had good websites, and several mentioned that they had moved on to facebook or Twitter. So, is blogging passe? Should I stop?

I started blogging years ago -- I think in 2006 -- because I wanted to be sure people could find me on the Internet. I thought setting up a blog would be easier than setting up a new website. (A kind friend set up a website for me years ago, but I had been thinking of something newer and glitzier. Instead, I settled for this blog.)

I don't think I'm a good blogger, and I don't have much of an audience. But the blog has an email address, and a few times people have used that, which has been useful. I've made sales because of the address and gotten fan mail.

Maybe it's time to find someone to make me a glitzy website. I'm on facebook and enjoy it. I refuse to get on Twitter or Tumblr.

Black Women Science Fiction Writers

A link to a good list.

Guardians of the Galaxy

I saw Guardians of the Galaxy last night. My mood has improved.

I especially liked the large plant, though the raccoon was also good.

My friend Sandy Lindow said there were plot holes. How could there be plot holes? The entire movie was Crash! Boom! Ka-pow! Bang! Bang! Bang! Rattle! BOOM! Except for the parts that were Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrill singing "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." I could have used more Motown, but the mix of songs fit the movie's weirdness better.

Good skiffy starscapes. I liked the mine inside the gigantic head of a long-dead god which is floating in space. Now, that is sense of wonder. But mostly the movie was Crash! Pow! The Nova city had a weird 1950s 'visions of the future' look. Sunny and very clean. Lots of pastel colors. I liked that too. Pow! Pow! Pow!

I like myself better when I am enjoying a weird Marvel movie than I do when I'm brooding over the news or fights in fandom. I mean, I know I'm living in a decaying empire on a planet that seems about to hit the rocks. But I don't have to let that ruin my mood.

Hwarhath Collection

I cleaned up another hwarhath story. This one was easy. Some of the files were in an antique version of Apple Works and got scrambled when I translated them to Word. I have to go through and fix the paragraphing and line breaks. I found only a few problems with yesterday's story, which is a pretty good story, taken all in all.

Today is fixing another story, then taking books to the library and dropping off a blanket at the cleaner's. Then -- maybe -- more writing.

I have been out of work -- retired -- for five years, and I am just now setting up a writing schedule. Work gets done, but very slowly. Now, I want to speed up. It's not as if I'm using the time when I don't write in any useful or entertaining way.

Art Museum

We ran up to Target Roseville yesterday, then stopped at the Barnes and Noble in HarMar for coffee and pastries and a look at books. I bought two pairs of socks at Schuler's, also in HarMar. One pair is SmartWool, the other is another company obviously aiming for the same market. Upscale, arty wool socks.

Then we drove to the Weisman Museum at the U. It's a small museum in a Frank Geary building. There were four or five small exhibits inside: a ceramics show; a show of photographs taken in the 1950s (I think) of the last steam engines running in the US -- beautiful, intelligent, black and white photos; a show of antique Korean furniture; a show of work by photography students in Beijing and at the University of Minnesota; and works from the permanent collection. Very nice. Patrick and I went through everything slowly, reading all the labels.

We drove back home along the River Road and Summit Avenue. Then I made a salad for dinner. It's too hot for heavy meals. Patrick installed Linex Mint on my little Acer netbook. We watched a movie on DVD, and I went to bed, while Patrick did more work on my Acer.

Today is exercise and work on the hwarhath collection. The air quality is awful right now: fine particular matter from the fires in the west. But it's supposed to improve.

Plans

In an effort to be more cheerful, in spite of the news, I am planning things to do. I want to see the dinosaur show at the Science Museum, because -- dinosaurs! And there is a ceramics show at the Weisman Museum which is co-curated by the amazing potter Warren McKenzie. That sounds good.

The Walker and the MIA seem to be on summer vacation. No big exhibits. But the new African gallery at the MIA is nifty, and the East Asian collection is wonderful. Chinese and Japanese pots! Among other things. There's a sculpture show at the American Swedish Institute that sounds interesting, also an exhibit of contemporary Finnish rug makers.

And I am thinking of day trips outside the Cities. Maybe down the river to Pepin, WI, to my favorite little gallery or up to Duluth to watch -- if we are lucky -- a thousand foot lake boat come through the shipping canal. As the boats arrive, they sound their horns in greeting, and the guy operating the Aerial Bridge replies. In case you are wondering, a thousand foot long boat is big. They move surprisingly quickly. You don't get a lot of photos before they are through the canal and -- if they are coming in -- turning to follow the channel.