Sarah Monette's Blog, page 50

show us your guns!

Geraldine Hoff Doyle, a.k.a. Rosie the Riveter, died Sunday, age 86.

In her honor, matociquala has started a meme.




My contribution demonstrates the single upside I can find to breaking one's ankle: six weeks on crutches gives a person awesome arms and shoulders.

PSA: sports bras

For those of you who find your mammary hypertrophy* getting in the way of your physical endeavors, I can report that Title 9's Last Resort Bra (a.k.a. the Enell Sports Bra) really does perform as advertised. It is expensive like whoa ($60 a pop) and hard as hell to get into (they are absolutely correct when they warn you that the proper size will feel too small when you start), but it works. I had been doubling up my sports bras to withstand the sitting trot, and the Enell bra is actually better. Once I get into it, I don't have to think about my breasts again until I take it off.

Which, frankly, is what I want from a bra.

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*Thank you, Lois McMaster Bujold and Ethan of Athos, for that phrase.

today I have

1. written my third Ellery Queen post for tor-dot-com. There is, of course, no one currently at Tor to care, and won't be until 2011, but it's the check-mark on the to do list that counts.
2. filled out paperwork for invoicing tor-dot-com for the two posts that went up in December.
3. fought with Wells Fargo's voicemail system and emerged confused but triumphant with the information mirrorthaw wants.
4. written a functional transition (i.e., it's good enough for the first draft) into the next supernatural manifestation in Thirdhop Scarp. The plot may finally start thickening.
5. scheduled a riding lesson tomorrow and one on Saturday. (YAY!)
6. called the vet about two necessary questions I've been failing to ask all week (nothing alarming--just the Elder Saucepan's pain meds and arthritis supplements).
7. AND committed us to bringing the First Ninja in on Monday for an ultrasound so we can maybe figure out wtf are up with her kidneys. (She's making sure the household cats meet their mysteriousness quota, all by herself.)

That looks like a lot more accomplishment than it felt like. Go team me!

continuing to read Kater's Hitler Youth ...

Professor Kater has put forward an extraordinary proposition:

Girls did not possess the same degree of herd instinct that characterized the males, which motivated them to join groups, gang up on others, and eventually made them complicit in crimes such as assault and murder. Girls had constituted only one-third of the total membership in the Weimar youth movement, which suggests a greater tendency to maintain their individuality rather than submerging it in a mass group.
(72)

While I certainly would like to believe that, by virtue of having two X chromosomes, I can count on my inherent rugged individualism to protect me against being enthralled by fascist demagoguery and mob rule, I can think of several other things that that information about female involvement in the Weimar youth movement might plausibly suggest, none of them a grossly overgeneralizing piece of sexual essentialism.

Harrumph.

words are weapons sharper than knives

There's a curious phenomenon in historiography of the Nazis; I've mentioned it before: the insidious way in which, if you aren't very careful, you will find yourself reinscribing the terms of the very discourse you're supposed to be studying. Hitler's innocence of the genocide of the Jews is probably the creepiest of these memes. It was a popular defense of the Fuehrer during his reign, and then got picked up by Hitler apologist David Irving on his long descent from fire-eating muckraker to Holocaust denier. Another example is the idea of the "ethnic German" which historiographers have a distressing tendency to treat as unproblematic despite its clear ideological freight. And a third, brought again and forcibly to my attention tonight by Michael H. Kater's Hitler Youth, is "homosexuality."

In discussing the endemic problem of discipline in the Hitler-Jugend, Kater says:

As early as 1933, Hitler told Schirach that Reich President Paul von Hindenburg was cross with him because "the young people did not show the necessary respect to old officers, teachers, and ministers of the church." Later in the Third Reich, HJ miscreants in their early teens were known for committing petty theft, obstructing railroad tracks, and accosting civilians in the streets. As for the older ones, traffic violations such as racing with staff cars became a serious problem, sometimes resulting in the injury of innocent bystanders. HJ leaders were habitually driving their cars with such speed that often "they cannot be brought to a necessary stop," according to an official complaint. Homosexuality and sadism became rampant among HJ members. In one notorious case in the summer of 1938, a mid-level teenage leader inflicted long-lasting torture on his charges by tying their wrists and ankles during an outing and then beating them with his steel-studded belt.
(52-53)

And again, just down the page:

During the war years boys and girls continued to engage in crimes like theft, impersonation, or gross acts of vandalism. [...] Nazi character training notwithstanding, homosexuality could not be curbed, and more women were being sexually molested than had been the case in peace time.
(53)

In both cases "homosexuality" is being vaguely lumped together with vandalism, rape, insubordination, theft, and joy-riding (the longer I look at these passages, the longer my list of problems gets), and Kater doesn't define either the Nazi use of the term or his own. He seems perfectly willing to accept homosexuality, like sadism, as nothing more nor less than a problem that crops up when discipline among teenagers is lax.

I know basically nothing at all about LGBTQ issues in Germany between the beginning of the twentieth century and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, but I do know, from reading about the Nazis, that there seems to have been a general association between thuggishness, love of (para)military social groups and structures, and what is referred to as homosexuality (also "perversion"), typified by Ernst Röhm, the SA leader murdered in the so-called "Röhm Putsch" of 1934. Röhm is invariably tagged as a "notorious homosexual" by historiographers of the Nazis; it's an epithet like rosy-fingered Dawn or ox-eyed Hera, and like those epithets, its meaning is actually kind of slippery. Certainly it is used, by both Röhm's contemporaries and historiographers of the Nazis, as code for "pervert" and "degenerate," a way to emphasize Röhm's bad character and general undesirability. I have no idea how Röhm understood his sexual identity, if he ever thought about it at all, but using the word "homosexual," as it was applied to Röhm by his contemporaries--or to these Hitler Youths--without stopping to interrogate it, unpack it, or even signal that it is a loaded term and neither transparent nor value-neutral, is sloppy scholarship, if nothing worse.

progress in one of several possible (and impossible) directions

A new draft of "To Die for Moonlight." 8,500 words. This story is like peeling an onion, if an onion were bigger on the inside than the outside. Although, since I've finally managed the ring composition, perhaps it's more like peeling a Klein bottle.*

I'm going to stop before I make my head hurt.

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*The internet is full of truly awesome pictures of Klein bottles. I particularly love that last one for looking so much like a uterus. And here's instructions for making one (a Klein bottle, not a uterus, although you can find instructions for making one of those, too) out of the sleeves of a worn-out shirt.

our love is all of god's money

A couple follow-up thoughts from my post on submitting short stories:

1. Short stories are not going to make you rich. That's just a fact, and if it bothers you, you may want to focus your energies on novels. (Novels probably won't make you rich either, but there's at least that tantalizing, mocking possibility of hitting the motherlode with the next Wheel of Time or the like.)

Don't get me wrong. I like being paid for my short stories, and I like it even better when I'm paid a lot. (It doesn't happen very often.) I'm not about to tell anyone they can keep their filthy lucre to themselves, thank you. I'm just saying that if income is your priority in your writing career (as for example, if you have a family to support or medical bills to pay or any other perfectly good reason why you need your creative genius to earn its keep on a daily basis), the return on short stories isn't going to keep the wolf from gnawing down your door.

2. What short stories will do is help you keep yourself visible and help you keep finding new readers. My last novel was published in April 2009, well over a year ago. My next book publications will be in the second half of 2011 (The Tempering of Men in August and Somewhere Beneath Those Waves and the re-release of The Bone Key in October/November), and my next solo novel will hopefully come out sometime in the first half of 2012. I can't do anything about the necessarily glacial pace of book production schedules, but I can keep trying to write and sell short stories. It's a way to keep myself in the game.

(Since Corambis, I've published "White Charles," "After the Dragon," "Mongoose" (with matociquala ), "On Faith" ( Shadow Unit 3.00), and sold "Extract from '"I opened the book and read": Self-Reflexivity and Self-Reinvention in Hôtel Image,'" "The Devil in Gaylord's Creek," and (non-fiction) "The Kindness of Monsters." Plus selling the short story collection Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, which will have two previously unpublished stories in it. I have three stories in submission right now, and a handful more that are in the final stages of editing before they go out.)

It would be all too easy for me to give up, to just sit here like Eeyore in a puddle and do nothing. Short stories give me, if nothing else, the illusion of control; they give me something I can do for myself. And they keep me occupied instead of fretting, which is a big help.

3. Okay, a third point. The other reason I write and publish short stories is that I enjoy it. I enjoy them. None of the rest of it would matter if I didn't. I do this job because I love it; it's too hard, and too much work, for any other reason to make it worthwhile.

Breaking Waves reviewed at io9

io9 has a really nice review of Breaking Waves , the anthology put together by Tiffany Trent to benefit the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Relief Fund. At the end of the review, Josh Wimmer says:

In my humble opinion, Randy Tatano's story "Backtiming" (deceptively simple, but keying into a fantasy I think a lot of us have entertained at some point), "Terra Incognita" by Camille Alexa (set in a deteriorating Antarctica in a dystopic near-future that is all too plausible), and Sarah Monette's "After the Dragon" are worth the price of admission alone. Vonda McIntyre personally recommended that last one when she told me about the anthology in October, and she was dead on. Strangely, of all the pieces, it probably has the least connection to Breaking Waves' general themes. But for sheer heart-grabbing-ness, vividness, and trueness, it is quite a feat.

Breaking Waves is a $4.99 ebook; all proceeds go to the GCOSRF.

(Mostly, this post is just an adult way of redirecting what I actually mean, which is, OMG VONDA MCINTYRE LIKED MY STORY!!!!11!1!!!! But also, Breaking Waves is a way to help the oil spill clean-up and get to read a bunch of nifty stuff.)

Go forth and conquer, little anthology.

UBC: Women of the Third Reich

Sigmund, Anna Maria. Women of the Third Reich. [Die Frauen der Nazis]. 1998. Richmond Hill, Ontario: NDE Publishing, 2000.


I don't know whether this book was poorly written or poorly translated or both (my money's on both). The language is clumsy; the scholarship is mediocre to poor (I grant that Leni Riefenstahl's post-WWII, self-exculpating memoir is not a trustworthy source, but when you're countering with Goebbels . . . um, maybe this needs a little more unpacking?); and as a historiographical endeavor, this is a set of eight biographical sketches, to varying degrees of sketchy, devoid of an argument even in those cases when an argument is absolutely crying out to be made. As for example, Geli Raubal. Or the fantastically hypocritical Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, who made a public career out of telling women to stay out of the public sector:

She wanted to communicate to other women her fervent conviction that fulfilling one's duty--quietly in the background and without demanding recognition--was an essential part of the female psyche.

"For mothers it is true that they come to a very quiet and understated power through service, whose sole purpose for ever and ever remains service."

Scholtz-Klink, of course, never served quietly, but traveled constantly from one congress to the next, giving speeches and putting her simple ideas down on paper. In 1938, when her husband started complaining about her numerous party duties, she divorced him.
(117)

And overarchingly, demandingly, the central question about Carin Goering, Magda Goebbels, Leni Riefenstahl, Gertrud Schotz-Klink, Henriette von Schirach, and even Eva Braun: what was it that made intelligent, ambitious women devote themselves to Nazism and to Hitler, who made no secret at all of the fact that he had no use, either personally or politically, for women who were intelligent and/or ambitious? Some of it is attributable to Hitler's legendary magnetism, but not all of it. Some of it is attributable to the Nazi habit of making exceptions: Leni Riefenstahl, for instance, was able to achieve extraordinary things with Nazi support, and Hanna Reitsch, who isn't covered in this book, is another example. But right at the center of the whole thing is this question that Sigmund doesn't even formulate, much less try to answer: why did these women devote their entire lives--and in the case of Magda Goebbels, her death--to an ideological cause that, from the beginning, utterly and unhesitatingly rejected them?

Sale!

"The Devil in Gaylord's Creek," the heartwarming story of a dead girl and her sword, to Fantasy Magazine.