Tricia Sullivan's Blog, page 14

goodbye, dear pram

I've been doing a big house-reshuffle, converting my office into a small gym for Steve, moving the kids into different rooms, clearing out the shed.  The only bit that hasn't changed is the kitchen (where I'm writing this now). 

I decided it's time to let go of the old pram (pushchair, technically).  I'm not one to hold on to things. But folding up The Pram for the last time and putting it in the car to go to the tip I felt close to tears.

My mother bought us this most excellent all-terrain pram soon after Tyrone was born.  We were beside ourselves.  Tyrone was  not what you could call a sleeper.  He was into nursing (so much so that he looked like a little sumo wrestler) and crying at every imaginable stimulus, and month after month when midwives would ask if he was 'settling' I'd give them my Mad-Eye Moody look and force back a hysterical laugh.

Every day, in the quest for peace, I took him out in the pram for a long walk in the morning and another in the afternoon.  He slept.  That first winter we had him we were living in a rural house rented for us by Erika and Richard.  The place was way out of our price range (which was why it got so hairy when they reneged on the rent, but that's another story) and we didn't have enough money for utilities so we kept most of the place closed off and only heated a couple of rooms.  I had no UK driving license, Steve was recovering from surgery on a broken leg and couldn't teach.  We were effectively cut off all winter. 

This was around the time I was finishing Maul.  Steve could cope with the baby for about an hour a day, so I'd walk him in the pram, breastfeed him, and then hand him over and race up to the computer to work before he broke down screaming.  Other than that if I wanted to work I'd get up in the middle of the night, sneak out of bed and write until Ty discovered I wasn't there and started crying. 

This was a kid who regularly cried so hard he vomited.  Like that.

Every day I walked a quiet road near the house.  There was a steepish hill and I'd go up and down it, again and again and again, in all weathers thanks to a rain shield and parasol, every day.  I developed muscly forearms from pushing.  Over that winter I thought only in terms of one hour at a time--one day at a time was too much.

The pram came to NJ when we had to move in with my folks for a couple of months.  Steve and I took turns walking Tyrone up and down my parents' hilly neighbourhood and again, I'd run inside to write while the toddler Tyrone was in good spirits (Double Vision, by then). Eventually Rhiannon came along and had her time in the pram, too.  Even Sean had his share.  By then the tires had been repaired countless times and the thing had a battle-scarred look about it.  But I loved that pram.

Yesterday I told the kids they could have one last ride before saying goodbye.  They thought it was hilarious.  Tyrone, who is no longer podgy but tall with enormous hands and feet, tried to squeeze in and nearly broke it. 

I'm not usually so sentimental, but goodbye, dear Pram.  You saved us!

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I argue grammar & martial arts

...in a guest post over at stevemorris  .

snuggy little kindle (for dummies)

The Kindle is working out well for me.  Within the first couple of days I'd read The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich (ZOMBG, wow), The Wizard of Oz, Patrick Ness's collection Topics About Which I Know Nothing (which has a hilarious SF story in it called 'quis custodiet ipsos custodes?') and had started Cloud Atlas.  Aaaaaannnnndddd....then I got stuck for weeks.  Partly this is because I got super-busy with OU work.  Also, Cloud Atlas is good, but I got bogged down in the weird dialect on the island about two-thirds of the way through and haven't recovered my momentum yet.  I'm not able to read it in little chunks while the veggies are being microwaved.  That's what Twitter is for!

Cloud Atlas has also made apparent to me one of the problems I have with Kindle: I can't easily flip back and forth to look at other parts of the book.  There's a kind of blindness, a tunnel-vision, reading with Kindle. Only a quibble, of course.  (That, and the thing needs a built-in book light.  How are you supposed to read in bed?)

The no-illumination problem stimulated me to finish paper books that I'd had lying around for far too long.  One of these is mainstream literary novel The Wonder by Diana Evans.  I loved her first book, 26a, which was a fast if heart-tearing read.  The newer book was not a fast read, but ultimately a rewarding one.  I can't think of anything to say about Evans' writing that doesn't sound canned, and she is most certainly not a canned sort of writer.  Her voice is distinctive and she roams between planes freely, and she is subtle.  I'm going to look out for more of her work for sure.

I also just finished Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie.  Slim little arrow of a book about two young men sent to 'the mountains' for re-education under Mao in the early 1970s, and a secret suitcase of Western novels.  And a girl.  Superb story.  Very funny, also.

The other thing I'm supposed to be reading right now is Calculus For Dummies.  I also bought Calculus For Dummies II, because I have another year of math ahead of me and you can never be too dumb about calculus.  Scouting forays indicate that these books will be helpful.  But on Tuesday night my tutur within two minutes sorted out the gobbledegook on integration in the OU text that I'd been struggling with for hours.  Now I  feel less panicky and more lazy. 

Sigh.  Truly, I will do as little as I can get away with, most days.

LA Banks and healthcare

I have been really sad since hearing the news that Leslie Banks (LA Banks) is gravely ill with late-stage adrenal cancer.  She is a prolific author of dozens of novels and has a daughter at Temple University. 

Why do things like this happen to such good people?  I can't get my head round it.  I can't even imagine what it must feel like to be in such a situation. 

Tina Wise, who is coordinating part of the effort to raise money to help Leslie and her family, kindly sent me this link after I wrote to express support.  Leslie introduces President Obama at a speech about healthcare in Pennsylvania last year.  It is powerful stuff.

The hypothetical 'catastrophic illness' that Leslie refers to in her speech is now upon her, for real.  Her friends have stated that her medical bills are crippling.  It is just tragic.

In case you are inclined/able to help, there is an auction and a general fundraiser here. 

any women in SF thoughts you want aired?

I'm doing a panel next weekend at the joint BSFA/SFF AGM with Shana Worthen, Niall Harrison aka coalescent   and Pat Cadigan aka fastfwd  (if Shana is on LJ I've spaced that fact...) It's on Women, science fiction and Britain in 2011.

Anyway, I haven't been to any of the recent panel discussions on this subject and it would be handy to know what would be valuable areas to look at.  So, please, if you are reading this and have any thoughts on this rather broad subject I would love to know more.

Is there anything you think we should be considering?  Anything you are sick to death of hearing about (so I can stay away from it, hopefully)?

Anything at all?

Suggestion box open...

my wee speech

At the British Library event on Friday, I wrote my introductory remarks down because I didn't think I'd be able to speak extemporaneously without making a mess of it.  When I listened to what Adam, China and Erik had to say I'm pretty sure I was right.  They were very polished--I haven't had enough practice to open up a talk that way.

A couple of people asked me afterward if I would post the text that I read out.  Here it is (with apologies for LJ-cut fail):

In the science fiction community we often refer to genre as the 'ghetto' to which our work is relegated.  To me looking at it that way is ass-backwards--or, to be British--arse-about-face.  Science fiction is a literature whose scope includes the entire nature of reality--or realities--from the universe (or multiverse) right on down to the smallest individual action.  The breadth of possibility in science fiction is no less than what is available to us philosphically and empirically in the totality of our senses and their extrapolation.  In a Venn diagram, all other literatures would be a subset of SF. 

There is no ghetto.

But there are issues of definition. 

I want to talk about the intermolecular tensions within the term 'science fiction.'  Let's just look at these words.  Science and fiction.  One is based on reductionism, on measurement, on rules.  The other is based on wild leaps of imagination.  The term is an oxymoron--or if you want to be kind, you could call it a paradox.  The science component wants to make sense, to jibe with reality as we know it now and to rigorously follow the rules that centuries of scientific exploration have given us.  The fiction part leaps into the unknown and makes some stuff up.  Fiction offers up whatever nonsense our imaginations can supply when we don't have facts, and so it can look pretty silly in the cold light of rationality.  When all else fails, put in tentacles!  Faster-than-light spaceships that make Earl Gray tea.  A succession of white male Time Lords.  But even if it's silly, imagination also brings metaphor to the table, and without metaphor the rigour of science can very quickly resemble rigour mortis.

The tensions in the paradox of science fiction have the potential to create a complex, seething idea-space that is pluralistic in viewpoint and outcome.  Instead, we often end up with a definitional discussion based on dichotomies and the axe of binary: Zero or one?  Is it or isn't it?  Yes or no?  In or out? 

(If you have a cat you know what it's like trying to get the cat to decide whether it wants to be in or out.  Shroedinger's problem would have been so much easier for me to grasp if instead of being neither alive nor dead til observed, the cat had been neither in nor out because it couldn't make up its mind.)

Back to dichotomies.  I do blame the scientific mindset for this problem, at least a bit.  This yes-or-no attitude so deeply ingrained in modern SF is reductionist in unhelpful ways.  And let's face it, if we were to subject the Gordian knot of science fiction to such a sword, we would indeed render it into two perfectly useless pieces. Science fiction stories work not in spite of, but precisely because of the dynamic tensions and frictions between reductionism and fantasy.

When I was studying music in college we used to play a game invented by the composer Benjamin Boretz.  It was the days of LPs and cassettes, and the idea was that everybody would bring a stack of juicy records to the session, and somebody would start by playing one track.  We'd listen, and then somebody would put on a different track, from their stack, as a response to what they'd heard.  It was a bit like a card game.  'I see your Mahler, and I raise you Jimi Hendrix.'  The kinds of juxtapositions and interactions that arose were illuminating in ways that can't be measured, and although it was subjective, the game was essentially empirical.  It had to be experienced to be understood.  You couldn't predict the outcome by theorizing.  You had to actually run the model.

All of this happened before hip hop really got off the ground, before the art of the remix went mainstream.  Now we have software that makes it easy to grab material and use it in new combinations, to carry it further or subvert it or use it to build completely new monsters.  We can make musical and literary hippogriffs, with the head of Tolstoi and the body of Lady Gaga, or vice versa.  These bionic powers open up all kinds of possibilities, and in science fiction and its cousin fantasy we see heavy remixing going on right now.  We also see mainstream fiction picking up science fictional undertones, and this phenomenon seems to threaten some within the bastions of the old-school genre.

Remixes are healthy.  Cross-pollination is healthy.  The process of building up definitions like walls and then tearing them down seems to me a natural respiration in any philosophical enterprise.  The argument about what is entitled to call itself science fiction is really beside the point.  Just as breathing in and breathing out is not the actual purpose of respiration, so arguing about genre definitions is beside the point of science fiction.  The purpose of respiration is to oxygenate the system, to energise it and keep it functioning in the world.  And that's the spirit in which these arguments have to be taken.

What really interests me about science fiction--and all literature--is the question of how can it expose the world?  How can it deepen my understanding?  How it can change me--and us?  And even, how can it change the world?  Perhaps these changes only work by degrees, but if you add up a whole bunch of degrees you get a revolution. 

photo series on The Angry Black Woman

The Angry Black Woman has been rebutting Psychology Today's idiocy with a series of stunning photos of Black women--if you haven't been following these, it's well worth a look.  In the series is an awesome picture of Octavia Butler and as I'm currently re-reading Wild Seed after many years I was especially moved to see her there.

on the town and up the hills

The event at the British Library last night was really cool.  I'd met Adam Roberts once, years ago, and hadn't seen China in at least 10 years.  So...whoah.  Sense of emerging blinking into daylight. It was great to meet China's partner, who is an MD and an amateur boxer and looks stunning in heels.  Great to see China, too.  He remains as lovely as ever and as far as I can tell, unruined by fame :-) I also got to meet Erik Davis, who had some interesting things to say about VALIS, and Sam Leith, who chaired the discussion and gently assuaged my fears about public speaking.

The discussion was involving and passed all too quickly, with the audience getting into it enthusiastically and thoughtfully.  I'd have loved to have gone on longer.

I was soooooo gratified when several people came up to me afterward with copies of Lightborn and said, almost verbatim, 'I've never heard of you before but I liked what you said and now I want to read your book.'  I really hope the book will be a good experience for them, and it's a wonderful feeling to be appreciated!

I should get out more.

There was a woman down in front with a tiny baby (who was very good and only cried once, briefly).  It made me realise how far I have come from the days of being physically attached to a tiny person who needed me ALL THE TIME.  It's a poignant sense of change.  I have to say I'm pleased to have a bit of my own self back, but at the same time...where did those ten years go? And, of course, I gravitated to that baby like a magnet.  Down, Trish!  NO MORE!!

But hey!  Mine are not babies anymore.  We all got through the Callow Run today for the first time, and I was so proud of my kids for trying so hard over all those hills.  I can't say it was a run for me, more of a jog-carrying-Sean for most of the time.  But fun.   I've blisters on my feet because I couldn't find Euston Station last night and was racing up and down Euston Road searching in my damned high-heeled sandals.  I used to live in London!  I used to have a library card for the British Library and went there regularly.  What is up with me? 

I was asked to post the little talk I read last night, which I'll do soon.  That's all for now.  Hope everyone is having a good weekend--loved the results of the Aurealis Awards!  Yay, mdep  , for one!!!

Please sponsor me & my kids for Callow Run (help Japan)

I have this British Library event on Friday and I'll be getting home at about 2 am probably, but I've been strong-armed by my daughter into participating in the Callow Run on Saturday, which is an annual event run at Hope Primary School.  The event is so small that I couldn't find a web link for it, but it's a 4 km cross-country run taking in hills and more hills.  Pretty much all hills, except the bits where there are hedges and stiles.

I would love to do this run in my own right because parts of it cover the same routes I normally run and it would be fun to do it competitively.  But the kids are participating also and Steve will be working that day, so in all likelihood I will be carrying Sean on my back for a good part of it.  Not expecting a competitive time!

Proceeds for the run go to the Red Cross Appeal for the Japan earthquake relief. 

If you would like to sponsor us, please leave me a comment or e-mail me on trish at morrisnoholdsbarred (dot) co (dot) uk and let me know how much you would like to give.  Small amounts very welcome for this cause.

who's the boss (not me)

Sadly my Flylady kitchen timer died recently.  I blame Steve.  He was using it to time his Tabata protocol workouts and it suddenly went all pale and foggy and then stopped.  So I splashed out on a Gymboss, which is a little timer for your wrist or arm that you can use to set intervals of work/rest. 

I'm supposed to be doing these Tabatas for reasons I won't go into right now, but I've been avoiding them because I know they are hard.  The initial workout is 20 seconds of high-intensity work, followed by 10 seconds rest.  You repeat this for a total of 8 sets, which adds up to 4 minutes.  I did a mix of repetitive punching, kicking, knees, at the highest work rate I could produce.

So here's the thing.  I'm not in great physical shape, but I'm in pretty OK shape for a non-athlete.  I wouldn't want to run a marathan, but not long ago I ran ten miles at a 10-minute mile pace, and didn't die. 

I warmed up on the bike watching a UFC heavyweight DVD that Tom O'Shaughnessy sent Steve.  It had this really icky scary guy on there.  Guy so big and menacing you'd really need to just shoot him in his sleep rather than have any kind of confrontation with him.  That sort of got my rate coding up a bit.  I got good and sweaty and I was feeling pretty cocky when I put on the gloves, set up the Gymboss, and hit the shed.

After three minutes of Tabatas on the bag I was begging for mercy and  by the end of it I was completely dead.  Four minutes saw me felled like a tree.  Shaking for nearly an hour afterward.

I was in despair until Steve told me that when he does this in the gym, a lot of the guys can't get through more than half of the four minutes.  Still, Steve himself does these every day.  He does this routine 2 or 3 times a day (hence the demise of the Flylady timer).  And he's 24 years older than me.

Feeling humble right now.  And the veins in my forearms are standing out.