R.B. Lemberg's Blog, page 48

Stone Telling Contributor Embraces a Tiger

 

This just in: Emily Jiang ( emily_jiang  ) is telling her new friend all about her poem in the Whimsy issue (psst, Emily is also has a poem in the upcoming Goblin Fruit... I can't wait).

More adorable photos on Emily's LJ.

Service announcement

A sick and regressing child, a departmental crisis, a bit of student-related nastiness, and personal health issues had all descended upon me in the last few days. This (and the plot bunny of doom) had derailed me. If I owe you an email and still hadn't answered by Thursday, please nudge me. Thanks.

Kudos to Jim Hines, and let's please support this

Jim Hines writes about Wicked Pretty Things, and extends

"an offer to any author who pulled his or her story from one of Telep’s projects as a result of this incident:If you have not already found a home for your withdrawn story, I would be happy to read it.
If you have not already found a home for your withdrawn story, I would be happy to read it.If I like the story (and knowing most of the authors involved, I suspect I will), I’ll offer $100 up front to publish it here on my blog.Each story will include a donations link. Once the initial $100 has been covered, further donations will be split 50/50. Half will be paid to the author, and the other half will be donated to a LGBTQ-friendly cause.If I publish multiple stories, I will look into putting together an e-book collection of those stories, with profits again being split between the authors and a LGBTQ-friendly cause."The Wicked Pretty Things incident is obviously of great interest to me as a queer, LGBTQ ally, and publisher/editor of a LGBTQ-friendly market .
It pained me to see that Running Press, which reiterated again and again that they are LGBTQ-friendly, has moved on sans  the LGBTQ story but still with Telep still as editor - while the brave authors who pulled their stories to support LGBTQ issues have gotten the short end of the stick. Jim Hines' initiative is going to help with this situation. If you can and are so inclined, please consider supporting this project.
I am writing a LGBTQ YA novel right now, and - regardless of whether it is sellable or not - I feel there is a robust market for queer YA. The readers certainly are not complaining. Not everybody would want to read queer YA, to be sure, but not everybody would want to read Twilight either.
Diversity is good for the field. Bigotry is not.

Henna, cultural practices, and musings on Jewish customs.

 Jha posted a link to this tumblr discussion about henna. 

It's so tricky, I just wanted to share some of my stream of consciousness on this topic with you.

Some Sephardi Jewish communities have nuptial henna rituals. I have not participated in any, because when I left Israel, my girlfriends of Sephardi descent were still unmarried, but I would definitely participate in Sarit's henna night if I'd stayed. So yes, I would have henna designs painted on my palms as part of her ritual. For myself, I would not have a henna night, because it is not my tradition. Yet, it is also pretty clear that the Sephardi Jews did not invent the henna night; they adopted it from the Muslim cultures of the region, along with other customs that serve to protect from the Evil Eye. So, is this appropriation if henna rituals were adopted by the Jews from their neighbors for a specific magical purpose? Or is it not appropriation, because the Jewish tradition is old already? Cultures cross-fertilize. In terms of the Jewish cultures in particular, it is astounding what range of ritual/magical practices, foodways, and folklore have been adopted by the Jews from the non-Jewish neighbors, whatever these neighbors happened to be at the time.

For myself, I would never have henna designs casually painted on my body. It seems off to me outside of a ritual context. But if I were to marry a Sephardi man, and his hamula wanted me to have a henna night, I absolutely would. But I married an Ashkenazi Jew, and henna wasn't in our repertoire. It would have been weird to have any custom that was not our combined heritages'  wedding custom. I remember that my biggest concern was to have klezmer musicians on the way to the khupeh, and indeed I got the proper freilakhs music I wanted, even though we couldn't quite afford it. I wouldn't have "mizrakhi" music on my wedding, even though I LOVE mizrakhi music and listen to it a lot.

On the other hand, I wore a Western-style white wedding dress.

There are no simple answers here.

Jaded16 says: "Another thing, when Indian “brides” wear henna or mehendi on their hands, we’re absolutely forgetting how many of them have no choice or agency when it comes to marriage, their sexuality, even the person they’re marrying. Here mehendi becomes a symbol of patriarchal expression (read possession of the feminine body)"

Yes, this is very very important.

The ritual immersion, or mikveh, is an inherent part of Jewish wedding ritual. The woman immerses herself in the mikveh for the first time before her wedding. Following family purity laws, she will continue dipping in the mikveh every month after her menstruation and the seven clean days are over. According to family purity laws, the woman who doesn't immerse cannot have sexual intercourse with her husband - or even touch him. Clearly, beliefs and fears surrounding a menstruating woman are patriarchal - and very ancient indeed. Secular Israeli women who wish to marry within the State of Israel (where there's no separation of church and state) have to go through mikveh immersion and bring a signed note to the Rabbi, who  otherwise would not perform the marriage ceremony. Most of my secular Jewish friends view the mikveh immersion requirement as a sign of the state's religious minority oppressing the secular majority, and patriarchal oppression in particular. And for many religious women, I am sure, the mikveh custom is inherently oppressive. Let's face it, the idea that a fertile woman is unclean for about a half of the month is not a martriarchal idea.

And yet, many women I interviewed love the mikveh. In Soviet Russia, some Jewish women went to great lengths to find an underground mikveh for immersion, even when it was dangerous, even when it meant traveling to another city by train, even when it meant dipping in ice-cold water. Yet, significantly greater numbers of Jewish women were grateful for the Soviet regime for providing them with opportunities denied to them by the Jewish shtetl patriarchy. 

Many Jewish-American families have old candlesticks, lovingly saved and brought over the ocean by the immigrant great-grandmothers, as the last and only signifier of Jewishness, and women's religious customs in particular. I have no candlesticks. My great-grandmother Roza had happily shed it all for what the Revolution had to offer. Religion was nothing but oppressive to great-grandmother Roza.

Personally, I have been quite happy to immerse in the mikveh, and to light candles using a new pair of candlesticks. On most Shabbes nights, my husband lights them, because we're like that. 

Cultural practices, objects, and symbols, I think, are not in themselves inherently oppressive; all folklore exists in context. Same or similar items may exist in various cultures.  In addition, no  "culture" is monolithic. Cultures are subdivided by gender, status, etc; but even within the women's culture of the East-European Jewish shtetl, the same practices were regarded by some women as oppressive, while for other women these were positive experiences. In addition, in the context of various cultures the practices do not exist in a vacuum; they come with long, elaborate histories.  In America, it is easier for me to practice many aspects of Jewish orthodoxy than it was in Israel, because of the very different local histories attached to these practices.

Those are just my thoughts, but I'd love to hear what you think. Please play nice.

Kudos!

 So, Brett Savory of Chizine ( jack_yoniga ) graciously left the following comment in my post on font (un)readability:

Hi, Rose (et al),

Thanks for your comments. We've changed the font at http://www.chizine.com. Please have a look. We hope you like it better, and that it's easier to read! 
Hurray! Thank you, Brett, and the Chizine team. What a great way to respond to criticism!
 

Online Fiction: Unreadable fonts

 One of my biggest current peeves with online fiction is website redesigns. Every time a publisher announces a redesign, I cringe - because, all too often, a perfectly readable yet outdated website will be transformed either into a monstrosity, or into something spiffy / sleek but disability unfriendly. In part, I am talking about the webmasters' insistent infatuation with fonts that are either too small, or fancy and unreadable.

An example not at random: the new Chizine.

If a webmaster takes a fancy to a sz9 font, I can at least enlarge it. The Chizine font is completely unreadable to me, no matter how often I press ctrl+. Short of copying and pasting a story into a .doc, I have no way of reading it.

There are many readers with weak eyesight out there. I wonder why it doesn't seem to matter to short fiction market owners? What's wrong with Verdana, sz. 12?

Am I the only one thinking along these lines?

I sold a poem, "The tenured faculty meets to d...

 I sold a poem, "The tenured faculty meets to discuss the Moon's campus visit," to  time_shark   for the Summer/Fall issue of Mythic Delirium. This poem was inspired by the Whimsy Issue (not by any particular poem - it's a Rose poem, but it's whimsical).

This leaves me with one poem in circulation. I am not sure whether to send out more, or wait; I think I'll wait. Not in a hurry.

The Dybbuk

So I suddenly talked to  gwynnega   in email about The Dybbuk. I'd love to screen it at some con for an audience interested in Jewish Folklore, etc. I have a lot to say about this film, dybbukim, "singing before the rebbe", Jewish magic, Yiddish cinema, Ansky, demonic possession as the standard folkloric trope for disability (and unruly women), etc, etc. I own a DVD of this film (produced by Brandeis, not the crap they sell on Amazon).

This would be cool, no? (I don't have money to go to cons, so this is just in the domain of dreaming).

Call for Submissions: The Moment of Change, Feminist Speculative Poetry Anthology

As I briefly mentioned previously, I have successfully pitched a reprint anthology to Timmel Duchamp at Aqueduct press.

This is a feminist speculative poetry anthology titled The Moment of Change (referencing Adrienne Rich's "The moment of change is the only poem")*. I hope this anthology will bring feminist questions to the foreground, while featuring queer poets, poets of color, and international poets as much as possible. My interpretation of speculative is pretty broad, as is my interpretation of feminism; please try me.

To the best of my knowledge, this will be the first feminist anthology within the history of speculative poetry (for a list of speculative poetry anthologies, follow the link). 

To this end, I would like to solicit reprint submissions at the editorial address, feministspec at gmail dot com.  Submissions are not limited by gender and sexuality, age, race and ethnicity, disability, immigration status, etc - everyone is welcome. Please send me your previously published poems that you think are feminist (maximum 5 poems per submission, please). Date of original publication does not matter, but please supply the  previous publication details for each poem.

If you have ideas for poems by others that can fit the anthology, please let me know at the editorial address ( feministspec at gmail dot com).

Rights: We ask for non-exclusive one-time reprint rights, non-exclusive promotional rights, and non-exclusive ebook reprint rights. These rights should be available when you send me your submissions (i.e. if the poem is under exclusivity period somewhere, that would be problematic).

Payment: one copy per contributor.

Submissions are open now, and will remain open until June 15th, 2011. I will respond to all submissions by July 15th, 2011.

Please ask any questions here, and please spread the news! A static website is coming soon.

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* Thanks to Rachel Swirsky ( rachel_swirsky  ) for suggesting this title!

Mermaid Telling?

time_shark   graciously posted an interview with me over at the Interstitial Arts Foundation blog. Go check it out :)