Hanne Blank's Blog, page 9

A Satisfied Customer

The Baltimore chapter of the Society for the Preservation of Daft Little Old Men proudly presents a portrait of a very satisfied customer.

Cats of all ages enjoy having daft little old men to sit upon, as they are warm, don't move around too much, generally wear enough layers of clothing that kneading with sharp claws does not result in the ejection of the cat from its chosen resting place, and frequently provide skritchies.  This cat, HRH Aziza Noor al Salaam of Mauraj, alias "Fez the Spotty Kitty," finds her daft little old man to be entirely satisfactory in all these respects and adds that she has managed to train her daft little old man to unzip his fleece jacket on her behalf and allow her to climb inside, between jacket and flannel shirt.  This is the kind of high quality customer service you can expect from the Society for the Preservation of Daft Little Old Men.

If you would like to obtain a daft little old man for your cat, contact your local chapter of the Society for the Preservation of Daft Little Old Men.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                      

mercy mercy me

I am a lackluster and dilatory blogger these days to be sure.  My apologies, I shall endeavor to be more interesting in public where people can see me rather than doing what I have been doing, which I must admit has mostly consisted in being uninteresting in private, trying to write and do eldercare and keep house and get ready to hit the road for a conference and book events.

Apropos of which I suppose I should mention them, no?

I'll be at National Women's Studies Association Conference in Atlanta next weekend.  I'm giving an as-yet-unwritten paper that you can read about here, if you're so inclined.  It's got a fabulous title so I'm sure I'll come up with something delightful, and in any event I do have lots of things to say on the subject even if they're currently not as organized as I'm sure they will be by Saturday morning.  I'll also be hanging out some at the booth for my speakers' agency, Soapbox Inc., so if you've ever wanted to meet me — or talk to me about booking a talk — and you'll be at NWSA, go see if you can track me down.

On Friday night, the 11th, I'll be doing a Big Big Love reading/signing at Charis Books in Atlanta, so if you'll be around, c'mon out.  It's free and I'm usually pretty funny, often intentionally.

In other news, I have been engaging in various autumnal rituals like getting the furnace replaced, rediscovering just how much I hate it when the cat not only crawls in underneath the covers but insists on snuggling up between my knees, and making sauerkraut.

I am a kraut fiend.  If I'm honest, I get kind of excited about almost any pickled or fermented vegetable, but sauerkraut has a special place in my heart.  And my stomach.  (I will happily eat an entire bowl of raw kraut fresh from the crock.  And not infrequently do.) We pulled the season's first batch of kraut out of the crocks last week and are almost done yumming it up.  I put another three heads of cabbage into my crock on Saturday so that there will be kraut again in time for Thanksgiving or thereabouts.  Someday I will obtain one of the super-fancy-schmancy German fermenting crocks that has a little water channel that the lid sits in, thus allowing gas generated by fermentation to escape without letting air from the outside in.  But for now I do just fine with my little 3.5 gallon pickling crock (with matching drop-lid!) I commissioned from my friendly neighborhood pottery a couple of years ago.  It makes enough for my small household, although if I were smart, I'd get them to make me another one so I could stagger the batches and never run out of kraut.

A task, perhaps, for later.  After I've written this paper.  And done a few other things.

Oh and!  Two further tidbits of information:

Tidbit #1: There are still a handful of copies of Inappropriate Crush available via Etsy.  They're all signed and numbered, there were only 75 copies in the edition.

Tidbit #2: If you've read Inappropriate Crush and would be up for writing a short (350 words or shorter) review of it that I could post on my soon-to-be-revamped website, I'd be delighted to feature it.  Send 'em to cru...@hanneblank.com and be sure to include whatever name you want on it, and if you've got a website or something that you'd like me to link to, send me that URL, too.

                                      

age and maintenance

As I was remarking to someone the other day, the wonderful thing about old houses — and mine is almost 200 years old — is that they are old and solid and you know full well that they've been through pretty much every kind of thing that a house can go through and have come out intact enough to survive to the present day.

And the not-so-wonderful thing about old houses is that when you buy an old house, or live in one, you are buying (and/or living with) every maintenance decision that anyone who has ever owned or lived in it has ever made, whether those decisions were good or bad.

This doesn't just mean the decorative ones, although I have some choice words for whoever thought it was a good idea to coat the walls of one of the rooms in this house with a cobalt blue paint so dark and so ineptly applied that it took two coats of primer and two coats of paint to cover it and still in some lights you can tell it's there.

No, it means the ones that go to the heart and the bones of a house as well: the decision to sister a joist with improperly-sized lumber, the decision to just keep adding more layers of roofing material rather than tearing off the old stuff first like you're supposed to, the decision to use materials that were not quite to code when running an extension to a gas line, the decision to put drywall instead of waterproof backer board up in a corner where a shower will be installed.

I confess that I would rather deal with these kinds of problems than the problems of new construction.  The shoddy materials and bad engineering, huge amounts of plastic and outgassing and lightweight, flimsy stuff in new construction gives me quite literal skin-crawly sensations when I interact with it, as if some part of my hindbrain can't trust that the whole structure isn't going to come crashing down around me if I should happen to, say, slam a door.  (Not that you can slam one of the common hollow-core plywood doors you see so many of these days.  They're too light.   The most you can do with one of those is close it huffily.)

And yet it's hard, the upkeep, the constant process of figuring out what the next thing is about your old house that must be dealt with, inevitably at some cost, so that one thing doesn't lead to another to another and to damage that is actually pretty catastrophic.  It's a constant rear-guard action, a perennial mental and physical patrolling plus a continual background rumble of tasks that want doing and preferably sooner rather than later.

It is, I suppose, what comes of building a box out of wood and rocks and metal and stuff, and then putting that box out-of-doors in all weathers for simply decades and decades, and putting all kinds of horribly damaging things inside it as well — water, and water vapor, and heated air, and chilled air, and for heaven's sake, keeping animals in it (two-legged and four).  I mean, what can you expect if you're going to treat it like that?

I'm thinking about this today because we've just replaced our furnace and air conditioning system for the house.  It was badly wheezy and inefficient and, we discovered as the old one was being dismantled, pumping a not inconsiderable quantity of carbon monoxide into our cellar thanks to a broken exhaust manifold tubing.  This replacement was, as you may well imagine, not inexpensive, and not undisruptive.  I'm glad we got it done.  It kind of looks like Star Trek down there now, all sleek and clean and efficient and whatnot.

And yet…

And yet there is so much left to do on this old house, just to keep things in decent working order, just to keep things from decaying in bad ways, just to keep up.

It'll happen.  And in the meantime if any of you have a fetish for tuck-pointing the mortar between the stones of old fieldstone houses, or perhaps for repairing and painting porches, do let me know.

                                      

uphill from here

I figure any day that begins with discovering — by following the stench — that your resident 85-year-old with dementia has hidden a dead mouse in a plastic snack baggie in a bureau drawer is only likely to get better.  Following the mouse removal, anyway.

(For those of you who do not live in 200-year-old houses: the point in autumn where the nights start to get cold is also known as Mouse Season.  There are always, but always, little tiny mouse-sized ways for mice to get into old houses, and they do, and this is the secret True Reason We Keep Cats Around.  We conjecture that the BeloveDad came upon one of HRH Fez's kills and decided to dispose of it.  The answer to the burning question of why this activity then turned into shoving said dead mouse into a snack bag and shoving the conveniently packaged mouse snack into a bureau drawer is, of course, Alzheimers.)

On that note, I wanted to thank all of you who took the time to comment with kind thoughts and wishes about my mom's cancer diagnosis.  She underwent surgery last Thursday, where they discovered that there was more cancer in there than they thought.  No cancer diagnosis is ever a happy thing, and hers is no exception.  The good news that the surgical team did a wonderful job and that there is reason to think they may have gotten all of it out is tempered by the fact that it is a "high grade" cancer and that cancer is an unpredictable and insidious thing.  Mom will be recovering for a while yet, and as with all chronic conditions, we don't know what the future will hold, but for now I'm taking comfort in the fact that she survived surgery, the surgery went as well as possible under the circumstances, and her doctors seem hopeful.

Onward, then, and upward!

ATLANTA!  I will be all up in your sweet tea next month, doing a reading/signing of Big Big Love at Charis Books on the 11th at 7:30 pm.  I'll happily sign any of my other books, as well, if you bring 'em or buy 'em there.

I'll also be at the National Women's Studies Association conference that weekend… giving a paper, hanging out with my speakers' agency Soapbox, Inc. (taking bookings for spring!), and generally causing trouble.

Speaking of which, some of y'all need to tell me what the good date restaurants are near the downtown Sheraton.  They grow 'em cute in Georgia.  A girl needs to be prepared.

 

                                      

Mrs. Avoirdupois Explains it All for You: What Apologies are For Edition

Dearest Plumplings, here it is Tuesday the Eenth again and, after considerable rumination, I have decided that in lieu of composing an entirely fresh essay for you all this month I shall bring forth to you something which I wrote for another purpose, namely, teaching my Chubbelinas at Miss Hanne's Academy for Wayward Girls, but which will nevertheless be utterly new to all those of you who are not and never have been amongst my pupils.

It is a short lecture that I give during the fourth week of the semester each autumn, entitled "What Apologies Are For, and What They Aren't For, and To What They May Occasionally, and In A Properly Modified Fashion, Also Be Applied."

Apologies, my dear Plumplings, are a matter of no small import to decorum.  To be capable of an apology shows humility and generosity of spirit.  To be forthcoming with apology when it is appropriate, without having to be prompted in any way, is a beautiful show of one's sense of honor and fair play.  To display awareness, through one's actions, of what constitutes a proper apology gives substance to one's reputation for acuity and sensitivity, as well as one's sense of propriety.  And, of course, to be capable of making apologies gracefully and without unduly rumpling the counterpane atop the well-made bed of pleasant sociable intercourse is a certain sign of sophistication and grace.

That said, apologies are a common source of vexation for those who would live a pleasant and well-mannered life.  We of the fairer sex particularly are prone to making apologies where none are required, an insidious practice undermining not only ourselves but the practice of apology itself.

To understand this we must first understand that apology may be overt and direct, a verbal (spoken or written) admission of wrongdoing and expression of the desire to soothe any irritation caused thereby, or it may be nonverbal, usually performed in the mode of retreat or disengagement from any offended party and the performance of propitiating gestures intended to smooth raised hackles.  These methods are most often used in conjunction, and rightly so: a verbal apology that issues from a mouth set in a face that does not appear contrite is unlikely to be taken seriously, after all.

These methods may also be used separately.  One must occasionally, of course, apologize by letter when one cannot be present in person.  This is only to be expected and is a perfectly adequate solution to the unfortunately persistent problem of a lack of affordable teleportation.

The nonverbal approach may also be used alone.  It is somewhat less defensible, however, than a solely verbal apology.  Yet there are times when one does not wish to risk further contretemps by offering a conversational opening to an offended person, and so does one's best to simply appear apologetic and inoffensive in the hopes that it will be sufficient.

This is less optimal than the verbal approach in that it is often indistinguishable from the unwholesome act of silencing and belittling one's self solely for another's comfort, and yet we cannot condemn it wholesale as it is sometimes by such unhappily desparate acts that self-possession must be retained and self-protection managed.  Thus I caution you to use the nonverbal approach only very carefully, and only with deliberate forethought.  And for all apologies, verbal or nonverbal, I urge you most fervently to make them only after evaluating them according to these simple principles:

It is just and proper to apologize for actions, deeds, and words.  Even if inadvertently so, if our acts have harmed or offended, an apology is virtually always appropriate.

It is neither just nor proper to apologize for what one ineluctably and inevitably is.  Even if what one is — fat, for instance, or homely, or an atrociously bad player of crokinole — offends others, if it is merely something you are and not something you have done, you are under no obligation to tender an apology.  If others' offense is due to their inability to be tolerant, kind, or gracious and not due to your having acted or spoken offensively, then honi soit qui mal y pense.

Some examples of the former category, that is, the Acceptable and Warranted Apology given for Things That Apologies Are For:

"Jessamyn, I'm so sorry.  You must let me pay to have the upholstery cleaned, I can't think how I managed to get lobster Thermidor all over your recamier, but I do seem to have done, don't I?"
"Do forgive me, Vincent, I know your time is precious and I do apologize for being late."
"Oh, Mildred, I am so sorry I forgot your birthday.  I hope you enjoy this nosegay, tardy though its arrival may be."
"My goodness, how thoughtless I am, I must learn to think before I speak.  I am so, so sorry I said that."

Some examples of the latter category, that is, the Unacceptable and Inappropriately Proffered Apology given for Things That  Need No Apology:

"Oh Philip, I'm sorry, if I only weren't so fat your coat wouldn't have gotten wrinkled in the taxi-cab."
"I wouldn't blame you a bit if you just left me behind, the crutches really do make me slower and I'm sorry I'm bogging the rest of you down, you're awfully sweet to put up with me."
"I do apologize, Aunt Lottie, I did try to be charming but I guess I'm just too homely for it to do any good.  The vicar's son didn't even want to stay to tea."

I trust the principle is clear.

Now, I must warn you now that there are, in addition to these two categories, some occasions on which one must strew about things that appear rather like apologies but are in fact not.

For instance it is polite to provide a warning with regard to what one is, but only if one is being mistaken for something quite different.  If one's hostess is convinced you will be her savior at the games table and you know full well that as inevitably as an antimacassar will not be an andiron, you will not, then you ought to tell her so.  A simple "Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Mabel, but I should warn you I am absolutely pants at whist" should suffice.  Should she insist that you play on her side anyhow, and she loses as a result, it is not your fault and you owe her no apology, since she was warned.

It is also appropriate, at times, to soften the hard leading edge of a firmly-stated preference or boundary by use of the phrase "I'm terribly sorry, but," as in "I'm terribly sorry, Edith, but I cannot abide a public altercation between a lady's posterior and one of those wobbly plastic garden chairs, I must insist upon putting you to the trouble of finding proper seats for the lot of us."  In this case you are not apologizing for the size of anyone's posterior — ample of rump is a thing one is – but, having clearly and firmly stated your boundary, for the inconvenience of causing your hostess to comply with it — a thing you're doing.

 (Never mind that Edith, in a perfect world, would not put me to the trouble.  She knows perfectly well how fat my rear end is and that I'd rather sit on a fence-rail than one of those terrible white molded-plastic patio chairs she insists on putting out at her garden parties.  But Edith, though she is ever so darling in other ways, has a memory as short as a snake's inseam.  What is one to do but to put her to the trouble?)

Finally, if someone expresses offense in regard to something that one is rather than something that one has done or said, it is acceptable in the name of comity to pull out the otherwise wholly impermissible Insincere Apology For Another's Reaction for which the basic formula is some variant  "I'm so sorry that you feel that way."  As in "Oh dear, Mr. Lagerfeld, I'm terribly sorry that the sight of my world-crushing posterior offends you so."

To sum up:

Apology may be verbal, nonverbal, or both.  Consider carefully what version you intend to use on each occasion.
Apologies are warranted and due for things you have said and done.
Apologies are neither warranted nor due in regard to what you are.
It is sometimes useful to employ something that looks like an apology, yet is not an apology, in order to grease the creaky cogs of civility's enduring engines.

 

[Pupils will now be divided up into groups in order to practice their apology-making skills, both written and oral, while the Lecturer in Deportment retires to the teachers' lounge for a small glass of brandy.]

 

Mrs. Clarence L. Avoirdupois is the Very Senior Lecturer in Deportment at Miss Hanne's Academy for Wayward Girls.  She answers your etiquette questions regarding all matters corpulent each Tuesday the Eenth.  Queries may be directed to Mrs. Avoirdupois via the comments section in this blog or at her Twitter page.

 

                                      

postcard from book tour

Everything is wonderful, wish you were here.

I'm having a grand time this book tour, blessed with wonderful audiences and beautiful weather in some of my favorite cities, seeing friends and meeting so many lovely, brilliant, funny, and good looking people. (How is it that so many of you are so damn cute?)

Thank you a thousand times to each of you who has come out to a book event (or who will be at the one in Northampton at Oh My! at 5:30). You're fabulous.

I don't know how other writers feel about touring, but as much as it's a pain in the ass to plan travel, and coordinate all the sundry crap that has to be coordinated so you can travel — a level of coordination that I have to say skyrockets when you have to factor eldercare into the equation — there's still something unique and precious and wonderful about getting to connect with the people who read all the stuff you write when you're all alone with your notebook and your typewriter and your laptop.

So thanks for coming out to play, y'all. It's good to see you.

                                      

My mother has cancer.

 

In the wild, my mother can often be found wearing soft comfortable things and looking generally sweet and innocent. Do not be fooled.

My mother is a complicated and a brave and a ferocious person. She is beautiful and smart and she sometimes drives me completely 'round the twist.  (She is my mother and this is her job.)

My mother is a survivor of degenerative kidney disease who has passed the decade mark with a transplant kidney thanks partly to her being brave and ferocious, but also in very large part to some talented surgeons, some astonishing drugs, and the awful and untimely accidental death of an adolescent girl with amazing, generous parents who saw to it that their daughter's death was able to translate into a new lease on life for complete strangers.

Last week, my mother's doctors found cancer in one of her ureters. They are optimistic about treatment, and my mother will be undergoing surgery very soon. Our fingers, individually and collectively, are very very crossed.

My mother, in case the fact that she's survived so long with a transplant kidney didn't make it obvious, is not exactly what anyone could call a pushover. She's a tough cookie and she's not having any truck with this cancer nonsense.

It's not a fight anyone wants to fight. It's not a fight anyone wants to watch someone they love have to fight. But this is the fight we have in front of us, and there is no way out but through.

I tell you this because it's important, because it's my mother, because it's cancer, because even after nearly twenty years of degenerative kidney disease and knowing that my mom's got an incurable disease and is not healthy and will never be healthy again as long as she lives, this is new and wrenching and disturbing and hard.  Insult to injury, and all that.

And I tell you because I need you to know, however many of you can hear this, that your bodies are precious and the fact that they function as well as they do is priceless. If you cannot bring yourself to love your body for any other reason, if you cannot bring yourself to care for yourself and honor yourself and your physical body any other way, perhaps you can do it in gratitude for that.

It matters.

And another thing that matters: If you are not already signed on to be an organ donor in the event of your death, I would consider it a great and personal show of support for my mom and for me  if you would consider doing so. Organ transplants can't cure cancer, but on the other hand, an organ transplant has given me ten years more of having my mom around than I would've had otherwise.

                                      

You don't have to know.

On this National Coming Out Day, I would like to just say a few words to those of you who have never come out because you've never been sure what to come out as.

There are a lot of people out there who spend a lot of time thinking vaguely that they should be coming out as something or other, but who don't.  Or who come out as one thing, but it doesn't really fit, and later they might come out as another thing, and that doesn't really fit either, even though they themselves haven't really changed.

There's a secret about this whole sexual orientation thing that very few people know and even fewer people will tell you, and that's this: it's all made up.  It's a convenient fiction.  The idea that human beings possess this innate quality called a "sexual orientation" is a modern concept, and the term itself is a term of art that's existed for less than a full century.

It developed because it appeared to describe a phenomenon that people observed in the world, that there were certain people who "oriented" in one way or another in terms of the biological sex and/or social gender of the people who they chose as sexual and erotic focus objects.

(And certainly some do, though this is merely one of many landmarks on the vast human sexual map by which one might reckon directions.)

And this idea in turn developed because, in the second half of the 19th century, people were starting to talk about a whole bunch of laws, inherited from legal codes that were essentially based on Catholic church law, that said that certain types of sexual behavior were impermissible and punishable.  The question, at root, was one of whether a modern secular state with a stated commitment to egalitarian treatment of its citizens could ethically or reasonably uphold and enforce laws that a) derived from religious edicts and b) were inherently anti-egalitarian.

The idea — and the words — of "heterosexual" and "homosexual" actually came to exist, in fact, because an Austro-Hungarian writer was trying to make an argument that these laws were baseless. It didn't really make a lot of sense, he argued, to say that a sexual act that wouldn't be an offense eligible for penalty if it took place between two people of different biological sexes (hetero-sexual) should suddenly become either offensive or something for which someone could be penalized  if it took place between two people of the same biological sex (homo-sexual).  He made this argument, and coined these terms, in a letter written in May of 1868.

I've written a whole lot more about all this in a book I have coming out in early 2012, called Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, about which more here, but that's not why I'm writing this blog entry today.

I'm writing this blog entry today to point out a few important things:

First, that if you're one of those people who has never felt like the current scheme of sexual orientation made sense to you, or never felt that it made sense of you, that's okay.   The concept we call "sexual orientation" is just a tool people invented to think with.  It's not some kind of immutable natural law that everyone has to fit into somehow.

Second, that for hundreds of thousands of years, no human being, anywhere, ever knew what their sexual orientation was for the very simple reason that the whole idea of a thing called a "sexual orientation" didn't exist.  People seem to have managed just fine without this piece of putative knowledge, and you know what?  They still do.

Third, that regardless of how or whether someone makes a public claim to a particular sexual orientation or identity, you shouldn't think for a nanosecond that you automatically know everything there is to know about their attractions and desires, relationships and loves, erotic intrigues and sexual sorties.  You don't, and you can't, not least for the reason that the vocabulary we have and the terms we use for this stuff is severely limited and capable of describing only a very small portion of what human beings actually do.

I'm also writing this blog entry to make a political point: because sexual orientation, as much of a fiction as it is, still matters a lot in our culture, so does coming out.

Our culture believes deeply in the doctrine of sexual orientation.  It does so because it allows our culture to pretend that there is a specific, knowable, thing called heterosexuality.  And it does so because it makes it that much easier to pressure people to conform to its prejudices about what biological sex, social gender, erotic behavior, and reproductive sexuality "are supposed to" look like and be like.  It does so because it makes it easier to punish people who don't adhere to the party line.

Being public about the fact that you don't toe that line is, therefore, important.  It's important to be seen and to be known as someone who should not be presumed to be part of the heteronormative sexuality machine.  This kind of visibility and presence is how cultures of sexuality change.

It's how we got where we are.  We became a culture of "heterosexuals" and "homosexuals" because people were being described, and eventually describing themselves, as "heterosexual" and "homosexual."

It's how our own culture has changed massively, in terms of all kinds of visibility and rights and representation for all kinds of biologically-sexed and socially-gendered and erotic and sexual and reproductive experiences and lives, just in the time I've been alive: because people have taken the trouble to describe themselves, to point themselves out as whatever they are, to identify the ways that they are unusual or different or simply not what it might otherwise be presumed they might be.

So when I say it doesn't matter if you know what kind of sexual orientation you have or don't have, I mean it.

And when I say it does matter that you come out, I mean that, too.

"Queer" is a very useful word in this regard.

In my particular, personal case, "queer" means that I'm a person whose sexual existence fits into precisely none of the pigeonholes the culture I live in has offered me a chance to put it in.  And because "cisgender femme omniflirtual genderfuckophile smartypantssexual happily unmarried to a medically unmediated intersex Belovedary" is kind of a mouthful that contains several terms I'd have to explain at length to most people before they'd have the slightest clue what I was on about, when I come out to people these days, I just say "Hi, I'm Hanne and I'm queer."

No, people still don't necessarily know what exactly my sexual orientation is.  And that's okay.  Like I say, you don't have to know.

And, to any of you who cannot come out — and I have the utmost trust in your ability to know best whether your safety, health, ability to earn a living, etc. would be damaged if you do — that's okay, too.  We've got your back, and we'll keep on working toward a day when no one who wants to come out will feel that sie has to stop hirself from doing so because the consequences are just too steep.

                                      

The Future! It's… full of words!

Today, I have three word-related intelligences to impart!

 

Intelligence the First: The Return of the Commie Pinko!

Several years ago, I founded and ran a writing contest.  It was a great deal of fun, but other things intervened and I stopped doing it for a while.

And then a dear friend of mine asked if maybe we couldn't do it again.  Because I am an immoderate softie, I said that of course we could.  And so we are.

It's called the Commie Pinko Writing Contest, signups will begin in December and the writing period will be in February, and if you want to know more, you just go clickie on the link.

 

Intelligence the Second:  Inappropriate Crush

I have about 25 copies left of my shade-grown fair-trade limited edition collection of prose (fiction, nonfiction, and a recipe) Inappropriate Crush.  Copies are numbered and signed, which makes them collectible, I suppose.  But mostly it means you can prove you got your hands on a copy of something of which there are only 75, and it's all stuff that isn't available under other covers, so.

I will happily bring you a copy if you will be attending one of my book events this week, if you let me know before 2 pm today (for Philadelphia) and before Wednesday at 5 pm (for New York, Boston, and Northampton).  Copies I deliver by hand are $15 each, payable in cash or by PayPal — email me at crush at hanneblank.com to reserve yours and let me know if you need PayPal information or will be paying in cash at the venue.

I will also happily mail you a copy if you can't attend one of the book events.  S/H raises the total price to $20 for US addresses, non-US addresses will be calculated when I ship the book.  Again, crush @ hanneblank dot com is the way to get your hands on one.

 

Intelligence the Third: The Invisible Library

A few of you will know immediately what a Lexicon game is, and probably even fewer of you have played in one before.  (Hi, everyone from Green!)  Others of you will need to go look at the Wikipedia entry and then at, let's say, the Macropedia Terradoma, which is a completed Lexicon game.

As a birthday present to myself, I'm going to be running a Lexicon game in 2012.  I'm aiming to begin it in March.

I'm calling it The Invisible Library.  

The Invisible Library is known only to those who are employed by it, and to those few mostly nameless, mostly faceless, instruments of government, industry, science, and other more esoteric disciplines who have reason to know that it is there.  The Invisible Library is responsible for handling, storing, and archiving all manner of documents and ephemera that the rest of the world simply doesn't need to know about but that are, for one reason or another, too valuable to simply destroy.

Most of the Invisible Library's staff have never seen one another face to face.  They wouldn't know one another if they saw one another in a crowd, or at a party, or even across the dinner table.  They are known to one another by code names and they work together via a heavily secured electronic network.  Together, they work to create a compendium — strictly for in-house use, of course — that thoroughly describes the  nature and provenance, history and access records, of the incomparable collection held by the Invisible Library.

I am recruiting 24 players to begin The Invisible Library in March.  If you would like to be one of them, please drop me a line at crush at hanneblank dot com.

                                      

Personal to the person who…

Just a note to the person who found my blog by Googling "hanne blank married?"

Not legally, but my partner and I have been together for 15 years.  Now you know.

 

For the people looking for porn stories about virgins, no, you won't find those here.

For the people looking for pictures of naked real women, you won't find them here either.

And to the person who Googled "how fat hanne blank," fat Hanne Blank just fine, thanks for asking, how are you?