This week: 29/3/15

• Due to various demands and responsibilities, I’m in that horrible territory known as three-day-week land. Looks like it may go on for some time and trying to work through it just makes me burn out faster. I don’t like it.
• Anyway, I had a wild weekend looking at art by Matt Stokes. One of my friends, Charlie Seber, is at the heart of a show called Madman in a Lifeboat. It’s part of a multi-media installation which I explained to my daughter as being like an SF story (about the movement known as the Truth Reality Activists). Instead of reading a book, you put the story together from a ‘museum display’. I found the script of the film at the heart of this show very funny right from the start so it was exciting to see it all put together.
  Then we drove across London (aaargh!) to see Cantata Profana which consists of these heavy metal dudes getting it on. I thought it was brilliant. The first time I watched it I laughed, the second time I got into it, the third time, if my well-wishers hadn’t dragged me away, I would have been banging my head on the walls. It’s in the oldest concrete church in Britain, no longer a church of course.
• So then we went to see Studio Ghibli’s Tale of the Princess Kaguya on Sunday night at the cinema. It's not something that should be seen lightly by any couple whose only child is a beautiful pale-skinned daughter with long dark hair. Like us. Kaguya's life starts well, but her father thinks he knows what's best for her, he really does, and the results are appalling.  I think we all cried, but it is very beautiful, and very, very well observed. We think it's quite subversive of all kinds of traditional values, perhaps a bit belatedly. The original story is here.
• Our daughter has now gone off for her Easter holiday with her grandparents, assuring us that like Kaguya herself, she is returning to her true home on the moon. We have asked her to bring back some cheese.
• I'm trying to read too much at once, but I don't care. Discovered the desperately sleazy tale of author Benjanun Sriduangkaew's previous activities and was shocked into reading their book immediately since it was on my list. It should have been Asian mythology week here, clearly, but Scale-Bright wasn't really up to it (though it had some good points). I'm finishing up Palace of Illusions, a version of the Mahabharata story from the point of view of Draupadi and it's a million times superior. The original story behind Scale-Bright is cool though.
• It's been blustery.

This week: 22/3/15

• Monday was a travel day, Tuesday was a homeschooling day! I took the kid to the dentist, taught German, voice projection and other elements of public speaking, went to the Royal Opera House’s very good cinema transmission of Swan Lake. It was fun, but having a three-day work week stresses me out. 
• Despite this, the editing, interior design and book cover design process are going reasonably well. 
• Changed the way I use Goodreads to adapt to the fact that there are no private shelves. Instead of everything I’ve ever read, I’ve now only got books I read recently, and actually want to review and discuss. In my to-read shelf, I’ve only got books I plan to read this year. 
• Signed up for Eastercon. Better late than never is only true if you get a membership before they sell out. I think sales must have slowed down a bit after the hotel rooms ran out first. I live in London, so although it’s a bit of a trek, I’m sleeping at home. 
• Friday was the last great solar eclipse of Britain’s foreseeable future but it was a wash-out. Not that it didn’t get dark and dingy under the clouds, just no darker and dingier than is typical for Britain. 
• Finished the beta read I’m doing for James Latimer’s The Winter Warrior. It gets a big thumbs up, and some more detailed comments written out this week. Blew 35 quid ordering Umberto Eco’s The Legendary Lands and ended up with something beautiful and also - as it is Eco - eminently readable. 
• Had to blow off some things I wanted to do. For instance, due to general tiredness and a short week, I just couldn’t keep up with the course on Australian Literature on Coursera, nor did I manage to have a social life with anyone other than my daughter. Or get any of the extra writing done that I usually do.

This week: 15/3/15

• Greatly tempted by a signed copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Buried Giant but left it for someone else in the end. The e-book is next on my reading list. 
• Stagnated a bit on some editing of The American Dream, but to make up for it, I’ve been getting to grips with the e-book conversion process, making a mock-up of my book cover idea, and getting professional help sorted out! 
• Saw Roy Williams’ Antigone at Stratford east on Tuesday night. Loved the urban grunge theme. Take away message: you can be powerful, but if you break the laws of human nature, you will pay. Wish it were true, but suspect people’s perception of the laws of human nature is socially mediated anyway. 
• Went swimming and wished I’d been more often. Have decided a writer’s life is unnaturally sedentary. A natural lifestyle would involve hunting and gathering stories all day and telling them round the fire in the evening. 
• Terry Pratchett died. I believe he was a good person, though I never met him personally. I know he was a great writer. The newspapers are filled with quotes he placed in the mouth of Death. 
• Spent the weekend in Nottinghamshire for Mother’s Day. Ate too much, drank too much, had fun!

The No Straight White Men Reading Challenge and how to do it.

It seems diversifying your reading base is the popular challenge of the year. Or perhaps the most incredibly unpopular one in a few circles!

I’m not planning on getting into whether you should, or whether you should be absolutist about it or whether you should just try to diversify a bit or a lot. This post - the first in a series if I get round to it - is for people who've decided on at least one of those options and aren't quite sure how they're going to decide what to read. And perhaps also for people who are wondering why their reading list was so un-diverse already.

So let's get started. Let's assume you have five books you really, really love by straight white guys, something like mine.

• Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman 
• Northern Lights (His Dark Materials), Philip Pullman 
• The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear, Walter Moers 
• Wicked, Gregory Maguire 
• The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

How easy is it to use that to generate a super-diverse reading list you'll also love? It should be a singe, what with all those book recommendations you can get from Amazon, Goodreads, etc. So off I went to Amazon with my fave raves to see what would happen.

 My plan was to generate two new lists, one of women authors, one of POC. Your mileage may vary, and I have to say, I wasn’t swamped in choices. There was usually at least one, and a few books like Wicked open out into a genre where women are very active. It turns out that maybe it was a mistake to depend on a recommendation system which only works if most of the other readers are reading diversely. Still, let's look at the results.

Women:

• The Assassin’s Apprentice, Robin Hobb 
• The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, Kate diCamillo 
• Deathless, Catherynne Valente 
• The Round House, Louise Erdrich (also American of mixed German/Ojibwa origins) 

There are only 4 results because people who bought Captain Bluebear apparently didn’t buy a single other book by women.

POC:

•  Perdido Street Station, China Mieville 
• Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami 
• Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang 
• Alice in Deadland, Mainak Dhar 
• My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk 

This is a nice list, at least it's got a nice cross-section of Asian background authors. It would appear that buyers of my fave raves don’t touch black authors?! I tried to improve on things by drilling down from this group and seeing what people who buy their books also buy.

The results of this second experiment were interesting. It would seem that Robin Hobb and China Mieville have been ‘discovered’ by people who usually read white male authors and not much else. The choices connected with Name of the Rose led to lots of black authors and other diverse choices, but they also led away from the more fantasy/magical realism stuff I like best. At no point at all, ever, was I connected to black authors I already knew I wanted to read. Not even black authors whose work resembles my fave raves.

The one exception was the chain which started from Captain Bluebear. Remember I said I found no women authors in its recommendations, and only one POC author, Ted Chiang? His book, Stories of Your Life and Others, isn’t even the sort of thing I normally read. I’m not a fan of short stories, though his seem so highly thought of I might give them a go.

What really matters about Ted Chiang is that his readers are also reading what’s in and diverse in the SF/Fantasy world. The list might not be perfect but it’s roughly where it’s at. They’ve discovered Octavia Butler at least. And from Octavia you can get to a number of other black writers in the SF/Fantasy world. You can find Nnedi Okorafor and Sofia Samataar. You can find that Nnedi has written a book called Afro SF. You can find Karen Lord.

That took 3 iterations and we’re still only talking about the big names. I don't know how you can do this unless you already know what you're looking for. I don't know how you get recommendations for black authors you will like using these strategies without going to a lot of effort. I know I can make a diverse reading list for myself a lot better than Amazon's algorithms did it for me:

The human-generated maximum diversity reading list

• Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman -> Un Lun Dun, China Mieville
  Because London 
• Northern Lights (His Dark Materials), Philip Pullman -> The Best of All Possible Worlds / The Galaxy Game, Karen Lord
  Because how the world is and how it could and should be (in SF form) 
• The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear, Walter Moers -> A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar & The Voyage of Edward Tulane, Kate diCamillo.
  Because journeys 
• Wicked, Gregory Maguire -> Scale-Bright, Benjanun Sriduangkaew & The Palace of Illusions, Chitra Divakaruni
  Because retellings of classic tales. 
• The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco -> The White Castle, Orhan Pamuk & The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
  Because classics, but also there’s that mysterious feel I liked in Name of the Rose. 
• Also, I have every intention of reading Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon this year. I’ll likely read a Robin Hobb as well. And probably Ted Chiang, I feel he’s earned it. And Abdourahman Waberi's Passage of Tears and Alain Mabanckou's Les Fils de Vercingetorix.
  Because. 

That’s 13 authors, 6 women, 7 men, and I believe 2 of the women are white and 1 is Asian. Unless I counted wrong, 5 people are black, so I still have a bit of a bias towards Asian men, which is an artifact of the way I generated the list.

This also happens to be a reading list I really, really like. I'm pretty confident I will enjoy these books based on their similarities to books I've already enjoyed. No thanks to Amazon, though. Really, I produced the list by paying attention over a long period of time. Six of those books have been on my to-read list for some time, for the rest, all but two, Scale-Bright and the Ted Chiang stories, were already on my radar. It looks like diversifying your reading list might be more than a five-minute job.

What you really need is people, specifically you need to tap into a network of readers who are already widely read over a longish period of time. No wonder it hasn't just happened automatically for some readers. When you rely on Amazon/Goodreads and other recommendation systems, you're mostly relying on people who don't read diversely and algorithms which are practically calculated to give you something very, very similar to what you read before.

This is in fact one of the things which keeps people other than straight white men off people's reading lists. Finding them requires conscious and deliberate effort in the context of a recreational activity in which we expect to behave 'naturally', often impulsively. Only when you're already tapped into diverse networks do a fair cross-section of choices start presenting themselves to you automatically.

If you're willing to make that effort, one way to start is to skim the articles of people advocating a non-cis-straight-white-male reading challenge, completely ignore the comment sections (unless heavily moderated, John Scalzi does a good job), and head straight for the reading lists.

BTW, perhaps you'd like to know whether I'm doing this challenge? Actually, no. I'm still going to be reading books by straight white men as well. I also have a writing project for this year which requires me to research Australia and New Zealand - including lots of people and not excluding white men. But I do have a pretty diverse reading list already, and a huge backlog of books by almost every kind of author to get through. And I may have more to say about diversity in reading in due course.

Some links:

Sunili Govinage at the Guardian
K.T. Bradford at xoJane
Heina Dadabhoy at Heinous Dealings - manifesto and list
Aoife at Consider the Tea Cosy
Scalzi at Whatever

The genesis of the Reptilian meme

This is a bit of a dense post, mostly for my own research, so only read on if you're really, really interested in knowing where Reptilians come from.

Since they were popularized by David Icke (c.f. Children of the Matrix, 2001, and other works), there have been occasional sightings and reports of the shape-shifting trans-dimensional Reptilian Overlords of Humanity, also known as lizard people. But where on earth did Icke get them from?

It seems the main source was one Maurice Doreal of Oklahoma, although I wouldn’t exclude Icke digging into any of the upstream influences directly. Doreal was a follower of Helena Blavatsky’s theosophy, a man who mingled fiction and non-fiction by producing both a 1940-s dated pamphlet and a poem on the subject of shape-shifting serpent men from the lost continent of Lemuria. His claimed sources were some emerald tablets, allegedly written by an Atlantean high priest named Thoth. Michael Barkun, who seems to have done most of the research on the reptilian meme, thinks he really got it from fantasy author, Robert Howard.

I would have thought Blavatsky directly, but since Robert Howard himself was unashamedly influenced by Blavatsky, it’s hard to tell. Fortunately, he only applied her work to openly fictional purposes. In 1929, he published The Shadow Kingdom, about serpent men who lived in underground passages and used shape-changing abilities to imitate and infiltrate humanity. These characters later became incorporated into the Cthulu Mythos. I guess you could call them the more honest fictional spawn of Blavatsky’s ideas.

So now we come to the mother of them all, Helena Blavatsky, surely one of the most influential female authors of all time (though not necessarily in the most respectable way, so people tend not to mention her in that context). In her theosophical masterwork, The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky wrote about dragon men who once lived on, you’ve guessed it, the lost continent of Lemuria in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Blavatsky claimed her source really existed, it just happened to be about as accessible as Lemuria itself, what with being guarded by a secret Tibetan organization at a time when foreigners just happened to be barred from Tibet. She called it The Book of Dzyan and claimed to have seen it, although others have accused her of drawing her inspiration from miscellaneous Asian sources and never going anywhere near Tibet.

Tthere is certainly a history of humanoid serpent-beings on the Indian sub-continent in the form of the nagas, and these seem a likely cultural source for Blavatsky, regardless of where she encountered them. I also happen to know that French folklore has a long-standing tradition of humanoid serpent-like beings, and though these seems a less obvious source for Blavatsky’s serpent beings, they may all resolve back to the same deep roots in the end.

Mark Forsyth and the art of rhetoric: the chapter on alliteration

Never mind The Elements of Style. I've been feeling a bit burned out lately, so I decided for some reason that what I needed was Mark Forsyth's The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase.

The first chapter is on alliteration, but since everyone knows what that is, I amused myself by hunting down other rhetorical patterns in Forsyth's writing. My plan is to see how many I can catch him using in advance of his introducing them officially.

1. Tell the punters what they believe so you can tell them why they're wrong. I hate, loathe, detest this tactic when it's used crudely, as it all too often is in the media, but Forsyth's 'Of course, as we all know...' is a bit more subtle than that.

The standard work (on history) was Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, but Plutarch wrote in Greek, and, as Shakespeare's friend Ben Jonson later pointed out, 'thou hadst small Latin and less Greek'.

All this to tell us that he used a translation of the same work by Plutarch instead.

2. Be flippant. Refer to Shakespeare as a thief (not forgetting to drag the image out quite a bit) and draw our attention to the fact that 'Full fathom five thy father lies', is exactly the same as telling us 'the exact depth to which a chap's corpse has sunk'.

3. Ask rhetorical questions, e.g. 'Who needs sense when you have alliteration?' Like #4, this is often best done with a fake-innocent expression on your face, seeing as it's so damn obvious. What it can often do, on the battlefields of serious debate, is get you out of addressing the issue.

4. Conceal your irrelevant and unsupported value judgements by leaping from the sublime to the ridiculous while acting all innocent about it. For instance, you might choose to do this in your selection of examples. Even better you might let yourself be a bit obvious about it, in which case you have humor and people will go along with that because they like it.

He (Charles Dickens) knew which side his bread was buttered, as had those who came before him, like Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice), and those who came after him (Where's Wally?)

5. Toss out some old familiar cliche, then turn it into an object of curiosity by expanding on it. Although Forsyth certainly does this, he's upstaged in the art by Charles Dickens.

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

(Cue detailed discussion oF the exact deadness of door-nails.)

6. Use tricky words to make yourself sound clever. Not too often though, and always make it look like you've got an excuse:

So muddled was he (Thomas De Quincey) that he decided to add a footnote apologising for his paroemion (that's the technical term for excessive alliteration).

7. Segue cleverly between one subject and the next, making it look as though the connection is self-evident.

'Agent' seems a strange substitution for 'friend'. But he (Quincey again) probably had to do it as he couldn't change 'farewell farewells'. It's much too clever to use a word as an adjective and then a noun. In fact, the trick has a name. It's called polyptoton (the subject of the next chapter).

I'm waiting to see if it's Forsyth's modus operandi to shift between chapters with a quote containing an element from both the current chapter and the next.

8. Make bold assertions of dubious validity: see emphasized sentence above. In the next installment, I get to see whether Mark Forsyth can actually convince me that polyptoton is the bee's knees.

Time flies when you're snowed in

This is where I am.

Pretty, huh? Okay, I'm not really snowed in, except voluntarily, but there's no way a car is getting anywhere near that house and I have to haul things up to it on a sledge. It got a bit easier after I dug out my old ski pants.

Like other people who grew up in warm countries, my first snow experience is so cliched it's almost laughable (to other people), while being rather intense for me. For the record, here are some things which don't count as first snow experiences:

1) the time it snowed a bit during the night and my mother went round all the neighbors' cars and stole what little was left of the stuff so we could make a snowman 20 cm high on the bonnet of her car.

2) skidding around on the occasional plaque of frozen white ice during our summer holidays in the high mountains.

3) that story I read about how it did snow once, and the snow stole all the colors and sounds, and even the heroine's friend, so that she had to go out into the dead emptiness and rescue him. I didn't know it at the time, but the story was probably based on Hans Andersen's Snow Queen, transplanted to the Mediterranean.

The story of my first snow experience goes like this. I was about seven or eight when my great-grandfather died back in England, so our mother collected up her two children and some suitcases and went to the funeral. I didn't really know my great-grandfather except as a very old very wrinkled man with some missing fingers, someone I'd seen once or twice. I didn't understand death except as a kind of emptiness - like a missing tooth - I'd had a few of those by then. I'd never been to a funeral before, or to England in the winter, and I'd never seen it snow. I stood by the window of my grandmother's house and watched the sky falling down onto the street outside. After a while my grandmother came and tied bin bags over our shoes and sent us out in it. I wasn't exactly scared but I felt uneasy and I never could decide whether it was fun or not.

I still feel pretty much the same way about snow. Skiing on a beautiful sunny day with lots of happy people around you really is fun, though that doesn't alter the fact that snow really can be dangerous*. And neither of those two things has anything to do with the feeling I can never quite shake off that something about snow isn't right. It's like in Dr Seuss's Bartholomew and the Oobleck - if green stuff started falling from the sky and settling on everything, you'd be a bit concerned, wouldn't you? Why should white stuff be any different?

I expect that's why I'm being kind of pathetic and staying inside my cozy retreat writing stuff. Besides, the beautiful sunny days haven't arrived yet. So here is a vow: I vow that on Monday, I am going skiing, sun or no sun. No really. I guarantee that tomorrow evening, I will post a picture of a ski trail, right here on this blog. In the meantime, I'm going to take that strange disturbing feeling snow gives me and pour it back into some writing.

* It just occurred to me that maybe this is why my daughter and I weren't ever so in love with the movie Frozen. As I recall, we sat there in the cinema, saying stuff like, 'That girl is dead! She's out in a blizzard in an evening gown and ballerinas! Why is she still alive?'