Predicting the Future?

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Over twenty years ago I wrote a story about a young man who gets arrested on a trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras because a blood test shows he has XX chromosomes even though he appears to be male. The Louisiana of that story’s time – which was more or less right now – had passed a law making it a crime to present yourself as anything but your “natural” gender.

He ends up in a jail cell with drag queens, a lesbian wearing male clothes, a trans person who is taking steps toward transition, and a woman not unlike himself – someone born with all the appearance of a woman, but with XY chromosomes.

I told it from his – very clueless, in the beginning – point of view because I wanted the story to be about someone who had never even considered the possibility that he was anything other than a cis man being forced to confront the situation.

It was a great story, but I was never able to sell it. I’ve looked at it over the years and seen a couple of things I’d change as I’ve increased my understanding of these matters, but it’s still a good story.

It’s just too late to publish it, at least as science fiction. It’s basically real life now. It’s obvious that many places are going to be punishing people for being trans or even – shades of the past – for dressing in a way that belies your assigned gender.

Maybe I should make the revisions and try it on a non-genre fiction magazine or anthology. Isn’t realistic a hallmark of literary fiction?

I’m not usually someone who writes science fiction that can be seen as predictive, but it was clear to me more than twenty years ago that there were places in the United States that might well pass laws against people for not fitting into prescribed gender roles.

Of course, I wrote it as a warning. That’s why most people write dystopias, after all. However, given the current fetish of the broligarchs for stupid takes on science fiction and fantasy, it’s easy to believe people would have taken it as a good idea.

I don’t want to live in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead or William Gibson’s Jackpot, but apparently a lot of people do. Continue reading “Predicting the Future?”…

Open House Closed for How Long

personby Madeleine Robins
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For a couple of decades (since the early 1990s) we held an annual holiday open house. When we were still living in NYC this started out as a party for my husband’s recording studio–but me being me and Danny being the boss, I did almost all the cooking, made the invitations, etc–and it was left up to the guys at This Way Productions to buy the drinks, make up the invite list, and ferry all the mountains of food down to Soho where the studio was. When Danny and his partners closed down the studio we had gotten into the habit of a holiday party. In 2002, we had our last NYC-based party–and Danny flew out to San Francisco the next day to start his new job, with me and the girls following two weeks later when school let out. A year later, when December rolled around it seemed entirely natural to have the open house again: the Robins-Caccavo Annual Holiday Party became a thing we did. Since Danny and I comprise two very different parts of the creative world (he’s the Sound guy; I’m the Words person) and two different work communities, it was always fun to see those worlds collide. New friendships form. Vast quantities of food disappear.

Every year we’d have about 70 people showing up somewhere between 2pm and 7pm. Spread out through the house and over five hours this was manageable–and permitted me to deal with my social anxiety by scurrying around refilling bowls and checking ice levels when I couldn’t handle small talk for a few minutes. Those five hours meant a week of planning, buying, and cooking. We might have just ordered pizza, but where would be the fun in that? Every year I made a turkey, a ham, an immense pot of chili (and latterly, a somewhat smaller pot of vegetarian chili). Plus cookies, sweet breads, and occasionally a birthday cake (for myself, since my birthday often fell on or around the Sunday of the party). Bread and cheese, bagels and lox, chips and salsa… I did all this cooking mostly in the evenings, around child-care and work responsibilities. I look back it all now in awe, particularly since the party was usually 1-2 weeks after Thanksgiving, and 2-3 weeks before Christmas: the season of kitchen time. Still, there was something wonderful about seeing this vast mix of people we liked getting to know each other. And no one left hungry.

At the end of the day the turkey carcass went in a pot for stock; the ham bone in the freezer to be deployed later for pea soup. I would then wind up with my feet up while Danny bundled up the leftovers and did the lion’s share of the cleaning. I married a very good man. And round about November of the next year people would start asking “are you going to have your party again this year?” And the answer, until 2020, was always “of course.”

Covid changed a lot of things. We haven’t had a party since 2019 (oh, those days of innocence). Would we like to do it again? Yes. But I’m not sure how many people want to attend closely packed social events with people they don’t know well (I mean, I am pretty certain that everyone on our guest list would be fully vaccinated and smart enough to stay home if they were sick, but can I promise that?). We could invite fewer people, but part of the joy, to me, was inviting everyone we knew and seeing them interact. It’s the social scientist in me.

Then there’s the… well, to be frank, the age thing. I consider throwing the party and part of me notes, in the immortal words of Danny Glover, that I might be “too old for this shit.” I’m pretty active, and I take joy in getting things done, but… turkey, ham, chili, baking, cleaning, organizing… It’s a lot. Do I actually want to be doing all that?

At the moment the answer is still yes.

And some things might even make it better. For one thing, we now have a relatively huge back yard that is civilized and attractive, where people who are not comfortable gathering inside the house could hang out. This might mean it’s a better idea to have the party in July than in December–summer in San Francisco can be chilly and foggy, but it’s less of a gamble than relying on a December day to be sunny and not prohibitively cold.

The window for this year’s party has closed (you can’t just gin something like this up in a week). But maybe next year we can try again. Maybe I’d better start planning now.

Melbourne

personby Gillian Polack
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Right now, I’m dreaming of my childhood. At an unholy hour tomorrow morning (6 hours from now, in fact) I will take a bus to Melbourne and … that’s where I will be on Monday, when you read this. I could finish packing, or I could tell you all about my childhood. I choose to finish packing. This is because my mother will give me a Look if I appear without clothes.

Why have I not finished everything at this hour on this day? Because I was very silly and fell over and damaged myself. Not badly, but sufficiently so that everything has been slow this week.

What will I be doing right now, on Monday US time? Some research at the State Library of Victoria. I have a list of books and every one I read is a tremendous help. Dinner will be with a group of old school friends I’ve not seen in forever.  Melbourne is the most European of Australian cities and I have the tough choice of eating well or eating very well. I will pack very loose clothes. My excuse will be that it’s summer.

Now you know where I’ll be and what I’m doing… I’d better go prepare.

Learning to Look at Nature

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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A sketch of a crow sitting in the sun on the street.I took up drawing this year. I’m still very much a beginner, but I am getting much better at really looking at something and seeing it at the level necessary to draw it.

One of the things I do is take pictures of things I think would be interesting to draw, so the sketch accompanying this post was made from a photo I took of a crow standing in the street on a sunny day.

My sweetheart and I feed the neighborhood crows, so I’m always looking at them. And, as with drawing, I find that the more I look, the more details I discover.

Years back my sweetheart started carrying some cat kibble in a small pouch so he could try to make friends with the crows. However, this was a hit-or-miss system and it didn’t really take off until during the pandemic, when he joined me on my regular walks around the block. The crows took note of us because the pattern was more regular.

After awhile, I had to start carrying treats, too, because they associated me with my sweetheart. They come to our bedroom window most mornings. We now feed crows within a four-or-five-block radius of our place.

Today, though, when we went for a short walk, none of our crows were nearby. However, there were large numbers of them in the sky, all flying the same general direction.

I’m pretty sure there’s a big crow meet-up somewhere downtown. I know crows have meetings from time to time. Sometimes they have them in a big tree in our neighborhood, but whatever they were doing today involved more crows than that.

Crow business. I’d really like to know more about crow business, but I don’t speak Crow, more’s the pity. Continue reading “Learning to Look at Nature”…

In Troubled Times: Facing the Problem Squarely

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Back in 2016, I posted a series of blogs entitled In Troubled Times. Today it seems fitting to remind myself that I survived then and will survive now. These thoughts are from Monday, December 5, 2016.

A few days ago, John Scalzi wrote in his blog, Whatever, “…the Trump administration and its enablers are going to make a mad gallop out of the gate to do a whole bunch of awful things, to overwhelm you with sheer volume right at the outset.”

Pretty shocking statement, huh? That was my first reaction. My second was that Scalzi is very likely correct. All the signs are there…all the signs that in my panic-stricken moments, I want to ignore so hard they go away.

My next reaction was to surrender my mind to a gazillion chattering monkeys, each with her own idea of What Must Be Done Right Now. I can work myself into a downright tizzy in no time this way. Not only that, I can paralyze myself with too many alternatives and no way to prioritize them, jumbling actions I might take with those that are impossible or unsafe (crazy-making) for me.

Any of this sound familiar?

It’s all based on a false choice. I don’t have to either prepare now for the logically impending “awful things” or play ostrich on the river in Egypt. But in order to see other, saner alternatives, I must first evict the Monkeys of Panic so I can regard the situation calmly.

We’re in for some hard times, and knowing that is a relief.

At first, it seems counter-intuitive to say that acknowledging we are in for some dark times comes as a relief. The relief is because instead of nebulous fears running rampant, bursting into exaggeration and melodrama at every turn, vulnerable to any sort of fact-free hype, I’ve stepped away from the emotional storm. I’m facing the problem squarely, as my tai chi teacher used to say. We’re in for some tough times, and likely there will be a whole slew of bad news in the early months of 2017.

When I’m no longer trying to deny or distort the way things are (for example, Trump’s cabinet choices and what is known about them, or what he has said he will or won’t do) I not only become calmer, but better able to see things I might do, alone or in solidarity with like-minded folks.

This is based on a simple truth that in order to act effectively, I need to be sane. I can’t be sane if I’m bouncing off the walls at every headline on social media. I could, of course, disengage entirely from social media and refuse to read or listen to any sort of news. But I don’t want to do that. I want to stay engaged, but in a mindful way. I want to know what I’m up against. Once I stop fighting the reality of what that is, I free myself to use my energy and time in productive ways. I don’t know exactly what form these tough times will take, but I don’t need to prepare for every twist and turn. I can trust my ability to respond appropriately and creatively.

 

Some Days

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m writing this late on my Monday evening because I was so worried about what was happening in my hometown. Not where I live now (Canberra) but where my family has lived since 1858. Outside a synagogue not at all far from my own childhood one, and half a suburb away from where my mother lives, there was going to be a pro-Palestine demonstration. Given what happened in Montreal over the weekend, I did not like this at all. Given what happened a few minutes away last year, during a Friday service on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, where my mother’s first cousin was one of the people ‘evacuated’ into a violent anti-Jewish crowd… I was very worried.

I’ve just seen the video clips of what transpired and Australia can sometimes be quite uniquely itself. Before I saw the video clips, however, I realised the angry crowd might be a bit smaller than last time. This notice was circulated on the interwebz shortly before the event:

Protesters still came. They were thoroughly covered, except for their eyes, and while this might have been sensible to hide their identities, it wasn’t such a good idea. Melbourne was not as hot as Canberra today, but Canberra was in the thirties… so these poor blokes must have been seriously uncomfortable.

I saw a bunch of clips of what happened after they arrived and there was no violence. Two of the pro-Palestine protesters were gently ushered into a police van and I’m pretty sure I heard someone say “Have a good day.” The angry violent Jews shouted “Go home. Leave us alone” in unison. well away from where the protesters stood.  I interpreted this (since I come from that community, I trust my interpretation) as “You’ve driven half an hour or an hour to be a pain, now just turn around and drive back, please.” They waved Israeli flags and Australian flags. They sang Hatikvah (mostly off-key) and several of them used the great Australian salute to the group of protesters.

No-one was hurt. Everyone got their point across, including the police. The worst loss was to the dignity of those who were scared of the young woman who led the “Go home” shout.

I wish more protests were like this.

Living in Margaret Atwood’s Future

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Cover of the first edition of The Handmaid's TaleHistorian Timothy Snyder keeps telling us “Do not obey in advance” even as more and more people appear to be leaping up to kiss the ring (or perhaps a part of the anatomy) of the grifter now apparently headed back to the White House in the ultimate triumph of the January 6 insurrection.

This week in his newsletter he is looking at Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in a three-part series. The third should be available the same day this post appears; the first is here and the second here.

In the first part, he critiques The New York Times’s summary of the book on its current trade paper bestseller list (where, I am glad to note, the book, which first came out forty years ago, has appeared for 139 weeks). The Times’s 16-word summary reads: “In the Republic of Gilead’s dystopian future, men and women perform the services assigned to them.”

His whole piece is worth reading, but he sums it up here:

Christian Reconstructionism is now at the edge of power in the United States, and the attitude of the relevant people towards the female body and indeed towards rape is an essential element of what is happening and what is likely to happen.  Both-sidesism, prudery, and euphemisms are keeping much of the media from bringing this story together in time.  We will need clear language in general, and this novel in particular, to see the whole picture.  I will develop this in two posts to come.

In the second essay, he makes this point:

The Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale is not a purely invented world based on the law and culture of one religion or another.  It is a well-drawn post-America.

Prof. Snyder thinks this book is important to understanding where we are today and I certainly don’t disagree, though perhaps the most disturbing thing about what an accurate picture it paints of where we are is that the country did not take appropriate steps to head it off.

We can all argue about what those steps should have been, but I’ll leave that to others. I’m tired of dishing out blame. I’m more interested in fixes.

Alas, The Handmaid’s Tale, while an excellent description of one of the places we could be headed (the others being a utopia for certain tech bros and no one else or just the grifter’s unparalleled corruption accompanied by significant foreign influence) is not the best book for fixes. Continue reading “Living in Margaret Atwood’s Future”…

A Small Responsibility

personby Madeleine Robins
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Watch any medical drama (of which there are many–and I admit I’m a sucker for them) and you will doubtless come upon the one where the next of kin struggles to make a decision for the patient who cannot speak for their/him/herself. Should the patient be resucitated? Given a potentially lifesaving treatment despite their prior expressed disinterest in said treatment? Should the patient be taken off life support? High stakes, high drama.

But sometimes the stakes are high but the drama is a little less so.

About fifteen years ago my aunt made me her medical power of attorney. At that time she was a spry young thing of 85, still traveling with her husband, meeting weekly with her French conversation group, cooking in her beautiful small kitchen, reading voraciously, holding ferocious opinions about the world and politics (she would not have been pleased with the outcome of the most recent election). So when she asked, I said “of course.” My brother and I are her closest living relatives, I live nearer than he does–and it’s my aunt. Of course I would do anything she asked, because I adore her.

In the abstract I knew what the job entailed (after all, I have watched a lot of medical dramas). We had a discussion about what amount of medical interference she wanted should she become incapacitated. And then we went back to talking about all the other things in the world, as we always had done.

In the 15 years since then, her husband died after a long and miserable illness, and without that tether–being the organized one who took care of him and saw that everything–appointments, home-care attendants, bills and arrangements and repairs to their home–was organized, she has drifted into dementia, a little like a boat drifting slowly out to sea. The day-to-day business and organization of her medical care is handled by a trust. My responsibility is to visit, to love her… and when the time comes, to make decisions about just how much care is enough.

Last week, just after the election, I flew down to LA for an emergency visit. My aunt had a sudden cascade of health problems. Chest pains proved to be pneumonia, which was leapt on with the power of modern medicine (which is to say, antibiotics–totally permissible under the letter of the power of attorney). The next day her Nurse Practitioner got results for a blood test which said that my aunt’s potassium was low. The level wasn’t critically low yet, but decreasing potassium can be an end-of-life sign, because significantly low potassium can trigger cardiac arrest. I was told to come down from San Francisco ASAP; it was implied that I might be coming to say goodbye. Continue reading “A Small Responsibility”…

Some Thoughts on Gender and Community

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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One of the many things my sweetheart and I bonded over when we first got together was a love of Whileaway, the place where people live in Joanna Russ’s story “When It Changed.”

We’d both like to live there – that is, in the there before it changed.

I should point out that my sweetheart is a man and, for those of you who haven’t read the story, only women lived in Whileaway.

But he would, in fact, fit into that world rather well, despite being essentially and comfortably male.

It was, in fact, by being around him that I realized the most accurate statement of my gender is “not male.” That’s despite the fact that I’m the one with a sword and a black belt and, even though I know better, much more likely to end up in a physical fight.

I’m not talking about the kind of masculinity we often discuss as “testosterone poisoning” (though testosterone is not nearly as powerful as many believe) or the toxic masculinity of the fascists who just got elected.

It’s not as easily defined as that. It’s a maleness that is not uncomfortable in an all-female setting while still being itself.

I wanted to do many things in my life that were coded as male, but I never wanted to be a man. I am resolutely not girlie, nowhere near as feminine in interests or appearance as many of the trans women I know, but I am still comfortably a woman.

I set my pronouns as she or they because I don’t have a lot invested in my gender identity, but I would, in fact, correct you if you called me “he.” I am not male. (I wouldn’t be offended, but then I am not someone who gets subjected to intentional misgendering, another issue entirely.)

It isn’t likely to happen. I may be big and aggressive and loud, with a black belt and a law degree and an unwillingness to let people walk over me, but people don’t ever seem to take me as male. I don’t know if it’s the hair or the way my body’s shaped or just my presence, but something about me seems to say “female” to most people in much the same way that my quieter and calmer sweetheart’s presence seems to say “male.”

In fact, I suspect it’s my apparently obvious womanness that makes some men get very angry when I don’t turn tail or apologize profusely when they try to walk over me (or run me down with their cars). Women are supposed to quail before men like them, and I do not.

I often put that attitude down to years in martial arts, but as I reflect on it, I think the attitude was there long before I started training. Training made it safer for me to stand up to such men because it gave me tools to use in response, but I was always going to demand my rights.

Funny, though, while those men scream at me and clearly want to hit me or grab me, they never do. That might be because even as they are dismissing me as a girl and showing their contempt for me, they can read something in my presence that tells them it would be a bad idea to lay a hand on me.

I hope that’s the case. I make every effort to convey the attitude that messing with me is a bad idea. I may look like an old woman, but don’t assume I’m harmless just because you have some stereotypical idea of old women.

Continue reading “Some Thoughts on Gender and Community”…

NaNoWriMo Thoughts

personby Deborah J. Ross
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National Novel Writing Month is upon us. It’s an international month-long event in which

folks pound out the first draft of a novel, posting the progress, getting lots of cheers every step of the way, and exchanging writing advice. Lots of friends will be doing it, many of them regular participants.

Alas, or perhaps not alas, not me.

I always have specific reasons. This year, I’m very close to finishing a revision of an on-spec novel that I’ve been working on for some years now, in the time gaps between contracted projects. I’m on the brink of the climactic scene, which spans 4 or 5 chapters and brings together everything that has gone before with a bang and a few nifty twists. If I nail it, the book works. Needless to say, this book not only haunts my every waking hour but has inveigled itself into my dreams. Not the story, mind you — the writing and revising of it.

I began this book back in 2013 on a lark, one of those what-if ideas that just takes off on its own. It had been a long time since I’d embarked upon an unoutlined, unplanned, seat-of-the-pants story, especially one of novel length. I had not realized how much my creative spirit needed what I call taking a flying leap off the cliff of reality. Working on my netbook, I continued the draft while taking care of my best friend as she died of cancer. The story, with all its open possibilities — and it had quite a few surprises for me — gave me an emotional refuge so that I could return, “batteries recharged,” to be present with my friend and her family.

Am I going to set this aside and lose all the momentum I’ve regained during this revision?

Don’t get me wrong. I think NaNoWriMo can be a wonderful thing. I’ve done writing challenges before, way back when, and learned a lot about JustKeepWritingNoMatterWhat. I also think I could use a reminder course from time to time, when I slog through a period of stopping every 5 minutes for another round of online Scrabble. The community support, the exhilaration posting each day’s progress, is wonderful.

But every writer works in different ways, and I feel my hackles rise — not a lot, just a tad — at the “everyone’s doing this, don’t be left out” feeling. Maybe I’m creating that in my own mind, or it’s an echo of being in the “out” crowd during my formative high school years. I need to remind myself to pay attention to what works for me, and that posting daily word counts does not fit most of the time. For me, daydreaming that leads to a deeper story, a connection between characters, a surprising turn of events, is time well spent. Sometimes, a single insight means a solid day’s work, even if no words appear on the page. Other times, if I force that daily page or word count, I end up with something superficial and green, which is not necessarily bad as much of the real work for me happens in revision. But by working well, no matter how slowly, I can nurture that depth as I go along and be sensitive to the openings and connections that I might miss in my haste.

If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, more power to you, and may its many gifts be yours! But if not, join me in writing “deep and true and slow.”

Continue reading “NaNoWriMo Thoughts”…