“America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women,
and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied
with their trash.”

- Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1855

Things that were said about writing by women:

• that it was weak, vapid, and pastel, as in strong “masculine” rhymes and weak “feminine” ones;
• that it was too subjective, solipsistic, narcissistic, autobiographical, and confessional;
• that women lacked imagination and the power of invention and could only copy from their own (unimportant) lives and their own (limited, subjective) reality — they lacked the power to speak in other voices, or to make things up;
• that their writing was therefore limited in scope, petty, domestic, and trivial;
• that good female writers transcended their gender; that bad ones embodied it;
• that writing was anyway a male preserve, and that women who invaded it felt guilty or wanted to be men;
• that men created because they couldn’t have babies; that it was unfair of women to do both; that they should just have the babies, thus confining themselves to their proper sphere of creativity.

The double bind: if women said nice things, they were being female, therefore weak, and therefore bad writers. If they didn’t say nice things they weren’t proper women. Much better not to say anything at all.

Any woman who began writing when I did, and managed to continue, did so by ignoring, as a writer, all her socialization about pleasing other people by being nice, and every theory then available about how she wrote or ought to write. The alternative was silence.

- Margaret Atwood, from If You Can’t Say Something Nice, Don’t Say Anything At All

OTHER DEPRESSING LINKS

J.R.R. Tolkien heavily influenced by obscure female writer? from Reel Girl

Women Writers And Bad Interviews, from Talking Writing

Naipaul says no woman writer is any good.

Women Still Not Equal In Writing World from The Rumpus

Linda Leith says it’s because women are not submitting in the same numbers.

Prikipedia? Or, Looking For The Women On Wikipedia from The Chronicle

TV Writing Remains A White Man’s World from The Wrap TV

Hey TV Networks! Hire some women writers! from Bitch Media

Has Virago changed the publishing world’s attitude towards women? from The Guardian

Where Are The Women Kerouacs? from Salon

My So-Called ‘Post-feminist’ Life In Arts And Letters from Deborah Copaken Kogan

15 Great Female Film Critics You Ought To Be Reading from Flavorwire

Why Is The Women’s Fiction Prize A Thing? asks Book Riot, then answers it.

Sexism and Silence in the Literary Community from Huffington Post

TOP TEN TUESDAY: WOMEN WRITERS WHO DESERVE MORE RECOGNITION, For Book’s Sake

Why are op-eds written by women more prone to verge on the personal? There is nothing inherently wrong with first-person narratives, but there can be too much of a good thing at The Guardian

Danielle Steel on being asked if she’s “still” writing: “I think it is something that only men do to only women, and not just to me” from The Hairpin

Women who write erotica get asked different things from men who write erotica, explained here.

The work of Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate, has been compared to “Mills & Boon” authors in a damning attack by the Oxford Professor of Poetry

Did A Debut Writer Get Bullied On Goodreads? from Salon

28 Female Thinkers You Should Know, Even If Wired Magazine Doesn’t from Huffington

Editor Tries to Mansplain Gender Disparity, Fails Miserably from The Atlantic Wire

Sleeps With Monsters: Reading, Writing, Radicalisation from Tor

Masquerading as Male in Crime Writing: A Pseudonym Story from Women Writers, Women Books

A Picture Says It All Or Does It? Judging an Author by Their Photo from The Daily Beast

Why I Only Read Books by Women in 2013 from Flavorwire

This film replayed on Australian TV last night, and I watched it again because it came up quite recently in conversation. This was a conversation in feminist company, and I offered Madison County as one example of a film which is better than the book. (So often it’s the other way around.) The reaction I got was one of mild horror; this film is perhaps in popular memory terrible, like so many others that are similar in tone. Coincidentally, the protagonist Robert Kincaid shares a homophonous name with a rather kitsch American artist, and I wonder if this doesn’t help any.

WILL THIS FILM ANNOY A FEMINIST?

Possibly. If you’ve watched a lot of films in which a woman mopes about, basing her entire life around that of a man (in this case two men), sacrificing everything for her children, then you may well be in need of some escapist fantasy in which women bust out of traditionally feminine roles. Or perhaps you’d better appreciate a film about a woman who in real history did use her life for the betterment of humankind, outside producing offspring and being a good housewife. And that’s okay.

But stories about women who do spend their entire lives in the roles that were set up for them by their cultures are just as relevant. To criticise Francesca is like criticising Elizabeth Bennett who, like the protagonist of this story, makes the best of her situation, which happens to hinge upon her relationship with a more worldly, older man (men).This movie knows what it is questioning. This is evident in the dialogue, and it is even evident in the intratext: As Francesca leaves her house for the first time with Robert, we see the letterbox of ‘Mr and Mrs Richard Johnson’. Francesca has been completely subsumed by her husband to the point where she no longer has her own name. By 1995 women were starting to keep their own names in large numbers, refusing to go by Mrs [Husband's Name], so this glimpse of the letterbox was no accident. 

The feminist aspect of this story comes through equally strongly in the wrapper story, in which Francesca’s grown children — a son and a daughter — deal with her posthumous wishes to have her ashes scattered from a local bridge rather than buried beside their father in the family plot. As the children read through Francesca’s diaries and letters addressed to them, the daughter quickly understands that there was more to her mother than met the eye. The son takes longer to understand, and is reminded by the daughter that it’s possible to both be a good wife and mother while at the same time being a fully-rounded human being. The son eventually realises that even though as the only boy he felt like a ‘prince’, and for that reason believed that as long as he was in existence his mother shouldn’t need anyone else, that this isn’t actually the case for women. We get a glimpse of how this new-found understanding is about to improve his own marriage for the better.

DOES IT PASS THE BECHDEL TEST?

There are problems with the Bechdel test, which was never meant to be the definitive test for feminism in movies anyhow. This film is a classic example of the test’s limitations in that we never do see two women talking to one another about something other than a man. But it is revealed in epistolary voice-over at the end of the film that Francesca became firm friends with another woman in the town. What drew the two women together was their shared marital infidelities, even though Francesca didn’t reveal anything about her four days with Robert Kincaid until years after he had departed. This suggests that the two women did indeed talk to each other about something other than a man, even if it were their extra-marital relationships with men which initially drew them together.

BUT IS IT ANY GOOD?

Stephen King, in his book On Writing, (rather cruelly, perhaps) lists this book as an example of terrible writing. With that sort of recommendation I picked it up one time to see what he was talking about, and I have to admit King was right; I don’t think I’ve read anything so terrible out of a mainstream publisher. The prose would sound off to all but the most tone-deaf of readers. On the other hand, even more startling is the fact that someone (presumably a group of people, with money) read that terrible book and thought, ‘Well, that’d make a great movie.’ 

It’s amazing what two good actors can do to redeem what, in the book, reads as bad dialogue. Props to the guy who adapted the script, also. And isn’t it interesting that this film was written by a man, adapted by a man and produced by a man (Clint Eastwood). I’m not sure what this says, exactly, except that it is possible for men to know what it feels like to be a woman such as Francesca.

For someone unfamiliar with the sleepy summer atmosphere of a farming town in Iowa, the setting is quite exotic, with the sparse dialogue allowing for the full orchestra of summer insects in the background. I love the sound of the storm outside, even if I am aware of the pathetic fallacy of turgid emotions.

I have a low tolerance for sap, and possibly a high tolerance for the erotics of abstinence — after all, the relationship between Francesca and Robert takes place mostly by correspondence after a single weekend together. Even for those who never experience a four-day love affair which affects them for the rest of their lives, it’s common to remember the earliest, heady phases of a romance, and that’s what makes this film resonant.

Power Postures Can Make You Feel More Powerful from Wired

Can This Simple Trick Stop Athletes From Choking Under Pressure? from PsyBlog; they’re talking about squeezing one fist and not the other.

10 Of The Best Yoga Poses For Headaches from Huffington Post is a series of photos. This first is the ‘cat cow’ which I have been doing on the recommendation of a chiropractor as an antidote to sitting at a desk. If I remember to do it EVERY HOUR ON THE HOUR then it definitely helps. But I haven’t had a headache in ages, so have yet to test out whether the other postures work. If you’re a regular sufferer of headaches, maybe you’ll let me know?

How Your Chair Changes Your Mindset from Co.Design

12 Yoga Poses To Undo The Damage Of Your Desk Job from Huffington. Includes the cat-cow.

On the day of my relations’ arrival right before Christmas, the vacuum cleaner conked out. Not a life and death situation, granted, but with the septic tank pump also on the blink, the house was looking far less than visitor-worthy, because nothing could go down the drain.

That same day, a neighbour happened to turn up to return a DVD. He offered me the use of his vacuum cleaner. “There’s enough stress at this time of year,” he reasoned. “Vacuuming is one of those things that makes a big difference and doesn’t take much effort.”

I don’t know about you, but my first line of thought after any kind offer is, “I’ll manage.” I thought, but our house is really quite shoddy, with dog fur in every cranny, which would fill up a vacuum cleaner bag really quickly. I don’t have any replacement bags for him, and I wouldn’t want to basically sponge off someone. I thought, “What if I break HIS vacuum cleaner, as well? How bad would I feel then?”

But I realised his offer was genuine, it wasn’t such a big favour after all, and if I said no, he’d leave feeling slightly out of sorts. (At least, I would in his position.) So I took him up on his offer.

At times like these, I also remind myself of a Benjamin Franklin quote.

He that has once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.

- Benjamin Franklin

I’m not naturally inclined to ask favours of people — perhaps it’s my WASPish background — there’s this feeling that by asking favours I’m putting another person out. What if they want to say no but can’t out of politeness? I guess that’s the main worry. In my case it even extends to accepting favours which have been offered without me asking. It’s ridiculous.

I learned of The Benjamin Franklin Effect a few years ago, and have at times looked back on certain incidents in my past and I conclude that people with ‘leadership skills’ and who score highly on affability scales have intuited this part of human nature, even if they don’t have a name for it: That when you ask someone to do something for you, no matter how they felt about you before, they end up liking you more than they did. It’s a form of blatant manipulation.

The Shockingly Easy Way To Get People To Do What You Want

Emotional intelligence is important, but the unbridled enthusiasm has obscured a dark side. New evidence shows that when people hone their emotional skills, they become better at manipulating others.

- Explore Blog

This effect works on the idea that we subconsciously think, ‘Hey I’m doing something nice for this person. I MUST like them.’ It only works in your favour if you’re not a complete asshole, I presume. But even then, the human desire to be helpful makes it difficult to refuse. Are the best leaders really just master manipulators?

A writer at Slate urges (somewhat ironically? I’m not sure of the tone) that if you’re offered a coffee at a job interview you should definitely take it, and order an expensive one to demonstrate your worth. The reasoning is that you’re showing a potential employer that you value your own worth, and they should gather from this that you require a decent salary to go with. I figure the Benjamin Franklin Effect is also at play here.

Never turn down the drink.

1. People (and not just soldiers) who died unceremoniously of the flu and other diseases during wartime, because I’ve yet to see a soldier come home to his beloved only to find her dead and gone.

The Army and Navy medical services may have tamed typhoid and typhus, but more American soldiers, sailors, and Marines would succumb to influenza and pneumonia than would die on the industrialized battlefields of the Great War.

- ncbi

2. Kids who love reading AND sports, who are actually pretty well understood by their parents and friends, because reading isn’t actually all that weird and nerdy.

3. Characters who do manual labour not as a temporary redemptive situation, but all their dogdam days, because life is unfair like that, and someone right now is out there doing it.

4. People who use a public bathroom without being bullied, abused or otherwise traumatized by the experience. (Though I suppose uneventful visits to the toilet can be justifiably edited out.)

5. Working mothers and Female Antiheroes

6. This:

7. Capable older women as protagonists in crime fiction:

Despite women being the largest consumers of the genre and, judging by their presence at events, a loyal fanbase, they seem to stop being of interest to crime writers once they’re too old to make a pretty victim or a – eugh – feisty investigator. They become hard faced senior coppers, the murdered teenager’s saggy mother, and when they’re pushed into background roles, there and gone in a couple of paragraphs, the language can get distinctly Medieval; do the words ‘hag’ and ‘crone’ really still have a place in contemporary fiction? Turns out they do. See also; housecoats and blue rinses.

It’s common complaint that as you age you become invisible and right now that is the only way fiction is chiming with real life. But when I look at women of my mother’s generation I see a lot of highly capable professionals, well put together and worldly; children of the sixties who broke free from the constraints their own mothers were bound by.

These are women we should be writing about.

- from Do Some Damage

And here’s a rundown of older woman protagonist stereotypes with which we are mighty familiar, from Bad Reputation.

8. What can happen to women even after a ‘natural’ birth? These stories need to be told conversationally.

9. Manic pixie dream boys, who rush in to start a relationship with a complicated older (preferably black) woman.

10. Black women in science fiction

11. Where are the stories about genuine female friendships, in all its different forms? (If you follow the link you’ll see I came across some.)

When I was a beginning teacher, part of my mentorship required visits to the classrooms of older, career teachers in order to pick up tips, and also (presumably) to hone my own teaching persona by applying my own critical faculties to the teaching practices of others.

One formidable teacher managed her classes by developing a particularly fearsome persona. First, she would turn up at least a quarter hour late to each class, which would impress upon everybody how important her own time was in relation to that of everyone else. She would make sure to arrive puffing. I never saw her enter a room without puffing and panting.

Second, she would routinely plonk her backside upon the desks of various students, even if it meant sitting upon their books and stationery. (I would have been tempted to come to class armed with thumb tacks if it were me, but no, actually I would not have dared.)

Most of all, this teacher was manic-vigilant, pouncing upon any student who dared to express anything other than the required emotion*. One day when I was in attendance, a student made the grave mistake of yawning unself-consciously. It wasn’t a loud yawn, and the hapless girl wasn’t even making a statement. But the teacher decided to take this as a grave personal insult, interpreting a yawn as only one emotion: boredom, and boredom not just with the subject matter but with the teacher herself. The girl got into a lot of strife for daring to yawn.

*Except boredom is hardly an emotion, but rather lack thereof.

I think of this particular incident whenever our Border collie yawns, because the funny thing about many dogs is that dogs yawn not out of boredom but due to excitement. “Walk!” I’ll say enthusiastically, and this will have him trotting to the door, stretching his front legs and yawning uncontrollably. He shakes his head afterwards. You may have seen dogs do it. This sort of yawn is not due to someone sitting at the front of a classroom droning on about spelling rules.

Humans are not dogs, but I’m sure this mammalian reflex indicates something slightly more complicated than one hundred percent boredom. In fact, we should never assume to know too much from a person’s body language, even if the likes of Alan Pease would like to consider everything in binaries and absolutes.

• What A Yawn Says About Your Relationship from Scientific American
• Really? Yawning Is Contagious Between Dogs and Their Owners from NYT
• Here’s Steve Jones talking on Radio New Zealand about the science of yawning: AKA chasmology.

Although the term ‘slave’ is used colloquially and loosely to refer to people who are paid less than they should be paid, even if we apply the most literal sense of ‘slavery’ to a situation, that is indentured humans who are kept alive at subsistence level for the benefit of other humans, there are more slaves now than there ever have been in history.

When slaves were last traded in The Americas, the life of a slave was worth the adjusted figure of 40,000 dollars. It says something about the worth of human beings that today an adolescent slave can be purchased for $50.

I learnt this from a podcast. For a good night’s rest I should probably avoid listening to such talks overnight, but for an appropriately sobering introduction to modern slavery, I recommend a talk from Zocalo Public Square, by Benjamin Skinner, a journalist who has written and researched extensively on this topic. Here’s the YouTube video of the same talk.

A few years ago SBS aired a short series called ‘Modern Slavery’, which has stayed with me. It’s a three part series. I especially remember the scene of the family born into slavery, made to create mud bricks all day in India. The toddler had one meal per day. It was half of a red onion. I think of this image each time my own preschooler complains that I’ve put red onion in a salad.

A New Way For Companies To Prevent Slaves From Working For You from co.Exist

How many slaves do you have working for you? from the Everyday Minimalist

The choice between good and evil or between right and wrong is no choice at all

Human nature dictates that each of us will always choose the “good” or the “right” as we perceive the “good” or the “right.” It is impossible to do otherwise. Therefore, if a character must choose between a clear good versus a clear evil, or right versus wrong, the audience, understanding the character’s point of view, will know in advance how the character will choose.

A thief bludgeons a victim on the street for the five dollars in her purse. He may know this isn’t the moral thing to do, but moral/immoral, right/wrong, legal/illegal often have little to do with one another. He may instantly regret what he’s done. But at the moment of murder, from the thief’s point of view, his arm won’t move until he’s convinced himself that this is the right choice. If we do not understand that much about human nature–that a human being is only capable of acting toward the right or the good as he has come to believe it or rationalize it–then we understand very little. Good/evil, right/wrong choices are dramatically obvious and trivial.

True choice is dilemma. It occurs in two situations. First a choice between irreconcilable goods: From the character’s point of view two things are desirable, he wants both, but circumstances are forcing him to choose only one. Second, a choice between the lesser of two evils: From the character’s view two things are undesirable, he wants neither, but circumstances are forcing him to choose one. How a character chooses in a true dilemma is a powerful expression of his humanity and of the world in which he lives.

- Robert McKee, Story

A CHARACTER IS MORE LIKELY TO MAKE A BAD CHOICE IF FATIGUED

No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts.

- Do you suffer from decision fatigue? from the New York Times.

I have looked for this particular storytelling device on TV Tropes, where you can find most any trope under the sun, but haven’t yet found this particular romantic plot device. I’m not sure if I’m one of the only people to have noticed this is a thing — a relatively new thing, I might add — a sort of inverse of the Rescue Romance, which is very old indeed.

AN EXAMPLE FROM ADULT ROMANCE

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about in The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. This is the passage where Clare first meets Henry (the two romantic leads). Clare is 6 and Henry is 36, which is okay and not weird, because this book is about a time traveler and the real-time age difference is more respectable than that. Anyhow, Clare is in a field, and Henry has arrived naked, and is presently standing partially obscured behind shrubbery. This is written from Henry’s POV:

“Who’s there?” Clare hisses. She looks like a really pissed off goose, all neck and legs. I am thinking fast.

“Greetings, Earthling,” I intone kindly.

“Mark! You nimrod!” Clare is casting around for something to throw, and decides on her shoes, which have heavy, sharp heels. She whips them off and does throw them. I don’t think she can see me very well, but she lucks out and one of them catches me in the mouth. My lip starts to bleed.

The phrase ‘pissed off goose’ lends a comical tone to this passage; although this scene contains violence, it’s a comic, safe kind of injury that results.

AN EXAMPLE FROM CHILDREN’S ROMANCE

Here’s a version of the same thing from Tangled, which I find disturbingly violent given how realistic 3D animation is getting. The frying pan violence is a recurring gag, and the video below is a montage of each frying pan scene, although the scene in which Rapunzel meets Flynn is an extended female on male act of violence which somehow feels more disturbing than the video can portray:

AN EXAMPLE FROM A POPULAR TV SERIES

I don’t watch Once Upon A Time, but an io9 headline reads: Watch two fairytale characters get turned on beating a man senseless.

Commonsense Media (a website I trust for its balanced written summaries) says that Once Upon A Time is for ages 12+.

INVERSION DOES NOT EQUAL SUBVERSION

I have written about this before in a discussion of Pixar’s film Brave.

There is a long history of male on female violence, which is alive and kicking in comic book world, for starters. But if we want to change this culture (and I admit that this is a big ‘if’, since many feel they’re entitled to their fantasies no matter what kind of place they came from), the way to do it is not by simply reversing gender roles.

SO WHY THE female to male INJURY TROPE?

In other words, why is it cute and sexy for a female to slightly (or significantly) injure a potential male love interest?

I have a few ideas, though nothing conclusive:

• In an era where women hope for equality in relationships with men, part of that equality includes the illusion of equal strength.
• Or perhaps the physicality involved in injuring a male love interest is simply a symbol for true emotional and psychological equality.
• The important thing here is the male’s response. A female character is testing out a male character’s partnership potential by doing something to him which, in certain males, would result in a violent backlash. By responding with humour and kindness, a male character who has just been injured seems safe and attractive.
• We seem to be firmly entrenched in the era of S&M. I’m going partly by the huge popularity of 50 Shades Of Grey. In a minor way, this trope is perhaps a prelude to kink.

When male to female violence occurs on screen, as well it should, as a reflection of many terrible real-world situations, then we don’t see such stories given a G rating. The male/female strength differential is such that female to male violence is comical, whereas the opposite is never so, yet nor can I accept that it is entirely harmless.

MORE ON TANGLED

I am not a huge fan of this film in general, frying pan violence aside. Others have written well on this topic so I don’t have to:

Feminist Film Review of Tangled from Bitch Flicks

Tangled Is A Celebration Of White Femininity from Womanist Musings

“Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.”

- John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Because so much religious energy is devoted to controlling sexual behaviour, either by disallowing it (or thoughts or representations of it) other than in strictly limited circumstances, or by preventing the amelioration of its consequences once it has happened, we have the spectacle of righteous people writing letters of complaint about televised nudity, while from the factory next door tons of armaments are exported to regions of the world gripped by poverty and civil war.

- A.C. Grayling, The Meaning Of Things

Dicks, Tits and Clits: What Would Equal-Opportunity On-Screen Nudity Look Like? from Jezebel

Why Are There So Few Dongs On TV? from Clementine Ford

The Social and Legal Arguments for Allowing Women to Go Topless in Public from The Atlantic

“Worked all day. Germany invaded Poland today so I suppose we shall be at war tonight.”

- Enid Blyton in a diary 1939

*

The Faster I Write, The Better The Book? from Roni Loren is about that supposed correlation between length of time taken to do a project and its quality. She wonders if there’s not all that much of a correlation at all. Instead, writing fast has a few advantages:

When you write that quickly under that intense of a deadline, you can’t stop and think or analyze.

So if you want to get the first draft down quickly, because you work better when you’ve got something to edit or rewrite, there may be a lot of merit to typing as quickly as you can. Are you overthinking your first draft? (That’s a Wordplay podcast from K.M. Weiland.) Remember what Neil Gaiman has to say about first drafts: they don’t really matter anyway.

H.E. Roulo explains how to outline a novel in 90 minutes

Rachel Aaron has a method she used to get from 2000 to 10000 words per day.

The Thesis Whisperer explains How To Write Faster, which involves rethinking your writing tools and letting go of perfectionism.

A Short Introduction To Speed Writing from Freelance Switch

As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one rule about a first draft and it’s this: “Get the damn thing done!”

Easy to say. Hard to do.

- from Go Into The Story

Hints on how to get up early from Zen Habits. It’s quite persuasive. I almost want to drag my sorry arse out of bed at five tomorrow. Apparently sleepy brains think more freely anyway.

There are apps out there to help keep you on task. One of those is ByWord (for Mac, so I haven’t tried it.)

How to write 1000 words a day and not go bat shit crazy (at least not within the first two weeks) from The Sociological Imagination

Top 20 Most Annoying Book Reviewer Cliches and How to Use Them All in One Meaningless Review from Blogcritics Books

IT HAPPENS TO THE BEST OF US: THERAPY FOR BAD REVIEWS from Writer’s Digest

Why Your Critics Aren’t The Ones Who Count from Brené Brown

The Value Of Negative Reviews from Whatever

What Do We Even Want From Book Reviews Anymore? asks Flavorwire

‘The vast majority of books are published into obscurity and my thumbs-downs typically take the form of allowing them to remain there.’ – from Laura Miller at Salon

Susan Sontag’s essay ‘On Style’ is about literary criticism.

Some years ago a friend of my mother was charged with the task of looking after someone’s cat while the owners were away. Unable to get into the house, the friend of my mother knocked on the door of the nextdoor neighbour, meaning to ask for a key.

“Don’t worry!” she said, cheerily, knowing how she might look in her work attire, accompanied by a man in similar garb. “We’re not mormons!”

She was met with a stony glare. “You may not be a mormon, but I am.”

I’ve since wondered if that neighbour really was a mormon. It’s sometimes tempting to pretend to be someone you’re not for the very purposes of pulling someone up on their Xism. I’ve thought at times of pretending to be part indigenous, but since I never change from alabaster under the Australian sun, I don’t think I could pull it off.

Here in country Australia, I get a visit from the Bible People once per year. They arrive in a minivan. They are let out near the servo, then they have to walk around the village in pairs weilding pamphlets, and I presume they’re picked up later after at least one of them has been savaged by dogs. There are a lot of dogs in this area. On the few occasions I’ve had to go door-knocking, I’ve vowed (to a non-existent entity) never to do it again. I also thank (someone else’s christ) that I’m not a Seventh Day Adventist or Jehovah’s Witness or similar.

I have a long history with Bible People, and I think it’s because I really enjoy long walks in solitude. Bible People wearing badges love solitary people on foot. We can’t make a hasty departure (at least not without breaking into a trot), and it’s always easier to interrupt the thoughts of a person on her own. (People running stalls in the middle of malls know this. I wonder how many of them have a history of Bible Bashing on their resume. It’s the most appropriate qualification.)

Although I seem to be a Mormon Magnet, I think almost everyone has a somewhat memorable experience with a Bible-wielding door-knocker. (I especially like this one.) In my time I have embodied the entire range of greetings, from door-shuttingly annoyed to, “Hey, I’ll read those pamphlets if you promise to read Richard Dawkins.”

I actually said that two years ago, because I happened to have a copy of The Selfish Gene on my bookshelf. It’s actually a rather dry read compared to his other books, which is probably why I’m offering to give it away. Also, I didn’t have a hard copy of The God Delusion handy. “So do you want me to go and get it?” I asked again.

“Actually,” said the shorter man, “I won’t take your book. I can’t actually read, myself.”

I have to admit, this pulled me up short. Although Australia’s literacy stats aren’t fantastic, it’s not often I come face to face with someone who is by their own admission unable to get through a book. It kind of explained a lot.

Since then I’ve been kinder to the Bible People, even though a bit of kindness will have you standing in the door for upwards half an hour. I have decided to take their pamphlets. At first I thought it was just adding to landfill, but there are a couple of good reasons for taking their literature:

1. It can put an end to a lengthy conversation about god when you really wanted to be scrubbing the shower, because you can say, ‘Oh, do you have any pamphlets? I’d like to take a look at those. Thanks, see you next year.’

2. I’m sure that when I take pamphlets the Bible People don’t feel as if their time is completely wasted. When they get back on their minivan I’m sure they can say quite cheerily, “Well, one woman seemed interested in the pamphlets. That’s a job well done.” (I guess I do feel rather condescendingly sorry for religious people, or at least for those who belong to religions that send their people door-knocking without the vacuum cleaners and commission.)

And what did I do with said pamphlets? I happened to be partway through The Hite Report, and somehow ended up using one of the religious pamphlets as a bookmark. That gives me a cheap chuckle everytime I settle down to read some more about clitorises.

As for the other booklets, I have annotated them thoroughly, and next year, so long as I get the woman who insists she has indeed read the bible, ‘at least seven times, and yes, including the disturbing parts’, I will hand her back her literature, annotated. Because there is a lot wrong with that particular subculture.  Turns out, a lot of what they preach has little to do with anyone’s god and everything to do with blind faith, submissive inequalities and anti-scientific thinking. And dog knows, the world needs less of that.

1. I’m Sorry You’re Suffering, from Persephone.

2. When It’s Not God’s Plan: 8 Things to Say to Grieving Nonbelievers from AlterNet

3. What To Say and Do For The Recently Bereaved at Medium, who recommends this book:

4. Joan Didion’s essay on grief

I’ve always wondered how I’ll cope when someone very close to me dies. Will my love of popular science books come in handy? I saved this quote just in case I want to read about multiverses and evolution and things at the most basic of levels, to remind myself that the universe is huge and infinite, and nothing, nothing at all, lasts for very long compared to that.

A dead creature is in every respect identical to a live one, except that the electrochemical processes that motivate it have ceased.

- from Here on Earth (by Tim Flannery)

I had never carried a camera, despite my parents’ and Rosie’s urgings, arguing — self-importantly — that I wanted nothing to come between me and the ‘pure’ experience.

My precious, priceless experiences.

- from Maestro, by Peter Goldsworthy

This passage reminds me of a trip to Floriade — Canberra’s big flower festival — in which there grew a single red tulip in a vast field of yellow ones. My husband takes photographs on his SLR digital camera and uploads them to a stock photography site (if they’re any good). He makes a couple of bucks every now and then, and that red tulip has been a pretty popular photograph.

I mention this because as he was taking that shot, an old man walked past and made some sort of tut-tutting sound about people who are always taking photos and can’t just enjoy an experience.

There are a lot of jibes like that, or about people who insist on listening to iPods when they’re out in nature, or people who spend too much time on social media or RSS feeds or whatever.

Thing is, taking a photograph of something is one way to enjoy it. By ‘it’, I mean ‘life’. Framing the photo, cropping it, enhancing the colour of it, or even just noticing the object in the first place is an enjoyable thing to do if that’s what you like to do.

There is no single way to enjoy a thing. I wish people would keep their anti-camera/anti-tech views to themselves.

Do people have the same complaints about birdwatchers with their binoculars? Or is it only certain types of technology which is the target of derision?

Today we read that the whole purpose of time travel is to change history, either the private history of the character, as in Playing Beatie Bow (1980) by the Australian author Ruth Park, or The Root Cellar (1981) by Canadian Janet Lunn, or the history of the world, like A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978) by Madeleine L’Engle. In this book the character changes the past so that the third world war does not break out in his own time. Time Travelers are no longer passive observers, but must take upon themselves responsibility for their actions in the past.

– Children’s Literature Comes Of Age by Maria Nikolajeva

***

VARIOUS LINKS ABOUT TIME TRAVEL

1. Speed of light discovery: would you go back in time? and Time Travel In Fiction, from Guardian Science.

2. What Is Time? from Michio Kaku (a video)

3. Watch design built for ‘predictably late’ Indian time, in acknowledgement of the fact that different cultures have different attitudes towards time-keeping.

4. Why the past is different from the future, from Brain Pickings

5. What Is Time? One Physicist Hunts for the Ultimate Theory from Wired

6. 10 Myths About Space Travel That Make Science Fiction Better from io9

7. Why Time Travel Stories Are Meant To Be Messy from io9

8. The 10 Least Competent Time Travellers from io9

9. Is Time Travel Possible? (a video from Unplug The TV)

10. The Awful Time Travel Trope That Both Looper and Doctor Who Embraced from io9

11. 12 Greatest Time Travel Effects from Movies and Television from io9

12. Rachel McAdams has been in 3 time-travel films, but never time-traveled from io9

13. Time Travel Via Wormhole Breaks the Rules of Quantum Mechanics from Discover

I was listening to a podcast recently — I think it was one of the 99% podcasts — when someone in interview started talking about something being ‘camp’ and I realised I have no idea what the word actually means. I thought it described the behaviour of stereotypically gay men, in relaxed, social mode. But no. I still had no idea what it meant, even after listening to a lengthy discussion about it in relation to architecture.

But then, a few weeks later, I came across ‘camp’ again in an essay about David Bowie:

Camp is notoriously hard to define, but in most conceptions it involves both a sense of doubleness — things are not merely what they seem to the naive viewer — and a preference for reversal — the very bad now reinterpreted as good. Camp makes most sense not as an aesthetic style — like classicism or modernism — but as a mode of apprehension or a hermeneutic. It is a way of understanding or interpreting the world. Historically, camp emerges in gay subculture where it functions as a kind of passive resistance to the straight world, much of the cynical humor of the Russians was a form of passive resistance to Stalinism…. Transvestitism for obvious reasons lends itself to camp interpretation, and the embrace of artifice over nature is a convention of camp taste… camp interpretation requires a lack of seriousness and the rejections of sincerity.

- from Goth: Undead Subculture

(Hermeneutic is another word which I keep having to look up.) This is probably the best description of camp that I have seen, because it describes how it relates to gay culture, while explaining in clear terms the wider context.

Another word I have trouble defining — apart from ‘I know it when I see it sense’ is kitsch.

KITSCH

From io9:

Fantasy has a problem – it is inherently kitsch. What do I mean by kitsch? Crap that people unaccountably like. The dictionary defines kitsch as tawdry, vulgarised or pretentious art usually with popular or sentimental appeal. Unicorns, wizards, put upon young wretches who come to be great mages, haughty princesses, riders in dark cloaks – Robert Jordan, if you want it summed up in two words.

Well, I suppose that’ll do. So what’s the opposite of kitsch?

In going the other way, in trying too hard to be ‘realistic’, honest, gritty or meaningful we end up over-reaching ourselves and the monster eats us anyway.

There. Now I have a definition for ‘gritty’. I’m just going to say it’s the ‘opposite of kitsch’ and be done with it.

Newbie neurons make fear hard to forget

How our bodies interact with our minds in response to fear and other emotions from Science Daily

“It’s about accepting that you’re mortal” - Extreme sports enthusiasts on overcoming fear, from BPS Research Digest

Mice Inherit the Fear Of Their Fathers, from National Geographic

1. A Non-creepy Reason To Make Eye-Contact from Jezebel, in which a study uncovers that we don’t even like it when strangers ignore us.

2. The difference between male and female body language is stark when couples swap clothing and pose for pictures, from The Society Pages. Another photographer had models pose in traditional ‘nude pose’ then asked them to pose unselfconsciously. The contrast is stark.

3. Do you have trouble when asked to pose for photographs? As these pictures suggest, posing in a happy way for photos is something we learn how to do, from Sociological Images

4. More on posing: This time looking closely at the poses expected of men and women on book covers, from Jim C. Hines, who tried some poses out for himself.

5. Smiling Men Can Make Women More Subordinate from Body Odd

6. Body cues tell us more than faces from The Conversation

7. The Fine Art Of Italian Body Language at Brain Pickings

8. Digital Natives Are Slow To Pick Up Non-verbal Cues from HBR

9. What Your Bag Holding Style Says About You from Frisky

10. Teaching Your Daughter To Pose Like A Girl from Reel Girl

11. Use This Body Language Cheat Sheet to Decode Common Non-Verbal Cues from Life Hacker, which offers some generalisations I wonder about.

12. The Different Ways You Ignore People from Thought Catalog

13. How to use body language to get served first at a bar from Acculturated

14. Oh yes, this is annoying. Everyone needs to keep their body language reasonably compact on public transport, not just women, who have been acculturated that way owing to a history of skirt-wearing.

1. That bright yellow movie posters = ‘big independent film’.

2. We use the plurals ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ when flipping coins, but there’s only ever one head and one tail on any one coin. Here’s why.

3. During both World Wars of last century, despite all the senseless killing, life expectancy increased. In The Spirit Level, the authors suggest that this was due to societies which had suddenly become more equal. ‘Increases in life expectancy for civilians during the war decades were twice those seen throughout the rest of the twentieth century. In the decades which contain the world wars, life expectancy increased between 6 and 7 years for men and women, whereas in the decades before, between and after, life expectancy increased by 1 and 4 years. Although the nation’s nutritional status improved with rationing in the Second World War,  this was not true for the First World War, and material living standards declined during both wars.’

4. Indie Album Covers: Once you see the trends, you can’t unsee them.

from The Metapicture