Wanna Read Along?

So I am doing an independent study next semester called “Female Protagonists of Colors in Speculative Fiction” and have decided to do most of my reading over this break between semesters to lessen the load in the Spring. A few friends mentioned that they would like to read along with me during this time. So here is the book list:

Required Texts:
James Alan Gardener – Expendable
SM Stirling – Island in the Sea of Time
Octavia Butler – Wild Seed
Nalo Hopkinson – Midnight Robber
Hiromi Goto – The Kappa Child
Larissa Lai – Salt Fish Girl
Leslie Marmon Silko – Almanac of the Dead
Eva Swan – The Bone Whistle
Daina Chaviano – The Island of Eternal Love
Angelica Gorodischer – Kalpa Imperial
Samuel R. Delany – Neveryona
Lizzie Borden’s Born In Flames (film)
Miyazaki’s Nausicca of the Valley of the Winds (graphic novel)

Additional Texts:
David Heath Justice – Kynship
Frank Miller – Give Me Liberty (graphic novel)
Children of Men (film)
Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu – The Shadow Speaker
F.M. Busby – Zelde M’tana

Some are hard to find, like Larissa Lai if you’re in the U.S. because it was Canadian only distribution so feel free to drop some from the list if you guys choose to read along. I’ll be posting about each books as I finish either way. BUT I forgot to post about this until I’d already started so I’ve already (re)read Midnight Robber and will be posting about it later this week.

Just started: Wild Seed

Next Book: Island in the Sea of Time

Probably won’t switch to Island until about January 1st because I’m in thesis crunch time and am trying to finish it before the end of this month by writing about 80 pages. We’ll see if it happens!

Academic Level Up!

So I had a presentation yesterday worth 30% of my grade in my Shakespeare class. I chose to do it on Rome as the female body and Tamora and Lavinia as separate but also almost identical representations of Rome within the play Titus Andronicus. I was nervous and nauseous all day but after my presentation my professor said I should think about submitting it to a conference.  Awesomesauce! So yes I finally feel like I’m getting in the swing of things in regards to grad school – hence the title of this post.

Hopefully that’ll mean some new posts. Part of the problem is I no longer have time to read blogs and so often I ping off what other people have written and go in a completely different direction and that’s how my blog posts come about. Or alternately I see some bullshit on the web and post about that.

*Sigh* Gonna make a quick skim through my saved drafts and see if there’s anything there for me to expand on for today or tomorrow.

Currently Reading: The Outlaw Demon Wails by Kim Harrison & The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner

Writing Day

I have a lot to do by this weekend and need to concentrate on that so I’m declaring it a Writing Day! Have to do some writing today, back tomorrow.

Currently Reading: Midnight Never Come by Marie Brennan

Writing Day! 6-18-08

I have a bunch of projects I need to work on and I’m feeling a little stressed so I’m declaring today a Writing Day! I will be working on various non-fiction projects and such today, tell you more about them soon.

Currently Reading: An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil by Jim Monroe

 

Writing Day! 6-9-2008

Everytime I go through a dryspell of reading I forget how much that affects my writing. When I’m reading something and I truly fall into the world and the people it’s one of those magical things that makes me want to write all the time. Of course this feeling only usually lasts until I actually start to write but still I’m declaring it a Writing Day today!

Currently Reading: Empress by Karen Miller

Some Posts Coming This Week:
-The Last 2 Days of WisCon
-Omarosa

WisCon Day 3

It’s been over a week since WisCon and while I’m still going through withdrawals I’ve forgotten a lot of the nuances of what happened so I’m just going to hit the major points.

Saturday was the day of the Coffeeklatch (People Against We-Sha-Sha!*) and it went fantastically! Much props to Tempest for the planning and execution.  We all discussed our secret plans for world domination…*cough* I mean had coffee and cake!

By then it was almost time for my first panel of the con and the only one I was moderating, Captain Jack’s Big Gay Torchwood. This was one of the panels I didn’t feel went that well, I wanted it to be a very fun but also thinky panel but I think there were a couple of people on the panel who just wanted to squee and gush about how cute Jack and Ianto are together. In fact one member came prepared to derail the discussion if it got too serious (too serious for who?) which really kinda raised my hackles. Maybe she didn’t mean it that way but it came across as her deciding the panel was gonna go her way no matter what, it just stank of privilege. 

So yeah I brought up the devaluing of women’s sexuality throughout the series and the way that they aren’t allowed to have the same experiences of their male counterparts. The invisibility of “the lesbian” in the show was another thing that was brought up and how casting Jack as an alien allows some folks to detach and not address the sexuality of the character directly (the same thing that happens with all the POC on Stargate being aliens, but that’s a post for another time). And Jackie piped up from the audience and brought up the problem with terming some of the kisses on the show “gay kisses”, which is that it sets up the default as all kisses are straight. The problem for me is that I felt like we didn’t really get to the meat of any of the issues because we kept getting somewhat derailed by people saying “ohhh so hot”, “oooh so pretty” but whatever.

The rest of the day was a bit of a blur, I know I attended some panels and they were probably super but nothing that really stuck out at me.  

I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss the Carl Brandon Society Party which I’m pretty sure happened on Saturday Night. Now first of all CBS put on the Opening Ceremonies on Friday evening which were a great big filk sing-along! There were songs about how WisCon was made for you and me, about each Guest of Honor, about all the good food that surrounded WisCon (I can attest to this!) and finally best of all Nisi Shawl’s filk song “Filk Music Ain’t Got No Soul”. It was a lot of fun and laughs were had all around.

Anyways on Saturday it was up to the CBS party where I drank C-52’s (B-52 with a M&M in it, C stand for Carl) renewed my membership, donated to the Octavia Butler Scholarship and ran into old friends and we talked about everything from the society itself to books that we had liked in the recent year. Then there was wandering from party to party until the crowded atmosphere became to much for us.

The night ended as I think all of mine did this WisCon, sitting in the bar with friends I only see once a year shooting the shit and getting hammered. By which I mean it was a very good time.  

Next up: WisCon Days 4, 5 & 5 1/2

Currently Reading: Changeling by Delia Sherman

*We-Sha-Sha has become shorthand, among certain folks, for the objectification/exotification of POC & cultural appropriation, pretendianism in particular. It’s origin is with Cassie Edwards, the romance novelist who the blog “Smart Bitches, Trashy Books” revealed was plagiarising chunks of her books from various other sources. Now a lot of her books have to do with the old west and a white woman being kidnapped by Native Americans only to join the group and fall in love with a Native man or some similar bit of a outdated trope. Plus they all have titles like “Savage Love”, “Savage Moon”, “Savage Bloodthirsty Native Man – Fear The Brown Folks!” okay so I made the last one up but you get the point. In one of these novels the heroine has super curly red hair but she talks about how she uses a special herb called we-sha-sha to darken and straighten her hair so she can fit in more with her adopted Native peoples. So yeah, People Against We-Sha-Sha! I even have a button :)