DEJA VU

This blog seems familiar to me. I don't think I've reviewed it, though?
I could check but let's not do that. I think it's best to let me go until I catch myself.
Pantryslut.
This seems so familiar--

1. I found my copy of Les Miserables. For some reason I feel compelled to note here that I am not a fan of the musical and that's not what inspired me to pick up this tome -- I have been meaning to read it for decades, actually, since before the musical became popular. I think I say this partly out of reflexive "I'm not trendy" punk attitudes, but also partly so you all know I am not going to be disappointed that it takes a full novel's worth of words before we even meet any of the more famous characters. And that's before the digressions about the sewer systems and such.

>1200 pages
>takes decades to read
just admit it's boring and you don't like it and you don't have to like everything classical just because academia tells you to.
I don't like Shakespeare. I think he's overwrought, his plays have serious pacing issues and all of his underlying ideas are ripped right from Dark Age writers with barely a thought given to adapting the underpinning philosophies of them for a then-modern audience.
He was a competent dialogue writer.
Know who else writes competent dialogue?
Stephen King.
I don't like Stephen King's writings either but he seems like a decent enough dude. I don't have a problem with him.
But to call him the Bard and devote high school classes to him?
I think not.

3. I love that Les Mis can be considered lightly abridged when one leaves "only" 100K words out of it. (I am reading the whole unabridged enchilada.)

For the record: 120-130k words is considered a full length novel.
You can omit an entire novel of text from Les Miserables and it's still considered only lightly abridged.
So clearly Victor Hugo had trouble getting to the fucking point.

A zillion and a half of you have probably already seen S. Bear Bergman's article in Slate today, on "gender-neutral" parenting and suchlike; if not, it's here.

Link cut because not on my blog--
and clearly EVERYONE is up on the latest gender-neutral parenting techniques.

In my very early 20s, I was deep into fairy-tale revisionism. Especially feminist fairy tale revisionism. Back then it wasn't as popular as it soon became, and most of the examples of what I was interested in were poetry. Lisel Mueller. Sandra Gilbert. Olga Broumas. Anne Sexton, of course. Of course.

Of course.
Rape rates in India?
Nah man, we're about women's rights here. Revising 3000 year old stories.
The amazing thing to me is how I'm an asshole for not caring about this shit while feminists ignore actual issues women have.

I've talked about this a little bit before, about how fairy tales offer both an alternative logic to organize stories around than the usual narrative thrust, and how fairy tales teem with ordinary girls being active. I was constructing my alternative canon, even though I didn't know it at the time.

Many of these texts -- and the spec-fic stories that were soon to follow, which I also read a lot of, hello Tanith Lee I still heart you like blazes -- liked to posit what happened after "happily ever after." What happened after the end? What really happened?

Also in my early 20s, I ran across a magazine called On Our Backs. I was smitten. (I blame photographer Phyllis Christopher, mostly). I was struck with a dream. It was a silly dream and I didn't take it seriously -- not to the letter, anyway. It was meant more symbolically. Someday, I would move to San Francisco. I would move to San Francisco and I would work for On Our Backs.

(I also thought I would go to grad school. I won't tell you here how many times and types of programs I've applied to. Just to put a pinprick in the way this is about to sound.)

Yes the heavy hitting issues.
I'm going to be a bigger women's right activist than almost every individual blog on Dreamwidth today:
I think rape in India is a serious problem that needs intense scrutiny and assistance from watchdog agencies and human rights organizations.
I know I've shit on raising awareness before (because it doesn't do anything) but at least I've actually talked about a serious issue women face and shouldn't and it has reached more people than read an average Dreamwidth.
Me: 1
them: 0

I moved to San Francisco in 1996.

In 1998, I went to work for the newly revived incarnation of On Our Backs.

In 1999, I quit after they failed to promote me.

Here's where the story ends.

What next?

Well, at the time, I got picked up by Black Books and spent five or so happy years doing lots of different tasks for them, from proofing manuscripts to editing anthologies to tons of publicity work. I also ran sex parties, which were our main fundraiser.

I ran sex parties for a while even after Black Books went bankrupt. And then I got pregnant and stopped. And the world changed, and the world moved on, and the owner of Black Books jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge last year, and I am still here, once again trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. With my time. With my talents.

"talents"

5 Must-Haves for Absolutely Fabulous Sex

Turkey baster--

1. Easy and Affordable Access to Reliable Birth Control

It's no coincidence that the so-called Sexual Revolution debuted shortly after the invention and dissemination of the Pill. And don't think social conservatives haven't noticed this, too, and this of course is behind their attempts to roll back access to birth control of all sorts. Pregnancy is only one of many health perils associated with partnered sexual activity and it's only a risk if you engage in a very narrow – but very fun – range of sexual acts with parts that are biologically compatible for facilitating human reproduction, but still. Even if you don't have any cause to use it yourself, birth control, cheap and easy, means more fun for everyone. A rising tide floats all boats, as it were.

THE MORAL DECAY
OF AMERICA
>implying societies didn't have (relatively) sophisticated forms of birth control since the Roman days
someday people will finally learn that there really is no new idea.

2. Affordable and Accessible Child Care

So, you used those anatomical parts of yours to facilitate human reproduction anyway; that doesn't mean you're not still entitled to a robust and varied sex life. As many people in this room already know, I am a parent of twins and thus this issue has particular relevance to my life at the moment. But seriously, folks. Child care. 

So you didn't take the cheap birth control effectively and now it's the state's fault?
Take care of your own fucking kid you spoiled prat.
That's a British term I am desperate to shoehorn into American language, incidentally.
That and poofter are the two terms I regret not being able to say unpretentiously.

So you can go see the gynecologist when something's up down there or you can get to the imaging lab when it's time for your annual mammogram. Actually I think my mammography lab does have a little waiting room with coloring books off to the side. But it also has a quiet room with waterfalls and plush white robes and lots of oversized photo prints of flowers and butterflies. You know. In case standing around half-naked without your bra on doesn't make you feel feminine enough. But I digress.

But while I'm digressing, how about number three?

That's not child care.
That is prenatal care.
Hey I'm not about to tell a mother what's what on birthing babies but you know you probably should check your terminology a little.
I've learned in these past few weeks that to a feminist words can mean whatever the fuck you want them to mean and dictionary definitions are for the patriarchy but seriously child care and prenatal care and neonatal care are different things.

3. Universal Health Care

Because being able to pay for annual mammograms and trips to the gynecologist and a little prostate probing and whatnot is really quite handy when it comes to maintaining a long-term healthy and happy sex life.

Hey, I can hear you thinking. Isn't this mission accomplished? Didn't we just get that, along with a buggy government web site and an ugly and stupid Congressional tantrum and all that? But no, dear listeners, I am not referring merely to the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. I am talking universal health care. I want single-payer and I want the death of insurance companies and their metaphorical heads mounted on pikes. Yes. I want well-funded public health initiatives and I want vaccines and I want everyone to get equal coverage because I'm a radical like that. You were starting to get that clue, right?

Good, because number four is…

>Metaphorical heads
WHY NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE IN THIS COUNTRY.

4. Guaranteed Minimum Income

Because nothing is quite the bone-killer as economic insecurity and anxiety. Except maybe actual poverty. So yes. Food stamps help you get laid, but they're not enough. A guaranteed minimum income would relieve so much misery and allow us some of the leisure time needed to pursue truly fulfilling sex lives. Or at least practice masturbation until we've really got it right. Right? Because nobody should have to choose between lube, and food.

That just leaves…

What does this have to do with sex, again?
I can't believe it took me until #4 to realize this but what the fuck am I reading?

5. An End To Rape Culture

Not, please note, an end to rape – although that's certainly helpful too – but an end to rape culture. That is, a social culture which defines some of us as sexual actors…and some of us as sexual objects. And you don't have to be concerned with objects granting consent, see? They're objects. What's more, only some folks even get to aspire as high as objects – if your body or your gender or your personality is nonstandard – or you're old -- forget it. So. An end to a culture in which it's OK to say something like "I'll donate a hundred dollars to breast cancer awareness if you let me motorboat your boob." Does that not seem like a clear-cut example of rape culture to you? Think it through. 

Surprising fact about this entry bullshit non-entry about sex but is really just a thinly veiled attempt at pushing an agenda: I've cut about 2/3 of it out.
Oh yeah she goes on.

The hardest thing about Simone's gender identification stuff is dealing with stereotype threat. God, how I loathe the mere idea of being seen as one of "those parents." Forcing her whacko ideals onto her poor defenseless child. It would be so much more humane to tell the dear, "no, you're just a girl," or at the very least, to pick one and stick to it.

So do that?
If it's humane, you know, she's like 5 or 6 so she might need some guidance.
If you just say "do what you think" then how will that go when she can't do what she wants?
As a kid I had all sorts of weird thoughts.
A part of growing up is getting a better perspective on life.
Along with killing all sense of childlike wonder.

The second hardest is dealing with gender policing from other children. Adults are no sweat. Other kids -- especially kids older than mine -- are tricky. A&S look up to older kids. They believe what older kids tell them. They're more skeptical of adults.

Yesterday it was April's turn to get gender policed. She was wearing Spider-Man shoes and a boy on the bus told her those were for boys. She laughed like it was the funniest joke in the world. Dodged another one. So far, so good.

No light up shoes or shoes with roller skates in them. If I can't wear anything that awesome you're not allowed to either.

1. My father has been reading Proust as part of his "now that I am retired I can Read All The Great Books" project. However, it turns out that Proust is the perfect example for my father of why hewing closely to the canon is not always so rewarding. He reports that he finds Proust a great stylist, but he is repelled by the author's nostalgia for a petit bourgeois upbringing that shows no awareness of the suffering of others such a life is predicated upon. I am laughing up my sleeve, dear readers. 

COME
LET US ESTABLISH A NEW CANON.
So we've got Homer, of course.
Dante--
Dumas--
Machiavelli--
Marcus Aurelius
Julian--
Musashi.
Luo Guangzhong.
Wu Cheng'en.
Julius Caesar.
Virgil.
Cao Xueqin.
Herman Hesse.
Frank Herbert.
William Gibson.
George Orwell.
John Milton.
Eiji Yoshikawa.
Jorge Luis Borges.
Yukio Mishima.
Catallus.
Ludovico Ariosto.
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Gore Vidal.
Robert Graves.
Bram Stoker.
Arthur Conan Doyle.
Edgar Allan Poe.
Dan Abnett.
Robert E. Howard.
H.P. Lovecraft.
Robert A. Heinlein.
Isaac Asimov.
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
There we go.
I think that's a solid basis.
Yeah that's a fairly multicultural list, even. Should keep the pussy sensitives happy--
No women, though.
Well they'll be happy for a second until they realize that.
Got a few modern (ish) writers.
Oh this blog.
I did review this. Turns out the person is some kinda gender something or other I can't keep this shit straight.
Well welcome back. There are about 15 people who regularly post to Dreamwidth so expect to encounter them.
Blogging is dead as dead.
There's the other entry.
Not even that long ago--
Fuck.
2 of you kants already read this so you'll miss where I go back and edit it because I forgot the song of the now.
Unless you're diligent and reread.