In the Hills, the Hippies

In a few bare hours, I'm off to Swampstock XIII and likewise more or less off the radar for a short while. Some of yez I'll be seeing there.

And it gives me the warmest of rock-star warm fuzzies to note that OVO will be taking the stage on Saturday to perform a whole set's worth of material that will be new to lots of people in attendance because it didn't exist a year ago. Woot. (Take that, bitchy inner critic! I have Accomplishments!)

Anyway, wish us safe journey and good weather, and I'll let you know how it goes.

Zhongguo Boogie

You probably know this already, but Caren and Niels have arrived safe and sound in the Middle Kingdom, after some small red-tape delays. Everyone wish them well and send them love!

The Truth About Cats and Dogs

I have a strong suspicion that there have been conversations going on in my house not unlike this one.

Someday I'll Grow Up to Be a Beautiful Girl (reprise)

You Are 52% Lady

You're part lady, part modern woman. Etiquette is important to you, but you brush aside rules that are outdated or silly.

Are You A Lady?

...Well, hello.

Word Virus

Literature is holy to me, which again shows how much I know about holiness.
- Kurt Vonnegut

I've been tagged by Jean, who had it of Antiprincess, who got tapped by Belledame; so on with the memeage:

1. One book that changed your life: Er, "the good ones all do" is a copout, so I'm going with The Hobbit, which made the kind of impression on me at six that you never get over.

2. One book you have read more than once: Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett; I go back to it every December as proof against Scrooginess.

3. One book you would want on a desert island: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It rewards rereading in every way I need a book to do.

4. One book that made you laugh: Anansi Boys. Niel Gaiman's extraordinary sense of humor is often glossed over even by his fans, but this one has him in top form.

5. One book that made you cry: It's tempting to say Little, Big, out of sheer despair that I'll never write like John Crowley. But that's another copout answer, so: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I mean, who didn't?

6. One book you wish had been written: One more Fafhrd and Grey Mouser novel.

7. One book you wish had never had been written: She Said Yes - the one about the girl who was supposedly shot at Columbine for saying she believed in God. Because first, that never happened; and second, shame on this poor kid's family for using her tragedy to fuel uptight Midwestern Christianity's ongoing sick martyr complex.

8. One book you are currently reading: The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, by Daniel Pinkwater.

9. One book you have been meaning to read: The Mind of the Raven. Actually, I've started it; I just keep meaning to pick it back up. In the haven't started at all category: Iron Council, by China Mieville.

10. Now tag five people: Er, I'm not gonna actually pressure anyone to do this. But I'd love to see The Missus, Spyder, Vishal, Maija, Andy, and Big Tony give their answers. (Yes, I know that's six.)

Into the Sunrise

Over the weekend we bid a fond zai jian to Caren and Niels, who are going to have to settle for what passes for Chinese food in China for a year or so; we're already looking forward to being able to take them out for proper Chinese when they get back to the States.

And oh, yeah: we miss them already.



Safe journey, sweethearts. May the Lord of Beginnings shine His light and grace upon you as you start your grand Adventure, and bring you back home and whole again.

Yes, We Have No Sense of Subtext

Belledame skewers an especially deserving example of premillenial loonyism; I contribute, with my usual sense of subtlety and tact.

Ring of Fire

Today or possibly yesterday was Lughnasadh, though considering the truly awful heat wave currently boiling this slice of the Mid-Atlantic, I'm reluctant to set anything on fire I don't have to, and dancing is right the hell out; one assumes the gods will understand.

As compensation, though, I offer this, which I wrote ten(!!) years ago and, alas, probably works better sung than read:

Fields of grain of golden hue
Make a crown for Master Lugh
Gather round beneath the tree
Pass the jug of Barley Bree
Light the pipe and hand it here
Crow as loud as Chanticleer
Howl a love song at the stars
Glorious on Lughnasadh

Honor Him who blessed the land
The Bright One of the Skillful Hand
Keep the Goddess's accord
Her union with the Great Horned Lord
Swear by Oak and Ash and Thorn
Swear by blood of Barleycorn
Say you'll love me near and far
Marry me on Lughnasadh

Come and join the feast of golden Lugh
Give a little back of what you grew
Scrape the fiddle, dance and play the drum
Turn around and see what you've become

Holly King is standing by
Waits to watch the summer die
Take your fill before it ends
Save a seed to plant again
Merry meet and merry part
And merry come back to the start
Dance the dance of all we are
Round and round on Lughnasadh

Bright blessings, all; keep cool out there.

Very Seldom Naughty

Good show last weekend - or at least we more or less looked like we know what we're doing, which goes a long way.

Here's a brief rock star montage, for them of yez that missed it:









I'm off to WV tonight, and from thence to Cleveland to see Les Claypool make thumping noises and be disturbing; and after that, we're having a big rehearsal and bandthink session, so there will hopefully be more OVO-related good news here soon.

On the domestic side of things, we added four wee paddy-paws to the L-K household over the weekend. Meet Willow:



She's been having a grand time of it so far, even if it's been challenging convincing her big brother that she isn't the best squeaky toy ever.

(All photos by Miss Mita, who we are going to be missing very badly all too soon.)

I Have No Text and I Must Comment

Weird glitch with comments in the last few days: you can post 'em, but they don't register with the comment count. So if you've left one since yesterday, it really does show when you click through, even though it reads as 0 on the front page. But you probably noticed that already.

I assume this is some strangeness on the part of BackBlog that will resolve itself in due course.

Come On You Stranger, You Legend, You Martyr

Syd Barrett, dead at 60.

David Bowie, from the linked article: "His impact on my thinking was enormous. A major regret is that I never got to know him. A diamond indeed."

See also the BBC's obit.

Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands
The bleeding hearts and the artists
Make their stand

A fond farewell; the world is sadder and less strange today. Wish you were here.

(Hat-tip to Antiprincess, on whose site I read the news.)

Update: Read this too. Heartbreaking and lovely.

That Space-Cadet Glow

In case anyone's still watching this space who wants to know and doesn't yet: OVO will be playing at The Cup this Saturday, and it looks like we'll be rolling out some new material. It's our first show since St. Patrick's Day, so I think this may actually count as a reunion concert of some kind. Come on out for the ren-folk proggoth love!

Girlie-Manifesto

I've been seeing a lot of references to this lately, but hadn't clicked through to watch until today (appropriately enough - not to mention we spent the afternoon watching Serenity, which has plenty of things itself to say on the subject of Independence). And can I just say:

Wow.

Damn.

And yes.

Strange Visions

It's probably much too early to start getting excited about this; but not too early, perhaps, to fervently wish for Alan Cumming and Ian Holm in the title roles.

Ra and June

This month's been a whirlwind, Faithful Readers, and I've been off the radar as much as not; forgive my sparseness of discourse lately.

I was in NYC for MoCCA a coupla weeks ago; thence to WV this past weekend; and tomorrow I'm leaving for NEARfest, which looks to be especially good this year - I'll do an after-action report if I have the opportunity.

And somewhere in there I picked up the new Current 93 and haven't had a chance to give it the listening it deserves, though some encouraging reviews continue to get me all aflutter to do so.

That's all I got for the moment. Real Serious Blogging will commence when the dust settles. Meanwhile, here's hoping everyone had a lovely Solstice. Sumer is icumen in!

Old Dead Calendar

It's 06/06/06 today! I hope you're all enjoying your Scandinavian death metal albums and Black Masses.

Meanwhile, slacktivist commemorates the day with one of his immensely sensible meditations; and of course there's some clever Beastliness going on over at Making Light. Me, I think I'll just relax with a bit of soothing music.

(Of course, whether or not 666 has any apocalyptic significance is subject to debate, depending partly on which version of Nero's name you crunch through the gematria; but nobody released any dubious remakes last Thursday, and besides, I have a soft spot for the classics.)

Pick a Window!

This most Erisian of dates marks the anniversary of the Second Defenestration of Prague. Celebrate appropriately.

They Eat of the Beef, and Enjoy to Look at the Bosoms

The wise and excellent Sage talks sensibly and at some length about boobs.

The First Rule of Project Mayhem

Stuff there's no social protocol for: Looking at your boss's computer at work and noticing she has a World of Warcraft icon in the Start menu, and sharing that split-second moment of nerd telepathy where you agree to pretend that you didn't see it and don't know what it is.

The Star to Every Wandering Bark

I blinked and missed the last two weeks, most of which were spent new-parenting with Monty.

He's growed a bit since then, too. We love him to pieces.

"A lot of filing, giving things names"

You've likely seen it already, but Making Light set off another round of the neverending fanfic debate yesterday, with this heretical apologia:

Good fiction gets under our skin. It can change the way we see the world. But whatever its effect, it’s a significant experience. It would be a bizarre thing—unnatural, even—for writers to not engage with that experience. ... In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn’t exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it.

Regrettably, if predictably, lots of people showed up to make a lot of generally unconvincing arguments that no, actually, fanfic is just Bad, because it's lazy, or it's creatively bankrupt, or it's just creepy, or it detracts from original works in some way that no one's really able to define; all of which mostly serves to show that people with a squick-reaction to something process their experiences very selectively, including debate on the subject of the squick in question.

I get a bit prickly about this sort of thing, I think in part because a lot of the reactions I see sound distressingly like the way folks who squick-react to homosexuality talk about it, even in the face of long and patient and thoughtfully-presented argument. (Indeed, the more I think about it, the more the parallels are startling: No matter how much you reasonably point out that, look, this is a phenomenon that's been around for as long as we've had history, at least, and it's actually incredibly diverse in its manifestations, has often been actually sanctified, and, really, the closer you look at things, the more you can see it come up in all kinds of notable contexts - there will always be someone who can't stop talking about omg the indecency, and the immaturity, and how dangerous it would be to break down those walls, and if we legitimize it it'll just erode the Real Thing, and please won't someone think of the children? and look, it's just icky, okay? and besides, it was different for the Greeks.) One commenter a ways down the thread objected to the use of the word "provincial" to characterize anti-fanfic attitudes, that that word implies small-mindedness - to which I thought, Yes, it absolutely does, and rightly so. It's a kind of thinking that says This Sort of Thing is Good, but This Sort of Thing is Bad in very broad terms, and comes up with myopic reasons to justify it; I don't like that philosophy aimed at people, and I don't much like it aimed at Art either.

What I find particularly interesting, though, is that almost none of the objectors have really engaged with the examples that have been brought up that, if not for issues of copyright, all kinds of works of acclaimed and established literature - from the Iliad to King Lear to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead to Grendel to Wicked - would unquestionably be categorized as "fanfic" by modern standards. The few reactions have generally been to assert or imply that those don't count, but without giving a convincing argument for why they don't. The only reasons given seem to me to be very weak, and ignore or sidestep the opening thesis entirely.

All of which has made me think that maybe there's some other phenomenon at work here. I've been sitting for a while on a half-assed and crackpot theory that one of the psychological axes that people show up on is whether they're wired to be connectors or categorizers. A connector instinctively draws parallels and sees the common qualities of things; a categorizer instinctively makes distinctions and understands how things may be separated. Obviously, they're both important ways of engaging the world (note how I'm doing both in this post!), and they yield up different ways of understanding and processing knowledge. But I think that realizing that many people are inclined strongly one way or the other might serve to illuminate why it can be so difficult to come to agreement on certain things.

I don't really want to privelege one over the other, despite being a connector myself (and I married a diehard categorizer, so there you go), but I do wonder if some of the brouhaha over in the fanfic discussion has its roots in a hardcore categorizer mindset that has a hard time seeing boundaries blur and needs the world to be tidier and better-organized than it actually is. I know there are people who get very upset with ambiguities and edge-cases, even in things like genre classifications (and especially in things like sexuality). I wonder if addressing this idea directly would lead to any interesting social breakthroughs; we do live in a culture that is, in many ways, in love with categorization, and resistant to the notion that "they're more what you'd call guidelines."

Has anyone heard of serious thought given to this or a similar idea? I'm certainly not up on my psychological science, so I don't know if this has all been said better long since. Though it is, of course, already on its way to being an old joke: "There are two kinds of people in the world - those who divide everything into categories, and those who don't."

(Cross-posted on the LJ, which I'm reviving after long silence.)

Someday I'll Grow Up to be a Beautiful Girl

I missed out on Blog Against Heteronormativity Day Saturday, more's the pity; but a post on my new favorite feminist blog says everything I'd have wanted to anyway:

But I do think that until such time as it's genuinely not seen as shameful to be "girlie," we're not gonna make much more progress. Not in feminism, not in the gay rights movement, not on a number of fronts, in fact, that on the surface might seem to have little to do with gender.

Because the dirty little secret, which has become a bit more open these past few years, perhaps, is that at the end of the day, "girlie man" isn't just an insult to actual girlies (that is, people with girl bits), or implicitly homophobic, or transphobic, although it's certainly those things as well. It is a very effective club to keep men--ALL men--in line. Just how much violence is committed in the name of proving one's non-sissyhood? How much wasted energy and misdirected passion? I am thinking: quite a lot.

She also gives a well-deserved tip of the hat to Joss Whedon, girlie-man par excellence. RTWT.

A Bottomless Cup

For the benefit of anyone who might be dropping by here after recently acquiring one of my CDs, I declare this Open Thread I.

Welcome! Please feel free to leave a comment, introduce yourself, and join in the general conversation here. The same goes for anyone who's been lurking and just needs an excuse.

As for youse regulars: if you haven't already, check out our new baby.