Dreamtime Drinne

Part 6 - lets pretend nothing interrupted the businnes of books . . .

2011-11-11T08:41:00.000-08:00

This is us - pretending there is nothing to see here - except that My BackPack is Pink has come to Poppetropolis.

I had mentioned that exciting things were happening - well they were - and they are happening so there's that. And now that means we need a recap:

In Part 1 I explain why I'm thinking about books in their physical and e-book forms and what they mean and why I'm writing the tour

In Part 2 I tour the Books that Became Decor and was startled to find that many of them were decor because I didn't really like them much

In Part 3 I tour the Stack of Books Under the Window - which are primarily hardcovers and discuss the system by which books were supposed to enter and leave the bedroom

In Part 4 I tour the Books in the Hidden Bookshelf and the history of bookshelves in my former bedrooms and the place of books in my house and my emotional landscape. I even surprised me.

Part 5 is this one - it's not terribly long. it's the books by the side of the bookshelf.

Now it's time for the e-books because I'm a little bit obsessive and refuse to write about anything else until I've finished what I've started.

Section 1. Most of the E-books I owm are consumed in various ways

I belong to a profession that requires technical and managerial. I have gotten those books through Books 24X7 for several years.

The cosmic poppet is showing off a book about instructional design.

I didn't really think much about Kindle because I didn't like e-ink screens as much as some other people ( I once again state for the record that this is a personal preference and I think Kindles are awesome technology and bought my own mother a Kindle which she loves and even sent her a birthday present of a Kindle book instead of an e-card which was great! Liking one thing better than another equally good thing does not make the thing I like slightly less "bad")

I wasn't really sure I would like e-books because as a multimedia designer and project manager I was well aware of things like "eye slide" on screens and retention rates vs paper for visual learners. The brain processes things read with light slightly differently than thing read when reflecting light ( solid objects like ink and paper). But then I went to the World Fantasy convention to meet Lisa and I had three plane transfers which meant that carrying a whole bunch of books plus our actual mixed media art was going to be cumbersome. I was starting to really enjoy Questia.com as well and figured well if I was doing professional and pleasure research reading on my computer maybe I could try some light airplane reading on my phone.

I tried the iPhone Kindle App and everything I didn't like about the physical form factor of the Kindle itself was gone and the Kindle app was great - easy to read, loved the physical act of sliding my finger to turn the page, was able adjust color, size and pretty much everything I would want to adjust. Kindle and IPhone! Two great tastes that taste great together! Not everything is Highlander.

Section 2 - Here are the Books

I was hooked. Just like any good dealer the first one was free: His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novick

Quickly followed by Throne of Jade and I now have the Black Powder War which I started but did not finish.

Other books I liked but didn't necessarily want to pay trade size price for that I considered my "light" or "solo" reading made it onto the iphone kindle.

Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire

Oldies I liked

The Trials and Tribulations of Myron Blumberg, Dragon by Mike Resnick which apparently isn't there any more

The new I wanted to check out but didn't think I would want to keep forever

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl Who Played with Fire

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson

The books I kept lending out and needing to buy new copies of

A History of God by Karen Armstrong

Books I really, really wanted but I knew no one else in The House would

The Magician's: A Novel by Lev Grossman

The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventure's in Narnia by Laura Miller

Reference and religious reading that only matters to me:

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions by Karen Armstrong

The Case for God - actually recommended reading by my Early American History Prof as a way to discuss delicate subjects clearly and non-offensively - Karen Armstrong again

My People's Prayer Book; Traditional Prayers, Modern Commentaries by Lawrence A. Hoffman

And I found that sometimes I was downloading books so I had a quick copy when I needed it for school or an audition:

The Attack by Yasmina Khandra

Buried Child by Sam Shepard

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

But the thing that convinced me I wanted an e-reader was this

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

It was 2am, I could not sleep. My Perfectly Normal Husband was sound asleep. In single days I would have popped on a light and read until I fell asleep again. In pre-Iphone days I had a choice of waking him up by getting up to go downstairs or trying to think about wrestling with a book light that might have woken him up. Iphone let me not just read under the covers providing a self lighting book, but it let me go and buy a new book at 2 am with one click. I had done this before mostly with my Women of the Underworld popcorn reading leading to the e-book collection of :

Angelic

Frostbitten

Living with the Dead ( Women of the Otherworld Book 9)

Men of the OtherWorld all by Kelly Armstrong

Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales edited by Ellen Datlow

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

and my copy of The Jeeves Collection by P.G. Wodehouse

but Bryson's book, which I no longer remember why I thought would be a good idea, was a different kind of 2am impulse purchase. I am fascinated by the history of things and how people used them and why people used them and how little people know about what brought about what they're using. This book was exactly like someone who thought about things the same way I did but they had waaay more source material and research time than I did. It was a pleasant but not "light" read. And I read it on my phone. And I wanted to read it on a slightly bigger screen but I loved having it right wherever I was at all times because all my Kindle apps shared the same library ( the cloud isn't really new). But I wasn't going to buy a unitasker. If I was buying tech it needed to do more than one thing. The iPad already existed but I was going to wait. And besides, if I'm working towards that master's degree in interactive instructional tech then I might want something besides an apple item. I did try to buy a Xoom, but for the things I wanted from a tablet it just wasn't there yet. I waited until about 4 months after it's release to get the iPad2 since I knew I was going to be asked to develop in iOS for school anyway.

So here's an interesting problem - it seems like I should be able to link you to the IBookstore since that's where I got the books from but it doesn't have an online presence that I could find. Thus cutting down on potential sales. This is the only time I have ever truly run into a "walled garden" issue with an Apple product because it looks like IBooks only exists as an app. Hmmn I'll link the one current book release to Amazon. Oh irony . . . .

My IBooks Store has:

A Doll's House by Ibsen

Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Caroll

The Balticon Pocket Program

Winne the Pooh

The Velveteen Rabbit ( so I can read to bored children that aren't mine)

H.G. Wells by John Davys Beresford

My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding because it had Esther Friesner in it

Waking the Witch - a sample of a Kelly Armstrong YA

and the IBook store also keeps the pdfs I download form the Internet

However I find that I end up using Kindle on iPad even though I have no intention of ever buying a physical Kindle. Part of that is I'm an Amazon Prime member, but most of it is that right now I like the software better especially with notes I write and footnotes. The readability is even I would switch out one for the other if there were issues of exclusivity I also run a Stanza ereader on the Ipad and now I can access both Books 24X7 and Questia.com from the Ipad so a single devices is now used for almost all my e-reading.

So since I got the Ipad

American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: the Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee by Karen Abbot

Hobson's Choice by Harold Brighouse

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms by Ethan Gilsdorf

The Magician King: A Novel by Lev Grossman ( the sequel to The Magicians, although I have to admit I wasn't expecting one. )

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The Sleeping Beauty ( Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms) by Mercedes Lackey

The Book of Five Rings Musashi Miyamoto

Design guide "MON" Momoyo Miyamoto

The Fall of the Roman Republic by Plutarch ( which I got because of the Cleopatra book)

Cleopatra: A Biography by Duane W. Roller- I couldn't find a source that just used historically verifiable context when writing about her instead of finding a supporting quote for a throwaway paper I ended up reading this whole book because I was able to research it on the fly. It's a good book but it's straight up history no fluff or speculation. I loved it - it's why I asked for the Schiff book for the Holidays.

Aesop's Fables - because it had been a while since I read the originals.

Section 3 - What do eBooks and eReaders do to me as a reader?

Well the 2 am impulse buy insomnia read is a completely e-reader dependent phenomena. The ability to no longer "lose" books I loan out ( I can get an e-copy and lend the physical copy with no worries) I am waiting patiently for an ebook version of Silverlock by John Myers Myers.

But really the thing that seems to have come back to me is the ability to read a pleasure book all night in one sitting if I want to. The iPad is very, very comfortable for me, moreso than the physical forms of many of the books I tend to read these days. So I read for pleasure more. I'm also more willing to take chances on recommendations because the costs are slightly lower and I don't have to deal with the physical versions of the books taking up space before or after. But mostly I buy more books because I can find what I want and I don't have to worry about whether or not there are enough "physical" copies at the bricks and mortar store. I love a good old curated bookstore but when I go to a big box chain the reason I'm there is I need the physical book right that second. If they have to order it in I can do that too from their own website.

I try to balance this buy supporting Amazon sellers with Brick and Mortar stores attached to them when I need out of print stuff or Magic the Gathering cards.

I still love my physical books but nowadays if they're going to be here in the Meatworld there will have to be a reason. We'll see those books in the coming up next. And then we'll discuss what that means to authors, promotion, and publishing.

The final part is coming - the Books in the Bedroom Waiting for Me to Read Them.

If it's any consolation that list hasn't changed since I started the series this summer. It's like everything hit stasis.

Part 5 - The Nature of Books and Business - A Tour of the Books in My Bedroom

2011-07-27T08:06:00.000-07:00

Exciting things are happening in the world outside the Dreamtime, and as is custom the more time you spend with Meatworld things the less time you have in the Dreamtime.

Everything has a balance, everything has a cost. The loss of momentum with the tour echoes the loss of momentum for solving the issues that led to the book collecting in their home in the first place and now it is time to return to the Books in the Bedroom - specifically the Stack of Books Next to the Hidden Bookshelf.

A quick recap is in order -

In Part 1 I explain why I'm thinking about books in their physical and e-book forms and what they mean and why I'm writing the tour

In Part 2 I tour the Books that Became Decor and was startled to find that many of them were decor because I didn't really like them much

In Part 3 I tour the Stack of Books Under the Window - which are primarily hardcovers and discuss the system by which books were supposed to enter and leave the bedroom

In Part 4 I tour the Books in the Hidden Bookshelf and the history of bookshelves in my former bedrooms and the place of books in my house and my emotional landscape. I even surprised me.

Part 5 is this one - it's not terribly long.

Section 1 - The Poetry of What Remains

Stacked exactly as they are, the books create a poem of their own. A scarily accurate one:

The line between

the Receiving

Wandering Stars making money

Selling the Invisible a Mind at a time

Words on Fire: One woman's journey into the Sacred

The Queen's Bastard

"XXXholic" The Unicorn Sonata

Of course the actual titles by themselves are less connected:

The Line Between - by Peter S. Beagle

The Receiving : Reclaiming Jewish Women's Wisdom by Rabbi Tzirah Firestone

Wandering Stars - An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Fiction edited by Jack Dann ( I didn't enjoy it much)

Making Money - by Terry Prachett

Selling the Invisible -

A Mind at a Time -by Mel Levine

Words on Fire - One Woman's Journey into the Sacred - by Vanessa L Ochs

The Queens Bastard - by C.E. Murphy ( this was not my kind of book at all, I think it came into the house by way of The Girl)

XxxHolic Volume 12 by Clamp (The three X's are a mathematic variable not the the standard English Usage of the triple x in media)

The Unicorn Sonata by Peter S. Beagle

Section 2 - How did they get there?

The Peter S. Beagle books were books I purchased directly from him at the event where I met the Poppets, which, on reflection was 2008 not 2009 as I previously estimated. I had his books from that event in the pile of "to be read" on my night table. They are non-standard sized beautifully illustrated books.

Words on Fire and The Receiving were books I was reading to put a historical context on the role I was trying to create spiritually in my organized religion. They were a way of understanding the barriers that I was experiencing as a Meatworld woman trying to fuse what the religion actually meant with the way it was practiced. Words On Fire is how I feel about studying Torah and Talumd. The words of Torah and Talmud are the real Ner Tamid ( eternal light) represented by the continuos light infront of the Aron Khodesh (the fancy box we keep the torah scrolls in at synagoge). Words alone can burn you up. Practice and application in the Meatworld makes you confront the reality of those words.

In my religion, as in many others, that struggle is usually written and recorded by men, and they declare women as "more spiritual" or "closer to God" and "excuse" them from the extra work of learning and studying because they "don't need it". In reality, to be able to study and be transported by those fiery words, or see them as anything other than fairy stories or literal instruction ( both of which are huge mistakes in Judaism) you need someone taking care of the kids, the businesses, and the laundry. All of the work to create the ritual meals, ritual spaces and transportive theater has to be done by someone whose eyes aren't burning with spirit but whose hands are busy polishing the silver and cooking the festive meal before the deadline so those holy, holy men can come in and be transported.

To no one's surprise those busy hands belong to the "more spiritual" women so the "weak" men can go learn and feel and do.

There has always been a deep spirituality to the women's work because of the way Judiaism is constructed, and literacy is required of all Jews including women's Torah Study. but it has frequently been denied or denigrated by the men who write the "serious" religious works. It's changing, but not from the outside, not by adding to it, but from the inside from uncovering things. There is in Catholicism something called a "sin of omission" and Jewish theology and educational traditions are rife with it. It's not that learned women didn't exist, it's just that periodically their history, commentary and contributions just got edited out as irrelevant or ignored as unbelievable. Judaic authorities don't really get rid of anything though and as society needed less back breaking labor just to get through a day of meal preparation women started asking questions and found documentation and we're still trying to sort it out. I'm in that sorting it out place.

Judaism works best for me with a lot of spirituality and intent, and a moderate amount of organized religion, but I found the more I actually cared about the spiritual part the less the organized part was working for me. In synagogue people who were more spiritual than I was were also more set in their patterns of thinking, but people who practiced the way that I did weren't really looking at the words with their little crowns in the Torah and seeing the fire.

Dealing with The Girl's illness was making me less social and more confused. It was unpleasant for me to go to shul. Those books came into the House for me to hear other women's voices. The words were burning me, the people were scarring me, these books helped cool things down for my fevered brain.

The book A Mind at A Time is about dealing with non-standard brains, completely Meatworld, given to me by another parent of another child with a different cause but similar presentation. It's painful for me to read it. I've read chapters, I skip around. It's still in the bedroom because it's a good, important book but unfinished. Words and The Reciving are still in the bedroom because I am unfinished. A Mind at A Time in in the bedroom because I'm still in denial about the darker years of The Girl's illness.

Selling the Invisible is a book about advertising but I've found it really useful as a project manager and someone who champions process solutions. It also helps make some sense of the constant barrage of overt and subliminal marketing we are exposed to constantly, not in a cynical anti-consumerist manner but in understanding the place of services and ideas in a capitalistic market place and how to position them and yourself in relation to them. It keeps coming back into the bedroom because I keep referencing it in other things. Somwhere in it I keep thinking there is a synergy between needs/desires and usability. That sweet spot between design, process, and end user. It's not in an obvious place but I keep glimpsing it obliquely, and I keep going back to it for that reason.

Section 3 - The Business and Nature Part

None of these books would have been obtained as e-books, they all have stories behind them and some were gifted or recommended. Some were purchased specifically to support the author. Some were because I would only find what I was looking for from people who had already tried to answer some of the same questions. The Beagle books were new, the rest were purchased used.

Undeniably, they are a snapshot to the six months they represent - I was struggling with the after effects of being the parent of a seriously ill child, my place in my religion and my ability to present transformative suggestions to my workplace. Intermixed with shadows of the world I used to walk in comfortably, the Pratchett and the Beagle work being things I fell into. It was important to remember humor and fantasy and at the time I was working through all the other books, I possibly lost track of the lightness of both.

The next entry will be The Books I'm Getting Ready to Read, and they will include the e-books that have been purchased between the start of this series and Part 6. Then we can talk about what it means to support your author between e-books and physical books

Part 4 - The Nature of Books and Business - A Tour of the Books In My Bedroom -

2011-07-04T16:01:00.000-07:00

The Books on the Hidden Bookshelf

Recap: I am currently blogging in an experimental fashion about the books in my bedroom and their relationship to the larger issue of electronic books versus physical books. The experimental part is that instead of approaching each entry in a formal essay, I am allowing the associations that happen with the books to become a kind of stream of consciousness reflection on whether the physical books or the electronic books would make a difference or have the same impact. This has led to some unexpected things.

Part 1 is the intro where I explain why I'm doing it.

Part 2 is the beginning of the actual tour starting with The Books that Became Decor.

In this part I list all of the books and explain why they became permanent residents, and the system by which books are supposed to come in and leave the bedroom. I do offer reviews of the content of the books.

Part 3 is the tour of the Stack of Books by the Window

In this part I explain how the system started breaking down, why the books in the stack are there and the emotional meanings of books in general and bedrooms gone by. I list the books and talk a bit about bedrooms gone by and some really personal things. All because of books. Who knew?

And this is Part 4 the tour of the Books in the Hidden Bookshelf.

Section 1 - How Did That Bookshelf Get There?

The first thing about the bookshelf is that it shouldn't be there. In Part 3, I explained that I never intended for there to be a bookshelf in the bedroom. As much as I love my books (and love them I do) I really wanted my bedroom to be a cozy, light, but uncluttered place. I dream about old school, mahogany shelved, multistory formal libraries, but did not want my bedroom to be that space. And I know from experience that bookshelves bring clutter in a bedroom. Extensions of the shelving just become another flat surface to put things down in a hurry.

But the movement of books down to the family-room basement wasn't happening quickly and the tendency to re-read an entire series when a new book was added to it meant that we were bringing up books and needed someplace to hold them. It was possible that we just ran out of room to add shelves downstairs and needed to add shelves to our room as well.

The problem is shelving that didn't look cheap, actually wasn't cheap. I started looking for low impact cheap solutions that might take some of the pressure off. At no point did it occur to us to get rid of books. We go back to them.

What I really wanted to do was redo the basement and get some order into the overwhelmed book collection. The Perfectly Normal Husband's bookshelves were 36 inches wide and 13 inches deep. For the reference and serious books that was great, because the shelves supported non-standard sizing and he has some very large books. But the upper shelves were filled with paperbacks which he has three deep vertically and then two more layers horizontally. The shelves have bowed. This is bad.

I don't know what's on the shelves to find anything - this is non-functional. There are also shelves within the closets under the stairs - that's where most of the family room books went when the Perfectly Normal Husband moved in, there's still room there. On the other side are two smaller bookshelves that display hardcovers and collectible dolls. The family room is where our personal knick-knacks go. I would like to replace all of the shelving with something that is less deep but has more shelves, and instead of stacking the books between shelves actually have shelves between book layers to distribute the weight. So I planned after a great deal of research to use the Ikea Billy system. We'll lose some depth but not too much and it's cheap enough to keep adding to. But the Perfectly Normal Husband had two additional shelves he had never set up before, and so we used our much vaunted common sense and tried that first, because they were already paid for.

In truth, one single bookshelf will fix the overflow and back up that has led to extra books in the bedroom. However, it ended up that there was no "good" place to put that bookshelf once it was built, creating a completely different set of problems with the basement/family room space.

Since the majority of the books that were causing organizational issues were paperback, I had an epiphany - there was all sorts of DVD shelving now. Were paperbacks really different from CD in terms of depth? Because if they weren't I could acquire less massive, less expensive DVD shelving and still have it be decorative and useful, also keeping the footprint light. The bookshelf behind the door in the bedroom is an experiment with the Ikea Benno. It's only 6.5 is inches deep and I was right; paperbacks sit on it beautifully.

So I bought one to try it and placed it behind the door so that I could see if it really was as unobtrusive as I thought it might be. I was considering two thin shelves under the windows so that they would normally be covered by the drapes. When I sorted the bedroom overflow books into paperbacks and hard covers I put all of the paperbacks on this shelf. Which is how I discovered the reality of books coming back upstairs when we re-read series. It worked well but the idea is supposed to be that this shelf would be transitional, to hold books that were coming up or going down. It's been there for a year, because no action has been taken on fixing the family room issue and it's currently engaged in the process of proving my flat surface shelving = clutter theory.

Section 2 - The Top of the Shelf: With the Clockwork Dragon . . .

. . .has the packaging for two ornaments I am changing into food carts for the Poppet Circus. I should throw these out. In reality I am going to alter them so that their collectible value will be nill and I have customized storage for them when they are done. There's no point in saving their original packaging. Now that I've typed this I'm irritated with myself. The actual peices are already in the Poppet Circus tent. Grrr. Hold on.

Ok. They're in the trash. How stupid of me. I really had to type that to get rid of them? What was I waiting for?

Now on top of the shelf there is a Collector's DVD of Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra, a Pussycat Dolls exercise DVD, a copy of The Grass Dancer by Susan Power, the DVD of Bye Bye Birdie from the local theater production where I worked on costumes to support them but did not audition. A custom leather small sized note/sketch book and a copy of Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart.

There is also a ziplock baggie of costume jewelry that has to be returned to Holly the Costume Mistress from the last show we did. Chances are fairly high that it will be there until the start of the next show we do which will have the costumer's meeting in August. And there is one specialized lens cleaning cloth to be used on glasses and iPads.

Cleo is there because of a school requirement where I had to write an essay on the historical veracity of the film vs. actual history, it was both more and less accurate than I expected. The Pussycat Dolls are there because I need to exercise and I like dancing more than I like anything else. Plus their music is good for working out, I miss when they did covers of standards - but at the moment both spaces where I could work out with this DVD are not workout friendly so on top shelf it sits. The Grass Dancer belongs to The Boy, it was required reading and in my room because I was helping him with an essay. Wicked Plants was picked up at Longwood Gardens to while away some time while waiting for an outdoor performance.

Section 3 - The Top Row shown by the Cosmic Poppet

This shelf has a bit of archaeological information associated with it. The Jousting Dragons trilogy by Lackey was purchased in one fell swoop, most likely in the same trip that the Harold Coyles were purchased. I read semi-compulsively and therefore try not to buy trilogies or series until they are completed. My most recent mistake is thinking that people write trilogies anymore. The other thing is that you will see a number of Neil Gaiman books. This shows that the year these books were up in the bedroom was 2009.

In May of 2009 I attended Balticon and met Poppets, through Poppets I met Lisa, through Lisa's blog I met the broader range of Gaiman's work.

It's not that I had never been exposed to his work before. He was responsible for two of the comics that I collect, Books of Magic and Tim Hunter, but he had moved on from both of these titles by the time I was serious about them, so I knew him mostly through back issues. I have a long and complicated history with Good Omens so about every other year people who were serious fans of Gaiman would give me a copy of the book. That is another story, the story of how Neil Gaiman is haunting me. I had American Gods because I like the work of Charles deLint, and I had read Anansi Boys because I like the work of Charles de Lint. I loved Anansi Boys and thought American Gods was interesting. But meeting many of the people in and around Gaiman's world that May of 2009, made me more interested in his other work. I was trying to understand the level of loyalty, inspiration and intelligent but still fannish behavior. So I started with the things I already had. Then when the friend whom I was helping at Balticon found out I was finally interested he insisted I read Sandman. I can honestly say I would have been frustrated with it in it's monthly comic book format however I adored it in the collected trade editions where I could read it like a graphic novel. I hunted them down in their complete set from Vertigo using bricks and mortar comic shops, actual bookstores and the internet. I made sure that all of the forms of commerce got my money.

Sandman is brilliant. I inadvertantly had read something featuring his Death a while before. So during 2009, when given the opportunity, I bought Neil Gaiman's work because even when it wasn't phenomenal it was always interesting.

Section 4 - The Books on the Second Shelf Down

What the Dickens - Gregory Maguire
Personal Demon - Kelley Armstrong (Just for the record WTF does that cover have to do with the story? The cover on my shelf doesn't look a thing like the one in the link)
No Humans Involved - Kelley Armstrong
The Snow Queen - Mercedes Lackey
The Prince Commands - Andre Norton
Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman
1633 David Weber and Eric Flint
1632 Eric Flint
Ring of Fire - edited by Eric Flint
Grantville Gazette

This shelf has the only "normal sized" Gregory Maguire paperback I own. I enjoyed it. I appreciate his use of words and the way he plays with ideas. This is not a fairy tale, although it is a something that involves fairies. On this shelf are three books that would not be taking up literal space if I had an e-reader at the time. The Kelley Armstrongs and the Lackey. The Women of the Otherworld series I buy the way my mother used to buy romance novels. I like her characters and her magic structure and her pulp-light mentality. I am curious as to what happens next but after six of them I don't need them physically. They work great on an e-reader even when it was just my iPhone.

The Snow Queen is part of The Five Hundred Kingdoms one of the absolute lightest frothiest fun worlds Lackey has written. It's on the Luna imprint which is supposed to be some sort of romance/fantasy hybrid label ( most of those suck - Luna is trying to make it not suck). While the intro pieces were interesting Lackey's is the only one I kept buying the follow ups for - but once again it's light and fun and I bought The Sleeping Beauty and Dragon in Distress on Kindle which worked out kind of perfect. I won't be purchasing a physical version of Five Hundred Kingdoms until the series looks to be finished and then I might want the full set for the shelf.

Section 5 - On the third shelf down from the top

The Plutonium Blonde by John Zakour and Lawrence Ganem
The Radioactive Redhead by John Zakour and Lawrence Ganem
The Doomsday Brunette by John Zakour and Lawrence Ganem
Sun in Glory and other tales of Valdemar edited by Mercedes Lackey
Broken by Kelley Armstrong (Another WTF cover that would have made me ignore this darn book. What the hell is going on there marketing people?)
The Tourmaline by Paul Park
The White Tyger by Paul Park
A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park (It was the cover art that made me take a chance on the book)
The Wizard of Karres by Merecedes Lackey, Eric Flint and David Freer
Myth Gotten Gains by Robert Asprin and Jodi Lynn Nye
Druid's Sword by Sara Douglass
Immortal Poems edited by Oscar Williams
Men at Arms by Terry Prachett

It was the covers that attracted me to the John Zakour/Lawerence Ganem books and my desperate wish for anything new and not pretentious in SF. I was getting a wee bit overwhelmed with urban fantasy, was losing my patience with epic fantasy and wanted my escapism to actually be escapsist. I like my epic fantasy and my SF to be political and have fantastic encounters grounded in real motives. I like exploring the economic and social impact of fantasy resources on standard forms of government and sociological constructs. I also like intersting characters. It's best when they have both. So this is an interesting shelf in terms of the experiment.

I bought Myth Gotten Gains from childhood loyalty. I've been with Skeeve since the beginning. I believe that I would have picked that book up in physical form under any circumstances. Broken was one of the early Kelley Armstrong purchases ( I keep using her full name because Karen Armstrong is also in my personal collection and has much more impact and meaning ) so I probably would have bought that physically as well. But Wizard of Karres I purchased on a business trip because I needed something to read and Flint, Freer and Lackey wrote a piece of serious Fantasy called "The Shadow of the Lion" that I really, really liked a lot. I most likely would have bought this on Kindle if it were available, and there's a book that preceedes it that I don't have that is still not available on Kindle or iBooks. So I'll wait until it is. It was good but not as good as the books in their "Heirs of Alexandria" series. I don't need to have it physically. Druid's Sword is part of the "Troy Game Series" I will most likely Kindle it's continuation and buy a used copy to finish the series on the shelf. That is more along the lines of the non-fluffy fantasy I enjoy.

And then there is the Paul Parks- A Princess of Romania and it's associated books. If I had read them as an adolescent I have no idea how I would have reacted. The series never explored the areas I really wanted to see but was still good. The work made me think, made me want to know more, the writing had depth, the character had flaws not quirks. When I read it it made me want to write, because I thought the ideas that weren't explored were interesting enough for me to explore them on a story of my own. I am still not ready to write fiction though, even for myself. I will read Paul Parks now on his name alone, not because he was brilliant (although he was very, very good) but because I followed along with him even when I didn't agree with where he was going. There is something compelling in his work. I don't know if I would read him electronically though, I am glad I have these books physically, the fourth one was in the Stack by the Window. Which leads to my problem with series. I have 3 paperback and 1 hardcover because I couldn't stand to wait a year to find out how it resolved. And I had both a discount and a coupon. How will I shelve the complete series?

Immortal Poems I've had since I was a member of the National Forensic League in High School. I still reference it often. Poems still feel like they should be on paper, perhaps because they are such ephemeral snippets in the the first place I like them solid.

Section 5.5 - the tiny shelf -

Remember that this bookshelf is really a DVD media shelf where I rearranged the heights to accomodate books. When I finished I had a narrow shelf left and rather than declare it "extra" I laid a few books across it horizontally. If I use this solution for larger scale book storage I will do the same thing. Of course I did happen to notice that it's perfectly sized for poppets to hang about.

What if : The World's Foremost Historians Imagine What Might Have Been - Audio Books

Volume 1

Volume 2

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

Fragile Things is one of the first post-poppet Gaiman books purchased after getting about halfway through Sandman. If I remember correctly it's because he has one of his stories inspired by Lisa's work in it.

Section 6 - The Bottom Shelf

The first two, Fortune's Fool and Demon's Are Forever would certainly have been e-book purchases. MegaTokyo and Venus vs Virus are manga. Tamison I bought directly from Connor, Peter S. Beagle's manager. Probably all of the books on this shelf other than those two would still be here. Audition is a reference book. The Ordination of Women is the actual arguments and Responsa which are formal legal religious rulings used in the Conservative and Orthodox movements, which is why it's edited instead of" written by". The documents that led to the ordination of women are in this book. Blu Greenberg is a feminist Modern Orthodox woman who is definately one of the people I use as a role model in much of life, not just religion. I wouldn't have looked at manga on the Kindle but I think I might like it on the iPad, however there is a kind of aesthetic to having an entire series of manga lined up on a shelf. Like the way encyclopedias used to give definition to a bookshelf. I wonder how strong the lure of print is for me and manga?

Section 7 - The Number of Books in the Bedroom

56 books were comfortablly stored on the DVD Shelves plus the 30 that are in the Stack by the Window and the 16 Books that Became Decor. So far the tour of my bedroom has delivered up 102 physical books not counting what's on my iPad Kindle. And we're not done yet there's still The Stack at the Side of the Hidden Bookshelf and The Books I Still Have To Read waiting for their moments in the sun.

I'm thinking of doing a count of the books and magazines by The Perfectly Normal Husband's Nightable. Just to get the count. Knowing that we stopped buying physical books for space and economic reasons a while ago. How many books do we really have waiting because we're stalled?

Next up will be The Stack of Books at the Side of the Hidden Bookshelf.

Part 3 The Nature of Books and Business - A Tour of the Books In My Bedroom -

2011-06-30T10:10:00.000-07:00

Preface: This one took a while both because it is long and I couldn't find a way to make it shorter, and because it is possibly the most personal set of things I have ever put on the internet and I struggled with that.

Ostensibly, this experiment is to use the books in my bedroom to explore the meaning and relationships of books, reading and content through the experience of one person and the differences that occur when electronically based reading becomes not just present, but actually usable to a reader.

I should not be surprised that describing the books in my personal setting honestly, requires the examination of things that were truly personal. Books have meaning, the content of the books has meaning, the room that is one's bedroom has meaning, so of course if you are describing those things, if they are meaningful at all there is no surprise that the writing (if honest) will expose those things. Yet, I am still surprised.

Many people are gloriously open on their blogs with many personal details and I admire those people and their writing greatly, I tend to cover my trail a bit with metaphor and allegory. But here with the books this will be different, because otherwise it's not really an experiment at all.

Names, as always, are obfuscated to protect the un-innocent, but there is no way to talk about the books in my bedroom without talking about bedrooms gone by, so with apologies I will steal from a far, far better writer and label the contents as follows: Warning; Contains Me.

Plus it's long - I've broken it up into sections again.

Today's Tour of The Books in my bedroom will focus on The Stack of Books in Front of the Window.

This stack of books is on the Stage Right Side of the Armoire shown in Part 2.

Section 1 - Recap for those just joining the tour:

I am writing about books and my changing relationship to them both in terms of physical space and emotional resonance. I have a lot of books but my use of ebooks, while all "early adapter" was present for the last year or so the addition of a tablet based e-reader has changed my physical relationship to books. Books are ridiculously important to me so the change has meaning.

I explain the background and outline the experiement here in Part 1.

I begin the tour that actually starts with The Books That Became Decor here in Part 2.

This entry will focus more on the emotional attachment and meaning of the books and my personal history with them in relation to my bedroom.

This is Part 3, which should really be titled: when Good Systems Go Bad. Or if this were a horror movie the title would be "OVERFLOW"

Section 2 - The way it was supposed to work . . .

In a perfect world, in my mostly clean bedroom there would be no television, the clothes would be in the hamper and the closet would have shoes in slight disarray kicked into them as soon as I got home. The paper in the room would be a small stack of mail being reviewed before being tossed/acted upon/and filed. There would only be a small stack of books at each night table. 3 or 4 at most, consisting of the "current read" and the "to be read next" books. There would be a stack of catalogues because there is always a stack of catalogues, however it would not involve more than say . . . . 20 of them.

That's the perfect world. Of course part of that is because I didn't list the comics. I'll get to the comics later.

Section 3 - Computers and Books and Bulletin Boards . . . oh my?

The truth is that there is a television in the bedroom. It's behind the doors of the armoire, it doesn't actually get a TV signal, nor is it connected to cable. Our friends who do have televisions in all the pertinent rooms in their houses tell me that it's not like having a TV at all. It is connected to a PS2 because a PS2 also plays dvds. When The Children who aren't really childish anymore were actually children, they were different genders and 5.5 years apart. I had a very strict no-TVs-in-bedrooms-or-living-room policies. There was one TV in the Family Room. The problem with this arrangement was disagreements and one child or another being frozen out of the room if their sibling had friends over. It is unfair to make five year olds tolerate 11 year olds and vice versa as the odd person out. It become more unfair to force 8 year old boys and 14 year old girls to always have to interact with each other in the only public space. Thus, the compromise was to put a TV and the extra PS2 that came with marrying The Perfectly Normal Husband into the bedroom, so the PS2 in my room was the escape hatch for the sibling surrounded by the other sibling's social circle.

A TV in the bedroom means you don't have to leave the room much. The last time there was a TV in my bedroom I was recovering from a back injury that laid me up for 3 months. Never again. But I could rationalize that this didn't count and it was enclosed in furniture so I didn't see it, and the Children could co-exist peacefully. Most of the time the three of them played multi-player together anyway.

Now with the ages in late teens and early twenties their social circles interact and overlap. The Armoir is almost never opened except to vacuum out dust - and that doesn't happen nearly as often as it should.

I'm not holier than thou about electronics, it's just our focus is different. Each child had a computer, a handheld game and a large bookshelf in their rooms. They got their own computers around the age of 8. Much to the dismay of my peergroup of Luddite Suburban parents.

They shouldn't have wasted their time clucking at me. I have more spyware on our network than a data-entry sweatshop, so the Children know that I know every keystroke they type. They had been sharing my computer with supervision for years prior to their independent access, they also had limited access due to parental controls and me blocking access at the network level based on their passwords. All of that was basically training wheels.

I believe as a city kid that you don't protect your children from dangers, you take them out with you and teach them how to protect themselves and be aware of, and assess dangers. The internet looks just like riding the buses or crossing the street to me. Teach them the dangers of the forests, arm them, let them make short trips until they are ready. Then at around 11 years old after three years of close supervision the deal is I keep the spyware up but loosen up the parental controls. Don't type or visit anything you don't want your mother to know.

It probably sucks to have a mom who uses the tech before you do. Or maybe not. I kept waiting for one of the kids to hack the system. When The Boy finally did it was to fix a problem with his school computer to reclaim their admin password that they had forgotten which locked up his school based computer. I was so proud, but a little concerned, it's a little weird for kids not to rebel against control. The Boy explained he never really did anything that he wouldn't admit to anyway. There was very little point. The House exists under a very laid back liberal environment with strict authoritarian control.

He primarily used his computer to go to Japanese websites to read Manga, most of which didn't make it over here or took months to get to. The computer has always been an extension of reading, even though The Boy has difficulty reading in general if the words are in mixed media, the difficulty disappears. Words along flick across his long term memory like ninjas on rooftops, Memory knows they are there, but cannot catch and keep them. However with sounds or words Memory can catch them.

The Boy has books, and many of them have pictures. The Girl's computer is there primarily to make pictures, view and share pictures, and connect with her friends. The world of Harry Potter led to tiny pre-teen fanfic and shared BBS worlds of unofficial roleplaying games. She learned more tech setting up websites and making art banners and character sketches than she did in anything that tried to orient her that way in school. Words in books sink into The Girl's Memories like a laser carving the Rosetta Stone into the moon, everything stays. Forever.

When The Girl loves a book or a book series it is best for me to re-read it. Her memory is insanely detailed and occasionally her love for something where I am ambivalent at best becomes akin to having a pop quiz during most conversations. Thus, her deep, deep love of Lord of the Rings meant that I actually had to finish the series. Yes, that's right - I don't automatically adore all things Tolkien. Mea Culpa.

I loved the Hobbit. The Hobbit and Narnia started my reading of Fantasy which led to books I did love with the same passion that many save for Tolkien. I liked Fellowship but I never got past The Two Towers for years and years and years. Until I had a Rings-Mad child. Then I forced myself through it. A different story, for a different subject.

This is about computers, bedrooms and books and business.

So the computers and books were connected for the children from the very beginning. When they were done with their books they would frequently be next to their computers as they looked things up. Finished books went on their shelves but frequently came down.Where my friends and I would create worlds and new stories based on what we read in Brian Saunder's backyard ( he had the only one big enough to play in ), my children found online communities and played let's-pretend with kids all over the world. It was the same, but different.

Which all leads back to the reason there was no tech in my bedroom.

Section 4 - When the Computers Took Over

Before The House there had been a computer in my bedroom for a good portion of my adult life because my bedroom usually functioned as the non-shared space I wrote in.

When I ran the magazine, initially I lived in a place where I had a separate office and there was simply one baby. Bedrooms were for sleeping and collapsing in. One reads for pleasure, or reads in comfort in the bedroom. Work was in the office. But video games started sneaking in on the single TV. So if the house had a family room, the TV was there, if the house only had a living room then the TV was in the living room instead. Generally if there was no office the computer lived where the TV was.

That arrangement lasted until the second baby arrived and the grownups stopped sharing a computer - trust me, it's generally better that way. I can share sinks, closets, drawers, books but sharing a computer leads to all sorts of dynamics I'd rather avoid. When that step happened the "second computer" ended up in the master bedroom and the main computer eventually migrated there too when it's space needed to be used for a play area. This led to people in the bedroom being up all night with the computer in the early internet era. The future of the Children and words, and books didn't exist yet. Computers and books were separate things. The computer was work, entertainment and games. And if one partner is up all night in a room with a glowing screen and the other isn't, I can promise it leads to a disconnect if there are already underlying fissures.

Section 5 - The Way We Were

But when the underlying fissures became the faultlines complete with earthquakes and landmasses sinking into the ocean, I still had a computer in my bedroom. Unfortunately, now it was mine. I was getting a degree in Multimedia. I was working, going to school being the single mom with the help of my very good friends and then finishing all those MM projects so now I was the on with the screen glowing all night.

It was stressful, the computer was a big reminder of my workload, I had two giant metal laboratory bookshelves filled with my books. My books being nearby had always given me comfort, they were there, they looked good and full and brought my worlds with me whereever I happened to land. But in the giant gray metal shelves on either side of the computer desk from staples with a mattress and box spring on the floor and a second computer desk and computer where perhaps a dresser should have been, I was no longer comforted by the books alone. I was depressed and stressed at how little my life and my space reflected anything like my taste, or my desire for peace, or even just being a grown up.

Also I found other people in the room playing Everquest was really, really, irritating while I was working. I had a new partner. His relationship to the computer superseded all other forms of interaction. He was very visual and interactive. He had books and loved them, but his first love was video games closely followed by television. With his arrival, cable TV also came into the house. None of us were used to that level of media consumption in that manner. Books at that point were a refuge from screens, and quite honestly a way not to see what my room had become.

When my dresser had to be replaced, I realized I had never bought furniture for myself as an adult person. The dresser was actually my nursery furniture which had been my Travelin' Grandma's furniture. Everything in my room was donated by family members or a found object. As a parent, as a wife and now as a student/girlfriend/mom, I always took care of designing the bedroom - MY bedroom last. I was in my early 30's and had never owned a brand new piece of furniture in the place that was supposed to be my personal space. It was nice, but it was all arranged from happenstance rather than taste, the only thing in my bedroom that was mine alone were my books. It was shocking. I'd never really thought of myself as the self erasing type, but when the veneers came off all of the relationships around me I realized that I was pretty damn close. But not in the disappearing way, in the "Don't worry about me - I can take care of myself" way. And I could. I just did it last. Which means I never got around to doing it.

Well, that sucked. It covered up a bunch of other stuff too. No matter what the house, the children, the marriage looked like, no matter how strong, or balanced or personality based things seemed to be, the reality was in that bedroom. I never got around to doing it well because I was the lowest priority, and I pretended it was OK because I did that on purpose. However I did it on purpose for close to a decade. At that point, you have to admit that you are not your own priority.

So I bought a dresser, real nightstands and a bedframe.

And eventually I bought a house - the one that we now refer to as the House. I had moved every year and half in my first marriage and had never lived anywhere for more than 4 years growing up- pretty impressive for someone who isn't an army brat. I never moved because I wanted to, it was always in reaction to something or someone else.

I'm not moving again. Maybe if I get rich I'll buy additional houses but not leave this one ever, ever again. I'll be the grumpy old guy in UP. I have friends that are physicists and engineers, we'll get it to fly if we have to.

The computers were killing the relationship between that partner and I. Truth is computers played a supporting role in the destruction that came with the marriage that preceeded it.

On reflection perhaps I should be more ambivalent about computers. Or at least more cautious about the men who love them.

When I bought The House, I did not know for sure that this person would be moving with us. He said he couldn't live with us. I agreed that he'd be happier living on his own. He was a little confused when I asked if that meant he wanted to break up. I guess he thought it was a given once he said that. What was important wasn't location but our relationships to things and environments were very, very different. He did not buy The House with me - but when I was looking at houses I was looking for a place to make sure that there was a place for computers to be out of the bedroom and away from other people in the house.

The partner did indeed move with me after all but then earned his nickname "The Bridge Troll". He was a very nice troll, he was only cranky sometimes, but one of the things discovered when the computers moved into spaces of their own was that The Bridge Troll moved to where the computer was and the rest of the household never really saw him again unless we pushed very, very hard to ask him to come with us.

In the world outside the office, I had bought myself real and grown up furniture (and a headboard!) and was planning on finishing the set in my new space. My bedroom here in the House is smaller than the master bedroom suite in the rental I was in before, but the Children's rooms are larger and the office is slightly down the hall and away. Bookshelves went into every room in the house. Every room except my bedroom.

The Children didn't realize we shared a bedroom, the Bridge Troll and I, because he was never in it when I was. Perhaps they thought we took turns. Perhaps because we did. The virtual world was where he wanted to be, and the portal to it was in the office. And therefore so was he.

When we helped him move out - we made sure that the place where his computer was had lots of natural light and helped him decorate so that when he left his virtual bridge he didn't become overwhelmed with the haphazard collection of things that had depressed me so completely before The House. It didn't work out between the Bridge Troll and I because I'm a little too interested in being here in the world and he was barely intersted in that at all. But when you love someone, just because they stop being good for you and you stop being good for them, doesn't mean that you have to let go of caring about them. So we cared about where he lived when he came visit the world we were in, and helped make it pleasant, but elsewhere.

Not in the House.

Now finally grownup in every way and self-supporting, I got to have my books displayed in places where they served a purpose, looked good and were still mine. I didn't need them in my bedroom like protective insulation of the self. They could simply be read, enjoyed and then become part of the House, another tiny bit of treasure or a feather in the nest.

But until writing this series it never occured to me that the reason I kept the bookshelves out of this room might be because I had to keep the bookshelves in my room before. Like I might lose me altogether if I didn't see my books, and I was finally able to just be in my room. Just a few books were enough to make sure the room was still true, but after moving every year or so I was finally home, I wouldn't have to move, the books all had a place of their own because the place was mine.

The Children had their books and computers integrated by this point, but I finally had myself, my books and my living space integrated. I still interacted with books like I always had, but the Internet cut down on my need for magazines so there were no new subscriptions.

Computers quietly had already supplanted some of my casual reading materials for news, gossip and journalism. I was willing to pay for subscriptions just not paper ones.

Section 6 - So here in the imperfect world . . .

Well now what have we got? We have the history of books in Drinne's Bedroom. Before the Perfectly Normal Husband joined the House, my bedroom here worked really, really close to the Perfect World scenario because I had a ton of book storage space in the basement. Also, while almost every other roommate and sig other left their books, when they left, the Bridge Troll took most of his books with him. It wasn't all that many books, just about two or three boxes - one decent bookshelf's worth.

But one of the things that made the Perfectly Normal Husband attractive enough for me to even think about risking the idea of marriage again was his lovely, lovely collection of books. And he even came with his own quality-grade bookshelves! He had the perfect mix of enough familiar books that we shared reading tastes and enough different books that he had practically a whole new library for me to read!

The Basement-Family Room easily absorbed his books and bookshelves and our books are now quite the collection of his/hers/ours because we have been together for some time now. Just at the point where we were starting to worry about storage (Remember when I explained how we shopped for book as a family?) we discussed the idea of giving away or selling off duplicates.

This was a big step. When the Bridge Troll wanted to get rid of duplicates - he wanted to keep his copies and get rid of mine. This included gaming books. I said "no" flat out to the gaming books. Several people reference game rules at the same time. I'd been running since I was 12. The only way you can have too many rules reference books is if you have more copies than people in your group. We did not.

I did actually ask him what would happen if we broke up. His lack of a clear answer led to me keeping all of my books. Even if his answer was - "if you get rid of the extra books to make space and we break up, I'll buy new ones or will buy new ones for you"- I would have gone along with it, but there was nothing except a denial we would ever break up ( this is not a convincing line to a person who has already survived a divorce) and a lack of empathy or reassurance. More than clothes, jewlery, pictures, my books are what shows a reflection of me, my family, things we've done, vacations, life events . . . my bookshelves are a scrapbook of our lives. I don't have many pictures on the walls. I do think my books serve the same purpose that photo albums and all those incessant videos of life events serve for non-reading people.

The Bridge Troll was asking me to take the chance that he would leave with copies of books that he had not been around for. And he was not offering to replace them. I don't need the original physical object, the story by itself was sufficient, but I didn't want the expense of replacing things I already owned simply to satisfy his need for minimalism. Certainly not without him at least understanding what he was really asking.

Now in the light of hindsight, I realize he knew exactly what he was asking. He was asking me for permanence, he knew if I took his copies and got rid of mine I would be saying that we were truly together for all time. That I expected us to make it. But he was asking me too soon, and he didn't know or understand enough to offer me a saftey net in return. Now in this light my reaction looks kind of cruel, and perhaps it was, but you shouldn't corner wounded animals and I certainly qualified.

So six years later I am discussing getting rid of duplicates with the Perfectly Normal Husband. There is not a care in the world, we'll simply take the one that is in better condition and get rid of the other (or others). It was like walking through an shift in time. I suddenly saw clearly how little trust I'd had in other relationships. Not that they'd all asked me to get rid of duplicate books, the reality was most of the books were mine so it was almost never that specific issue until the Bridge Troll. But except for that first time, I had never expected anyone to stay. Ever.

Not family, not friends, only the one husband, that first time and when that proved so incredibly untrue, I figured that category of partner permanence was also not something that happened in real life. You are supposed to leave your parents, your children are supposed to leave you. Life may keep your friends around you virtually, but not physically. Everything changes, everyone can go. Except the books, they stay, you can't take them away from me.

It's OK. but it's one of those moments, planning this winnowing of duplicates that I realized how much I'd healed. I still don't trust anything to stay, except him. Not even him really, life happens, I'm difficult. Healthcare is not subsidized and I've seen people have to divorce or move away because of needing healthcare. He can have my books, because even if anything happens and we can't be together, he knows what they mean. Even if he takes them with him he'll know what they mean, so it would be OK as long as he's the one that has them.

Even if he gives them away it will be OK because he's the one giving them.

That's how much I love him.

And besides, we needed room for new books.

But just at this epic point in personal development a wrench was thrown into the works - The Girl discovered reading for pleasure in a really big way. And what she was reading was all the stuff we had read. But the girl loves her books like the Velveteen Rabbit got loved, and she sometimes misplaces them. Whereas the Perfectly Normal Husband and I barely break the spine, The Girl gives the meaning to the phrase "Dog Eared". She carries her books like pets. They get into scrapes just like pets.

New Plan. We keep duplicates and give the disposable copies to The Girl, which saved us replacement money. But the backlog then began.

Section 7 - Perhaps we could build an Aztek Pyramid out of them?

The Perfectly Normal Husband reads and subscribes to magazines and comics, in his field of history and, well just comics. He also gets Amazing and Analog and a few other magazines. There are three 2ft stacks around his night-table. He packs them up and puts them in archival boxes in the attic every now and then, but he switched jobs and hasn't had nearly as much time.

We receive books for the holidays and they land in the bedroom first. The become the "to be read pile" There is usually a difficulty because these are beautiful books that we like to look at, that should have a place of pride on a shelf, so they don't go down to the basement because they would be stuffed in willy-nilly. There is a 1.5 ft stack of books on one side of his lamp and a very impressive jenga like structure of books measuring about 17 inches long by 30 inches high on the other side.

Poor Perfectly Normal Husband no longer knows how much of that pile is read vs. unread. I will not take pictures - I don't want to embarrass him, it's not really his fault, it's because we have more books than shelves and any attempts to fix it without suddenly pitching the house into looking like a dorm room are insuffecient without really addressing the basement - which became the new "Do it last" room when working on home improvement.

The area around his night table are his personal books. The area around mine suffers from catalogues - but I have the option of throwing them out, and I do frequently. I used to have books around mine but when I got a laptop I found that I used it more like a magazine and not so much like a work item. When the laptop was in the bedroom, I wrote letters(email) to friends and family and read magazines in their online format. The computer once it was not attached to the desk started just being a magic book I could read anything at any time. I hate reading long things on my desktop but I was fine reading long form on the laptop because I could lay in bed be comfy and all of a sudden it was more like reading for pleasure.

Instead of a pile of books I had my laptop tucked into a charger at the side of my bed. The first change in my attitude towards electronic reading was the ability to change the environment of where I was reading. That made me the one who brought the computer back into the bedroom. But I was using it like a Victorian Ladies Writing Desk and an infinite magazine. I did not do any kind of actual work on the laptop.

And there were still books. Shortly after the laptop started changing my habits, I became irritated and exhausted by the basement and the stacks of books in the bedroom. We gathered all the "extra" books finished and unfinished and separated them into hardcovers and paperbacks so we could see how much more shelving we would need and look into some sort of discreete transitional shelving that wouldn't overpower the room.

The hardcover books from that exercise are what is in the pile that is neatly infront of the window.

In this stack are the following:

A Guide to Jewish Religous Practice by Issaac Klein
1635 : The Dreeson Incident Eric Fling and Virginia De Marce
Spinoza A Life - Nadler
American Shaolin - Matthew Polly
Team of Rivals - The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln( We had it years before Obama's administration made it a household name)
Watchman - Alan Moore
Jewish Wisdom - Rabbi Joseph Telushikin (This is an awesome book - it's historical while illustrating things that became part of spiritual practice - so it's not all "do this" it more like "think about this and this is where it came from" proving that people did most of the religion making not God but that doesn't mean it's not spiritual)
The Book of Ballads - Charles Vess with - lots and lots of cool people
Reserved for the Cat - Mercedes Lackey
The Everyday Guide to Wine Course Guidebook - Jennifer Simonetti Bryan
Modern Philosophy of Language - edited by Maria Baghramian
The Jewish Book of Why - Alfred J. Kolatch
1634: The Ram Rebellion - Eric Flint with Virginia DeMarche
Mirror Mirror - Gregory Maguire (The cover I have is better I never would have picked the book up with the new cover)
1634: The Baltic War - David Weber & Eric Flint
The Grantville Gazettte IV Eric Flint
1634: The Barvarian Crisis - Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce
Liberty Medows Cold, Cold Heart - Frank Cho
Girl Genius - Volumes 6 & more - Phil and Kaja Foglio
Buffy Omnibus 2
The Yiddish Policeman's Union - Michale Chabon
Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology - edited by Jordon Goodman et al.
JPS Hebrew -English Tanakah ( this is the Jewish Bible, direct translation with original hebrew next to it - no rabbinic commentary)
Venus vs. Virus
French Women don't get Fat - Mirelle Guilani
The Salmon of Doubt - Douglas Adams
The Hidden World - Paul Park
Buffy the Vampire Slayer the Roleplaying game

Oops almost missed : 29. the American Way of War - A history of United states Military Strategy and Policy - Russel F. Weigley

30. Jewish Art and Civilization

Hmmn that's a lot of books.

They're stacked neatly on another item of imminent home improvement - the custom glass tile that needs to go into the backsplash in the kitchen. We needed to hire a tile specialist and ran out of time then had time but ran out of money. If it ever gets finished ( it will I swear Fantastic Artist Who Made the Tiles!) I will blog about it then, but right now the box is in safe and plain view and protected by the books in this stack.

Section 8 - Would E-Books Have Made Any Difference to this Stack?

The 1634 Books are books that get re-read when the newest one in the series comes out that's why there are several. For a long time we couldn't wait for the year delay until the paperback came out so we bought the hardcover, right up until the Dreeson Incident. 1634 is a shared writing environment and I really cared about the characters but when they shared it out to so many writers they put down a fiat - write about the everyday people, not the main characters of the original story. Which is all well and good for a bit but then there were way too many characters and I wanted to get back to the main characters of the original story and thus found my enthusiasm waning. The Dreeson Incident was bought on release, but I couldn't quite muster the desire to open it up, the world was drowning in details, all side dishes and no main course anymore.

I haven't actually bought a new Ring of Fire book since. They were early adapters of electronic formats though and I subscribed to the Grantville Gazette. Once again short stories worked well on the computer, but not full books. If I could have purchased The Dreeson Incident on my iPad and not have it reside accusingly next to my armoire I probably would have bought the subsequent books figuring I could get to them with fresh eyes at some future point. Interestingly when I realized how long I had but haven't read the book, I went to look for it on kindle. It isn't available.

Sorry guys, I love everyone good and bad in Grantville, but unless I get an actual book with Mike and Rebecca as the main characters again I'm just not invested in keeping up anymore.

You lost me with Spinoza.

The other books in the pile are art, non-fiction, and religious books and what I would call deep pleasure reading. The would probably all still be physical books - only the Ring of Fire books would change to electronic format, and even then it would be on a trial basis. When I do like them they are good reading and I tend to read them on trains and vacations. I almost feel like the fault is mine for being put off of them. Like I'm guilty of betraying them.

The upshot is that about 25 of those books would still be in the House regardless of the availability of electronic books. Because of them being gifts or containing high quality art content.

And of course the comics. I'm still not sure what to do about those.

The yellow bag is full of them. They are mostly mine. What they are is irrelevant. I enjoy them immensely and love the art and don't want to see them on a computer but wish to the heavens above that they were on my tablet instead. Waiting for them to be graphic novels worked well but I would pay for them to be virtual instead of physical - I have no sentimental attachment to the physical object of a comic at all, even though comics have been part of my life as long as books have. Webcomics like Looking for Group and Girl Genius show that full page comics work well as a computer format, if I could just have an e-version of the physical comics I'd be perfectly happy.

So the conclusion is that if I could get my hardcopy comics electronically on my tablet ( but not on my computer) I would. I don't know what would happen to get Ring of Fire books on my tablet instead of my floor - but it's possible that one of the turn offs was the amount of physical space they were taking up.

But now knowing just what physical books meant to me and how they kept peices of me intact through scary times, knowing that asking me for my books has such emotional impact let's look at what that would have meant during the crisis points in past bedrooms.

If the Bridge Troll wanted to get rid of physical duplicates and I had electronic copies would I have said no?

I would have gotten rid of the duplicates, I would never have reacted to the underlying signals that he couldn't read my needs or that he was passive aggressively trying to push me into defining our relationship on terms I wasn't willing to accept. There wouldn't have been any tension, but there wouldn't have been any insight either.

On the other hand, if I was the one who was lying in bed with a small portable computer and the sig others who brought the computers into the bedroom started using computers in relationship damaging ways, would I have ever brought it up?

No, I lose a sort of moral high ground, I brought the computer in, I'm laying in bed looking at a tiny computer, I would never have been able to say "please stop sitting at the desk playing Everquest" because the legitimate answer would have been, "Well you're using a screen too!" and I would have conceded the point.

Once the Perfectly Normal Husband received an Ipod Touch from Anti Claus and All of Us, he stopped playing so many "sit in front of the large screen" games and we have a tendency to sit in the living room together, or lay in bed next to each other and read, it's just on screen, but the behavior is book-like even when we are actually playing games. The form factor changed the interaction. We can hand the other person the amusing thing or the picture we are looking at. We share interesting quotes or sentences, just like when we are reading.

The house looks almost the same as when there were nothing but books, but where even laptops took a lot of space and form limitations still dictated locations, tablets and smart phones made us revert to our natural physical behavior with books. So if you took a picture of us in our quiet everyday downtime say 18 years ago and took the same picture now, it would only look like what we were reading on changed, but if you took a picture anytime between those two pictures the snapshot would show us at desks, in rooms isolated from other people or gathered together around a screen watching the same thing.

What happens moving forward as more books go on my tablet? Ironically too many books in my bedroom makes me feel like something is broken now instead of making me feel whole, but the idea of no more physical books feel like staring into a vortex.

It took all that time for technology to behave like a book behaves in your life.

But what would I have had in all of the bygone bedrooms when the books were the only thing I had that really belonged to me?

If it were just the stories, and not the books, would they really belong to me at all?

Helping a Friend Open a Store in the 7th Dimension

2011-06-28T20:27:00.000-07:00

The Nature and Business of Books Part 3 will be up tomorrow . . .

The Nature of Books and Business - A Tour of the Books In My Bedroom - Part 2

2011-06-21T06:41:00.000-07:00

OK everybody, this is going to be a long one, feel free not to read it in one sitting.

I've figured out I'm going to do this series once a week posting on Tuesdays until I'm done.

A Recap -

Way back at the beginning, when I first started this blog my third post was about the books in my house and why I suddenly was crushing on Ray Bradbury.

The reasons for blogging were new for me, but late to the party for everyone else. I had found that I had become less willing to expose myself or my ideas in print. The writing that used to be my outlet felt more like a threat. The work that put food on the table and books on the shelves demanded as light a footprint as one could possibly leave anywhere, especially on the internet. But my head was full of ideas, and I was trying to work through them. Words were failing me changing my little design and crafty "fun" subversive things sliding them into a place where even I had to admit that they crossed from hobby to art. They were holding too much in them.

But books were almost the first things I wrote about. When I was young, writing was what I was making money at. If you'd asked me I would have told you I was an actress, but I wasn't making money at it. My mother was the artist, although I pulled off some artistic things it wasn't part of the identity at all. No matter who I thought I was, or who I actually was, there were always books and there were always spaces I called my own. Those spaces were defined by books. They still are, but I am developing a different relationship with reading and books at the moment based on e-reading. Unlike many other people, discussing the future of books was a big part of my life 15-20 years ago so I find myself somewhere where I predicted this future, but none of the emotional or preferential effects. I think it might have something bigger to say about culture, or change or hubris or me. So that's what this series is - me trying to figure it out - as the poppets and Lisa would say, "Silly Human".

But writing it out is the tool I'm most familiar with and sometimes I don't see things until I try to talk about it with someone else.

This is Part 2 of the Tour of the Books in My Bedroom. Part 1 is here.

The Tour - The Books That Are Actually Decor

Section 1 - The Bedroom

Before we start the real tour I should probably show you my bedroom:

unlike every other bedroom I ever had, this one doesn't have bookshelves in it, or it didn't until very, very recently. That's because I have a house. The books in the bedroom are the books that are in use, or in transit, or stayed in the room because I can't have a room with no books, so some of them officially became "decor" after being read.

A book-free zone is unthinkable. My dream is to convert my garage into a full formal oak paneled library. I have enough books to do it. My concept of heaven is a comfy leather armchair by a fireplace with a comforter and a cup of hot cocoa in a library with all of the books ever for me to read into eternity. Literally, when I made this -

it was because like all people with Poppets, I imagined that the Halloween Things would want the same things I would want when It Wasn't Halloween.

But I also like things clean and neat and nicely, if eclectically decorated. One of the truths I learned as an adult, that was not true when I was a child; is that when my house is disordered it's because something is wrong with me. A little lived in clutter is fine, I'm not OCD about it but the tipping point from "I can function in this because it's just showing that we are living in it" to "This is a constant irritation and I just can't get to it" gets narrower and narrower.

And when things went really, really wrong I learned to say something, or do something, or spend money to fix it rather than wait "until I was well enough" to do it myself. So when my house is too messy or too disorganized, I know that if I get sick ( physically) and I don't have things set up in advance I could risk making my recovery ( physically and mentally) that much more difficult if I don't take heavy action. The inhabitants of the House are well aware of this now. It took me years to learn it, but only about a year to fix it and then communicate it.

So now the Children Who Are Not So Childish anymore know that everything in the house has a system, and if the system gets overwhelmed a new system will be developed to handle it, things will be planned, built, bought or purged. January post-Holidays is the big organizational month once we realized I usually get sick in February/March, and deep cleaning usually gets to coincide with Passover. I was not always this good about these things. My mother remembers my childhood bedroom with horror. I am a multimedia designer even when I am all of the other things I am. I do actually use things that I made or did from 20 years ago. We still actively play in the Dungeons and Dragons world that I've run since I was 12 years old. We still use notes and references from my tiny self while playing now.

If I did not hate "the look" - my house would easily have become the collection of bookshelves and collectible items that only my basement currently emulates. It is a look I know and love in many homes of friends. The walls of Caldor Shelving (or O'Sullivan as soon as they make some cash). There is a joy in staring at a friend's bookshelves and seeing what they have that you have, or what they have that you don't, that they like . There is the beauty of the books themselves, the spark of connection when you see how varied their brains and reading tastes are. Bookshelves are the markers of Academics, SF fans, Scientists and Jewish Households. In some households there will simply be built-in bookshelves in the family room, filled to the brim but the childrens books on the easy-to-reach shelves. In some homes there are only books by the desks and maybe one full bookcase of "important" books. Mystery readers seem to be more willing to buy and sell their books through used booksellers to keep their book collections down to a single wall. Some parents of my friends were romance novel readers and they varied between hoarders who made some SF collections look paltry, and those who either did the library thing or the used bookstore thing and kept things very, very neat.

What I never saw growing up, or until I was a grownup, was a house without books. There were always books. At least on a bedside table.

And honestly, I read everything that stayed still long enough. And then I kept it. And I still do. Until about 3 years ago I couldn't even have thought of a book I would want to read and not actually keep. Then I went through a phase of reading "chick lit". I enjoyed it, and would not denigrate it, but I realized I didn't really want it taking up space in my house. You see someday I will have my library , and in my garage right now are two sets of metal industrial laboratory shelves - packed full with my books and covered over waiting for me to build the right library system to start in the family room until I someday have enough money to convert the garage. But I am not converting that garage now. Those are books that could be safely in my house, but because I needed a light laugh and I find almost all sitcoms to be either exercises in sadism or just not funny "Shopaholic Sleeps With A Demon in A Cross Marketing Buffy-Inspired Bonanza" is in the house instead. It was purchased, and enjoyed but it's served it's purpose - which was disposable entertainment. I doubt I'll be rereading it. I'm not sure any of my friends would like it. It's not that I'm embarrassed that I read it, it's just that space could be taken up by something cool like "I Will Fear No Evil" which is currently out in the garage.

I had never thought of disposable books before.

Section 2 - The Lifecycle of Book Placement at The House

The way books cycle in is this - We go the the bookstore - we come back with books - the ones we were looking for and the ones that were joyfully discovered. Between the Perfectly Normal Husband and I, we are good for a minimum of 5 books each. Possibly one or two hardcovers a peice. The other way books come in is that they are specifically asked for as presents for the Holidays. Books we might not get ourselves because they are expensive and will never, ever come out in paperback and both the Perfectly Normal Husband and I have impulse control and a strong sense of budget. However, he can actually use the library, and I cannot because they have a terrible habit of wanting their books back and I have a terrible habit of keeping the books. We've declared detente. I don't use them so they get to keep their books. I donate duplicates and participate in fundraising. Libraries are important - and I'll write about me and libraries some other day.

The books initially come into the house and go to the bedroom. We read in the bedroom, the living room, and the office. Although the primary home for the books and where they live is the family room, we do not generally read there because it is the media room where the TV and games are. Sometimes we read when the TV is on. We read alot in the dining room. The rooms were we primarily don't read are the bathroom and the kitchen. However, if the book is yours it starts in your bedroom and returns there at the end of each day until it's done, even if it travelled with you.

You read it before you go to bed at night and lay it on your night table, put it in your pouch or the side of your bed. When it's done you move on to the next book. But all the "getting ready to be read" books are in the bedroom. The "just recently finished books" are in the bedroom. The Children who Aren't so Childish Anymore each have significant and decorative shelving in their rooms, but I knew from experience that as much as I love my books, for my bedroom to be calming and a place of relaxation I couldn't let the bookshelves live in the bedroom or very soon it would look like a nerdy college dorm except there would be even more books where the beer cans were supposed to be.

But you need some books. You just do.

So the first books that became decor were from the piles of "recently read" because when we were done with repainting the room and the general renovation of the House there needed to be some books that just lived there - but they needed to have a space and a form of their own.

However, now the system is breaking down, because the basement hit saturation point. And the office is only a transitional point for non art/work/school books too. Additional books do not get added to the ones that "live there". Slowly over the last year we started avoiding bookstores so as not to bring more books into the house.

You may now picture us reading the Sunday Book Review like pathetic little children, our noses pressed to the imaginary glass, eyes wide looking at the shiny reviews thinking "but maybe just that one, one won't hurt that much". We then deaden the desire by filling it full of internet articles and the very reviews we are reading electronically.

Or I buy it on Kindle, a guilty selfish pleasure, because until the iCloud, there was no way to share it without sharing my device. A book is something that always has the promise of being able to share it with someone else. An ebook seems more portable, but is far more isolated and isolating. I can recommend a book I have on my Kindle App, like Bill Bryson's At Home but I can't lend it to a cash strapped friend.

But "Sequel to Shopaholic raises Baby Half Demon and Hires Fae the Nanny" was a selfish pleasure in the first place, so now I don't have to give it bedroom space. I was never going to lend it out anyway. At 6.99 it's cheaper than the trade size version they seem to think all chick lit must come in, and cheaper than going to a movie. So I win! But it will never make it to "decor" like the books we are about to see.

Section 3 - The Books that Live on the Tall Dresser

There are only 4 books that live there but several Poppets.

This portion of the tour will be brought to you by the Poppet Pretending to Be Silas, from The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. You can find a Poppet Playing Silas to live with you here, and The Graveyard Book here.

At the bottom of the decor pile is The Ultimate American Gardening Book and right above it is The Ortho Home Gardner's Problem Solver.

They are large and beautiful books. You might get the idea that they are there because I love gardening or am interested in it. Or you might think I have them there because I think or want you to think I'm good at it.

They are actually there because I'm completely lost with the whole gardening thing. Well not completely, but I'm at the very least easily disoriented by being someone responsible for living things in my home that I would like to be healthy and grow up strong and remain as wonderful and pretty as they were when I first became responsible for them. So those two books are loaners from someone who is much, much better at this stuff than me. Because I have a garden and trees and bushes and plants and stuff. I know what an ecosystem is and I know that my little plots of land have good ones, but sometimes stuff eats them, or they grow too fast, or some new thing happens. Then I use these books because these are thoughts or conversations that happen in the bedroom. Quick questions get looked up on the internet . If it an "I need to understand and process that" situation I go to these two books, so they live here as decor, because this is the room where I end up needing them.

Above them is an illustrated book called "The Rabbi's Cat" by Joann Sfar. Other people apparently know this author through some children's book called the Little Vampire. But The Rabbi's Cat was purchased in an indie bookstore while on my honeymoon in Washington DC. It is a graphic novel for adults taking place in a Moroccan Jewish world in the 1930s and deals with Talmud and Torah and mysticism and reality in deep and fokloric ways, while still playing with modern sensibility. You do not have to be Jewish to understand this book. If you are Jewish and not Sephardic, this book might do strange trippy things to your brain and your sense of identity and things that you were sure were absolute will, quite properly, not look so absolute anymore. But it's OK you can ignore all that and just enjoy the pretty book with the story about the talking cat and go back to your nice modern middle class world afterwards. It's OK to just like it for the neat story and the pictures.

( Sephardim are the group of Spanish,Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Jews who were targeted by the Spanish Inquisition who stubbornly insisted on surviving anyway instead of Ashkenazi which were the Europeans and Baltic and Russian Jews who were targets of the Nazi's and Pogroms who stubbornly insisted on surviving anyway - Most of the Jews you see in stories, on TV or meet on the East Coast are Ashkenazic. Most of the Jews you hear about over in Israel are Ashkenazic. Most of the Jews who are actually IN Israel are Sephardic. Very few people know much about actual Sephardic Jews even if they are Jewish. I have learned that the type of Jew I am by linage is something a little in the middle of both. As I reconstruct things, our family's traditions, our deep stories are strongly linked to Sephardic practice, but the family worked hard to present as Ashkenazic - there are reasons- they are a different essay. )

That book stays in the room as decor. It is meaningful as an object I purchased with my new husband, a story I never thought I would see, and content that does what books do, it makes something open. I share that book with people in the house but when they were done with it, it lives with me in the bedroom, like a talisman or a dream-catcher.

But here's a truth. If the full color graphic novel version of it were available electronically, I would carry it in my iPad and break it out to look over it or think of a panel in it while I was waiting for things like buses or doctors. I would use it to break myself out of moods or destructive thought processes. I would show other people bits of it in conversation. It's a book I wish I always had available. I would pay for it twice to be able to always have it near me without risking damaging the one I have on this dresser. I would use it differently if I had it electronically, but it would still mean something to me even in it's Kindle or iBook based form. I would have it because it was important, not because it was disposable.

It is not currently available that way. But I'll keep checking. Actually I stopped typing this entry just to check and see if maybe it was in the iBook store since I'd never checked there. It isn't.

I'm a little sad. Writing about it made it real enough to make me feel like I should have already had it that way.

The last book on the pile is Ill Met By Moonlight by Mercedes Lackey and Roberta Gellis. The Fairy GoodReader is usually near this book. It's a mash-up of Mercedes Lackey, one of my most consistently enjoyable fantasy authors, Roberta Gellis who hid historical fiction and cultural studies in "romance" novels my mother bought (and who taught me how to stock a keep) and Shakespeare thrown together with the whole Tudor and War of the Roses thing. It was like someone was throwing together some kind of specific genetically engineered bait for me. Especially before the whole Tudor and Anne Bolyen thing became "hot". Now I kind of wince when I see something set in that milieu, but Roberta Gellis is one of the first authors who created a kind of "consciousness raising" effect on me about women, and history and the reality of historical information on real people. I'll read anything she writes if I come across it, but interestingly I don't seek her work out. It's almost like I would prefer to stumble across it.

Maybe the book graduated to decor because of the synergy in it, maybe just because it never made it down to the basement. Once I put it there I liked the blue of the spine on the stack. Perhaps it's also because the line "Ill met by moonlight proud Titania" is one the the most sublime lines of A Midsummer Night's Dream to me, with entire universes in that moment between Oberon and Titania when he says it and she reacts to it.

However, it's a book that now would likely end up being bought electronically rather than in hard copy. I purchased the first one This Scepter'd Isle, not realizing it was going to be a series and most likely, until I'm sure it's finished I will buy ebooks for the subsequent ones. I'm too compulsive, I need to know what happens next, but it might not be worth more books coming into my house. If I love it as much when the series ends as when it started, I will buy used copies to live together on my shelves in the family room or hopefully, someday, my library. For this book I do not want or need the physical book, yet oddly it has a place of pride in my bedroom.

There was a fifth book there called The Great Pretenders but I needed it for something so it moved from a decor book to an office book. and will most likely move down to the basement.

Section 4 - The Books that Live on Top of the Armoire - Stage Right

This is the Stage Right side of the Armoire arrangement. The poppet guiding us on this side is Poppet Reads The Graveyard Book. When he is not being a tour guide he generally lives on the tall dresser. You can find other Poppets reading other copies of The Graveyard Book here sometimes although as I write this all the Poppets there are pretending instead of reading.

This is an interesting pile of books. It is mostly interesting because they were initially put there to get them off the floor because a good portion of them stubbornly refused to be good enough to finish.

The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble: The Worlds First Great Financial Scandal was interesting to me and timely reading since I read it in 2006. I like it but it's pretty dry. All of the drama coming from the reality of it instead of any great mastery of prose. The Rise to Rebellion is a book by Jeff Shaara that I borrowed from The Perfectly Normal Husband, but I can't remember whether I read it or not. I love the revolutionary period, most especially from a cultural anthropology standpoint. The seething roiling change everywhere all across the world, the intense juxtaposition between the known and the unknown, the differentiating experiences of The Enlightenment combined with the power of philosophy to create real economic and political systems almost seemingly out of thin air. It's an amazing, amazing time, but I can't remember if I've even opened the cover on that book. So there it is waiting for me to get around to it to check.

Great Jewish Short Stories was bought on a recommendation. I'm sorry I did it. They were not great, they were trite, overwrought, well trod, second-generation-whining stories that reinforced any number of tropes and stereotypes that were banging about in old vaudeville, high form Woody Allen movies and every self hating "American Jewish Novelist" from 1960 through 2000.

Even thinking about reading this book makes me want to go re-read The Rabbi's Cat to cleanse my mental palate. I keep it as a negative example. I may have subconsciously made it decor in order to keep anyone from reading it by accident. As I read it I kept thinking "Is this what people think I want to read because I happen to be Jewish? Is this what Jews write because they think this is what being Jewish is? " and then I wanted to hide for a while until the thinking stopped. There is better stuff out there covering the same themes. Saul Bellow is not a man I want on any synagogue committee I'm involved in, or literary review board either.

There was a science fiction collection that was worse. Thank God for Peter S. Beagle and Josepha Sherman writing short stories with Jews in them that happen to be good stories and the characters just happen to be Jewish instead of Irish, or British or Hispanic.

If I had bought the electronic version of it I most likely would have deleted it. I don't know why I'm holding on to it. Perhaps I can let this book go.

Reluctant Voyagers - I think someone else brought the book into the house. I think I read it because it stayed still, I don't recall the book at all. When I run out of other things to read I will go back and look at it again. I do know it got put there for aesthetics of color and spine height and because when I set up that arrangement it was one of the books waiting to go down to the basement.

Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley. Love her. Love reinterpretations of fairy tales because they are so interconnected and important. Loved her writing since I was a teenager and read The Blue Sword, so this is another one of the decor books that's there because it was a current read at the time I needed books for furniturescapes. It goes back to my younger bedrooms when they were filled with books. Like a little refraction of past bedrooms to this one.

Phule's Errand by Robert Asprin. I reread the Phule's Company books the same way, and for the same reasons, that people watch reruns of M.A.S.H. or the DVDs of Wooster and Jeeves.

I like these in book form. They're small. Exactly the right ergonomics to love a book and read it wherever you want to, or slip it into a purse, briefcase or backpack. It's a light afternoon couch read. It is most likely on top of the decor stack because I put it down and didn't want to have it accidentally go into the basement since the Phule's company books live together in the living room bookcase. It would have been placed there before the system broke down. This is a book I would go to the bookstore to buy. I don't want it electronically. I am very sad that there will not be anymore, and that I own all the ones that have already been made. This was the one in 2006 with Peter Heck. The decor books on the armoire are the frozen moment of time when the redecoration was pretty much done.

Section 5 - The Books that Live on Top of the Armoire - Stage Left

This side it full of books I loved that I wanted to keep in the bedroom, plus two books that just had no place else to go. The Wizard Poppet shows them off.

Princesses: the Six Daughters of George III is an amazing book with exactly the kind of history I love to read that sheds light on history's impact in hidden everyday actions. It shows the inaccuracies of impressions gleaned from studying the history of the Revolutionary Period from only American sources or popular culture. It in many ways reminds you how not-very-long 200 or so years is in history and how events and marriages and love affairs from then effect things that are happening now. If you think about it for a moment you will realize that it's true in your own life and not just because these people happened to be royalty. If your great grandma married in an arranged marriage in 1847 and then your grandma married for love but had to run away from Ireland to do it, you are eating in McDonalds in Idaho because that's where they could afford to buy land in 1852. You think you are from Idaho and you are, but you're there because of the rules governing women and marriage in Ireland in the 1840's. It affects you directly. If great grandma had been willing to stand up for her daughter's choice to marry you might be in Dublin looking for work instead.

I've always thought of royal families as public allegories for their countries' populations anyway and I've seen nothing recently to dissuade me from that thought.

I've also thought about how difficult it must be to be a public allegory when it's so hard to muddle through as a regular unknown human.

It's a good book. It's a straight history book. Furthermore, it's a straight history book that isn't military. Just be warned. This is a book that I might have bought for myself for half of the very high price electronically, but it was given to me as a gift and it is a beautiful book besides.

A History of Japanese Religion - this book is mind blowing in a literal way. It's a straight reference book originally written in Japanese by Japanese academics and then translated by the same academics into English. Once I knew that, I had to change the way I was reading it because phrasing that I would have dismissed as connective or "flavor" had a different weight when I knew it wasn't being taken through an extra layer of Westernization. I can only read this book in short sittings because it opens my mind to things about other things almost ever page or so in ways I haven't thought before. I haven't had enough time with it to finish it. Someday I'm going to take it on vacation with me. This might be a book that I would want both physical and electronic copies of because of the way I am reading it, but I don't know how I would use it when I do finally finish. For me this book is like a journey.

Lost by Gregory Maguire. He wrote more than just Wicked. It's his original work for non-children's literature and does not reference any fairytales. I liked it. I'm glad I have the woodcut-looking-cover instead of the Harlequin Romance-looking-photo-based cover they have now. It looks market tested. Pope Joan: A Novel is a book that I wanted to be better than it was. It's in there for color and aesthetic balance. Village of the Vampire Cat rocks. I read it with The Boy back in the day, and New Comic Fantasy was purchased in a fit of hope. It would be a book that I would now purchase exclusively as an ebook. I just bought "My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding" from iBooks and have discovered that I infinitely prefer to read my short stories this way on the iPad. ( Why yes, Esther Friesner participating in these two anthologies is indeed a commonalty, and now you know something more about what will make me buy a book and something about my general age).

Section 6 - The Business and Nature of Books Part

Lets's take a look at that last bit again. The part where I bought an anthology because Esther was writing in it, but when I went to look for it on Amazon her name wasn't even on the cover. Instead there were three names that were actually a turn off for me and would have made me pass by the book in the store. Charlaine Harris writes the Sookie Stackhouse novels which involve vampires, which I was sick to death of back when Anne Rice became big. I like Buffy because she killed the vampires and the vampires were actually evil demonic things unless they got ensouled. And when they did get ensouled it wasn't all a happy-day-in-the park and you might have to kill them anyway. Buffy spawned almost as many imitators as Rice did, which led to someone publishing Twilight. Which is great for the publisher, but I hate vampires. So Ms. Harris may be the next Shakespeare but I don't care because she's writing primarily about vampires. LA Banks seems like I should sort of like her, but the back cover blurb reads too much like an overheated LARP. Its full of vampires and vampire lovers and I don't care if these vampires were hip hop. And I've never heard of Sherrilyn Kenyon - which is no reflection on her, remember I'm out of touch - but it's not going to make me pick up a book I want to read for humor's sake. Actually none of those names is going to entice me to pick up a book for humor's sake. Esther writes humor, they write supernatural. Esther writes all that other stuff too, but she excels at selling me humor.

I'll tolerate vampires if they are funny. You are marketing a funny book full of collections of amusing stories. You kept the only funny person off the cover. If I hadn't found it when I was cross referencing author's name, you wouldn't have gotten my 6 dollars with no print costs. So you lucked into the sale.

Older readers that have books for decor and go to the bookstore coming out with 10 books a trip ARE your market. Perhaps you should remember that publishing is not the movie industry and that while the tween market is profitable, they are not the sole movers and shakers of funding. Couldn't you have Ms. Harris AND Ms. Friesner? And part of the question is this : which type of book would you rather move? I bought the e-book and might have passed on the physical book even with Esther in it. But I'm over 30. Most people older than me are still physical book centric, they might not know Esther was in it. How many of them are exactly like me - not willing to take up space for an anthology that I might only like 2 stories out of 10, but still willing to spend 6.$ for the chance of 2 good stories if they take up no space?

I can see why this is scary for a publisher.

Can you define this market? Can I predict how I'll react to a book now? The objects in this entry are permanent. I'm not planning on changing anything other than Phule's Errand going back to it's proper place. Can you predict what I might buy based on my "decor" books or how I might buy it now? Remember in the last entry I listed Troll's Eye View on my Kindle. I'd read about it online and ordered it right away. I think I can safely say I'm likely to never buy a physical anthology collection again. I do think I would buy a physical single author short story collection though. Like Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things. The reason would be the expectation of consistency. I wouldn't buy a singly authored collection unless I was always predisposed to the author's writing in the first place.

But the need for ebooks will become different in the next entry next week when I describe how the books in the bedroom churn and what happens when the system breaks. I won't describe each book - the way I did here for the decor books, there are too many, I will list them and explain why they are where they are, instead of what they are, so this might be the only part of the series where I tell you my opinion of a book. These are just my opinions, so if someone thinks that Great Jewish Stories is a heartbreaking collection of staggering genius and you've made it down this far please feel free to defend it in comments. But I'm thinking perhaps it's time for me to let it go - or make art out of it or something.

So this is the end of Part 2 where at least some of the books as decor wouldn't have had a physical form to display if ebooks had really been viable when I did the room. There's already a sliding impact.

The Nature of Books and Business - A Tour of the Books In My Bedroom - Part 1

2011-06-14T08:05:00.001-07:00

I'm going to write about books and fame and authorship and the publishing industry and the identity of being a reader.

I can write about this with a simulacrum of authority, and I think it might be some variant of important since I'm really one of the little people, but I can approach it a bit differently due to things I used to be.

I used to be kind of a big deal.

But not in any special kind of way that matters.

Some Background:

It was pre-internet, although I was using it, so its closest modern equivalent is "internet famous". I used to call it psuedo-semi famous. If I walked in anywhere that touched the world where I was sort-of-famous people who knew me and I did not know them would come up to tell me where they met me or saw me, or if I helped them. ( Or sometimes if I hurt them).

I am not by nature a kind person, but I did my level best not to hurt anyone. It's important to remember that people see you as something other than what you know yourself to be Both good and bad. And with any kind of status you get some power. As Steven Moffat made the Doctor say last week "Good men don't need rules." I too have a lot of rules. Truly good people will be good regardless of race creed color or religion. I'm religious so that I can at least check myself against what a truly good person might do.

These pieces of information are important because you are about to see the books in my bedroom and what they mean, and what it means for the publishing industry. While I'm showing you, I'm pretty sure I'll drop a fan or miss a step in this burlesque show and you'll see me nakedly struggling with the fact that I'm working hard to decide what I want to be when I grow up and the past is informing the present.

It's what the past does. No one should be really surprised.

Some present-round with pitches for very nice writers:

Two weeks ago, I was somewhere in that world where I used to be kind of a big deal - but I went away. Now almost no one knows anything about me. All fame is fleeting, niche fame more than most. It makes me happy in a kind of subversive way. I do something different there now. I am an enabler, not an event anymore . I like it. It's very useful. I am happiest when I am useful.

People who write books and publish things are there too. For various reasons we end up talking. I almost look like "the public" to them so I am representational. I usually have not read their work. This is because I am out of touch, not any failing on their part. Sometimes when I meet them I will then read their work. This surprises me when I think about it because it used to go the other way : I will have read their work, and then I would meet them, and then sometimes it would change the way I viewed their work. I developed a theory back then that you should never meet anyone who's work literally changed the way you think or look at the world, because there is almost no way for it not to change something about you, or them, or the work.

There is a very good book about discovering things like that written by Laura Miller, you'll see it later.

But now I almost never hear about a new genre writer unless, due to the oddities of my life I meet them.

So I have met Paolo Bacigalupi, who is very cool and whom I enjoy hanging out with but whose books I have yet to read. There are two of them in my house. You will see them too. I confessed that after an entire year of his winning every SF award in sight I was possibly the only person left on the planet who hadn't read it - but at least he knew I liked him for himself.

Paolo is really the reason for this blog entry, and perhaps James Knapp, who won the Compton Crook Award for State of Decay which is being marketed as a Zombie Genre thing but it isn't one. It's traditional hard SF. I would never have looked at it if he hadn't won the award putting him in a position where I was facilitating a podcast interview reading of his first chapter. ( I don't know if it's posted yet but I'll update if there is a link.)

Perhaps this is where I need to admit what I was fairly semi-famous for. Once upon a time I created and edited a magazine. This was when publishing opened up because of new tech, the closest thing I could compare it to is the way podcasting works now.

Some Nostalgia:

So I ran a writer's group, which was very different than contemporaneous writers groups, as it was focused on things other than getting published and it wasn't juried. It was exploration and craft based. And I hosted and ran workshops, and I wrote a bit. Thus when I started the magazine, which was a non-profit kind of incubator thing - I promoted the hell out of it. So people saw me pretty much everywhere on panels, as a guest, and with people who were much, much, more famous than me.

(It doesn't matter which one . . . those days are over and you're all way too young to remember something that would in effect be hipster like from that era anyway . . .)

What that does mean, is I used to know a lot about the publishing industry, all of the pieces of it not just genre stuff, because I was deeply involved in trying to get the publishing industry to distribute my magazine, which was dedicated to giving writers a chance to write, take chances and possibly fail without having to publish a novel first. Because that was the way it was then. I was consciously recreating a John Campbell style environment in order to try to get writers to be more creative and less focused only on getting published. I was good enough at it to get a real distribution deal. I was in Walden and Borders. However 14 years is a long time.

16 years ago ( maybe longer, it's fuzzy now ) when electronic books were still fiction and the convention hall was packed with people who hoarded their books like dragons hoard gold, I was on a panel where every single person on it was the equivalent of Madonna famous and I was something equivalent to say . . . Moonshine Willy. The panel was on whether or not people would buy electronic books, and the bibliophiles in the room all of whom embraced science fiction with the passion that fueled real world rocket ships to Mars were saying "No, bloody hell no!! We will not go!! To the last musty page we will defend our books!!"

And I was saying something along the lines of this: we grew up with books, but access to paper at this level is new, books are a form of wealth once, but there were penny dreadfuls and dimestore novels and pamphlets. We love our books because that's what we held in our hands when we discovered our worlds and that attachment is sentiment, not necessarily ergonomics, economics or comfort. We will always have some physical books, but they will once again be objects of wealth, education or eccentricity. The reality will be when the form factor becomes usable, children will remember their electronic books and their teenage discoveries of literature with the same fondness we have for our pulp art covers.

At this point I should perhaps mention I was the youngest person on the panel being a mere 24 years or so old and I now shockingly recall the only female. And at least two of the Really Big Deals conceded the point and when it ended everyone had agreed with me that the tech wasn't anywhere close to being pleasant to read now so we weren't in any danger of having to figure out where it was going to go. ( In the late 80s/early 90's).

I was invited to be on a lot of panels about the future of books after that. Reflected starshine. I'll bet hardly anyone remembers that was a really big deal 20 years ago.

What Happened in the Bar - With That Guy:

So flash forward to now - We were talking about reading a book vs reading on the e-readers with Paolo checking out my iPad and me explaining that the Kindle on iPad is what I'd been waiting for and we were cross comparing iBooks and Kindle for stores, sorting and readability.

I showed him my Kindle library - and he looked at me and said "You're willing to show me that you read Kelley Armstrong?". And there, in that moment; was the moment others said we were going to lose when books went electronic. That moment when you know something about someone because of what's in their library just by seeing it. A social signifier. In Slate there was an article called Judging a Girl by Her Cover. It used to be what you saw the stranger reading created the intimacy or the shared knowledge, but now sharing what I was reading was an act of trust and therefore intimacy.

Here an author ( a good one! I have read his journalism) was now looking at something very real about me, knowing I hadn't gotten to his book yet, seeing what was sitting there instead. And he immediately saw Kelley Armstrong; author of Dime Store Magic, the title that made me buy her books. And he also immediately teased me about it, and I immediately told him the truth. They're light, they're popcorn and not particularly brilliant but they are filled with female characters that make rational choices in unnatural situations making them one of the very few "supernatural" series with female characters who don't make me want to kill myself or someone else.

It was just as if he'd seen it on my bookshelf.

The iPad mostly gets read in my bedroom. So the books inside it count for the tour. Here were the other books in my Kindle for iPad, their covers floating at him in glorious color:

The Jeeves Collection by PG Wodehouse
At Home by Bill Bryson
Sherlock Holmes
Seder K'Riat Haftorah - My People's Prayerbook
Cleopatra a Biography - Duane W. Roller
Hobson's Choice - Harold Brighouse
The Great Transformation - Karen Armstrong
The Magicians: A Novel - Lev Grossman
The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia - Laura Miller
Son of a Witch - Gregory Maguire and two other books by him
All of the Stieg Larsson novels - I had read them exclusively on e-formats
Living with the Dead - was the Kelley Armstrong he saw initially - I have three of her others on the iPad Kindle
A whole bunch of Mercedes Lackey - because she almost always tells a good consistent story that doesn't leave me hanging
And the Regency Dragon series by Naomi Novik because they gave me the first one free I bought the other two.
Troll's Eye View - edited by Ellen Datlow
Fall of the Roman Republic - Plutarch the Rex Warner translation
Buried Child - Sam Shepard
Pride and Pejudice - Jane Austen
Aesop's Fables - the George Fyler Townsend translation

But of them all honestly, Kelly Armstrong's have the most striking lurid covers recalling modernized pulp fiction infused sensibility. Of course he's going to focus on that instead of the strange religious book and the philosophy and history stuff. But really all he got to see was the new cyber effect of "what's in my purse". Does it show anything about me? Well yes.

I read history, I read about the nature of God through a lens other than my own, I tried Bill Bryson's book and it was awesome, his book reads like my brain thinks but it's non-fiction. I read plays and translations and when I read fantasy I obviously read it frothy - or at least I do when it's on my Kindle app.

There is nothing there to indicate whether I would be a target market for Paolo's book - The Windup Girl. But we had a fantastic conversation about female characterization, the nature of ebooks and whether or not it was going to change things.

It was a funny full circle thing - but much reduced. Paolo is now maybe Adele level famous ( to keep with the music analogy) and I'm practically unknown. We were at a table in a bar instead of a convention lecture room and I believe, although I am not sure, that I am older than him. But it's the same conversation with the primary difference being the e-book is in my hand instead of being imagined.

And truth be told right now I am far more likely to buy an ebook than a physical one.

But there is a caveat- those books on my Kindle were books I bought when it was on my iPhone. I just got the pad, they were transfers. The iPhone is a 4 inch screen. I specifically bought books that I knew no one in the house will be interested in besides me ( until the announcement of iCloud there was no way I would have anticipated being able to even share them with family members). So these were books that I COULD read on a 4 inch screen and my "serious" books in that collection "At Home", the Plutarch, the Karen Armstrongs, the Cleopatra, were otherwise large and expensive books that only I would be reading. I made the effort to read them on my tiny 4 inch screen but I longed for a Kindle sized electronic format to read them in. I hate unitaskers. I needed an eReader that had other uses, I am not personally fond of the electronic ink for reading - although it is a preferred tech for many and I did buy a Kindle for my mother - it's not to my preference ( this is not a holy war, there are lots of different kinds of paper and bindings too).

So by default the things I was sharing with him were my "light" things and my selfish reading indulgences. On reflection it was very personal indeed.

And now, of course, I felt guilty. I still hadn't read The Windup Girl. When I started it back in November in our dead tree oversized trade edition I realized that I wanted to take my time with it. It wasn't something I wanted to read like disposable popcorn. After we returned from the trip two weeks ago I broke open the book again. I have taken some time off and it was a perfect opportunity.

I came to a horrible realization. It would be much better for me right now to read this on my iPad. It's more comfortable, it's more portable. The physical book is beautiful, the print is easy on the eyes but it's not readily available without me making special effort and time for uninterrupted physical space. Whereas the electronic version is readable late at night without keeping lights on disrupting the Perfectly Normal Husband, I can't just lean over and pull up the Windup Girl or read it on a six hour jag start to finish. Which is the way I prefer to read books. But I can only read electronic books that way now. Physical books are taking up space and lend themselves to interruption far more than ebooks.

Even back when I was sure ebooks would be a given (I can carry a library in my purse!) I didn't predict this.

But I can't justify spending money on the electronic version of something I already have.

So that got me thinking about books and how I use them. The way I relate to them. The tipping point between hoarding and cherishing. They are meaningful to me, ebooks are simply interesting to me, but I haven't bought any eBooks that are "Important" yet.

So in the context of the other things that have happened over the last two weeks, I started wondering how to sort out all of that thinking. I realized that if Paolo interacting with my ebooks was a sort of "what do you know about who you are moment" that the books in my bedroom are perhaps a better indicator of how I relate to books now and in the future.

It's a microcosm of book culture, and desire and market. So the next few entries will be an experiment, much like the ones I used to give the writer's group. I will describe the books in my bedroom and why they are there. And ponder things like "what does it mean to Farenheight 451 if the screens are the books too". Because frankly, I believe that's what's really going to happen.

But the publishing industry counts on the me from 20 years ago behaving the same way today. And that endangers authors. The model underneath is changing, but the people in that room with the Madonna famous writers love their books and the culture of books, and the handling and smell of books.

I'm pretty sure of one thing:

If the books become the screens, when the Firemen come -we'll still be the first against the wall.

Fighting The Wrong Fight

2011-06-03T04:06:00.000-07:00

This is an ad by the Bodyshop in 1998 - through the power of Facebook people are now reposting it as though it was recently "banned" in the US instead of China and reposting it as though it were somehow controversial now 12 years later.

When I read that it was banned my BS meter pinged so I looked it up with the incredible power of the internet. You know . . . . Google. I found my favorite thing in the world - a primary source.

http://www.anitaroddick.com/readmore.php?sid=13

And I'm furious that we are celebrating this ad being "banned" rather than screaming about the fact that Roddick didn't put her money where her mouth was.

What was Body Shop Really Looking for?

Anita Roddick is an amazing woman, and I for one love and actually use Body Shop products. (or at least I used to - they stopped making/distributing my favorite product Viennese Chalk Scrub)

(*Update : someone mistakenly thought Anita was the photographer who took the shot. The photographer was Steve Perry Anita was the founder and CEO for The Body Shop)

However I would like to take a minute to look at what was "banned" about Ruby. Anita was thrilled that she got a "cease and desist" letter from Mattel. She was amused that one plastic construct could "hurt the feelings of another". She assumed it was the implied insult to Barbie as opposed to the indirect attack on the trademark. Because it fit in with her agenda to do so.

Awesome - that's what provocative activist stands are supposed to do - get enough publicity to make a difference - it worked. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find out the sudden trending of Ruby the Rubenesque articulated doll featuring the prominent branding of the Body Shop on all of the retweets and Facebook posts was actually started by the Body Shop's marketing department itself to get back some of it's liberal activist rep back from the early 90's. Before it was just another chain in the dying mall.

Yeah that's right - I am exactly that cynical. Because this ad was banned in China -Here all they got was a cease and desist letter from Mattel and parental complaints about implied nudity.

That's not being "banned", that's voluntarily giving up without a fight here in the US. Because you don't care about anything other than the publicity and you were hoping to be "banned". And that my friends, means you care more about making your point and selling your stuff than anyone's actual rights.

Because let's be honest Ruby looks way more naked than Barbie, and part of that actual sexuality and nakedness is BECAUSE Ruby looks more real.

And let's also be honest - Ruby is posed in a sexualized manner, she is selling product to make you more attractive. And perhaps in the very prudish world where "my first Barbie" is now made with plastic panties so that the Barbie can't even be naked if it wanted to, the argument parents were levying against the Body Shop windows might be that Ruby looks like a naked woman who's posing for her lover getting ready to dive into bed until you get close enough see the articulation points and realize it's an anti- Barbie.

Also this wasn't the only ad that ran in the Ruby promotion, there was also this:

I'm down with a good Odalisque as much as the next art loving gal, but this one really is just unfair to poor Barbie. Girlfriend couldn't even loosen up enough to get on a couch this way:

Which one is going to make parents walking through a mall complain? Naked chick pretending to be a Barbie - that's which one. Also the second ad is bordering on trademark infringement because it's recognizably one of the trademark Barbie TM faces, whereas the standing Ruby is obviously a doll face developed for the ad and in proportion to the doll itself .

Is it possible that it was this second ad - the one not making the Facebook Outrage Rounds that caused the cease and desist letter? Because there's no issue with the first one really, but the second one could be misappropriating a trademarked image for use in advertising someone else's product.

In other words "making Barbie look bad" might actually be "using Barbie's trademarked face to devalue the Barbie Brand specifically to sell your product" Body Shop is a for profit business - not an art house or a non-profit.

Body Image in Media is Important - But Fake Outrage At The Expense of Defending Free Speech Sucks

We'll never know because Anita Roddick didn't really want to fight the REAL fight, she wanted the controversy and she got it. The publicity kicks up every now and then and the images get redistributed. At least one article a year since 1998. The images have done some real good for real people. The woman who created the company and this campaign died in 2007. There is no point in my having a current beef with her. But she stopped before she fought a bigger fight.

Body acceptance is a lovely thing. However not fighting the cease and desist order when you specifically provoked it is a betrayal of real rights.

It is well known that Mattel's lawyers aggressively defend all of it's brands but Barbie in particular. It's also well known that Mattel loses lots of those lawsuits. The Red Ruby poster would have been able to defeat the standard cease and desist, the green one might have had some trouble in trademark law because the part of a doll that you trademark instead of patent is the face.

Going after Barbie is a cheap shot and easy, manufacturing outrage at a corporate entity is also easy - but defending the rights of others to utilize images in art and culture and not allowing trademark to expand past it's legal limit is waaay more important because while Mattel has the right to defend that trademark Mattel does not have the right to say all images of articulated dolls are equal to the Mattel Trademark. Red Ruby was defensible and could have stayed displayed. Body Shop has corporate lawyers on retainer and could have handled the suit.

Mattel didn't sue these guys:

But these guys also did this ad in the same series that caused a bit of a stir so maybe by 2007 picking on Barbie wasn't such big news but going after superheros was:

Or maybe it was just because it was a non-profit.

Mattel just lost the Bratz fight - and they had more valid legal standing there since the designer made the dolls while working for Mattel.

Mattel regularly loses against art shots using mangled, or pornographic Barbies in art.

Mattels lawyers continually correct opposing counsel that refers to Barbie as a "person" or a "she" or as anything other than a brand. They play legal hardball but started losing whenever it's a free speech issue. (warning that last link is long and written for lawyers and no one interviews any actual Mattel lawyers until half way down the article).

This means Roddick's characterization of the cease and desist letter is her own construction/projection and had nothing to do with Mattel:

"Their reason: Ruby was making Barbie look bad, presumably by mocking the plastic twig-like bestseller (Barbie dolls sell at a rate of two per second; it's hard to see how our Ruby could have done any meaningful damage.) I was ecstatic that Mattel thought Ruby was insulting to Barbie -- the idea of one inanimate piece of molded plastic hurting another's feelings was absolutely mind-blowing. "

And all in her mind. She does not provide the text of the cease and desist.

So here's what pisses me off :

- either the red Ruby didn't look Barbie enough to get the cease and desist letters going and they made the green one with the "Barbie" face hoping to get the cease and desist because Mattel was so well known for aggressive copyright protection and that was the plan all along

-or it was done with no expectation of infringement but Roddick rode the infringement case to make people believe it was about weight and shape instead of one business suing another.

Either way Roddick was allowing all the people who cared about the image to believe that it was being "banned" for the body image alone - convincing people that they were trying to ban body types. Making those people feel oppressed by a larger force ( the government and the law) than the already considerable forces that oppress them.

Which frankly would be untrue.

If Ruby was Banned it was just a little bit by a country that bans lots of other things not the US

ban¹ (bn)

tr.v. banned, ban·ning, bans

1. To prohibit, especially by official decree: The city council banned billboards on most streets. See Synonyms at forbid.

2. South African Under the former system of apartheid, to deprive (a person suspected of illegal activity) of the right of free movement and association with others.

3. Archaic To curse.

1. An excommunication or condemnation by church officials.

2. A prohibition imposed by law or official decree: a ban on cigarette smoking on airplanes.

3. Censure, condemnation, or disapproval expressed especially by public opinion.

4. A curse; an imprecation.

5. A summons to arms in feudal times.

v1 - There was no governmental or legal ruling to remove Ruby from ad campaigns in the united states - there may have been voluntary compliance with a letter written by Mattel's legal department that had no standing in court.

v2- While an argument could be made that Ruby was subject to apartheid like systems that keep us from seeing the forms of realistic women's bodies in advertising ,judging by the fact that a quick google search shows articles referencing Ruby come up every year I hardly think her movement and communication have been limited.

v3 - I do not believe Ruby was cursed - actually she seems blessed - how many print ads have this kind of shelf life?

n1- Unless Mattel are Church officials Ruby has not been denied religous identity

n2 - the removal of Ruby was voluntary at request except for China - she was totally banned by the government in China but not by Barbie and Mattel.

n3- OK I might go with this one - enough parents didn't like it that the public opinon "ban" counts - apparently it took about three distraught parents until one came up with a ridiculous enough quote to get press and let the Body Shop cave to pressure instead of fight to keep the posters up or just move them so that they were inside the store instead of visible on the mall

n4 is covered in v3

And I'm pretty sure that neither Barbie nor Ruby is being summoned to arms to fight for the King.

I am sure that I will see the Body Shop's Red Ruby all over my internet today being played as a real time outrage and real time trend. But she was a publicity stunt and her withdrawal in the face of very small actions proves it.

She is a beautiful photo and a lovely shape and I truly believe all people of all sizes are beautiful and sexual, and perhaps make you think about body image. But Ruby is still smooth and plastic and young and sexualized. It would have been more radical to put her in the original Barbie one piece. It would have been even better to see Roddick and The Body Shop fight for their right to Ruby, instead of continuing to empower corporate rights past their actual legal boundaries.

But maybe they couldn't because their ad campaign was specifically designed to incite Mattel and parents through trademark infringement and sexualized implied nudity and blame it on sizism instead.

Making women shaped like Ruby feel like the very government wants to erase them might be good for The Body Shop, and allow women shaped like Ruby to feel like Ruby is helping them fight the Power. But there's a strong possibility that she made up the fight in the first place.

And she didn't fight for a damn thing. She just went away when the going got tough.

The Body Shop should have gone to court.

Christina Hendriks and Brooke Elliot getting real roles and being allowed to be sexually active romantic leads without being punch lines is more important to women with real bodies in the media than Ruby is - and the government is not trying to ban either of them. Hell, the government of Britain actually endorsed Hendricks as the preferred figure for the UK- that's kind of the opposite of banning isn't it?

Kudos to the Body Shops viral marketing team - I'm sure sales will go up after the Facebook exposure.

Reflection

2011-05-16T05:09:00.000-07:00

I'm alive, I promise.

Some interesting things happened in the home stretch of the last few months - some interesting perspectives as I watch people bobble and plan and turn with their new businesses, and I keep going with my own plan.

The first is that there is a deep need for really smart people to be able to understand that they are not "the norm" that not everyone sees things in their way, that the things that hurt and worry them might be slightly different things than hurt and worry other people. It's not a narcissism so much as an insecurity, many, many smart people are pretty sure that they aren't really special or particularly advantaged. Other people's lives look more like they would like their lives ( or their businesses, or their children) to look. It's more than just the grass is greener, it's an absolute sense of being "average".

Maybe everyone has it. That's why we're always surprised when people think or behave or believe differently than we do.

Turning Presentation

2011-04-20T21:53:00.000-07:00

Sorry all the regular Poppet Readers - I have a presentation due tomorrow and need a safe blog to embed it and here's my blog and it's sort of like it's safe so I'll just leave this here - see the cute wizardly Poppet? He's really the only interesting thing to see . . . no need to bother with the out of context embed down below

The Turing Test on Prezi

So What ARE You Doing?

2011-03-26T06:46:00.001-07:00

If you click on the pics below you'll get the whole storyboard .

Poppetropolis Animation

2011-03-16T03:47:00.000-07:00

I made it myself.

I'll update soon with the still but these are all actual Poppetropolis buildings.

Something in mind . . . .

2011-03-06T19:39:00.000-08:00

Winter Light

2011-02-28T07:20:00.000-08:00

Shameless Plug for Someone else's Cute:

2011-02-24T05:06:00.001-08:00

It's Milk Toof

When It Matters

2011-02-12T13:37:00.000-08:00

There is a school of thought that when in a situation of subservience, such as a teacher/student relationship, one should "go along to get along."

How one should go along depends on what the teacher wants or your goal.

If taking the the class to reach a larger goal - like a degree or a certain GPA, going along means studying the teacher, figuring out what that teacher most values and doing it, modifying ( but not compromising) what you most value until they fit.

That is valuable. It teaches you a life skill and lets you learn, both what the teacher has to offer and what you can do to work with others who are not exactly like you. Because no one is exactly like you. Ever. No matter how hard you try, or how much nothing you have done is new -- no one is ever, ever exactly like you.

Sometimes that can be very lonely if you think about it too long, which is why people daydream about having a twin, or a perfect mate, or a magic hat that knows you better than you know yourself.

But sometimes what the teacher wants is thinking and open debate and that of course is where the trouble starts . . . . .

There is a Book - inside the book is a chapter that describes interactivity. I do not disagree with the book, but I strongly disagree with it's tone.

That tone indicates that one should not really pay attention to what non-designers say - they are just BSing because they don't understand what you are saying. It glorifies the fact that everything is NEW and even LANGUAGE is changing. Students and youth will see solutions that experienced designers will never ever see. Because they are "Designosaurs".

No really. The only sop to the poor, old, decrepit, artists and designers who work in traditional media is something where these evangelicals of digital design concede that the usage of the term "conventional designers" is somewhat condescending ( and a term I've never heard used in a professional context "traditional" being the term I've heard used when referrring to non-digital media. )

Understood. Youth, anarchy and open source software tools for creating digital media is where "all" the "credibility" is. But that's not design to me - that's masturbation. The most I will give it is that it is public masturbation.

Here is the thing, design, and please understand that I mean DESIGN not ART is about interaction. A designer is creating something to be used, a form, an application, an object, a theory, and the goal is for PEOPLE to use it. If they don't, or can't, or won't; it might be beautiful, it might even be art, but it fails as design.

Design - what does it mean anyway - let's get long and referencey about it - Design according to the Oxford Dictionary is about planning and the act of planning - it references art but is not art

Pronunciation:

/dɪˈzʌɪn/

noun

1 a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is made: he has just unveiled his design for the new museum  

[mass noun] the art or action of conceiving of and producing a plan or drawing of something before it is made: good design can help the reader understand complicated information  

[mass noun] the arrangement of the features of an artefact, as produced from following a plan or drawing:inside , the design reverts to turn-of-the-century luxe  

2 a decorative pattern: pottery with a lovely blue and white design  

3 [mass noun] purpose or planning that exists behind an action, fact, or object: the appearance of design in the universe  

Nope - no part there where one of the things you should be learning about is how it's OK if "some people just don't get it".

So what about when design is a verb - is that the part where we look for the higher ground of artistic integrity?

verb

[with object]

decide upon the look and functioning of (a building, garment, or other object), by making a detailed drawing of it:a number of architectural students were designing a factory  (as adjective, with submodifier designed) specially designed buildings  
do or plan (something) with a specific purpose in mind:[with object and infinitive] :the tax changes were designed to stimulate economic growth

Ummn nope - not there either.

So gentle readers, artists, and consumers - because I know that design is the incredibly unsexy thing you have to do to execute art for mass consumption and digital design in particular must be meant to be seen by unexpected audiences you will forgive me for making the mistake of thinking an example given in my textbook of the effects of a piece of interactive art was an example of design having unpredictable as opposed to desirable effects.

There is an artists group called Antenna and they created the Power Flower art installation. It's really really cool. It goes for a certain length of space and as you walk past your movement and energy activate a flower and it glows blue. When they first put it up as the book describes it a small child understood it very quickly and started interacting (playing) with the art right away but this poor old lady never understood the connection between her movement and proximity to the light because she wasn't moving in a speed or manner that connected the sudden glowing blue light with anything at all and was just irritated by what seemed to her to be a sporadic bath of blue light for no apparent reason.

Now the book went out of it's way to point out the ages of the participants in this early version of the installation - and perhaps it wouldn't have seemed so ageist (see old people don't get it!) if it hadn't been glorifying the young every fourth sentence or so. But even with that I thought - Awesome! It's obviously a design issue - if the goal is to "create delight" and there's a problem with getting some group to interact with it then how could you change the design so that it would reach a wider group to create that effect?

Because that's what you should do in a design class right?

Well apparently my fellow students felt that this example was "proof that you can't please everyone all the time".

No. No it wasn't.

And so because we were required to actually engage each other in an online discussion board I engaged - politely and explained that public art shouldn't be cutting out an entire segment of the public on purpose and was getting angrier and angrier that the consensus was that maybe "women over 60" weren't part of the target audience, so there was nothing wrong with the design.

Ladies and Gentlemen - the work was commissioned for the windows of Bloomingdales in New York City, I propose that the target audience is DISPROPORTIONATELY women over 60.

The artists I might point out - changed the design and added a musical tone which creates more of a point of connectivity so the connection of progressive sound becomes another point of entry into the work to create "unexpected delight".

Here is the work:

And I am happy to report that the actual artists have a much better attitude than the "artists" in my design class:

But I wonder - if the young and artistic are continously told there is more value in their point of view than the older and more experienced designer how will they ever manage to reach anyone with empathy if they also hold the idea that either art or design is meant to be exclusionary.

It matters.

It matters enough to speak out in class and run the risk of offending someone's comfort zone and being "that guy".

If the old lady realizes that the flowers interact with her movement and thinks "that's lame" then she doesn't like the art. That's OK - you really can't please everyone. If she never figures out that her actions have anything to do with the flowers or the light then she doesn't have an opinion on the art all - she never experienced it to have one.

It's the designer's job to make sure that she can form an opinion.

Sigh. There really wasn't a choice, but now I am absolutely "that guy". And that was before this week's mangling of the "Hockey Stick" graphic and Climategate to make it seem like graphic designers were accused fo taking bribes because visual design is THAT POWERFUL.

But the gentleman in the discussion insisted that nothing was wrong with the installation if it didn't reach people and even when given the location and the fact that it was public defended the idea of it just being the "fault" of the audience demographic and left off with "we'll just have to respectfully disagree".

No we won't - we can politely disagree.

But the respect is pretty much gone.

The gentleman in question had none for the public and reserved it for the artist, which much eroded mine. I don't know any working artists with that attitude.

But the exchange was polite - and tempered with the fact that he doesn't see it as disrespect and there's nothing in the book to convince him to respect those poor beleaguered people who are not new or anarchistic or devoted to blowing off management.

That was the compromise - the going along to get along - because had he been my friend or co-worker I would have called him out on it - and less politely than I did online.

I'm going to go play the interview with the artists again so I can remember the really important stuff in art and design.

Every Spellcaster Needs a Workroom

2011-01-31T03:58:00.000-08:00

When we read about fantastic places and other worlds it's sometimes with a very deep longing. We wish we could be surrounded by the magic being described not knowing that we are surrounded by it now.

Wizards always have a mysterious workroom to study arcana and practice casting their spells. It is in the upper corner where the light that comes in has to be blocked because sometimes you need the light and sometimes the light can ruin the spells.

Witches have workrooms too, they're exactly like wizards that way, and almost every other way except they happend to be female and therefore are both scarier and supposedly more evil. Where a short tempered magic user who brooks no nonsense named "Christopher" is an eccentric but powerful wizard, the same magic user behaving the same way named "Grace" will be an evil witch who will eat your children and is jealous of your staid and normal life doing anything she can to disrupt it.

But they do the same things - cast the same spells. Handsome or pretty magic users are considered more dangerous than ugly ones. If they look a little odd, you know who they are. If they're too pretty something is wrong. No one ever considers the ones exactly in the middle. But we never notice anyone who isn't odd or pretty anyway so I suppose that's the same for spellcasters.

In the workroom is a set of shelves with arcane tomes written in many languages, with arcane symbols and the writing of ancients. There are other books with secrets to manipulate humans into making things the spellcaster needs. There are books to sell invisible things, create things that aren't there, books on how to manipulate light. Books of the past and the future. Books that will drive you insane if you make it past the preface.

On the wall there are two sigils in metallic gold, olive green and dusky blood red and black. One is the symbol of "Emptiness" and the other is the symbol for "Chaos" . The spellcaster will never tell you what the symbols are, but they can be read more easily on the other side of the world. Here they are pretty and balanced and perhaps a little odd or unnerving since color is scary on this side of the world where browns and beige and golds are sacred.

Green grasses are woven like rows and rows of tiny baskets on the wall. The floor is a pile of cut threads of some blued green covering the wood .

There is a bench that a visitor or petitioner can sit on that with the right somatic components turns into cabinet, and a piece of paper on the door to the materials cupboard that becomes new no matter how many times it is written on. It is a limited spell - what's written on it is gone when something new is needed, but the spellcasters will tell you there is a need for that.

The room is filled with light from a single glowing disk on the ceiling. It was there before the wizardry, a sign of a different time with less magic, easily collecting dust but ensorcelled to put out four five times more light than it was designed to. A simple spell, they'll tell you how to do it, even show you the tools they used in one of the little compartments in their worktable.

It is the eternal problem of spellcasters that you need a great deal of stuff to cast spells, all sorts of papers and potions and special tools, like boards with buttons that make words from anywhere in the room, and magic sheets of metal to control the things on the other side of the glass in the other dimensions and worlds.

There are boxes of glues and clips and pins and odd little bits that look like squids and spirals and shooting stars. Things that mark the pages of books but leave no trace so the wizard's (or witch's) marks can remain there own. Most spellcasters don't really believe that everything is meant to be shared.

There are castles, and Magic, and a tower of tiny, complex, already-created spells. They make figures dance, hold celestial choirs frozen in time, perform the tasks of a full team of scribes and bureaucrats. They let artists paint with light and create colors with no pigments. They create maps of worlds that don't exist yet.

There is an astral tether wrapped in wire and glass and grounded in small glowing blue boxes that lets the spellcasters communicate with other wizards and witches all over the world. And sometimes ordinary people too, on tools that are uses more regularly, by people who consider themselves more regular. But the magic is insidious, as more spellcasters become interested in everyday things, everyday things become more like the tools of magicusers. Now many ordinary folk are using tiny boxes of light thinking they are just fancy versions of the things they are using before instead of the things that hang about in a wizards workroom.

Their own spellbooks are a mass of illegible scribbles bound with metal and leather for the important things and metal and pressed remains of books gone by for the others. There are shelves of these but most of their work is stored in their memory and extra memory, a tiny group of small chips barely the size of your thumbnail hold years and years of thoughts and work and dreams, tiny spirit jars with pieces of the spellcasters soul.

There is the usual assortment of owls and vultures and gargoyles, trophies of courts where the spellcaster served, pirate ships raided, journeys completed, adventures successfully survived, surveyors tools, a pen with no ink that can become any type of writing implement, or paint brush and paint any color, a giant glass pane to bring in the other worlds and cast the spells to send them out into the world, a tiny malevolent looking earthsprite gifted by an enemy attempting to look like a friend - it backfired the spellcaster and sprite took a liking to each other right away - the supposedly hidden insult turned into a gracious gift instead.

A tiny handmade crafted box of earthen clay, spirals dug into the exterior blue glass beads pressed in. The spirits of ancestors pressed under glass suspended by brackets. A small touch of a hell that specialized in graphic designs.

In the corner you can't see is a hint, a pinkfaced white haired witch in white whispers into the ear of a black clad greenfaced witch with a small smile and black unruly hair, their images surrounded by many many names the same dusky blood red behind them as the sigils on the opposite wall, underneath them in neat black portfolios and rolled paper tubes are hopes and dreams and passions all stored for future consumption.

The Spellcaster's workroom fully organized, because having recently gone up a level, knowing where your components are is mandatory, and the amount of time you spend working on those higher level spells and memorization for the next take will double if you aren't together.

The seven year old boy who had stumbled into the room by accident thought he recognized the witch on the wall but was in for a world of surprises when he left the room find the owners of the rest of the house . . . . nothing at all was the way things were at his house . . . .

The Dao of Cleaning out Closets

2011-01-16T08:26:00.000-08:00

This picture was taken after the Poppet Gypsy Wagon had been shaken about by a silly human. It was of course an accident, but the Poppets then had to clean up.

And one of the rules of cleaning up is that sometimes you make a bigger mess first to make things cleaner later.

It is a time to reduce things and to empty things.

When I chose The House. I was a particular kind of person. I am a person who likes to arrange things, but almost all of the things I built were virtual, verbal or flat. I was not a person with small children, my children were exactly Big Enough Not to Worry. I was not a person who needed a big TV room, but I was a person with computers and books, and flat art made on a computer, and occasionally I might make a rug. But rugs always went away as soon as I was finished.

So I chose The House for a number of it's charms and potentials but did not buy it intending to have a sculpter/hacker/crafting mixed media artist, a mechanical engineer and a painter in it.

I didn't realize that I would have to reinvent myself every decade or so. All three of us have large scale work and large pieces. All four of us have paper intensive hobbies and two of us have record intensive professional lives. So I need a real workspace and the office which really had been started with on person playing games and the other person doing multimedia work needed to be restructured - the three artists all have to use technology we need centralized storage and systems to keep track of the peripherals, some of our supplies are outsized now. We are different than we were.

But the office holds things - the legal detrius of life and health and school and career. I'm clearing it out and it's been disorganized for some time. Now things have shaken us up so I'm making a bigger mess to have less mess in the future. I found drawings and stories and (God Help Me) poetry from my high school years - small betrayals of my claim not to be an artist - reinforcement of my position that if I am one, I'm really rather mediocre.

But they are valuable in some ways - they are baselines for ideas I will be developing for school so I won't have to get stuck in the now, I can improve what I started 20+ years ago.

There are things I've finally lived long enough to outlive their legal lives and I can throw them out into the giant shredder. There are things I was going to throw out that I realized I couldn't because they definitively mark some health concerns and therefore might be important later, since some of the members of the House might be special that way.

But one of the interesting things to me is that through 10 different moves in less than 20 years all of my worlds and the people I built in them are still with me - from junior high school through now. And they all have stories, and the stories are not bad to start, but might become better if I worked on them. It is very, very difficult for a multimedia artist to throw away anything because I have proven over the years that I do reuse it, physically and intellectually.

However, that's no excuse for it to be disorganized. If it's going to keep travelling with me, it's going to have to travel tighter and be more easily found.

Dao is a sword in Chinese - it is single edged and slices and chops

DAO is a data access object

dao is also when pronounced slightly differently "way" and "path" and "road" and represents a philosophy.

When you clean out your closets and look at your paper you cannot lie to yourself. You did this, you ignored this, you bought this, you called a lawyer about this. Here is the evidence. Do you hold on or do you shred.

And there is no one answer that holds for all of everything, not if you do it right. You need to deal with each piece honestly. Then you figure out which keeps going with you and what gets left behind until the next time silly humans shake up your wagon and you have to clean out all over again.

Then you'll look at all the pieces that got added from this time, and you'll look back at all the things you saved from before and that will most likely guide your way when you make the next choices.

And you'll shed (or shred) some more and travel on. It's just like that.

Cleaning closets out sometimes gets a little sad. But there will be room for all the chargers and tablets and canvases and photo boxes and cameras and tripods and portfolios.

Travelling on.

Holiday Briefing: Logic- The Destroyer

2010-12-30T12:00:00.000-08:00

Does it seem odd to anyone else that the winter is when we have our Must See Them Holidays in our very, very scattered culture?

We seem so surprised when actual Winter gets in our way.

It's also odd that we put the first semester finals right smack dab inside the cluster of holidays. It pretty much presumes the traditional dependent student; as opposed to say the parent of children or head of household who is expected to create the feelings and events that are supposed to inform all of those fond associations with the season.

And thus the Holidays came.

The Taunting was impacted ( but not stopped - you cannot stop The Taunting). Unlike previous years the presents needed to be hidden only to be revealed on the day of. Part of that was practical - the theme this year was Chocolate. All Chocolate, all the time. Godiva, Hershey's Nestle's, Lindt, Mars, a little boutique outfit that made World Peace bars . . . every night a different chocolate ending with specialized chocolates for each of the Children ( who are not so Childish Anymore - as proven by the eighth candle's Bailey's infused chocolate bar for The Girl).

The secondary Taunting gifts involved clothing. Things delayed due to recession but needed anyway were made fun. Sales were shopped. Artisans were traded with. But we kept the holiday ridiculously low key, lower key even than the Cheapass Taunting of 2009. Last year it was because I was closing down my projects, and knew that things were ending. This year it is because I returned to school to create new beginnings, however the semester was ending.

Here is the catch - I thought I had taken a relatively balanced load but they were all production classes that had final projects before final exams. Although I sort of knew that, in practical terms it escaped me. There were 4 tests in rapid succession in Logic and in order to combat my LD it takes about two days to prep for a test, having done it in a very intense way this last month I discovered what I'm really doing is rewiring my brain temporarily; but so completely that after working on a logic test I was unable to use language properly for two to three days afterwards, creating amusing malapropisms for friends and family and actual Conduction Aphasia for me.

When I first took the Logic and Object Oriented programming classes I had this idea that I would develop strategies that would help other people with symbol processing disorders be able to take and pass the class, however about 2/3 of the way through I realized NO ONE with my disability is going to take these classes to this level - they'd have to be masochists and have unlimited time ( or a psychotic need to prove that they are able to pass the class anyway - at least that's what my mirror tells me) Instead I've developed a series of strategies that can help any number of other people with different LDs, or people who are not naturally adept at the structured thinking these classes require, but if you have a hard core symbol processing disorder, as my programming professor says: "There's nothing wrong with being a poet".

Everything was going well, although I was sleep deprived and then I thought - "I can modify this technique and maybe get some rest."

This was a huge mistake causing me to get a truly dismal grade on the one test I couldn't drop as the lowest score. How bad? 25. There's an average killer.

I found a scoring error and got an extra 13 points but it pretty much meant that I had to really, really invest in the final - 4 days of drills and prep. 4 hours of actual test.

But I did survive, and the Holidays happened without me speaking properly. The last final was on the 21. The trip to Grandma's House was determined to be an Xmas Day Trip. My Perfectly Normal Mother-in-Law was pronounced healthy enough to leave her house for Xmas Eve.

There was much rejoicing.

So really, everything was as good as it could be. And then finally my grades were posted - I'd gotten a 100 on the final and because of weighting managed to get an A for the class. Had I scored lower it would have been a scholarship affecting C.

Huzzah! But I was exhausted.

Anti Claus however had no patience for that sort of nonsense and broke in to make copies of our keys, and deliver a sonic screwdriver that actually is a screwdriver, kick ass motorcycle boots and small bombs of pixie dust to the Children. I think I was Found Boring this year.

I think I found myself a bit boring this year.

But I was not the only person in the family and some of the other had been waiting for Xmas day for some time. They had plans.

We travelled out to Grandma's house, where Grandma's Gingerbread Poppet had found the perfect tree, and the Perfectly Normal Husband brought all of his Holiday up with us. It is obvious that the family would like a return to things being arty.

New Poppets have joined the house - Aunti Claus brought some for the Children ( apparently she didn't approve of a Poppet-free holiday. They are Candy Cane Poppets but they look a little blood spattered - one wonders where they accompanied her first before landing in the stockings)

My parents gave me a photobox. My Perfectly Normal Husband gave me a vampire, a wizard, a literary Death and a Tinker. Someone got me a Magic Trackpad.

I just like saying I have a Magic Trackpad.

Now here's the thing about Grandma's House. It's pretty much the test model for "lake effect" snow. So before leaving, pretty much the only non syllogistic thing I understood was the weather report for Grandma's House. And the report was "There might be some snow" and no one thought it would be much, but we warned all of our fellow travelers to inform loved ones and offices that there was a chance we would be snowed in at Grandma's House.

Then we got all pre-occupied with The Boy getting sick and my amusing attempts to communicate. And so we went over the river and through the woods, as we do yearly and played with dancing trees and had yummy food and shared a few bottles of wine and sort of showed the youngsters what "keeping a weather eye out" looks like it in the digital age.

Things were moving along nicely but we were starting to go - "Hmmn . . . Gee. Might need to stay an extra day or two, " when all of a sudden the word "Blizzard" started popping up on our weather eye screens.

Well they weren't kidding. We played it hour by hour but had to leave Grandma's House in a flurry all of our own because they were calling for a Blizzard at the House too.

Grandma's got about 20 inches, we got about 10. We raced the storm home and won by an inch. The other 9 fell after we were settled back in, but it wasn't much of a visit. The poppets didn't even get to come out and play with Grandma's holiday decor.

But we did spend it together and the food was wonderful.

Here is the thing I learned last week. If I were not inherently logical, I would not have been able to succeed, but to immerse myself to much in logic damages me and everything around me. There is a reckoning. The Art part came easier to me, but there was no balance in that either. The two need to be combined instead of in opposition. There was not enough time with family and just being. 6 Days - but a microcosm of the year.

And on the 7th day the Poppets came out and said - "Wake up sleepyhead! You need to play with your toys."

Well. I suppose I'm not back into right thinking for Poppets yet, I just started playing with my toys today. However I am very grateful for my friends and my family and my project teammates at school, because I am thinking about things as though they might be fun again.

That's a pretty good way to mark the solstice I think.

No one makes graphic novels about the adventures of getting the family together for a photo, but there are all sorts of stories when you do. This year I'll bet there were all sorts of adventures behind all of the holiday photos. Stories that will be told each time the album opens.

A fictional version of ourselves for the Dreamtime:

New Year's coming . . . .

Always Time

2010-12-22T17:06:00.001-08:00

Completed Work.

It IS Time Travel - with Poppets! - 3rd Panel

2010-12-20T18:30:00.000-08:00

The Future panel.

Past and Present are posted immediately below if you missed them.

It IS Time Travel - with Poppets! - 2nd Panel

2010-12-19T19:50:00.000-08:00

This is the underlying panel for The Present.

The Past Panel is the entry right before this if you missed it.

It IS Time Travel - with Poppets!

2010-12-18T07:27:00.000-08:00

The direction was a mosaic that showed the passage of time using at least 25 original photos.

I did it in triptych form - this is the underlying first panel for "Past"

Sleep, Once having found The Key,

2010-12-14T08:08:00.000-08:00

was loathe to leave once established.

Reinforcements have been called in .

Digital Fine art homework Complete! (5 other assignments left waiting)

2010-12-04T21:31:00.000-08:00

This is it - 3 Logic Tests and 2 Java Programs to go . . .

The Taunting 2010 - Mulligan

2010-12-02T03:44:00.000-08:00

The Poppets and I are just not ready this year. We would like a do over.

This might be the Time Travelling Taunting - Candles were lit, Giant New Computers were set up, fried foods were ordered in, there was gelt, and papers due the next day were written around midnight.

My Perfectly Normal Mother in Law went in for Very Serious Surgery yesterday, it was planned, but it was spinal surgery. It was a long day and we were all worried for everyone (Perfectly Normal Husband was his usual strong competent together self but obviously nervous-ish) Unfortunately her brother and One of My Favorite In-laws also went in for triple bypass surgery. That was not planned, and perhaps at their ages they should be over sibling rivalry.

So the really good Channuka news is that everyone did very well with their respective surgeries and they will both be able to walk properly and keep their hearts beating regularly and have their families lovingly tease them even though the Taunting is not their holiday. If they don't have dietary restrictions I will be making them lemon squares for theirs.

If they do I'll modify the lemon square recipe until I can make lemon squares for them. I'm pretty good at that sort of thing.

So while the Poppets and I were not really on top of things a friend of ours found this - most channuka stuff is kind of lame, especially song rewrites by hipster jews or actual religous types - but this is an acapella group that has found the perfect balance and thus created an awesome "Smile Out Loud" moment, instead of the usual cringing thought of "Really is that the best we can do?" sort of thing.

Thank you Maccabeats for being on key and really entertaining; Merry Channuka - the Poppets thought you were neat and they were sick of Adam Sandler!

The Black Box - Inner Workings

2010-11-17T07:38:00.000-08:00

All of the other Boxes deal with Light. The getting of it, the making of it the manipulation of it. Wrestling it into art or code, or just getting enough of it in to shed onto other things.

The Black Box is about the Dark, what to do with the Empty, how to admit that there is no such thing as Empty, to use, code, and manipulate the things we pretend are Empty to make art. Or light.

The Black Box will invite the light in, but only on it's terms. Light is just another thing in the fullness of Empty.

In the Black Box we are expected to build things out of the Dark.

Now we are building Universes. Out of art.

It's a big thing. As a friend of mine says it's almost unfair - I have been worrying at the problem for a good deal longer than my boxmates. In the room where I turn light into art, I have also been asked to make a world out of someone else's art. All my rooms ask me to make Universes. All my rooms lead back to art.

But the Black Box is different – even time travel changes there . It is dual place. I have been here before and yet somehow it's new. I thought it would fill up the Empty places, it would shine the dark in the places I worked to only see light, so I could get back to the whole.

Here's the trick about my Universe in the Black Box - I'm building it to put other people in it.

They each have Universes of their own:

an ancient storyteller's circle,
a religion where the all knowing priest reveals the power of relationships and venerates the matriarch with blown glass and colored light,
the warmth of an eternal eve of Christmas, fellowship and eggnog,
a Universe of kindergartners with sparkly stuffed snakes, hungry caterpillars and vicious jars of playdough.

There are 7 Universes to go.

In each of their Universes I am somewhat me, but mostly I become who they think I might be. It's my job to fit in their Universe, their job to create a Universe where I can see what they want me to be. We have to experience it for each other to make it real. It's their Universe but they made it for me. When I make my Universe, I will make it for them.

Their Universes are all based on art that made them happy or whole. Mine is based on art that made me break.

I do not know how that will work for them. I will build it anyway. In the Black Box I am a tiny lonely god.

In between Universes, we do two things - explore who we are and learn how to be everyone else. It's hard to see this happen, so we also learn how to watch and how to evaluate the becoming of others. How to help others see the choices they would not make themselves.

When becoming others - it is easy to see how you might find the things living in your own Empty. It is not so apparent that you find those things when watching the others Become.

I don't know what it's like to have always had a Black Box nearby, to have experienced the sliding between action/observation. absorbing/becoming, experiencing/remembering while doing all of the things one does to exist. But the gap in time fills the Black Box Dark. I watch my boxmates struggle because sometimes there are places and choices and things that fill the Empty and they can't see them. It stops them from Becoming.

When we Watchers see them, its our job to share them. In the sharing we give them our own things that live in the Empty and I wonder if we become just a little less material ourselves.

The Black Box has coughed up some reality; caught in someone else's words, in someone else's worlds.

Warriors know where each of their scars came from. In some cultures we circle and tell the stories of those scars, our lives written on our bodies. The stories tell the warriors of things to know - not just to avoid - but to know.

Some battles are long won, it's rude to mention scars now. Our culture is about the perfect presentation, healing, moving forward. So maybe we are surprised when we tell about a long healed wound to find the time travel.

Maybe we are surprised to find out we were Warriors.

The pain is fresh in the telling, you use the pain in the Becoming, it's new again, but you leave the Box and it's just a scar.

There are two things here - surprise at the real time pain and surprise that you can still go there. But to share it outside the Box, people will label it - say things like " you're not really over it" insist that you "admit it" or "deal with it". Everything outside the Box is Present Tense, but only in the Now.

Inside the Box everything is in the Present Tense too, but it’s in the Always.

We are the engines that build the Universes, but we can also get lost between them.

And I'm beginning to think that maybe outside the Black Box we're just somewhat ourselves, but mostly we're what we need to be to fit into someone else's Universe too. And that sometimes that pain we carry around in the Empty is when we realize that sometimes we don't make that Universe better, because we can't.

I was prepared for that in the doing, I wasn't prepared to find it in the watching.

I'll build it into my Universe.

When the Universe is built I’ll put my boxmates in it.

Then they will be in my Universe, I’ll be in the Empty before and after that Universe.

I wonder if it’s like this for all the things that build Universes.

Job-like Interview - Updated

2010-11-12T04:49:00.000-08:00

We shall see if it moves on to an actual job interview. At least I have a snappy new suit.

Update - the job like interview went well, but the job it was attached to had the clients decide to go with a .net architect instead of an ops manager, so back to the drawing board.

But I still have a snappy new suit.

Tomorrow We Protest . . . . Politely

2010-10-29T15:08:00.000-07:00

The Doomsday Poppet is not helping.

Some of the House is going to the Rally for Sanity, and we will have signs.

Some of the House is staying here because it's the sane thing to do if you're sick with a really bad cold.

I have to make some of the signs first.

It's hard because there are so many choices, like the approved:

"I don't agree with what you are saying but I'm pretty sure you are not Hitler."

and

"Well, you know, that's just your opinion man."

But the majority of the House will be carrying signs that will most likely say "Meh."

But there are some that I might play with like

"When I was on the Debate Team, we got points off for calling each other names."

"Please stop campaigning long enough to govern for a bit."

"Clean Cup! Move Down!"

A personal fave made by someone else

Maybe if enough people show up for a comedy event the media will understand that a whole bunch of people showing up in DC doesn't really mean anything about the rest of the country or politics in general.

But that will require more people to show up for a piece of comedic performance art that happens to express the non-polarized sentiment that we'd like our politicians to act like grown ups instead of the idea that crowds are just crowds, well that would be fine too.

Zombies . . . .Love and Midterms

2010-10-22T10:28:00.000-07:00

About this time a year ago when I was working, I rolled the office chair I was sitting on over my own foot.

It takes talent sometimes.

It was about this time a year ago that the writing was also on the wall for the long term funding for my department. Dead Department Walking.

It was also this time last year that I was working towards the World Fantasy Convention, Lisa and I had collaborated on the House Where Halloween Things Live When It Isn't Halloween.

Which was the last Poppet Project I finished.

So the most interesting thing about running over my toe was that I didn't realize that I'd damaged it until almost right before I left for WFC, because I was trying on dress shoes and felt some pressure. My toe had done that thing toes do when they are bruised under the nail. I'd had experience with this before - it takes about a year to grow out and not look like Zombies Ate Your Toe.

I'm pretty good at predictions, not by being psychic but by doing the work. The department had a two week window at this point last year, if they didn't have good news by the time I was back from WFC, no matter what they were told in meetings they were going to be absorbed back into the larger group, their support staff would be let go, they needed to plan. Schemes were hatched , promises were made, but in the end it's gone down almost exactly the way I'd told them, and now, the zombified toenail is almost grown out - one professional pedicure and the damage will be gone, and the department is officially dissolved. Zombies Were Eating Our Department.

I had one more prediction, that even in "good" times, I'm such an odd collection of skills that it takes about six months to a year for me to be hired again. This time last year I had two months to go before my contract ended, I had finished an amazing accomplishment in 40 days, and I was preparing for the coming storm.

Some of it went the way I expected, and some of it not so much. It's been more difficult in ways. It all feels like circles. Like I'm riding the ripples as the move outward. Sometimes I've been a little zombified.

But at a particular point in time - which was scary and a little low - Lisa sent me some Zombie Love. I didn't know I needed or wanted Zombie Love but there it was.

Smiling it's little embalmed stitching smile at me, fresh blood running down it's ruff . . .

In it's own weird and creepy little way, the Zombie Poppet made all the other zombifications kind of identifiable, and avoidable. Like having an actual Zombie kept all the other zombie wannabes away. Like a totem. It helped a lot.

So when I saw Lisa, I brought Zombie Love with me, and we made a joke about Same Time Next Year. October is now the month I seem to see Lisa in person. It seems so strange to me that I haven't ever cooked for her.

I felt guilty, there were things that we had talked about doing but the year happened without us. It was OK, maybe the year need to grow out, for the damage to work it's way out. Like the toe, maybe I hadn't realized the extent of the damage until it became really visible and it was too late to do anything other than let it heal on it's own.

So here's where I am - the Zombie Toe is almost gone, Zombie Love arrived when I received my Forgiveness Poppet ( who will be appearing here soon as the Embarrassed Ambassador's Younger Sister), Lisa and I are still playing with the House Where Halloween Things Live, because there's no rush, we did it to play. Here's hoping that my annoying streak of being right continues and I will find a job that works for me in the next few months since I predicted it and that the long dark streak of no work on Poppetropolis will end, since I didn't predict that.

It will be like a Halloween Resolution.

And everyone should go to the American Museum of Visionary Arts where some of Lisa's Dark Caravan is being shown in the Smile Exhibition.

My Zombie Love is at the edge of the roller coaster there.

I owe Lisa some pictures. . . . does this one count?

I'm Fine except for the Earth Shattering Kabooms

2010-10-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

I've been sort of hidden for the last few weeks. I'm not sure where to start.

Objectively -

Healthy ( mostly)
Doing well in School
Increased interest in people putting me in jobs
Creativity increased ( Which is good. Summer was scary.)

Also objectively:

September could have been titled "When Viruses Attack!"
I have figured out how to do well in school in the most time honored manner of overachievers by spending 6-8 hours a day on my homework - it's not optional. I need to do this in order to get through the coursework and understand it. It's a side effect of either the symbol processing disorder or the nature of the work. So I've forgotten birthdays, friends have been afraid to call and "bother" me, I'm afraid I'm isolating myself.
Although I now have live people calling me about live jobs, there is the most interesting new development where it's not as simple as "they don't want me" or "someone else got the position". It's an odd thing where the positions are still open. They haven't filled them, I'm still in the running. How strange. It's like companies are flirting with hiring but can't commit.
Creativity - well the creative writing class this summer was - how shall I put this delicately? "Uninspiring."

OK. That's good - "Uninspiring." We'll stick with that. However, I know my plan to look like a proper purple squirrel requires creative output for the next year as I complete my degree, upon which I will probably never be asked to create creative output in my field ever again. So in order to become familiar with the newest graphics software I decided before I transfer back into my alma mater to take a digital fine arts class. It's a leap. Until Poppetropolis I don't think I ever considered any of my work "fine art". I do have the background knowledge my current degree had a robust fine arts requirement. So here I am.

Hineini.

The fine arts class works better than the writing class - perhaps because I'm not particularly good at art, so I have to strive to get to "acceptable" and the work brings ideas. Because I have to bridge between the idea and my capability. Maybe sometimes you need to work at something where you're mediocre to do the things you do well creatively.

It's a working theory anyway.

Seeing Lisa last week helped a lot. The pic for today is actually my first "Fine Arts" class project. I suppose I shouldn't be shocked that Poppets ended up being a part of it.

Ok - so we covered objectively. Now subjectively.

The Problem:

Tired of not being taken seriously in the workplace because my skillset and job titles are much maligned as "posers" or "empty suits", I am taking a class in a pure coding language. This is not just because I want to know how to do what I generally am managing - but because in the last half-decade I have been flat-out lied to about what work has been done. I have always been able to read code at a logic level (The languages aren't all that different. Regular programmers make the mistake of thinking that scripting languages aren't anything like coding. They are incorrect once you get to the intermediate level of a scripting language. At the advanced level, the only difference is environment and syntax) however, I cannot read a database.

No one will let me take a real database class until I take a programming class. Neither of these things is required for my degree or my level of employment, but I am vulnerable without them. I am tired of vulnerability.

I am terrified of getting a position just to lose it or be trapped. I am not willing to be easily sacrificed again. This skillset is like invisible magic armour or a spirit sword.

However, it's like a fairy tale. If you want to get the magic power - there is a cost.

The Discovery:

I started to write the fairy tale part - exactly like a fairy tale - for the blog. Actually doing it was worse than talking about it head on - so I stopped.

Fairy Tales, they're about the big, dark, scary things. The hidden things, the things too big to tell people outright because the first thing to do is try to separate or minimize them. That's why all the helicopter parents are so scared of them now. They're full of wolves and shadows, and curses and poverty, and powerlessness and power.

You can make them full of princesses and light, but really all that proves is that being a princess is no protection. No one is safe. It doesn't have to be your fault, and things will still try to kill you, trap you, lead you into the dark, hate you. The happily-ever-after isn't joy - it's safety. And it's precarious. You'll know it, because you were a princess who was cursed, kidnapped, murdered, raped, tortured, bartered to an evil man for peace or money. Prince Charming's kingdom might still go to war, there might be famine and plague and what you've survived before gives you lessons to teach, and all they want to see now are the pretty gowns and singing forest animals.

They want to forget that those animals started talking to you to warn you that someone was trying to cut out your heart and eat it to make damn sure you were dead.

And the other "clever children" fairy tales, Red, Hansel and Gretel, and all of the Jacks and Alexis. All those are stories of how to survive poverty and abuse, neglect and discrimination without letting them define you.

No wonder their stories need to be neutered. Do we want to pretend that doesn't happen now?

Maybe we should tell them in the original more often. The fairy tales are tools - like the It Gets Better Project they're doing now. Admit how truly dark it is first, then maybe someone will be able to believe there's light.

The universal part of the fairy tale isn't in the resolution, it's in the suffering that precedes it.

I'll finish writing my own fairy tale- because it was upsetting, because I didn't think that the subject was that dark, and because maybe it's more universal than I think. I don't know.

But I do know that it made me realize that even though I'm being consumed by an impossible task, it's for the original version of happily ever after - not marriage, or wealth, but safety. (Well, maybe some wealth). And knowing Rumplestilskin's name is not going to help me spin common sense into code.

But maybe I can get him to tutor me.

Quick Admission of Guilt

2010-09-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

Today is the first time I have ever, ever actually asked for an accommodation based on my disability on a test. Ever. In over 25 years. I have always found other ways to handle it.

My teacher, who suggested it originally listened to my request and said "How do you feel about this?"

I feel like it sucks. Like I have to admit that I can't do it. Like it's a completely different kind of failure, like I'm damaged and stupid.

I just told her it sucks.

However, she told me, it's reasonable, it's appropriately thought out and the test accomodation will simply emulate how I would do the task in the real world. And then she called me out on my harsh language discussing it and my body language. She wanted to know why I was being so hard on myself.

Why were we having the conversation this way? Because I actually create accommodations in educational and professional life, I knew everything she was saying, because I have told it to other people. She has a family member on with something similar so hearing me articulate it at my advanced age and full knowledge was significant to her. She could see what it felt like on the inside.

It feels like it sucks.

So those of you out there who have children who don't self advocate - especially the "gifted LD's" that are usually just ID'd and left to swim alone - I figured I would share that even with years in the field it took everything I had to admit that I shouldn't at least try to make myself sick and pass the midterm without the accommodation for a class I am taking for myself, that won't transfer directly to my degree.

And those of you who are trying to get by without activating your accommodations when you need them, know that it doesn't get any easier. But I do know that it's equally self destructive not to use them - they're not cheating - they get you to the same starting gate as the people who don't have a disability.

However, I understand why it still feels like cheating - especially when the abled tell you it's an unfair advantage.

So I did it. It hurt, but at least I'm aware it should be done.

You should do it, even if it hurts - the point of taking classes is to learn and use the material - it matters that you come out of the class with that knowledge - not how you got it compared to everyone else.

I don't have the answer on how to not feel like some sort of damaged goods when you do it though. I'll let you all know if I figure it out.

Now I shall cap off my day of dipping my toe in self-loathing instead of being proud of myself for making a practical mature decision, by watching That Scottish Play.

Like a Shakespearean Tragedy about self-loathing will help . . . . I guess we'll see if catharsis really is a valid theory.

Safety Word?

2010-09-27T06:11:00.000-07:00

I've recently read some very good advice:

"Always have a safety word installed with your loved ones, in the event that an evil doppleganger from another universe tries to take your place."

- The Mad Typist

I am known for taking precautions to reduce risk.

Assuming that evil dopplegangers will be waaayyy to busy to read through my meandering with poppets the safety word is "Renoir".

If I can't explain why - then it's a doppleganger who was smart enough to find and figure out the blog.

If I explain why and it still sounds fishy - check with the inhabitants of the House. They'll know.

But I wonder sometimes - why is it always the doppleganger that's evil, what if I'm evil and the doppleganger is good?

What if the doppleganger and I are both neutral?

Maybe we should both sit down for tea and discuss this . . . . I'll bake scones.

(Hmmmn . . . . . if it doesn't bake, it's definitely evil, and definitely a doppleganger . . . . forget the safety word - safety word plus Bake-off!)

Poppet with Paisley

2010-09-16T19:45:00.000-07:00

Insects Are Attracted to Desserts

2010-09-06T10:05:00.000-07:00

The Black Box - and the Unified Theory of Couches

2010-08-31T14:17:00.001-07:00

It's always there.

At the Beginning, shortly after the Big Bang there must have been this one Couch to symbolize all the couches that ever were or ever would be. It is the same couch every time, locked in every black box anywhere.

It will be busted and old, and made of the odd paisley-like muted floral pattern that seems both timeless and trapped in the type of time labeled "past"

And then it will come into the the Black Box and pretend to be

a loveseat,

a swing,

an entire penthouse apartment all by itself,

a chaise,

a restaurant booth,

waiting room furniture,

a bus stop bench,

a bed,

a crib,

a psychiatrists couch

a designer couch.

Sometimes it will branch out and be a car, or a sculpture, or even a tree.

But it always looks the same. It's always looming somewhere near the curtains waiting for its moment. It is terribly accommodating during the rehearsals or workshops or class, absorbing the hung over, or the unserious in its broken, warm, springless embraces.

The serious are usually pacing, or sitting in hard chairs looking to keep the energy they will need for becoming:

the lovers,

the kids on the swing,

the divorcing couple in the penthouse,

the crying woman,

the man waiting for his date that will not come to the restaurant that night,

the woman waiting for her test results alone,

Marilyn Monroe,

the sleeper,

the baby,

the psychiatrist,

the designer,

the driver,

the artist,

a bird.

I wonder about who gives the Couch to the black boxes. When they shopped for it and first bought it and put it in the place of pride in the living room did they think -" This looks like the shiny new version of every old couch I ever saw backstage?"

Is it a cult ritual to buy couches like this and keep them until they are too worn for the living room and sent to the family room, and then to the weird uncle's den, and then finally the young man's first apartment from which he then donates it to the Black Box to impress the hot starving actress chick he'd like to have sex with? Does that first purchase happen because they hope it might be the One True Couch, destined to be in the Black Box?

There is a whole journey in this Couch that silently works just as hard as we do at becoming.

It is jarring to see the same couch through time and space no matter which box I am in, trying to be something plus what I already am. There is a lesson in it's effortless becoming, which only happens after it's epic journey before the Box.

Here in this box, at this time, the couch collects my box mates, they are sleepy, they are unsure and do not appreciate hard surfaces. They like the couch better when it is not expected to be other than what it is. But it's distorted now - it's been so many things it can hardly hold the shape of a couch at all. It's holding all of the shapes it could be, making it amorphous.

I wonder- when the Couch forgets it's shape altogether, where it will go? Does it ever really leave? Does it go out into the world, or is it like a phoenix where it will become ashes and then reform as the next shiny new version of itself to live through the whole life cycle again?

Just so it can be beaten and worn and universal enough to be back in the box again.

Inside the Black Box the couch is Everything.

Outside the Black Box, it is only a worn out, dated couch.

Couchy Phoenixes.

No.

Phoenixy Couches.

It's the only answer.

Vacation Timelines

2010-08-27T19:25:00.001-07:00

There are things I need to write. I've been postponing them. I only made the space to write what other people asked for.

There are things I need to build and do, books I have to read because I promised myself.

But I am on vacation for a bit.

Which seems a little odd since I am not at a regular place of employment. But I'm just a silly human. Vacations are about different spaces not different definitions of work.

School counts as work too. I'm not being fair to myself. I should step back and allow myself to be an observer.

But maybe, I can be an observer up close.

OK. Vacation.

Then I'll get back to all the jumbled words and see about sorting them out.

Do you guys need this ball back?

Personal Hell

2010-08-12T10:54:00.001-07:00

Tell me how the Frack I am supposed to answer this to make an " artist's statement"?

My gut reaction, first round answers will not be appropriate:

QUESTIONS TO ASK: Writing an Artist’s Statement

Consider the following questions when writing about your own work, whether for self-reflection or for someone else.

1. Will you take another writing class?

Not unless one of my children is being threatened.

And even then, when the kids are safe, the people who forced me to take the class better watch their backs.

2. Have your goals as a writer changed?

No, I still want to be a better writer purely for the sake of craft and not go anywhere near publication.

This goal is apparently not supported in any writing class.

3. What’s the most important thing you have learned?

The fine points of writing a Mary Sue.

4. What do you wish you had learned that you didn’t?

Anything remotely like creative writing.

5. What do you want to say about your work?

I'm sorry.

6. What would you write if you had the time and talent to write anything?

A heartbreaking work of staggering genius - or something happy that an audience of three will appreciate and start a small cult based around it.

Oooh - or an action/buddy film that starred Angelina Jolie and Sophia Loren kicking everyone's ass. I'd need to be a time traveller as well as a talented writer with unlimited time - but hey - I'd have unlimited time to work out little technical details like that.

7. What have you learned about your writing habits?

I do not work and play well with online creative writing courses.

I can indeed write from a place of anger, solely to reach the goal of pleasing a mediocre critic who only likes things that are less than 2000 words, and favors powerpoint presentations as opposed to instructional feedback.

8. Do you see yourself as part of a writing community? Do you prefer to work in isolation, focusing on the work, and reading?

Not unless the writing community has the crazy lady that lives in the house on the hill and tells other writers to get off her lawn. In that case, I am a member of that community, and I am on that lawn brandishing a chainsaw and calling "Here, kitty, kitty . . . ."

9. What’s the most important thing you learned about getting and giving feedback about work in progress?

People have very, very low reading comprehension. This low level of reading comprehension is exacerbated by last millennia's GUI formats and a horrible bulletin board structure leaving me unsure whether to rant at the software developers or the readers, thus encouraging my silence.

Oh! and that the instructor will not correct a classmate when they have obviously not read the same story we are commenting on, even when said classmate thinks the guy being kidnapped in the shower is committing suicide instead. . .

10. What techniques, authors, or exercises have been most useful to you?

Since we were exposed to almost no techniques or authors, and the exercises were all castrated into pseudo "work-for-hire" things slanted towards generating hack pieces, I would say that the most useful exercise was my exposure to flash fiction. That exercise has now created a deep seated hatred for the form that can only be compared to my core hatred of vampire fiction.

11. What insights have you gained into the practice and art of creative writing?

See 10.

Oh and rage. I've gotten a lot of insight into irrational rage.

12. Has your voice changed? Is your writing truer, deeper, better?

Are you suggesting I go through puberty or a sex change and start writing porn?

Or are you a really big fan of Daft Punk? Or maybe Kanye?

Would you be forcing me to write this porn from a memoir perspective while playing Daft Punk or Kanye?

I've always suspected that about you. . . .

13. What authors do you want to read now (has that changed)? Do you have writer role models?

I am desperate to get back to clear writing and entertaining fiction. I shall cleanse my palate with some nice Andrew M. Greeley, reread some Heinlein and Gaiman, and studiously avoid anything that won a Pulitzer or was lauded by the New Yorker circa 1978. I will immerse myself in some Karen Armstrong thought experiments and some David McCoullough, just because he's awesome.

My writer role model is Esther M. Friesner who was also my photographer once when I was covering Toy Fair. When I hit my second childhood I want to be just like her.

14. What’s your best piece from the semester?

Villanelle for a Melancholy Robot

Ok - so this isn't going to help me write a "extended piece of non-fiction where the writer explores process, inspiration, and artistic progress." which is supposedly the goal of an "Artist's Statement".

The thing I really learned is that this class is not the way for me to break through to my former creativity - however it's doing wonders for my extended studies in curmudgeonliness.

Please - if anyone out there knows the value or has successfully written an Artist's Statement - please, please share- I'm dyin' here . . . . .

Birthday Poppet Picks a Cake

2010-08-05T18:08:00.000-07:00

The Boy is having one of those important birthdays this summer. So the Birthday Poppet and I went shopping to find the perfect cake to take up to him, because he visits someone else's world in the the summer. This will be his last birthday as a visitor to that world. If he goes back after this birthday, it will be because he is working there.

If he works there, it will be because he's pretty good with bow and arrow.

Back to the cake.

There are lots of rules for visiting the visitors of the Other World and we have a system - we bring sushi, we pack enough to feed the natives, and like all good Red Queens I make sure that we can serve high tea.

Then we bring out the gift and the cake.

Because there are no candles allowed in this world ( they apparently do not trust me or my clan with fire - yet they supply my offspring with weaponry - I find this inconsistent) the Birthday Poppet, which belongs to the Boy, sits upon the cake and pretends to be a candle. The boy makes the Birthday wish and blows on the Birthday Poppet and then we all sing to him in two or three languages.

We no longer sing charmingly off key like we're supposed to because of the habit we have gotten into of singing Tom Lehrer songs together. We've lost the knack of not harmonizing.

We have been doing this since the Birthday Poppet arrived, this is third Birthday since he was first given to the Boy. That first time he was the gift. Here is this year's cake - a tiramisu cheesecake.

The Birthday Poppet was surprised I had considered anything else. The Boy discovered this cheesecake in November and talked about it fondly many times since.

The boy made his wish, we shared our food and a lovely time was had by all until the gatekeepers of the world caught on to the fact that we were still there longer than we were supposed to be - but time runs differently there, so we told them it was Time's fault.

And a lovely time was had by all - and the leftover tiramisu cheesecake came back home with the Birthday Poppet who was quite happy to celebrate with the leftovers at home. He is already planning things to celebrate the Boy's major birthday when he comes back to us, however I'm pretty sure it will be with the same cake.

It's Midnight at the Well of Souls - or in my living room

2010-07-22T04:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was long.

Returning from yesterday, all I wanted was sweet sleep or at least putting up my feet. And friends are floating, each of us in a dance that looks like being caught between generations.

The other generations have prickly edges - we keep getting caught in them. We seem to be defined by the space between them. There are not enough of us, and our struggles and successes and experiences will always be blended into the shinier or louder generations on either side of us.

But we are here now, individual and collective, navigating the gears of the world. My friends and I are not having a fantastic gearjumping month - each difficult in their own way.

So last night a friend called. "I think I am having a breakdown."

I listened and heard the crackling. This wasn't a phone thing, but there was no hysteria.

"OK, leave where you are. Come over here. We'll break it down." He asked the Keeper of the Generations in his house if that would work. She told him to come.

It was selfish in some ways. I had already used up a bunch of my allotted gearjumping for the day, I thought I could help, but not on the phone. And sometimes place is important. I knew he needed a break of place to move out of the things holding him. Instead of bed, I made some coffee.

And waited.

My other friends checked in with the status of their navigations - some bad news, some good news, some secrets where we could hear the emptiness of the unsaid. That last one was mostly from me.

And we all shared our hope for the breaking friend and then he came to the door with his briefcase full of depression and anxiety and society, and his immediate need to pack and escape with his family.

And I was happy that he came, because it might have been easier not to. Sometimes your shamanistic journeys are only two or three miles down the road.

So I asked him the right questions and he started with the regular answers and then he saw the circus in my living room. Because everyone should have one.

And he smiled and got down on the floor like a five year old and peeked inside.

It is impossible to stay in a breakdown state when faced with a circus full of Poppets.

Everyone loves a circus. We played with it for a little bit and then worked out the answers that would be good enough for now.

It broke the pattern and freed him up from the sharp edges for a bit. My living room is bigger on the inside than the out.

The denizens of Poppetropolis were pleased to be of help.

I was pleased to be of help.

But it's the morning after midnight and I'm very tired now.

The Black Box

2010-07-11T06:12:00.000-07:00

When you enter the box , first you see the lights and then the floor and then the curtains – maybe.

When you enter the box first you see the black and then the lights - sometimes.

When I entered the black box I smelled the black.

Oh. Yes, of course. Here are the curtains, the boxes, the scruffed floor that proves it’s true.

When you enter the box it is a trial, a transformation, a test.

It is for everyone. Move. Reach. Feel.

Hurt. Scream. Love. Stretch. Know.

Show.

In the black box I learn how far my puzzle pieces are from the center of my snap apple puzzle. I am marked and measured in my native language that goes deeper than the words.

Oh. Right. Sorry I forgot. I didn’t mean to. I thought I was doing the right thing, Stop apologizing? Ok sorry, I mean . . . never mind. I’ll practice quiet now.

We stand in a circle at readiness. The knees are slightly bent, the hands are loose, the feet need to be ready to spring forward. We are trying to learn telepathy.

My body and mind remember, and slide easily to that place, aware from the center seeing/not seeing. Almost. It is almost easy. I can no longer see behind me. I shut that down when I wasn’t in the box. Here in the circle now it feels like a withered arm being asked to lift.

I try not to hate myself for that.

When we are one we need to leave the ground. We need to leave it knees up, like a spring letting go of the ground not a piston showing that we are leaving it. We need to surprise gravity, not defy it. We need telepathy, not show and tell, to leave it.

I know exactly when we are supposed to release the floor and how we are supposed to address the air. The mind and the body send the signal and the meat and the muscles say no.

Split seconds – speed of thought.

My will is stronger than the meat and the muscles, but gravity is not surprised. I go up but barely. It’s a victory. A quiet one.

It shouldn't have been a battle.

The other 11 are trying to understand the place where all thought is no thought. I know that place – I fall back there like a bead in a well oiled groove, but those hard fought four inches – straight back, knees up, no bounce –was a ten year war played out in the space of that neuron-synapse interaction.

Here is the trick to telepathy in the black box, the fact that you have to focus is a given, but it will only work if you actually care. Right now- this first day – it is still a child’s game to them.

The Black Box though, is the entire world to me.

I’ve just spent a lot of time pretending that it’s not. Enough time for gravity to stake a higher claim on the meat, but the black still has my soul. It’s my alphabet.

It doesn’t take much for the Black Box to strip me down past the excuses, measure the damage. It exposes things caught between the lights and the floor.

So much more complicated than Scylla and Charybdis

You don't choose between them here in the scent of the light warmed black. You stand in the center and become the third thing.

Juvenescent Confabulation

2010-07-04T04:59:00.000-07:00

Welcome one welcome all come and enjoy the show.

It's exactly like time travel, for an audience of one.

There is a thought experiment that we do every now and then, when we are 16 and we imagine ourselves talking to our older selves that are yet to be- telling them what we expect from them. Sometimes we do this experiment because all of the adults in our lives are looking for us to perform this task. They will give us a round number - "Where do you see yourself in the year 2000?" They will ask us this in 1984.

They will raise the stakes - where do you see yourself in they year 2020 - because it sounds cool and impossibly futuristic, even now.

Sometimes we will ask ourselves the question in the middle of the night - our nascent selves keeping away from the numbers and going to the dreams or the ages . Who will I be when I am 30? What will I have to give up if I go for what I want now? What will I keep if I have to give up what I want?

We are 16, we are not fools. There is no real innocence at that point, we've learned to compromise, we've encountered limits, sometimes they can be overcome and sometimes they can't. The adults remember this time as full of possibility and see us all as impossibly hopeful, but if we're even a little awake, we know. We know our parents were 16 once and very, very few of them are doing what their 16 year old selves wanted for them.

The implacable hope is armour - the firm absolutism of our belief systems is not naiveté, it's the fear we'll lose sight of it later, when We are Them. It's not always because we haven't lived life, sometimes it's because we have. Silly grown-ups, how strange you are when you edit your younger selves. How could you have forgotten that metal tinged taste of the entire future before you? Didn't it cut your tongue a bit? Do you only remember the relationships and erase the analytics? Is it easier that way? Is it numbing? Is it better? Maybe it is.

On the other side of the question though are the adults who are in their older selves - looking at the raw open youth, seeing them with the eyes of those who made the choices, and found some things the 16 year olds infront of them couldn't have imagined as being worth the price then. Or things had changed so much for them that they can't imagine the 16 year olds they were - that person is lost to them - a myth of self.

So when the older person asks the younger to imagine talking to a future self - are they looking for redemption? Information? I know it depends: On the 16 year old; on the 36 year old; on the 66 year old in question.

I know older people (older than 16 at least) who have running conversations with their younger selves. They are explaining. They are apologizing. They are angry, or sad, or triumphant.

And in every case their 16 year old selves are unchanging and static, yet somehow accusatory, or disappointed, or pleased. Even though they never answer back.

I wonder what that is like.

I think it's simpler somehow. It makes the immortal commandment of Polonius easier if thine-own-self doesn't answer back.

Of course if you knew 16 year old me- as I do - you would know that the idea of not answering back is anathema.

I am quieter now.

I/She just waits until I can't avoid the conversation anymore.

Where do we see ourselves in 2020? It sounds so impossibly futuristic.

And all the Men and Women Merely Players

2010-06-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, it's not the loss that causes the melancholy, it's the effort needed to rebuild.

There are things I thought I put away, not childish things in any form, but passionate ones. I played with little shadow versions of them, like puppet show passion plays. Those would/could/should be enough.

"Passion - Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Late Latinpassion-, passio suffering, being acted upon, from Latin pati to suffer."

Isn't it funny how we've taken a word whose meaning is based on suffering and changed it into a kind of ecstatic frenzy - a euphemism for sexual love? A desire for more passion in our lives or our marriages takes on a whole different meaning when you bring it back to the root. Ultimately a possibly unhealthy meaning.

I was passionate about a boy once. When I look back on it, it seems like a derangement. Every moment was vibrant and alive with possibility, unpredictability, intese joy, intense sorrow. In the throes of passion doesn't mean the bedroom - it means all of the time you are controlled by this passion whatever it is, who ever it is based on. The connection to the suffering is real and immediate, everything else seems shallow and chalky and gray. Only the things related to what or who is the center of the passion seem real and bright. Everything is just something that leads you to the chance to surrender, to participate in that presence or action again. All the times you are not near or engaged are all the "moments before". The time of suffering while waiting to see what passion will bring. As poor fools in the throes of it all, we will call it many, many, things and we will try to use that word "passion" to make it fit those other, safer things.

But it will still be passion.

I got over the boy. If he even remembers me now he will remember our time together very differently than I do. Passion is a kind of insanity. You cannot build a life on it. Not the real kind where you don't die young, or end up stabbed 23 times by Senate.

Passion based on a person is by nature transient. The idea of suffering because I am not near someone if foreign to my understanding of love. When I am alone and I am loved, I am happy because I know my love for the other person is not based on proximity but security. I love them just as deeply two continents away, or two hemispheres away as I do when I am next to them, when we are entangled together. Distance is nothing to love. Love is like Damascus steel to me - tools we share, my beloved and I so that we can build and fight and defend to and craft together.

All of my beloved - family, lover, children - I am not passionate about them. The greeks who separated love: agape, eros, phillia, storge, they missed a word or category for this kind of love. Maybe "storge" but it didn't make it into a lot of literature, (possibly because it doesn't lead to tragic or comedic actions). But it is not passion.

I was passionate about an artform once. I had convinced myself that I could use the past tense. I could learn from it and chuckle with fond memories and traumatic ones and move on.

I am utterly and devastatingly wrong.

The tense is present tense. It's much stronger than a simple passion for a boy. Everyone knew it then. People who knew me later knew it still. People who know me now got glimpses when I played with the shadow versions. Then I stopped playing with those. Now the people in my life are blissfully ignorant of it. All was quiet on the passion front. Not the modern one with it's garish calls to buy things at Victoria's Secret or the pretty religious ones trying to create some form of agape with ritual and structure. Those puny passions are fine. I put aside the suffering. I became an audience ( for the first time?)

For those around me it was a good call. True Roman Stoicism for the good of the community and all that. There is a reason after all that they call it "suffering for one's art" and it is pretty obvious that great artists that could truly be brave for art or scientists (those monomaniacs of discovery) always had someone supporting them or no ties at all. But if you are the support - parent, breadwinner, wife - your art is best something to be dabbled with, shown proudly by offspring or spouse when visitors come to call. Art for Art's sake as long as it causes no one else any inconvenience.

And I believed that so completely that I didn't even realize I wasn't putting things together, I was breaking them apart. Or maybe breaking me apart.

So now - when I checked the recent damage of self and current competencies - all of the ways I used to take inventory and maintain and repair had failed. Not because they were bad systems, but because I had used them up. They were finite measures meant for specific or surface damage. They worked bravely and well for over a decade. They are simply the wrong tools. There to fix- like love, not to upset and destroy and recreate - like passion.

That's not enough. Love does not conquer all, it cannot heal by itself and sometimes you can't fix things unless you break them a bit first. Maybe I needed to break them alot.

And so with a long hard look at what was broken, I stood on a crossroad with a different devil on every choice. I blinked instead, and refused the road alone. I invited the devils to follow me but I needed to go back. Or down. Everything that was wrong - all the pieces damaged, and battered and missing - I thought I had learned them in other places, through life or jobs or school or relationships and simple survival. That was the mistake. I had learned them all in theater.

All of them. Every last one.

Dammit.

Now I'm awake. The question is what am I going to do about it?

There are four devils following me to school. Dionysus is laughing behind them because they don't realize they're pulling the chariot. I'm hoping that Minerva is travelling with him.

We'll try not burn or break too much.

****

Passion - Date: 13th century

1 often capitalized a : the sufferings of Christ between the night of the Last Supper and his death b : an oratorio based on a gospel narrative of the Passion
2 obsolete : suffering
3 : the state or capacity of being acted on by external agents or forces
4 a(1) : emotion (2) plural : the emotions as distinguished from reason b : intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction c : an outbreak of anger
5 a : ardent affection : love b : a strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object, or concept c : sexual desire d : an object of desire or deep interest

passion applies to an emotion that is deeply stirring or ungovernable passions.