dolorosa_12 | My linkpost is like footsteps in the snow

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My linkpost is like footsteps in the snow

Canny readers will have noticed that today's post contains three weeks' worth of material, and is posted on a Thursday instead of the usual Friday. While I have no excuse for skipping several weeks' posts, I should explain that I will be spending most of tomorrow on a train, and felt it would be easier to post today instead.

Amberlin Kwaymullina: 'Let the stories in: on power, privilege and being an Indigenous writer'.

Here is a Q and A with African writers of science fiction at Omenana. I found some of the questions (from students at Simon Fraser University, Canada), to betray some rather ill-informed assumptions on the part of the questioners, but all of the answers were illuminating.

Tansy Rayner Roberts' Continuum 11 speech: Fantasy, Female Writers & The Politics of Influence.

'In The Rustle of Pages', a short story by Cassandra Khaw.

I loved this poem, 'A Visit With Morgan Le Fay', by Sofia Samatar.

Via my partner, this review of the new Channel Four show Humans.

Aliette de Bodard has begun posting regular 'Shattered Wings Thursday' posts, which consist of related content for her upcoming novel House of Shattered Wings. Keep an eye out for upcoming posts in this series.

One of my former academic colleagues, Myriah Williams, who works on medieval Welsh manuscripts, has written about the rather surreal experience of having her research attract wider attention in the mainstream media.

YA Books Central is running a giveaway for Serpentine, Cindy Pon's latest book.

No Award posted about Australian kids' TV show themes (Lift-Off forever!).

'The Definitive Oral History of How Clueless Became an Iconic '90s Classic'.

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How does 'A Visit With Morgan Le Fay' handle Morgan? Because for some reason everyone on the English-speaking internet seems to think she's a villain, which is pretty much the exact opposite of the version(s) of the legend I grew up with.

Oh no, that poem is quite the opposite - very pro-Morgan, if that makes any sense. It's a very brief prose-poem, and to discuss it in any great detail would probably spoil it for you, but have no fear that it's portraying her as a villain!

Sorry for the slow reply. I was away all weekend visiting friends and didn't have much time to go online.

I'll read it soon, then!

I am utterly unfussed about late replies to either entries or comments, btw.

And thanks for linking to de Bodard's posts on House of Shattered Wings, even though it's not really making me want to read the book more. Quite the opposite. Yes, I'm sure l'Ile aux cygnes is a great place to live when you can't go near the banks *eyeroll* (and having googled her, I am completely unsurprised that someone named "de Bodard" went to Louis le Grand because of fucking course she did.) Edit: sorry, that came out a lot more bitter than I expected. I just have issues with the way France still treats nobility (which she is). I don't know her personally, so for all I know she has none of the attitudes that are prevalent in nobles/aristocrats, but I have to admit I have my doubts and I still get a visceral :/ reaction to her name. /full disclosure

Edited 2015-07-01 22:23 (UTC)

Okay, so I'm clearly missing a lot of context here, and for that I apologise. I've liked Aliette's short fiction and have been really looking forward to House of Shattered Wings because I love books about (fallen) angels interacting with humans, particularly in post-apocalyptic settings. In the interests of full disclosure, I should also mention that the two of us are mutual followers on Twitter, and friendly acquaintances online, a situation that arose in the wake of the business with Benjanun Sriduangkaew/Winterfox (I'm pretty sure you know what I'm talking about, but can go into more detail if you like). Aliette was one of the people who was very publicly supportive of Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Kari Sperring, Athena Andreadis, and other targets, and I got to know her through this.

I hope this doesn't come across as if I'm scolding you for your opinions and feelings about the treatment of aristocrats in France, but I wanted to alert you to our connection to avoid any potential awkwardness.

That's actually how I became aware of her as well. I want to love this book so bad, because it sounds like everything I should love and yet. And yet.

I find it very hard to voice what I want to say, because this is very much one of these things that We Do Not Talk About. Part of it is that I find it very odd that everyone is including her in Diverse SFF lists and whatnot, because one more aristocrat voice is exactly what we need (not). And trust me when I say that, in my experience, her name being "de Bodard" far outweighs her being half-Vietnamese. part of it is that I saw her refer to l'Ile aux Cygnes in a way that seemed to imply she'd never been there (it's roughly 35 feet wide. IT'S ALL BANKS) and looked at her name again and went "ten to one she went to a private school and/or to school in the 16ème, then did Sciences po/l'ENA/l'X" and lo and behold, she went to a private school in the 16ème and did l'X according to her French Wikipedia page. Just. OF COURSE SHE DID. (EDIT: Polytechnique and l'X are the same thing.)

I have read the first chapter, btw and I am also side-eying the mention of the Periphérique [sic], because not only is should it be Périphérique (although I would personally call it le périph) but that didn't exist until 1956. If the book is set during the Belle Epoque, it should be l'enceinte de Thiers. And if "devastated countryside" is referring to what I think it does, wooooooooooooow (and I suddenly feel like quoting Starmania). There are also two different comparaisons to a serrated knife/serated knives in this chapter alone, which doesn't give me great hope for the editing, between that and the Periphérique [sic] issue.

That said, I might just be over critical because I am melting in the sun and I did want to find out what came next, but I had even more issues than what I mentionned above.

I appreciate that you're letting me talk about this, but I really don't want to harsh your squee so I wold totally understand if you told me to shut up.

(EDIT2: I have no idea how coherent this is, sorry.)

Edited 2015-07-02 23:31 (UTC)

Yeah, like I said, I'm missing a lot of social and cultural context here, so I don't really feel qualified to discuss that side of things. I would say that discussions of other people's (complicated) identities and making assertions about how they choose to identify makes me a little uncomfortable, so I'd prefer not to continue along those lines in the comments here with regard to Aliette.

I do understand cringing when you read works set in 'your' cities and the authors appear to get it wrong. An author whose work I otherwise adore had a story with several Australian characters, and they mentioned swimming and hanging out in a part of Sydney where no resident would go - a really touristy area, and certainly not anywhere that you'd swim. It was like a flashing neon sign that the author wasn't very familiar with Sydney, in a book that was otherwise absolutely fantastic. There was also a recent (Australian-made) political thriller on TV here in the UK. It was set in Canberra (where I grew up), and they were trying so hard to make it seem like this bustling, fast-paced metropolis - very different from the empty, silent city I remember!

Anyway, like I said, I have no problem with this line of discussion, but I would prefer - if we're having it here - to keep it general, rather than about individual people who I consider friends.

Sorry. I completely undertsand why it makes you uncomfortable, since it tends to make me uncomfortable too. I would just like to say that I'm not objecting to Aliette who is by all accounts a nice person, but to de Bodard who has benefitted from French societal issues, if that makes sense? idk. Mostly I want you to know that if I ever go full grump on this subject again, it's all to do with my own issues. /drops subject

I don't think I can talk about what's wrong (so far) with the portrayal of Paris without touching the subject dropped above, so I will have to drop it too.

And Now For Something Completely Different! Can you explain the Morgan poem, please? Because I didn't get it and now I feel like an uncultured slob.

The way I read it is it's about the tiring, silent, unnoticed 'women's work' that goes on in the background, and that is undervalued and unrecognised. There are also scattered references to small kinds of folk magic, the kinds of stuff that witches are always portrayed as doing in weird little folktales from around Britain and Ireland (knotting horses' tails, gathering dew, dancing on frost-covered grass with feet smeared with fat to protect against the cold). It's a small, homely kind of magic.

I also see resonances with a medieval Irish poem normally given the title 'Lament of the Old Woman of Beare' in English. Here's a link to a translation, although I'm not sure if Samatar was alluding to it in her poem. Ignore most of the rubbish written online about this poem (it's all 'sovereignty goddesses' and 'mystical Celts' and is complete nonsense), and you can see that it speaks from the persona of an old woman lamenting the passage of time, initially mourning the loss of her privileged youth (when she ate and drank well and was loved by kings), and ultimately being reconciled with her age and impending death.

At least, that's what I think is going on in 'A Visit With Morgan Le Fay'.

Edited 2015-07-09 14:28 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer! It's very interesting, even though it completely doesn't fit with how I see Morgane (and I will chalk this up to 'the British are doing their thing again').

Thanks for the Myriah Williams link too! I finally got a chance to read it and it was great.

Also, I ended up writing this post, sort of spurred by our conversation above. No obligation for you to read it, btw. I just thought maybe you'd be interested.

Yeah, I guess the beauty of Arthuriana is that it can be so many things to so many people, and the characters and their stories can get used to say so many different things.

I'm friends with Myriah, so I was able to sort of follow her experience in real time as it was happening. It was a very surreal, but rewarding experience for her as an academic, and I thought she wrote about it really beautifully.

I did see that post, and I appreciate you explaining your thoughts on the matter. I think I've said all I wanted to say about the situation in the comments here, but thanks for being so understanding about the whole thing.

I think it's very important that mediaeval Welsh manuscripts are in the media. And that my old department gets some love, too.

I agree completely! I'm really happy for my friend, although the whole experience sounds somewhat bizarre.

I'd thought your old department was the same as my old department (although I was only there for the M.Phil and PhD and did my undergrad degree in Australia). It really was a great place to study, and I'm glad I still live in Cambridge and still have friends there so that I can continue to participate in academic life despite having left academia.

I was there for both my B.A. and my PhD. I'm one of David Dumville's students: Dumville chick no. 3.

Ah, he left a couple of years before I got there. I was supervised by Máire Ní Mhaonaigh.

(By the way, I still live in Cambridge, so if you ever want to meet up to talk ASNC, books, or anything else, let me know. If this is awkward, please ignore. I never know how to ask about this sort of thing without sounding really awkward...)

That would be lovely! I've been wondering how to ask you the same thing :-)

Oh, excellent! I love meeting people from the internet, but I always find it so awkward to work out how to ask about it! I'll reply to your PM now.

There are a lot of interesting links in this post, especially the first 3 seem like something I definitely need to check up on when I have a little more time.

Glad they appeal to you! I really liked Tansy Rayner Roberts' post in particular.

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