west of the moon

The politics of the syllabus.

I've committed to a reading list for my lecture course, and am nearly done with one for the seminar as well.  I also expect to have tentative syllabi for both by the end of this week, which is nice.  (Although I don't yet know the scheduling on my seminar, and that impacts the syllabus.  I requested that it be scheduled on either Monday or Wednesday afternoons; because of university holidays, though, a Monday class has one fewer meeting than a Wednesday class, and it would be easier to finalize the reading list if I knew how many class sessions we had.)  Once I have a good syllabus outline, I can get to work on actual lecture writing, which is the fun part.

The process of constructing the syllabus for the lecture class has been really interesting, but in difficult ways.  The thing about a historical survey course is that you have to make a lot of choices about what to include and what to leave out, and each choice is significant, because each choice represents a value judgment.  I've already discussed the biggest value judgment I made in putting this course together, which was the decision to structure the course around six main geographical regions rather than just two or three.  There's another choice I made that's almost equally big, though, which is to make the Scientific Revolution the endpoint of the class.  By ending with Europe on the threshhold of the Enlightenment, and giving a prominent place to Newton, I'm sticking to a fairly standard narrative in the history of science.  I'm saying that what happened in Europe in the 1600s was a dividing line, the birth of modern science, that it represents something new and important.  It's the way I'm choosing to tell the story, but it's not the only way I could do it. 

These choices all have such big consequences, though.  By choosing geographic breadth, for instance, I'm sacrificing some other things.  In any culture or civilization that I'm studying, I just won't be able to cover all of their scientific activity.   Right now I think I'm prioritizing astronomy, alchemy, math, and physics.  In most areas, that means I probably won't be covering (or at least not in any meaningful way) botany, zoology, physiology, or medicine.  In a couple of places I'm choosing to talk about metallurgy and agriculture, because that feeds into a larger point I want to make, but I'm probably not doing that everywhere.  I'll be working a little bit with philosophies of science, systems for constructing knowledge, that kind of thing, but not with anything approaching the level of detail and elegance with which they've been covered in previous incarnations of this class.

It makes me a little uneasy to look at my course outline and realize that I'm leaning so heavily towards the physical sciences, given my own personal affinities for the biological sciences.  But when I look at scientific activities in the premodern world, what I see is this massively interconnected network of knowledge.  Focusing primarily on the lines of intellectual inheritance between the Greeks and the Renaissance Europeans highlights the philosophical aspects of that network; focusing on other aspects of the transmission of ideas highlights the more technical (or technological) aspects.  I'd be a bad instructor if I didn't include both the philosophical and the technological sides of early science, but there's something really fascinating about the cross-linked influences of the more technological side of scientific inquiry.

missing week.

Home again, and exhausted.  I'm spending today trying to catch up on things, but it's difficult putting the pieces back together after unexpectedly losing an entire week.  Where it used to be mid-June, it's now late in the month, almost July.  I still haven't put together the reading lists for my fall classes, I still haven't finished sorting all the papers in my office, I still haven't picked up my drycleaning.  The houseplants need tending, and the books I had ordered at the library have probably all been returned to off-site storage.  I have work to do, mail to read and answer, bills to pay, laundry.  Time to get moving, then.

To everyone who offered their well-wishes and condolences, thank you.  I'm hoping to thank you all more directly also, but in case I don't get to it soon, thank you.

Grandma Blanche.

My dad gave the eulogy at his mother's funeral yesterday.  He said that what he wanted to do was tell people a little bit about her life, because she never said anything about it herself.  And it's true, she didn't.  Dad knew things because he talked to her all the time; ever since my grandfather died, twelve years ago, my father and his mother talked on the phone every day.  I had no idea.  But even then he didn't know a lot, because Grandma hated to talk about herself. 

She was born in 1914, and her parents were Polish immigrants living in Newark.  We're told that her parents were actually pretty wealthy, that they owned a pearl button factory.  Grandma had two brothers, Adolf and Stanley.  Stanley was the oldest.  My dad thinks that Grandma was in the middle, and Adolf was younger than her, but my uncle Bob thinks that Grandma was the youngest, and Adolf was the middle child.  There was an influenza pandemic in the United States in 1918 and 1919, and between twenty and forty million people died, and two of the people who died were my great-grandparents, in 1919.  Grandma's two brothers were sent to an orphanage, but some relatives took in Grandma, because at five years old she was old enough to clean their house. 

What we haven't been able to figure out is when she changed her name.  Her given name was Bronislava Solek.  By the time she got her nursing license, she was already going by the name Blanche.  I'm guessing that the relatives she lived with didn't change her name, because they didn't even teach her to speak English; Grandma only spoke Polish until she was ten years old.  But as a teenager she spent some time in a convent, and I think it was maybe there.  Grandma wanted to be a nun, but the other nuns in the convent told her to wait, to not decide so young, and they paid for her to go to nursing school.  She went, and she became a nurse, and I guess after a while out in the world she decided that she didn't want to be a nun either. 

I remember when I was little, she told me about the night my grandfather proposed to her.  She was working in the emergency room in a hospital in New York City, and it was New Year's Eve, and she was supposed to have the night off, and she and my grandfather had dinner plans.  She didn't know it, but he was planning to ask her to marry him, and he'd made reservations at a fancy restaurant, bought roses and champagne.  A big snowstorm came in that afternoon, though, two or three feet of snow.  The hospital needed extra nurses, and they were snowed in besides, so she called Grandpa to cancel.  Instead of just cancelling the plans, though, my grandfather drove all the way from Paterson into Manhattan, in the middle of a blinding snowstorm, and by some miracle didn't get into an accident on the way.  And he stayed at the hospital all night while she was working, sleeping in a chair in the waiting room, and when she had a break she came to sit with him, and that's when he showed her the ring and asked her to marry him.

The other story I remember her telling was from before that, from before she met Grandpa.  At the end of nursing school, all the women in her class had to go take their licensing exam, and the statewide exam was in a different city from their school.  I think she went to school in Newark, and the exam was in Trenton.  According to Grandma, the school paid for them all to stay overnight in a hotel in Trenton the night before the exam, so that they could get a good night's sleep and not have to risk travel problems and missing the test.  Grandma said that all of the other women were studying all evening, but that she had never been to Trenton before, and she didn't want to spend her only evening there stuck in a hotel room studying.  And besides, she said, if she didn't know the material by the night before the test, she was unlikely to learn it well enough to remember it in the morning.  So she went out, bought herself a nice dinner, went to the movies, went out dancing.  And then aced the exam the next day.

The priest who did the funeral Mass was a young man, and very serious, and he asked me at the wake if my grandmother had taught me to pray.  She went to church whenever she could manage it, and she prayed the Rosary every day, but no, she didn't teach me to pray.  What she did teach me was to have a good time, to enjoy myself as much as possible.

goodbye.

My grandmother died this morning.  When I was a little kid, she showed me things from her yoga class, how to sit half-lotus, and she taught me to play cards, poker and gin and six kinds of solitaire.  She crocheted a blanket for me once, all bright-colored borders and little flowers, and it's still one of my favorite things in the whole world.  She liked Chinese food, and she always said she wished she went dancing more often, and I didn't spend enough time with her, ever, and I'm going to miss her. 

I'll be at my parents' house for the rest of the week, and may not be answering much email.

Strange Horizons discussion boards temporarily disabled.

Just a quick FYI for anyone who might notice: the Strange Horizons discussion boards have been temporarily disabled.  It looks like one of the administrator accounts was compromised, and we're keeping the whole thing offline until we have a chance to figure out what happened, repair the damage, and find a way to keep it from happening again.  Sorry if this inconveniences anyone.

UPDATE, 6/12:  I think we've identified the security hole in the board software that caused this problem, but we don't have a timetable yet for fixing it.  Sorry.  (And since I've been asked, some details.  It looks like a random attack, not one that had anything particularly to do with the magazine.  Someone exploited a flaw in the board software to gain access to an administrator account, and used that account to delete most of the user database and most of the posting areas.  We think we can restore it all from backups, but we can't reopen the board to the public until we've fixed the baseline security problem.)

Feminist Fiction is So Five Minutes Ago

I was on two panels at WisCon, and despite my initial mild skepticism, they both went very well.  Interesting panelists, engaged audience members, a good balance of who got to talk when, etc.  (Both suffered slightly from my own personal need to talk constantly, but I don't think I crossed the line into Bad Panelist territory.  If anyone who was there disagrees, please please please let me know?  I would hate to be That Guy and not know it.)  The feminist fiction panel is the easier of the two to talk about, I think, and so.  Panel report!  We bounced around a little bit, topic-wise, so the report will be more thematic than chronological.

The Panelists:  Me, Kameron Hurley, Lyda Morehouse, Rebecca Maines, and Victoria Gaydosik.  (Oh!  Hey!  Someone took pictures of us.)  Victoria and I were co-moderating, and we started by explaining the concept of the panel.  A lot of feminists are concerned about the fact that younger women are less and less likely to either identify as feminists or find feminism interesting or relevant.  Many of us found fiction to be a powerful force in discovering feminism, so how can we use that to help younger women discover feminism? 

At this point, we asked all the panelists to name a few books that had been influential for them, and to talk a little bit about why.  I am going to try and reconstruct this book list, but I am almost certainly going to miss something important.  (There are not many books on this list mainly because we had fairly repetitive influences.)

• Alanna, by Tamora Pierce
• The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy
• The Women's Room, by Marilyn French
• Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong
• Books by Elizabeth someone?  Naomi, can you help me out here?
• And, in a big non-fiction ringer, The Feminine Mystique.

Okay, that list is too short.  I have to be forgetting something.  I was surprised, though, by how much The Feminine Mystique was completely relevant to the conversation.  I first read it a few years ago, after Paula Fass discussed it in one of the lectures in the social history course I was reading for.  I picked it up expecting to read it for historical significance, and was shocked to find how completely relevant it was for me, given that it was first published more than a decade before I was born.

Younger Women and Feminism: Talking about those influential books, and why they were influential for us, brought us directly back to the question of younger women and feminism.  They fell roughly into two categories: books that openly discussed the ways in which women are constrained and limited by society, and books that showed girls doing things like going out in the world and having adventures.  We used the word "epiphany" a lot when describing the experience of reading these books.  If you grow up immersed in the idea that women can't (or just don't) do certain types of things, then books like these can have an enormous impact.

The thing is, the overt rhetoric that young women growing up today hear is that there aren't limitations on what women can do.  A book can't be revolutionary or inspirational just because it shows girls having adventures, and a book that talks about the limitations placed on women isn't going to resonate with a teenager or college student who's still in a supportive environment and still being told that she can do anything.  One of the greatest victories of feminism has been the fact that girls today generally aren't told that their lives are heavily restricted; where feminism still has work to do, though, is in dealing with the fact that women's lives still are socially constrained in any number of ways.  What happens when the much-discussed younger women get a little bit older and realize that (to draw an example from an audience member) ideas they propose in business meetings are dismissed, but those same ideas will be praised when proposed by a male colleague?  Or when (drawing my example from last year's feminism-and-fashion panel) they find that they're less successful in job interviews because their voices don't sound serious (read: deep) enough, or they laugh when they're nervous.  Or when they hit their mid-twenties and suddenly realize they're surrounded by magazine and newspaper articles about how "nesting" is the hot new trend for ambitious young women. 

I know people disagree on this, but it seems clear to me that the battles feminism is fighting today are a lot more subtle than the battles it was fighting thirty years ago.  This is a good thing, overall, but it might also mean that the fiction that was written in response to the situation thirty years ago probably doesn't resonate with young women today. 

That brings up another interesting point from the panel, though, which is the possibility that younger women don't identify as feminists, or don't find feminism important, because there are so many other battles to fight.  Lyda Morehouse brought this up very early in the panel, saying that she doesn't actually think of herself as a feminist much these days; the problems she faces as a lesbian and a mother are much more important than the problems she faces just as a woman, and she's only got so much energy.  If feminist-sympathetic young women are more interested in today's big and un-subtle problems, like gay rights or war or political corruption or any one of a dozen other things, can we really fault them? 

Today's Feminist Fiction:  So what is it that we're looking for in today's feminist fiction anyway?  Just making a statement about women being strong and/or equal isn't enough, apparently, so what is?  This was the most energetic part of the discussion, I think, and I can't even begin to re-create all of it, so I'm just going to talk about the part that I found most interesting.  Which is to say, a lot of us are looking for fiction that does something more realistic or more interesting with both men and women.  Kameron Hurley pointed out that fiction that just goes "poof!  men and women are entirely equal and everything is happy!" is really kind of unsatisfying because it dodges the difficult questions. 

I brought up romance novels here, because in my (admittedly limited) experience, there's some really fascinating stuff going on in romance novels in terms of gender dynamics.  I mean, okay, the only romance novels I read are Nora Roberts books, but I'd be shocked if she's far out of the mainstream for romance authors.  And what I see in those books, over and over again, are men and women who are negotiating (successfully, of course) the complexities of gender relations.  The men -and- the women are allowed to be both strong and vulnerable.  These books are full of women who value both their careers and their families, and men who encourage and support them.  And Lyda, who's recently started publishing romance novels under the name Tate Hallaway, backed me up and went one further, saying that there's been a real revolution in romance novels recently.  As far as she can tell, she said, category romance is producing some genuinely feminist fiction, while chick-lit has become the new standard bearer for crappy gender stereotypes.

And -that- was something I found fascinating, and made a lot of sense to me once I started thinking about it.  Clearly it would be a mistake to slander the entire chick-lit genre, but I've read a few chick-lit books (and read reviews of a lot more) that do seem to follow a pattern.  "Sassy young woman thinks that she's doing a bang-up job of having both a successful career and a satisfying personal life, but when she runs into some serious conflict, she realizes that having it all is just too hard."  So that's troubling, especially given how popular these books are.

Inadequate Conclusion:  I know there was more I wanted to say about this panel, but this writeup is long, and I've been working on it on-and-off for three days, and I'm tired of it.  Sorry.  But I had a great time on this panel, and found that I kept wanting to talk about it for the rest of the weekend. 

The next step.

So, for those of you who haven't had the chance to hear this from me in person, the update.  I'm going to be teaching at Berkeley next year.  It's a one-year lecturer position, and I'm doing two classes each semester. 

This fall, I've got one lecture course and one seminar.  The seminar will be what the history department calls a 103S, the 103 meaning it's a reading seminar for advanced undergraduates (as opposed to a 101, which is an independent research seminar), the S meaning it's in history of science.  I haven't finalized the course description for the seminar yet, but it looks like I'll finally get to do the "Biology, Evolution, and Human Nature" course that I've been wanting to teach for about four years now. 

The lecture course is going to be interesting.  I'm teaching History 30A, the first half of the general history of science survey course, loosely defined as "from antiquity to Newton."  This is a pretty standard type of course; I did a quick run through online syllabi from other schools and confirmed my impression that there's a standard narrative for this type of course.  Cover the Babylonian and Egyptian advances in writing, paper, and other technology, then the first attempts at science in early Greece.  The Aristotelian cosmology, early attempts at physics, Greek geometry.  That knowledge transfers to the Romans, who make mainly technological advances on it, and from the Romans to the early Europeans.  When Europe descends into the chaos of the Middle Ages, this scientific knowledge is preserved both by the Catholic Church and by Islamic scholars, who then pass it back to European scientists at the end of the Middle Ages, ushering in the dawn of the Scientific Revolution.

There's a reason this narrative is standard--it's a good solid story that provides a framework for understanding the origins of modern science.  You have transmission of knowledge across cultures, you have both conflict and cooperation between science and religion, the genuinely interesting clashes among cosmological theories, so on and so forth.  And I'm certainly not planning on throwing it away.  What I am planning on doing, and what I've been thinking about doing since the idea of teaching this course was first raised, is expanding the scope a little bit.  Cover not just the European science and its precursors, but also the work being done in China, in India, in the Islamic world.  It's pretty common in introductory history of science courses to treat Egyptian science as basically Hellenistic, but I've seen some interesting indicators that it was equally influenced by other African civilizations, and I'd like to open the course up to include things like metallurgy and mathematics in the Sahelian kingdoms. 

And yes, it has occurred to me that I may be trying to cover too much material in just one semester, and I do worry that by trying to achieve this breadth of subject mater I'll end up sacrificing depth and real understanding of the material.  I don't want to, for instance, end up doing only a cursory job with Galileo or the Copernican revolution.  But this feels really exciting to me, structuring the course this way, and more to the point, it feels necessary.  Once I started thinking about the class this way, I found that I couldn't really go back to thinking about it any other way. 

So that's what comes next.  This fall, a seminar on evolution and a lecture course on early science.  Next spring, another seminar (probably a research seminar) and another lecture course (History 30B, the second half of the survey, History of Science from the Scientific Revolution to the Present).  In between, I'll be job-hunting again, still running the magazine, picking up freelance writing work if/when it becomes available. 

And in anticipation of questions:  Yes, I do realize that it's inevitable that my students (and prospective future employers) will eventually discover this weblog, but I really don't think I'm going to flip out and pull the whole thing down again.   And no, I'm not just on vacation this summer, although I'm certainly giving myself room to take things a little easier.  I'm doing prep work for next fall, writing lectures and developing reading lists.  I've also still got that work for the Encyclopedia of Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, and I want to start working up sections of my dissertation for publication.  I've also got a book to promote, long-neglected friends to catch up with, a birthday to celebrate in Las Vegas, and some sunshine to re-acquaint myself with. 

So that's where we are for now.

pao!

Another new recipe victory last night!  Not nearly as fancy as the last one, but really satisfying.  I have this cookbook, China Express, that I bought just after graduating from college and have been in love with ever since.  I used to cook from it a lot more, and my basic marinades and stir-fry sauce concepts are drawn from here, and people who came to my dinner parties in my old apartment (Tim and Heather, that means you) would recognize a few of the recipes, particularly the baked fish with black bean sauce. 

Anyrate.  The point is, I'm trying to get back into cooking more often, and trying to expand my horizons, so I went back through this cookbook yesterday, and last night's experiment was "Spicy Chicken with Peanuts," known more popularly in Chinese restaurants as Kung Pao Chicken.  The whole point of this cookbook is that the food is easy and fast, and this was.  A little more cornstarch than I might otherwise have liked, but it worked.  Cut some chicken breasts into half-inch cubes, mix with a marinade of soy sauce, rice wine, cornstarch, and minced ginger.  Cover that and put it in the refrigerator, get some rice started in the rice cooker.  In a bowl, make a sauce out of chicken broth (or water), soy sauce, cornstarch, rice wine, black vinegar (or Worcestershire sauce), and a little sugar.  Chop up some more fresh ginger, some garlic, some scallions.  Open one of those little cans of sliced water chestnuts, drain and wash them.  Wait another couple of minutes for the rice to finish cooking.  Cook the chicken, take it out of the wok, do a cursory pass at cleaning out the wok before heating more oil.  Put in the ginger, garlic, and scallions, along with some red pepper flakes, saute for a few seconds, dump in the water chestnuts, stir for another few seconds.  Pour in the sauce mixture, cook until it starts to thicken, then mix in the cooked chicken and about a cup and a half of dry-roasted peanuts.  Serve with the rice, and be enormously pleased when your boyfriend (who orders kung pao chicken at every Chinese restaurant we try) declares this to be the best kung pao chicken he's had in years. 

spring cleaning.

First we had the months and months of increasing chaos as the dissertation took over more and more of my life.  Then we had the weeks of celebration surrounding graduation, and the week of travel and wonderful amazing visiting with friends.  And then, this past week, we have apparently had hibernation.  I haven't caught the WisCon Bird Flu, but I think that's because I've been doing nothing but sleep since returning home.  (No, really.  I have discovered in myself a previously-unsuspected capacity to sleep and sleep and keep on sleeping.) 

As of today, though, I've started the process of reconstructing a normal post-grad-school life.  And the first step is, apparently, a really really thorough cleaning of my office.  The second bedroom in our apartment functions in equal parts as a work space for me and miscellaneous storage for the both of us.  This afternoon, I cleaned the bejeezus out of it.  Cleared my desk, emptied the storage closet, shifted a lot of boxes and stacks of papers and books into the bedroom, vacuumed (I even used one of the vacuum attachments, the, uh, long stick-like one, to clean the baseboards and in the corners and everything!), dusted, reorganized, and moved stuff back in.  It's not done yet, not by a long shot--I need to reorganize papers, find room for a couple of boxes of additional stuff, cull the bookshelves, that kind of thing.  But it's a functional space for the first time in nearly a year. 

The cleaning process was kind of exciting in other ways, actually.  I found a box full of old journals and a bunch of pictures from high school, including a set of prom pictures.  I found a box full of academic books and journals, some of which might have been helpful a couple of months ago, but at least I know where they are now.  I found a floor-standing fan, which I knew I owned but somehow had convinced myself I sold at a yard sale three years ago.  I did not find any of the Known Missing items that have disappeared from this apartment over the last few years (Matt knows he's missing a box full of books and DVDs; I know I'm missing a box full of knitting reference books and old mix tapes), but for now I'll take what I can get.

I should have taken before-and-after pictures, but in their absence, here's a picture of my newly-reorganized desk.  And maybe tomorrow I'll get around to some of the other posts I've been meaning to make.  But first, maybe a nap.

  clean desk! 
  Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi.