west of the moon

roundup.

I've been trying for about a week now to corral my thoughts on another step in the syllabus construction process, namely, how to deal with historiographical issues and other debates in the secondary literature.  I'm not getting anywhere with that.  (Oh, and also, I'm returned from the Las Vegas Birthday Extravaganza, but I'm not really planning on posting about it.  It's not that much happened in Vegas that needs to stay in Vegas, it's just that I had such a wonderful time that I don't feel like crunching it down into a weblog post.)

The syllabus post will hopefully come soon, but in the meantime, I've been collecting links like a mad magpie, and I'd rather share them than hold on to them for much longer.

• Barbara Ehrenreich has a weblog!  But y'all have been letting me down.  Barbara Ehrenreich has been blogging since last December, including a brilliant and breezy commentary on gay marriage, and no one mentioned it before now?
• And then there's Timothy Burke.  Speaking from my position as someone just setting out on this academic career path, I can only hope that I come across as smart and engaged as Burke is.  I'm particularly fond of his recent posts about the process of archival research, but he first came to my attention when I was hip-deep in dissertation stress and six different people emailed me links to his entry titled "Should You Go To Graduate School?"  ("Short answer: no.")
• Liz Henry, in the wake of a family hospital emergency, sparked a smart and complicated discussion on politeness and power.  I'm a big fan of both politeness and etiquette, but I also agree that the pressure to be polite (read another way, the pressure to be well-behaved) can easily become a mechanism by which people without power are blocked from access to power.  The medical or hospital example is a dramatic but effective demonstration of this--a lot of bad health care experiences happen at least partly because patients (and their advocates or representatives) are so conditioned not to push back against authority.
• The 2006 Biomedical Image Awards, featuring a lot of gorgeous images.
• An essay on the problems of Wikipedia as a source for historical research. 

More later.

a couple of answers.

What I assumed was a quick thinking-time housecleaning break yesterday turned into a full-scale cleaning assault.  Somewhere around the point where I decided it was a good idea to sweep behind the hot-water heater, I realized what was going on.  On some level, it is apparently very important to me to have a clean house when I turn thirty next week.  Less than a week away from my birthday, I feel really good about turning thirty.  I'm at a good place in my life--to be a little flip about it, I know a bunch of stuff, and I'm good at some things I want to be good at.  This is where things start to get interesting.  So it's not milestone-birthday anxiety, this need to set my house in order (both literally and metaphorically).  I think it's just about marking the occasion.

Greg gave me some questions to answer, and I guess I should get to that.

1. Are those ignorant of history really doomed to repeat it? Are we all doomed to repeat history whether we're ignorant or not?

I realize this is practically heresy, but I've never entirely understood what Santayana was getting at.  Not having ever seen the context for the quote, though, I'm going to choose to assume that he's talking about personal history, rather than history on the broader scale.  As far as personal histories go, I think we all know people who repeat their own mistakes over and over again, and yeah, in that case the only way to get out of the cycle is to really do a lot of thinking about your own past. 

2.  What has been the most unexpected good thing about editing for SH? What's been the most unexpected bad thing?

The most unexpected good thing has been the people I've met.  My involvement with Strange Horizons has brought me into this incredible community of people, and honestly, I'm not sure I would have found y'all otherwise.  For bad things... I feel like you're trying to get me in trouble here.  How about this: the concern that my involvement with science fiction (SH in particular, but publishing in general) is somehow going to hurt me in my academic job search.  (I like to think this is an unfounded fear, but it's impossible to say for sure.)

3. Pie or cake?

Pie.  (Which is not to say that I'm anti-cake, like Some People.)

4. Do East Coast people have tend to possess some quality you wish more West Coast people had? What about the reverse?

Of course it's dangerous to generalize, especially because my West Coast experience is so thoroughly Berkeley-centric, but if we can take all the standard disclaimers as read, then I'd say that East Coast people tend to have more of an ability to not take themselves so seriously.  There's a particular kind of self-deprecating humor that was absolutely standard among my friends back east, both in New Jersey and in Boston, and one of the weirdest adjustments for me when I moved to California was realizing that a lot of people I met here were just tone-deaf to that.  I might have thought it was a grad school thing, but my first year out here I was dating a computer programmer who was involved in a lot of dot-com stuff, and I saw a lot of the same trends.  Some days, I felt like I could guess whether a person was a California native or not by listening for the presence or absence of a self-mocking note when she talked about the importance of nondisclosure agreements for casual conversations.

5. Describe your dream home. You're not paying for it, so it can even have an observatory or roller coaster or whatever.

My needs are so prosaic!  My dream home has large bathtubs, room enough in the yard for both big shade trees and a thriving flower garden, and at least one room whose only purpose is to be a library.  (Really lovely built-in wooden shelving and cabinets wouldn't hurt.)  It has a big kitchen with plenty of counter space, and it gets good daytime light in all the important living spaces.  The house itself is large enough that you can't hear everything people are doing in other parts of the house, but not so big that you could get lost.  It's walking distance from some sort of interesting and active urban-like area (like Rockridge in Berkeley, or Davis Square in Somerville, or downtown Iowa City), it's located somewhere where Matt and I don't have to drive to work, and it's convenient for our friends to visit.

Oh, and it has at least one secret door and hidden passageway.

Anyone want some questions?

imitative learning.

During my second year in graduate school, as part of my department's requirements that we take one graduate course in another department, I took a seminar on child development with Alison Gopnik in the psychology department.  I was extremely fortunate all throughout graduate school to have stellar coursework and brilliant professors, and this seminar was no exception.  Child development was my primary emphasis in the psychology major as an undergraduate, and it's still an area I find fascinating; discovering that the seminar included historical perspectives was just an extra bonus.

One of the things we discussed in the class was the idea of imitative learning--kids will learn to do certain things by watching adult behaviors and mimicking them.  It's not just functional imitation, though.  They'll incorporate imitation into play, and Alison pointed out to us that if you spend any time observing children through these learning processes, you'll eventually realize that there's no easy way to distinguish when a particular behavior is play and when it's become a learned act.  Take, for example, using a hairbrush.  A kid will see his parents using a hairbrush to brush their hair.  While playing, the kid might pick up a wooden spoon and run it along his hair, pretending that the spoon is a hairbrush.  Later, in another context, he'll perform the same act, but with an actual hairbrush instead of a wooden spoon.  He's still playing, he's still just pretending to brush his hair, but he's pretending by running an actual hairbrush over his actual hair.  At some point later on, he'll be really brushing his hair, but it's very hard to pin down the point where pretending stops.

This discussion really stuck with me, though, because of Alison's off-hand observation that this process continues into adulthood.  At first you're kind of playacting at cleaning your house and paying your bills, but eventually you're a fully-functioning adult person, and where's the line? 

I've been spending my morning cleaning the house--I'm supposed to be planning lectures, but I'm trying to work out some timeline issues in the syllabus, and I need to think a little more.  I like cleaning as thinking time; it's not thinking-intensive on its own, and at the end of it you have a clean house, so that's a nice bonus.  (The problem, of course, is that sometimes I very abruptly realize that I've solved whatever problem I was unravelling, and run off back to the computer while all the stuff I was reorganizing in the living room is still flopping about in big messy stacks in the middle of the floor.)   I've been cleaning my own living spaces for ten or twelve years now, and I'm still surprised at how much of it still feels like I'm in that imitative play-acting space.  I just finished cleaning off the stovetop, for instance.  We have a gas stove, so every time I clean it, I have to clear the burners afterwards; the little gas-holes get water in them, so they don't always light cleanly right away, and sometimes have to be helped along with a match flame.  Every time I do this, it feels like a conscious imitation, like I'm copying some behavior I observed as a kid.  (But where?  We had an electric stove, when I was growing up.) 

Twenty Epics: Online Launch Party!

Welcome to the Twenty Epics online launch party!  Once upon a time, we'd hoped to have an real live launch party for the book at WisCon, but publication delays and other small problems made that impossible.  Thanks to the initiative and energy of some of our fabulous and talented authors, though, we're doing it online!  My heroic co-editor David is collecting launch party links at the official party headquarters, and everyone is encouraged to participate.  Some of the authors are posting about the writing process for their stories; Mary Robinette Kowal even included some pictures of the Icelandic landscape that inspired her piece in the collection. 

I think of myself as a fairly articulate person, but I actually cannot adequately convey to y'all how excited I am that this book is finally available.  (Lulu | Amazon | B&N)  At nearly every stage in the editorial process, I have been nearly overcome with glee over these stories.  (I've qualified that "every" because, well, there was a moment of doubt.  At some point after the guidelines were released but before we started reading the submissions, I started to think things like "what have we done, committing to having twenty stories in the book before we've even seen the submissions?  What if we can't find twenty good stories?"   This was, of course, a completely groundless fear.) 

The book concept was fun to work with from the beginning.  Mini-epics!  Bite-sized epics!  It's not just gimmicky, though--we both felt there was more to it than a novelty idea.  Why can't you convey something enormous in a few short brushstrokes?  Why do you need padding and meticulous detail to convey a story with a sweeping scale?  It's not that I have principled objections to the brick-thick fantasy novel, it's that I wanted to see what else you could do. 

David and I spent a couple of days reading through all of the submissions, camped out in my living room surrounded by stacks of manuscripts.  I knew very early on the first day that we were going to have a good book.  What I didn't realize until a few weeks later, when we'd finished haggling over the exact table of contents and I read through the set we'd settled one, was that we had a really brilliant book.  In the guidelines, we asked the authors to redefine "epic" for us.  What we have in the book is not so much a redefinition as a range of interpretations.  Some of the stories are light and fun (with a few that are outright goofy), some of them are emotional and serious, some of them deal directly with events on an epic scale and some of them just move the epic adventure into the background of a very personal story. 

And they're all fabulous.  Not only are the stories themselves fabulous, they come in a lovely package complete with a beautiful cover painting.  So go buy the book (Lulu | Amazon | B&N), then come talk to me about the stories, because I've been waiting for months to be able to hear what people liked and didn't like in our beautiful little book.

(UPDATED to add: Rumor has it that they'll have a few copies in stock at the Barnes and Noble in downtown Berkeley in the next week or so.  So if you're local to Berkeley, you may want to think about buying the book in the store rather than online.  That helps boost our odds of getting more books in actual stores.  Thanks!)

epix!

The long-anticipated day is upon us!  Twenty Epics is finally available for purchase.  (Lulu | Amazon)  You'll be hearing more about it in the next week or two--it looks like we're having an online launch party soon--but there's one thing I wanted to address first.  The ever-fabulous John Scalzi posted about the book, and in the comments on his entry, someone asked why we chose to publish through Lulu.  It's a good question, and one that a number of people have asked, and I figure it deserves an answer.

The book was originally scheduled to be published by Wheatland Press.  Wheatland is small, but well-respected, and they've developed a good reputation for quirky anthologies.  (Including the first All-Star Stories book, All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories.)  David and I went through the whole Twenty Epics process assuming that we were publishing with Wheatland, and then at a fairly late stage in the game (somewhere right around when we were sending galleys to the authors), we found out that Wheatland was having financial difficulties and was going to have to cancel the book.

At that point, we were in a kind of awkward place.  We had a book.  The authors had already been paid, the cover art had already been designed, we'd been fielding review requests and advance purchase queries for a couple of months.  Not only did we have a book, we had a book that we were confident was a -good- book.  We just didn't have a publisher.  David and I made a few queries to other small presses, had a couple of promising leads, but ultimately those leads didn't go anywhere.  Somewhere during that process, we floated the idea of just publishing it ourselves.  This is the age of miracles and wonders, after all, or at least the age of the rapidly-proliferating small press operation, and when you get right down to it, why -can't- All Star Stories be a publisher?  Most of the small press publishers (at least the young ones) are using print-on-demand anyway, and we'd already done so much of the work, why not take that last step?

There are, of course, a lot of reasons not to take that last step.  Publishing it ourselves means taking a much bigger financial risk, and it means that we're going to have to do a lot more legwork for publicity and whatnot.  In the end, though, it seemed like a good choice for us.  I love this book to bits and pieces, so I'm happy to put a lot of time and effort into publicity.  David and I both have (we hope) some credibility in the field, which should go a long way towards discounting the "any idiot can publish any old crap" stigma of self-publishing.  The print-on-demand service we're using, Lulu.com, lists books with Amazon (facilitating online sales) and with Ingram (making it easier for bookstores to order).  Yes, it's possible that going this route is going to cause us to have lower sales numbers than if we had kept shopping around for a small press to take us on, but honestly, I've seen the sales figures for similar types of anthologies, and it's not as though we were going to be making the big bucks under any circumstances.  This was never an enterprise that was going to make us rich. 

So that's where we are.  Like I said, expect to hear more (much more) about this book in the coming weeks. 

vox.

I've been playing around with Vox a little bit.  Don't worry, I'm not picking up and moving house, at least not for a long time yet.  (I will say, though, that the idea of a TypePad-like system with friendslocking capabilities is pretty appealing.)   The photos-and-media integration is more sophisticated at Vox, which is a lot of what I love about it right now.  I want to be taking and posting more pictures, but it's kind of a hassle in TypePad, so when I have picture-based things I want to post, I'll be putting them on the Vox blog instead.  (I may do a little additional posting there, because the system is so new and shiny, but this is still the main base of operations.)

My Vox blog, with a couple of entries, is at http://smg.vox.com.  All future entries there will have excerpts cross-posted here, so no, no one has to change bookmarks just to look at all my flower pictures.

(If anyone's interested in a Vox account, let me know. I have a few invites I can toss around.)

fruited purple waves.

I love the Fourth of July. 

When I was a kid,  we used to go to the big Fourth of July parade in a nearby town.  "Big" is, of course, a very relative term; it wasn't big like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade or anything.  Just bigger than the other parades around, like the Memorial Day parade in my hometown, which entirely lacked parade floats and consisted mainly of all the Little League teams marching in our softball and baseball uniforms.  The Fourth of July parade, though, that had clowns, and parade floats, and marching bands, and local politicians being driven around in fancy old cars. 

What really fixed me on the Fourth as a holiday, though, was living in Boston.  Every year, we got a huge sprawling group of people together to spend the day at the Esplanade.  Half a million people or more go to the Esplanade every year for the fireworks, but it's not just the fireworks, it's a day-long event.  We'd get there early, spread out a lot of blankets, and spend the whole day just hanging out, playing cards, napping, whatever.  It was always a really happy day, and at the end, fireworks!  (Well.  Except for the one year that it rained, and we gave up and went to the movies instead.  But that was fun too.)  If I ever move back to Boston, I may try to revive the tradition, although I suspect that the "no alcohol" restriction will make it difficult to lure my friends away from their own backyard barbecue plans. 

This was a low-key Fourth of July.  Matt and I spent the evening with some of his co-workers, at one of those previously-mentioned backyard barbecues, and it was fun even though I didn't know anyone there.  I think my favorite non-Esplanade Fourth of July, though, was two years ago, when we went to Washington DC for a couple of days.  We spent most of the time visiting friends, but on the Fourth itself, Matt and I went off on our own to tour some national landmarks.  It was cold and rainy, but we made our way around the Mall anyway, visited Lincoln, checked out the very impressive new World War II memorial, and made our way to the National Archives.  I'd never been there before, and the display around the Declaration of Independence is beautiful, very impressive and very effective.  Among other things, the Archives do a great job of putting the Declaration in a context, making it clear that it was a revolutionary act, that in many ways the bedrock foundation of this nation is its tradition of political dissent and questioning authority and fighting injustice.  It's good to be reminded of that.