Sending what good thoughts I can up your way. This is the last thing anyone needs.
Xopher, I don't have an answer to your question (I was never in any danger of becoming a chemist), but I'm enormously amused that the magic number for instability is 93. Somewhere in Elysium, Saint Aleister is laughing his balls off.
Andrew Willett, that is too cool for words. Break a leg!
Ooo, can I be in the ML house band? I mean, I do this sort of thing, but I figure the Fluorosphere Chamber Ensemble of all places has room for a guy with an ersatz folk sensibility and a penchant for doing weird things to a Martin Backpacker.
(Um, and you should also totally go see Whisperado. I went to the show in September '07 and had an enormously good time. One highlight was Patrick doing vocals on a cover of Richard Thompson's "Down Where the Drunkards Roll," which, due to some dreadful oversight in my musical education, was the first time I'd heard that song. I am, alas, not up in The City very often, but I'm glad I was that weekend.)
Jenny Islander @217: I don't think that's a good example of the blindness you are describing because the point of Planet 51 is to turn a classic "WASPy Military Poster Boy vs. the Horrible Monsters" B-movie on its head. At one point in the preview I saw, he attempts to defuse a tense situation by giving Clean-Cut Mr. Recruiting Poster Smile No. 3 and ends up traumatizing some poor alien kid for life.
There's also the irony - which may or may not have been intended by the creators, but you never know - that the blond, white hero is voiced by an actor who is himself neither.
The Lyke Wake Dirge! I'm pretty sure I have more different versions of that than anything else in my music collection. Off the top of my head, I can think of covers by Steeleye Span, Pentangle, Mediaeval Baebes, Black Happy Day, and the Iditarod with Sharron Kraus. And there may be one or two I'm missing there.
It wasn't a tune I was familiar with prior to reading Neverwhere, but it seemed like not very long after I'd encountered it there that it was suddenly all over the place.
Okay, I am wicked behind in this conversation, and I really appreciate the thoughtful responses from Shweta, heresiarch, Xopher, and Meg Thornton, and I apologize if I've dropped the ball on the wee subthread I started.
Shweta @314: I admire your generosity of thought towards the "you're overreacting" folks; I think you're right that people don't do it because they're trying to be jerks, but likely from just not having the frame of reference to understand why something that's not a source of pressure for them can be one to anyone else. I think, too, that there are an awful lot of people to whom various kinds of adversity don't seem "real" unless they've experienced them personally. (Not just insensitive blowhards, either; my mom, from whom I got much of my socially-conscious sensibility, is like this in a lot of ways.)
Though, thinking about it (and thinking out loud here), I wonder whether "annoyed" and "hurt" aren't coming from very different places? Can someone who's vulnerable and hurtable *get* "annoyed" really? It seems like something that happens more when one has the high ground on some axis.
Though I think I get what you're saying, here's where I have to mostly disagree; I'm a depressive, and I confuse "annoyed" and "hurt" all the time. There are certainly things in my history that qualify as genuine injuries and wrongs, but the quirks of my neurochemistry can make it hard to tell, unless I really remember to stop and pay attention, if any current reaction I'm having is the result of someone else doing me harm or something I'm conflating with it. (The flip side of this is that it's very easy for someone who knows this about me to convince me that I'm just being crazy and irrational when they really are doing harm, and here we are back at "you're overreacting" again.) I don't think annoyance is a state that requires being in a position of power already; being vulnerable to injury doesn't mean that some of what you encounter isn't anything more significant than an irritation or an inconvenience. It's just that being wounded can make some of those irritations seem more grave than they are.
Xopher @333: Your discussions with Hindus match up with my own experiences; when it's come up at all, the reaction I've gotten most has been pleasant surprise that I had the Remover of Obstacles in residence on my desk. But I'm always a little bit self-conscious that I'm a white guy who got the Ganesha puja from another white guy, and, like Shweta, I can imagine people who might take exception to that. (It would be one of those cases where I'd likely listen respectfully and disagree, while doing my best to own the inauthenticity of what I'm doing, just because I have a hard time with the idea that gods and food and clothes "belong" to anyone in particular.)
Meg Thornton @405: A witchy friend of mine once said to me, while I was going through a crisis that was stretching me nearly to my limits, "The Goddess is good, but sometimes She eats Her young." It was, weirdly, a much more comforting thing to hear than the sentiment that God never gives us more than we can handle, which is demonstrably neither true nor useful.
Prayer, therefore, is not recommended, since it might draw the attention of their bosses, and we can't be certain that attention would be positive.
The tradition of pulp horror reminds us that there are other possible cosmologies than a benevolent creator with our best interests at heart; we should also allow for the possibility of the Lovecraftian blind idiot god of chaos and insanity, and the Ligottian anti-god who actively has it in for us. :) (And even short of that, there's Carla Speed McNeil: "Woe betide the favorites of gods who think they're funny.")
My own brand of DIY syncretic woo has as one of its cornerstones an idea I had from Alan Moore, talking about his explorations of magic: "The idea of a god is a god." Which is something I both believe and cannot wholly explain, which I think qualifies it as a Mystery worth a lifetime, at least, of contemplation.
On Dobson: I think he and his followers are exactly the kind of people my grandfather was talking about when he said "If you can't outsmart a two-year-old, you don't deserve to have one." (Also, if beating a little dog with a belt doesn't make someone a "monster," the word has ceased to have useful meaning. And his gleeful, smarmy-not-funny description of that event makes me come awfully close to hoping for the existence of a Hell, one full of very large Dachsunds with very sharp teeth. Signed, Dan L-K, weiner-dog-owner.)
I myself am not an anti-corporal-punishment absolutist, but I'll say that I have serious misgivings about the use of a "discipline" technique that implies the message "If someone weaker than you is doing something you don't like, you can hurt them until they stop."
Shweta @266: Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, which are pretty close to where I see things myself. "Listening respectfully" is, I think, always a good idea, even if you end up disagreeing with what's being said.
I'd say the line is where one's convenience/desire causes other people harm. And that's easier to say than to figure out, sure, and people don't necessarily agree.
Well, there you go. No one wants to be That Asshole who says "Oh, come on. This isn't really hurting you." But I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that a party who claims injury is always right, either. ISTM that there's a difference between being actually hurt and just being annoyed*, but I sure don't want to be the one making that call.
Pondering on this a little more, I wonder if a better yardstick is pretention to authenticity, because it seems like the most harm is done by appropriating something and passing it off as the genuine article.** If I make a curry, I'm not going to try and convince anyone that it's Real Authentick Indian Cuisine*** (though I might call it something like Practically Chicken Korma in the spirit of creating some kind of ballpark expectation). That seems a pretty good distance away from doing a half-assed imitation of some other tradition, pretending it's the real thing, and trying to make money from it.
And on that note, having thought about it some more, I think my good-book-bad-movie parallel breaks down at the point of looking at who profits by it. A bad adaptation is likely to create at least some market for the original work, assuming the filmmakers are reasonably upfront about their source material. So if you're that author, it might be annoying to have the schlock identified with you, but you might at least get some sales out of it. But exoticized misrepresentations of appropriated cultural stuff seem to mostly create a market for more of the same, which results in NinjaMania (on the relatively benign end) and You Too Can Be A Mystical Shaman seminars (on the other).
I've also been thinking more about the parallels between cultural appropriation issues and fanfic, both of which seem to cause arguments along similar faultlines, and which seem to me to spring from a similar impulse: "Wow, there's some Cool Shit that would be fun to play with." And I think that the appropriate "marketplace" for both, in the vast majority of cases, is a gift economy; it's probably okay to share these things, but it's probably not okay to sell them. I recalled after writing my previous comment that I have in fact been to an event where middle-class white people participated in a "sweat" (organized in part by both actual Indians and Caucasians who had spent a significant amount of time immersed in Native - in this case, Lenap'e - culture); one of the reasons I have a hard time seeing it as objectionable is that no one paid five figures for the privilege.
___
*There's a set of objections to appropriated stuff that read a whole lot like accusations of BadWrongFun as much as anything else, with the harm, if I understand it right, being mostly having to know that there's someone out there Doin It Rong. But Doin It Rong is, I think, an inevitable byproduct of transmission, and also the means by which we get wonderful things like rock music and Voudun.
**Though I also think fetishizing "authenticity" leads to some strange places, not all of which are good or healthy themselves.
***But, if I were ever foolish or unlucky enough to be serving it to someone who'd grown up on the real deal, I'd at least hope for a certain level of courtesy on their part the same as any other guest, in the same way that I don't get a pass to be rude about the lasagna at my very not-Italian in-laws' just because it's not like what Mom used to make.
To go off on a slight tangent here: I have to confess that I have mixed feelings about the idea of "cultural (mis)appropriation." On the one hand, white people passing themselves off as Authentic Native Americans is stupid and tacky and disrespectful. But I can't quite get on board with the notion that you shouldn't adopt any other culture's custom (or clothing, or food, or iconography) unless you have an immersive textbook understanding of its cultural context. Which, yeah, is probably the ideal when possible, but doesn't strike me as a very practical standard.
Part of it, I must admit, is that my approach to life is syncretic by inclination, and "a small slice of each, please" is as close to a working philosophy as I'm likely to get. I don't especially want to be limited to only the experiences I'm "entitled" to by virtue of heritage, and notions of cultural purity - my own, or other peoples' - leave a bad taste in my mouth. At the same time, I understand that "take what's useful, leave the rest" has its own unpleasant resonances in light of a history of imperialism, so I get why it's a sensitive tangle of issues. But I'm just not sure where the line is; I'm pretty confident that making curry doesn't make me much of an appropriator or a wannabe, but I'm less certain about wearing a kurta*, or worshipping a god with an elephant's head without adopting the rigors of living as a Hindu** otherwise.
And my feeling about clumsily appropriated cultural trappings is that it's a lot like a bad movie based on a good book: it sucks that the movie is what most people think of, but the book, as has been famously pointed out, still exists. But then, two days ago I'd have said that if rich white people want to put a makeshift sauna on their campsite and call it a "sweat lodge," there's no harm in that, so it's possible I'm missing something here.
But in any case, I really want my culture to be a melting pot rather than a neatly sectioned cafeteria tray. And not only because I'm an over-privileged Westerner who feels entitled to chicken tikka masala*** and oud music and kung fu lessons, but because (as Eddie Izzard points out) a mongrel nation is a healthier society than a purebred one. I have to wonder if a certain amount of tacky and disrespectful is the cost of doing business in a genuinely diverse multicultural world.
___
*My friend Vishal says no more so than businessmen in Mumbai wearing white shirts and ties, but note that that's at least one bingo square right there.
**Whatever that even means, complicated by the fact that there's not much consensus of definition among Hindus, and that it's not generally seen as something you can even convert to.
***A dish originating in Scotland, which surely goes to show something or other.
pat: Just so. Me, I don't enjoy slasher movies or the stuff that usually gets called "torture porn," and yet I like an awful lot of things that share some of the same elements: the films Se7en and Event Horizon and Hellraiser, and particularly creepy TV show eps like Buffy's "Hush" or Torchwood's "Countrycide." And I'm not sure I could quite explain what exactly I think the difference is, or whether I think it's of degree or kind. Certainly all those things have some discomforting or at least unsettling effect on me, and some I find pleasurable and some I don't, and there's no clear bright line separating one from the other.
I'm a little surprised that no one has yet mentioned the (ISTM) obvious genre connection with discomfort and pleasure: horror.
Being frightened and tense is not comfortable, and yet fiction (in an array of media) designed to produce those effects remains among the most popular entertainment around. As a fan of (some) horror, I can attest that there is also something pleasurable about those sensations, cultivated under the right set of circumstances. But damned if I can say exactly what, or why (though Tim's admiring "that was messed up" hints at some part of it).
It's not a pleasure everyone shares, and I have no judgment whatsoever to pass on those who don't. But it's very real, and widespread enough that even mediocre attempts to service it have been known to achieve success in finding their audience. (And, as Thomas Ligotti suggests in "The Consolations of Horror," at least some of the value of horror is connecting - in spirit if in nothing else - with other human beings who share your kink.)
pat greene @255 and others have, I think, touched on why it's so difficult to dismiss the bullying of critics who are not here and can't hurt us; their opinions echo those of people whose instructions we value and who we were reluctant to disappoint.
For me, it was a high school English teacher who was otherwise quite wonderful as a mentor in nurturing enthusiasm for literature, but who was also convinced that science fiction was all rayguns and BEMs and therefore without real value. I knew better even at the time, but it's hard to shake that disapproval, and hard not to react to it when it comes up in another context. (Actually, come to think of it, I grew up surrounded by English teachers, including having one as a parent, and that there was a clear bright line between SFF and "good books" was a background assumption. If I've managed to quit being embarassed about reading something with a dragon or a spaceship on the cover, it's only because I've been disengaged from that environment for a long time now.)
When those are the opinions of people you trust, or want to trust, it's very hard to shake that iota of doubt that maybe they're fundamentally true, even when they're being spouted by complete jerks. And it takes a very long time to be able to trust your own view of the world. I'm sure my pursuit of writing fiction was set back considerably by the several well-meaning educators who told me I might be pretty good if only I could quit writing stuff with monsters in it; it took years to stop feeling like when I sat down to work on a genre story that I was wasting time I ought to be devoting to creating something "good." (And, of course, the truth was that the stories I wrote when I was in school were pretty much crap, but the monsters weren't half bad.)
John Stanning @1: I once apparently gave a college classmate some mental scarring when he was trying to learn that sonnet; while he was rehearsing it, I said "You know that one's about jerking off, right?" He told me he was never able after to read it without hearing my voice in his head.
(And I know it isn't necessarily about that, but "jerking off, or possibly Teh Gay" didn't have quite the immediacy of impact I was going for.)
Oh good. Now whenever I see an image of that robed and tonsured fellow surrounded by birds, I'm going to be hearing him in my head saying nothing but "Francis Francis."
"What do you mean, 'out of fuel'? It's a Plot Device; it'll run on anything we damn well put into it!"
Matthew @60: That was always my assumption - that "space opera" and "hard sf" were in fact points on a continuum with some distance between them - but my actual knowledge of the current state of the genre is limited to Stuff I Like, so what the hell do I know?
(And of course you're right about the "far-future" aspect as well; one of the things I like about Banks is that "human" means something different to the Culture than it does to us.)
Serge, I love that answer from Tregellis. Plausibility is all well and good, but Pure Plot will keep the story engine going when everything else has run out.
I'm a bit croggled by Jeffries' inclusion of Iain M. Banks on his hard-sf list, with the implication that the Culture's miracletech is "scientifically supported" - particularly since Banks is at some pains to point out in "A Few Notes on the Culture" that his universe runs on limitless handwavium. (Which is one reason I'm in mild disagreement with Victoria at 45, and the assertion that "In Good SF the science is as accurate as the story is entertaining" - I don't think scientific accuracy is especially relevant to quality. But I suppose it depends on the kind of story you care about telling.)
LMB, the paganism is a big element of European neofolk as well, what with the runes and the true love knots and "The Odin Hour" and whatnot. I get the impression that a lot of National Front types see Christianity as an unwelcomely pacifistic, and possibly Semitic, affront to the true ways of their heritage. Which in its way is more internal consistency than you usually get from those guys.
I wonder if the American manifestation of that is the result of influence from European racist groups, which have apparently had connections to paganism for a while now. I recall reading a German interview some years ago with Andria Degens of Pantaleimon where the interviewer said that in Germany identifying as pagan was usually thought to be an indicator of neo-Nazi sympathies, much more so than in the US or Britain.
Echoing David Wald at #26, there's a significant element of the UK and European neofolk musical community that at the very least has fetishized fascist imagery, and at least sometimes the ideology as well. Some of them (like Death in June and Boyd Rice) seem to thrive on the are-they-or-aren't-they controversy and theatrics more than anything else, but there are certainly lots of neofolk musicians and fans who are open about embracing dreadful social philosophies wrapped up in cultural or national pride. (One of the few places I've seen someone use the word "miscegenation" seriously in the last few years was on a neofolk-related mailing list.) Weirdly, some of these same guys are also completely accepting of homosexuality - think of the SS-officer-as-sex-object thing going on with William Hurt in "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and you'll about have the picture of it.
A few years ago, Tony Wakeford, who fronts Sol Invictus and a couple of other neofolk projects, published a statement online disclosing his former membership in the National Front and his disavowal of, and regret for, that period of his life. It's short and to the point, but I find it very moving - particularly his mention of all the people close to him who would be hurt if the fantasies of nationalists were to become a reality.
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