forthwritten

forthwritten @ 2019-09-23T19:36:00

2019-09-23T18:36:16Z

Something I'm finding increasingly weird is the US/north-west European attachment to hawks and falcons and owls and simultaneous positioning of parrots as gaudy and superficial. If you parrot something, you mimic it without any real understanding. It's an insult to be compared to a parrot, a compliment to be compared to an owl.

The appeal is that hawks and falcons are lords of the air, masters of their element. Owls are creatures of the night, silent in their approach, beloved of Athena, associated with wisdom. These species are almost always solitary apart from a (often lasting) pair-bond. Even then, they hunt separately; as far as I'm aware, Harris hawks are the only species of raptor that hunt collaboratively. Trained hawks, falcons and owls are, very generally speaking, in it for the free dinners. Humans can take a wild juvenile hawk or eagle, work with it for a season, and release it back to the wild with no problems. We romanticise the shit out of these solitary apex predators when really, humans aren't very much like them at all.

In contrast, parrot life is usually focused around small groups of a pair and their offspring which are incorporated into a larger, more fluidly organised flock. Parrots have intense, subtle negotiations about their personal space and the kind of touch they would like to receive. They are constantly communicating through posture and eye pinning and feather angle as well as voice. They are natural problem solvers - there are a whole range of foraging toys you can buy captive parrots just to keep them entertained. They are wary of new things, but this turns into intense curiosity. I am not joking when I say that everything in my living room has been licked by a parrot. They do things apparently just for fun for their whole lives - look up videos of cockatoos sliding down a roof over and over again. Some parrots will use tools. They even name each other.

They will do things just to get a response from you: being ignored is a psittacine nightmare. They contact call if they cannot see each other - or if they cannot see the humans they have accepted as flock. It's a sort of "hello! I can't see you! are you okay?" and your response is "hello! I'm okay! are you okay?" and it will happen in the forests and in the grasslands and in a house and basically anywhere a parrot is. They are intensely, intensely social. They forage together. They eat together. They preen together. They play together.

They decide who is flock. It's something to earn, and is not automatically bestowed upon you. It can take years to persuade a parrot that you're worth spending time with. They have an extraordinary memory and depth of feeling. There are rescue parrots that, years later, will say things in the voices of their abusers. They are exquisitely sensitive to their environments, both physical and emotional. Teflon fumes will kill them. Punishment will destroy them. They seek partnership, not dominance.

We are so weirdly similar to parrots: smart and social and adaptable and playful and problem-solving. The more time I spend with Leia, the more I wonder at how the cultural imagination has got these birds so wrong.

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music: 10 of the best

2017-09-13T20:14:40Z

I've been really enjoying 10 of the best recently. With some bands, the appeal is in being reunited with songs dear as friends - revisiting them can be an experience in itself. With other bands that I know less well, it's learning of new-to-me songs, or seeing the music I know contextualised in a different way. With other bands, especially ones that I have listened to but lost track of, it's becoming aware of more recent work (especially when that work isn't easily accessed c.f. Burial's various EPs and collaborations). These are some of the lists I've particularly enjoyed or want to listen to later.

Genre
Northern Soul
Riot grrrl
Bollywood samples

Bands
Belle and Sebastian
Björk
Brian Eno
Burial
Cocteau Twins
David Bowie
Girls Aloud
Grace Jones
Joy Division
Leonard Cohen
Manic Street Preachers
Missy Elliott
Mogwai
Nick Cave
Pavement
Pixies
PJ Harvey
Siouxsie and the Banshees
Slayer
Slipknot
St Vincent
Suede
Tori Amos

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Livejournal

2017-04-05T19:46:28Z

I have deleted the contents of my livejournal. I had to agree to their awful TOS in order to use LJ-Sec to mass delete entries; while turning off javascript lets you log in and read your friends page, I wasn't able to edit entries or log into LJ-Sec without agreeing to their TOS.

I respect that I am minimally affected by the new TOS, but I am uncomfortable about agreeing to a) abide by a TOS that I can't actually read (the English translation is not legally binding) and b) agreeing to abide by Russian legislation. As someone who is queer, transgender and generally supportive of political dissent against repressive regimes, I am not comfortable having material on their servers.

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things I have been reading recently

2015-08-14T00:11:06Z

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

John Hersey - Hiroshima - long but definitive read on suvivors' immediate experiences
Vibeke Venema - When time stood still: A Hiroshima survivor's story
Paul Ham - The Bureaucrats Who Singled Out Hiroshima for Destruction
Sarah Stillman - Hiroshima and the inheritance of trauma
David Samuels - Atomic John
Daniel Cordle - Hiroshima’s literary legacy: the ‘blinding flash’ that changed the world forever

Amnesty International and sex work

Alison Phipps - 'Disappearing' sex workers in the Amnesty International debate
jemima2013 - Invisible women

Other things

[CW: medical; explicit details of late stage cancer] Yasmin Nair - Gay marriage hurts my breasts
Gita Jackson - What a book about British wizards taught me about American blackness
Tansy Hoskins - How the Jack the Ripper industry distorts London's East End - being the child of a forensic psychiatrist I have read fairly widely on historical murder, crime and forensics; my opinion is that the Identity Of Jack The Ripper is the least interesting issue here (if I had to come up with some sort of Thing on Jack the Ripper, it would be contrasting historical forensics with present day and possibly near-future forensics). Would much rather see a museum about East End women's experiences ofc.

Other things

Alicorn - Double, double - what happens if a child is promised to not one, but two witches?
What happens if a Slytherin competed in the Triwizard Tournament
A favourite trope

*reluctantly takes out tiny pistol, drops it and sighs*

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Oktavist singing

2015-07-28T17:33:21Z

To my considerable joy, I have recently discovered oktavists - bass singers who can sing an octave lower than usual basses. I do love a good bass rumble; when I sang in a choir, the director once had a massive go at the basses for singing a G rather than an F, and it was only when the choir stopped singing (and the basses were gazing at him in hurt dismay) that the director realised he'd actually been hearing an aeroplane passing overhead.

Oktavists can sing a good five and a half octaves lower than me! The human voice is pretty incredible. They seem to be a largely Russian phenomenon - the operatic equivalent is a basso profoundo - but I'm not sure that European music quite writes for this voice type.

Under the cut: two songs performed by Kovcheg (Down the Mother Volga and Song of the Volga Boatmen) and St. Petersburg State Academic Capella Choir performing Monotonously Rings the Bell.

( cut for embedded videos )

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Mad Max: Fury Road

2015-06-10T23:03:44Z

So I like films with sensitive explorations of gender, and I like films with explosions, and Mad Max: Fury Road combines these to pleasing effect.

The setting makes no sense whatsoever - setting massive amounts of, presumably fractionally distilled crude oil on fire in what's meant to be a post-nuclear apocalyptic wasteland doesn't seem like the brightest idea to me but what do I know about massive flames coming out of trucks or, indeed, worldbuilding. What's even happening with Gas Town? It's all pretty confusing.

I loved the dusty, cobbled-together aesthetic - VW Beetles soldered together to make truck cabs, people making ad hoc repairs out of anything they could find, the understanding that you didn't waste metal but should find a use for it. It's something I loved about Tatooine, and something I love about this.

FURIOSA. I have a lot of feelings about Furiosa. She's terrifyingly competent and brave and resourceful and determined and tough - all the characteristics of a male action hero, but on the body of a slim shorn-haired woman with a really cool looking prosthetic arm. Her war rig has a skeletal left arm painting on the side. It's her vehicle; she's left a human mark on it as she straps metal around her shoulders.

For a film with very little dialogue, it passes the Bechdel test. The women characters are so interesting, and all have backstories I want to know about. How did they all end up there?

In terms of problematic stuff, I am not keen on the way that the good guys' bodies were portrayed as non-monstrous while the bad guys' bodies were. Furiosa's disability is not really remarked on, whereas there are some quite obvious scenes where various bad guys' disabilities and prosthetics are presented as something monstrous and unhuman. I think this is seen more clearly through Nux: the War Boys are deathly pale and move with arachnid grace, but by the end Nux's flesh is looking much more skin coloured.

( spoilers )

SO. Did you write meta? Do you know if anyone's written interesting meta? I really liked happydork's review and this review by yasaman but would like to read more!

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Fergus, ? - 1st May 2015

2015-05-02T17:22:27Z

Last night I said goodbye to lovely, sweet Fergus.

( cut for photo )

I adopted Fergus last August as a companion for Fern. The rescue thought he was about two, but I thought he was younger - maybe by as much as a year which is pretty significant in rat terms. I don't know much about his life before he was rescued - apparently he was kept in a cage in a bathroom, with no name and barely any attention. I imagine he was bought for a child who somehow failed to be captivated by Fergus' charm and sheer force of personality. That child was an idiot.

Fergus had been a bit grumpy and a bit unsure about being picked up and handled, but he was so willing to try. By the end of his life he actually preferred getting fussed by his human friends over eating - the only time he favoured food over attention was when my mum gave him some lamb. Otherwise he'd look at the food as you scattered it in his cage, then back at you and ask for more attention. He loved nestling his head in my hand so I could scratch his ears and above his eyes and his back. His fur smelt of fresh tortillas.

When I first got him he was very unsure about climbing and I had to rescue him when he genuinely got stuck on sticks. He would also get his balls stuck when he was hauling himself into a hammock. It was about as unfortunate as you can imagine.

There were things he never quite got over - he was very wary when it came to unfamiliar foods but enjoyed everything from mango to watermelon to lamb to turkey to strawberries. He disliked carrot, and once carefully licked all the pesto off a gnocchi before rejecting the dumpling. I suspect he'd never been exposed to lots of different foods before; Fern taught him a lot about what was good to eat, but rats are notoriously neophobic.

Fergus was Fern's last companion; when the rescue tried to introduce him to other male rats, he'd screamed in terror but was fine with an old lady rat. He was occasionally a bit boisterous for her but they'd snuggle up together in the rat house. He also had an endearing habit of stashing food in the litter tray - something Fern found very convenient.

( cut for photo )

After Fern died I was worried that Fergus wasn't getting enough mental stimulation so attempted behavioural enrichment. This did not go as planned. I made a ratty piñata by filling a toilet roll tube with dry mix and sealing both ends. My pack of super-smart girls would have got into it in minutes, if not seconds; Fergus, however, picked it up in his mouth and charged around the cage with it, alternating this with just throwing it about. The next day I had to rescue Fergus from the piñata.

( cut for photo )

I tried to make it easier for him by hanging a chain across the width of the cage and hooking toilet rolls that were sealed at the bottom and open at the top to it. Maybe this would help him? Again, my pack of girls would have chewed the bottoms off in seconds. Fergus, however, preferred to hug the toilet rolls in a manner reminiscent of a small child attempting to wrestle a punching bag. He did manage to tip them enough for the food to fall out, but I've never seen anything quite like it.

Fergus also had a very special relationship with Penny, youngest and weirdest of the dogs. Penny loves eating rat bedding, and Fergus was very happy to push some out for her, watch her eat it with a very interested look on his face, then push some more out to see if she'd eat that too. Penny would oblige. I felt ganged up on.

( cut for photo )

Earlier this week, Fergus got out of the cage I'd foolishly left open. H found him sitting in my slipper. No sitting very quietly and listening for the rustling of a rat who is enjoying their freedom immensely. It was like he'd found a thing that smelt of me and was waiting for someone to rescue him.

He died from a devastatingly fast respiratory infection; he'd been a bit under the weather for a couple of days and I decided to take him to the vet for a general checkup, but in the hours between me making the appointment and the appointment itself he went downhill very fast. He got antibiotics, steroids and subcutaneous fluids at the vet, but died just before midnight.

He was such a personality, so full of affection. He wasn't the brightest of rats and he was so hapless but did everything with such joy and enthusiasm - if he could talk, it would have been in capslock. My parents adored him. I'll miss his silly face greeting me ("HELLO HUMAN IS IT PLAYTIME HUMAN ARE WE HAVING SCRATCHES NOW HUMAN") and the satiny, shining fur on the top of his head that was the perfect size for my thumb to rest on.

H: Fergus was so ill-suited for the world, he was lucky to have you
Me: Imagine Fergus in the wild
H: I will not

( Read more... )

Goodbye Fergus, Fergal, Fergie, Fergilicious, Fergalus. I hope the last nine months of your life were the happiest you knew and the best I could have given you.

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telling and showing

2015-03-15T19:58:11Z

Why do people decide that, if they need to show that one of their characters is smart, their character should be a professor, and then the character's supposed area of expertise is never drawn on and, for bonus points, the character delivers a shitty lecture that would get severely marked if an undergrad handed it in as an essay?

This multi-clause expression of disappointment brought to you by Still Alice which features a linguistics professor - a neurolinguist who wrote a book called From Neurons to Nouns - delivering a lecture that includes some waffle about "since the dawn of humanity, people have tried to communicate". That wouldn't cut it in an undergrad essay, let alone in a professor's lecture.

Disappointingly, there was no linguistics in this film. Linguistics develops terminology, tools and conceptual models to talk about communication - both when it works and when it doesn't. There is a fair amount of linguistic research on Alzheimer's disease and other dementias; it seems implausible that a linguistics professor in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease wouldn't respond in some way to that, either by reading everything she could get her hands on or making a conscious decision to avoid the literature. We don't see her researching tests. We don't see her engaging with her neurologist as a professional - as a neurolinguist, she'd know far more about the language issues or at least have the skills to understand them. I've seen doctors treating doctors and their interactions are really interesting; as a linguist myself, I'd want to study it.

Perhaps this is what irritated me most. As a linguist, on some level, I am almost always thinking about language and communication. I am thinking about how that advertising campaign works, or the internal rhyme in lyrics, or whether I was too manipulative in my interaction with someone, or digital modes of communication. I am thinking about illocutionary acts and textual structure, creative lexical primings and phatic functions. Today I am thinking about what exercise I should set my students and Krakatau as the world's first news event that was reported in something close to real-time. Sometimes it feels like my head is spinning with the constant stream of data before I even look at words - the colour of that crisp packet and its culturally-specific semiotics of price range and flavour, the typography of that magazine cover, the multitracked sounds in a song.

Compared to some people I know, I don't eat and sleep linguistics. I'm interested in other things, like queer stuff and paleontology and animal behaviour and history. I worry that I'm not obsessed enough. But it's still a constant ticking in my mind. Sometimes I even dream in it.

We saw no evidence of that in Alice's life. The "professor" bit seemed tacked on - a reason for the audience to believe that this person was smart, successful and ambitious; at no point did it convince me that this was someone with an insatiable curiosity about language, the sort of person who wants to know where it comes from and what it can be used to do and how it does those things, someone exquisitely sensitive to language and alert to every nuance. Clearly we are meant to contemplate how cruel it is for Alzheimer's disease to rob a linguistics professor of her language (as if it is not devastating for someone not as clever or eloquent). But as it is, the linguistic element feels less like an added dimension so much as a somewhat cheap plot point.

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Folky stuff

2015-03-01T21:16:42Z

Closing some youtube tabs because my browser is unhappy! I've been dabbling with some folk music on the violin and just generally hearing more folk stuff due to spending more time in Scotland.

( (violin) folk stuff )

I first heard about St Kilda as a child at a folk night in Scotland. I think I heard someone play this but it was a long time ago and I'm not sure now

More recently, I read about Robin Robertson's visit to St. Kilda, which resulted in "render[ing] the strange place in song"

The last song – I knew – would be about the evacuation of 1930, when the islanders left their ancestral home, never to return: a candle burning in each window, the doors flung wide, and on each table of every house, the Bible, laid open on the first page of Exodus.

This is that song - gorgeous, troubling and haunting, evoking hard, spare lives. I find "gave them up to water's trust" particularly striking, and the final lament of loss of a shared identity, shared history and shared characteristics as the inhabitants are dispersed.

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forthwritten @ 2015-02-13T17:17:00

2015-02-13T17:18:00Z

Seen this on facebook and thought I'd put it here too:

If you were setting up a ritual to summon me, what three objects would be required?

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why I like River Monsters

2015-01-17T22:02:51Z

Friends, I have a confession: I have finally obtained a guilty pleasure. And that guilty pleasure is a TV show about fishing.

The entire premise of this show is that this man travels the world trying to catch really big and/or dangerous fish. There's usually some kind of legend and/or bloody mauling attached to it, so off Mr Jeremy Wade goes to try to catch it. The show is incredibly predictable - you know exactly when the false starts will be, the twist of new information, the final big showdown. It's all accompanied by Wade's laconic narration. This is a man who does not show excitement unless he's yelling "fish on! FISH ON!" when something takes his bait. Occasionally he'll do something like go swimming with some hungry piranha or stab his own thumb with a fishhook, but in the best tradition of laconic men, he'll remove the fishhook and then use his own blood as extra bait. There's an amusing tension between the format of the show - BLOODTHIRSTY KILLINGS! EXCITEMENT! CONSTANT DANGER! - and what fishing actually is, which is sitting somewhere for hours, usually very quietly, waiting for something to take your bait.

Obviously my love of weird water creatures is strong (I was fascinated by this book as a little kid) and I'm especially fascinated by the ones with bad reputations. I really, really like sharks, have been unsettlingly close to wild alligators and have a massive soft spot for stingrays. Most of these animals are horribly persecuted by humans out of revenge, fear, malice or because we did something stupid and got in the way or provoked them. They're being animals and we get in their way, and while they have teeth and stings, we have so many worse ways of systematically killing them. There's a threat here, but it's not them.

Wade is a biologist by training and a catch and release fisherman. After catching them, he (rather tenderly) holds the fish in the water and gently moves it to get water flowing over its gills to help it recover - tired fish just sink to the bottom and die. He only releases the fish once it starts moving independently. Sometimes you get genuinely interesting insights, like piranha changing their behaviour in response to invasive species. He respects the fish and the river and the ecosystem, and argues that healthy rivers should have monsters - it shows they are capable of supporting (usually) apex predators, that the ecosystem is healthy enough to support plants and bugs and little fish and bigger fish and mammals and finally the biggest fish that eat them. A river with monsters is vibrantly, gloriously alive.

However, what this show manages to do really well is interactions between Wade and the locals. It's kind of sad that a fishing programme does this better than many serious documentaries, but there's a genuine respect and willingness to listen and learn. Crucially, when people don't want to talk he backs off, and the cameras don't always accompany him when he goes to talk to someone.
He ends up talking to people and going fishing with them and hearing their stories and asking them to help him out. This isn't done in an obnoxious way that exoticises them - "see these tribesmen hunting in their ancient tribal custom". Wade's basic approach is "I'm a fisherman who doesn't know this river, you're a fisherman who does know this river, you're the expert here" and it means that he actually engages with people rather than patronises them. It's not perfect but it's a good sight better at being respectful than most TV.

This isn't intellectually taxing TV. You aren't going to be left reeling (ahaha) with new information. But as an entertaining programme with fascinating creatures, interesting stories and often intriguing environments it has a surprising amount to recommend it.

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Not exactly huevos rancheros

2014-12-01T12:37:08Z

Made this last night and feel I should document it. I sort of had an flavour goal in mind, but who even knows if I can recreate this. Any Mexicans should look away now because no doubt this is a horrible bastardisation of your fine and noble culinary heritage.

- Chop an onion and fry in olive oil until lightly caramelised
- Add a bay leaf and some jeera; fry until fragrant
- Add six chopped fresh tomatoes
- Discover that it's possible for a tube of tomato paste to go mouldy. Don't add that
- Reduce a bit
- Add a generous teaspoon of fancy umami paste
- Add half a teaspoon of fancy Waitrose chipotle paste
- Taste. Frown
- Add another half teaspoon of fancy Waitrose chipotle paste
- Taste. Frown
- Add half the (admittedly tiny) jar of fancy Waitrose chipotle paste
- Taste. Frown
- Add Tabasco sauce
- Add dried chilli flakes
- Taste. Feel better about the chilli content
- Add dried sage
- Add a splash of veg*n Worcester sauce
- Add salt, pepper and a pinch of brown sugar
- Make two pits in the reduced, slightly sticky tomato sauce
- Break an egg into a small bowl, drop into one of the pits. Repeat for the other egg
- Cover and leave on a medium heat for approx four minutes
- Scoop out, grate some mature cheddar over it
- Eat

It was pretty good for a first attempt! The tomatoes had reduced by about half so there wasn't as much of it as I thought, so was sadly a one meal dish rather than getting stretched over two days. Definitely something to try again.

Also, I am developing deep feelings about Mexican food thanks to Lupita in London and Pinto in Glasgow. I might make horchata at some point...

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music recs

2014-09-22T20:09:08Z

Sometimes I just want to listen to music that sound like a metal bin full of shit being kicked off a wall. I listened to a lot of industrial music as a teenager and sometimes I still want to be overwhelmed by noise. When I lived in shared housing, I would often deploy a mix of industrial noise, weird experimental music in horrible time signatures and the Vengaboys if my housemates were having sex in inappropriate areas of the house.

I mentioned my enjoyment of music that sounds like a repeatedly kicked bin on twitter, while listening to Einstürzende Neubauten, and people were kind enough to give me listening recs.

( Einstürzende Neubauten, Godflesh, Kinothek Percussion Ensemble, Death Grips, Lydia Lunch and Arseny Avraamov's Symphony Of Factory Sirens )

Usually, if I want noise, I play the KLF's It's Grim Up North. I first heard this from my co-presenter when I did student radio and adored it from first listen.

It needs to be played loud enough so you can feel the driving, thunderous beat in your chest. It conjures up the industrial heartlands, the M62, abandoned warehouses, rain, illegal raves, lorries roaring past you on a wet road; the Norse names chanted over glitches and synths and crackling, claustrophobic and tight and dense. There's a tremendous sense of movement and barely controlled power, as if at any moment everything might break free into unimaginable chaos. And then, just as you're unsure whether it will hold together, Jerusalem emerges against the beat and screeches and sirens; stately and unhurried. At first the relentless beat and chant of "it's grim up north" is juxtaposed against the music; but the the other sounds die away as the hymn swells, as expansive and dignified as I've ever heard it. And at the end, all you are left with are the birds cawing and the sound of the wind sweeping over the desolate moors.

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Frivolous question

2014-02-21T23:50:36Z

You know how people are generally held to be cat-like or dog-like? It comes to my attention that there is genuine division of whether I'm more like a cat or more like a dog. And so, a completely frivolous poll:

View Poll: #14997

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autostraddle links

2014-01-10T23:44:27Z

I've been enjoying some of the stuff Autostraddle has been posting recently, so in an attempt to close some tabs...

Here are some of the trans*scribe and first person essays I've read recently, mainly trans stuff, race and queerness:

“It Was Personal”: Why I Don’t Take Part in the Trans Day of Remembrance
“And I Do Mean All My Life”: A Trans* Coming Out Letter
Of A Swamp Witch And A Rural Queer
When Do I Finally Get To Belong? On Being Both Native and Queer Enough
Fear and Loathing (as a 21-Year Old Queer) in Singapore
Homeward Bound: Searching for the Secret Island of Black Queer Mixed Femmes

My girlfriend also pointed me in the direction of their collection of 140 longform articles which I now pass on to you.

A couple of shorter news articles:
India’s Government Demands Review Of Anti-Gay Court Verdict
Queer Catholic News Recap: Five and a Half Things To Know

And finally, You Know You’re A Queer Catholic School Survivor If… The one that got me was

Attending a school where everyone knew your middle name and personal history helped prepare you for entering a community where everyone knows who you slept with and how many times you and your girlfriend have broken up.

ahahahaha so true.

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linkspam: the "for crying out loud white people" edition

2014-01-04T17:23:51Z

Oh dear, oh dear. Not been a good couple of weeks, has it? Yesterday I was linked to someone on twitter who insists she's GREEN not WHITE, she's TRANSCENDED RACE and all the WoC pointing out that privilege doesn't work that way are RACIST BULLIES. I rolled my eyes so hard they almost fell out of my head.

Ani DiFranco
For fsck's sake Ani, I want to like you. I've seen you live. I had a poster of you up in my bedroom. And then you want to hold a wildly expensive retreat on a former slave plantation.

Autostraddle: Out of Rage: Ani’s Not-So-Righteous Retreat
For Harriet: Dear Ani DiFranco Supporters: You Cannot Reclaim an Oppression You Have Never Experienced
Art that's smarter than its artist
Make Them Apologize: Ani DiFranco Says Sorry For Plantation Retreat But Many White Fans Still Won’t
The Toast: A Note From Ani DiFranco

For reference: Righteous Retreat cancelled and from ani - personally, the phrase "i have been thinking and feeling very intensely" makes me laugh and laugh but whatfuckingever.

Other race, feminism & social justice stuff
Reni Eddo-Lodge: On the Fallout from Women's Hour
Flavia Dzodan: Intellectual gaslighting or “Feminism needs a new intellectual voice”
Reni Eddo-Lodge: A Year in Black Feminism
"Whiteness" in Europe & Tumblr’s US-centric SJ Discourse
Black People Don't Go To Galleries: the reproduction of taste and cultural value

To finish with, let me link to Sara Ahmed's Living the consequences:

It can be difficult to have experience of being a feminist killjoy in the world and then to become part of feminism and be perceived as killing feminist joy! And this is how many women of colour experience feminist spaces. When you talk about whiteness, or mention race or racism as structuring your own experience, you get in the way of an occupation. You are accused of hurting white women’s feelings, and of causing divisions because you talking about divisions.

[...]

And as feminists most of the time we do not inhabit feminist spaces, which is probably why encountering the same problems in feminist spaces that we encounter in the world at large is so exhausting. And depressing: the walls come up in the places we go to feel less depleted by walls. Perhaps part of the difficulty of pointing out how power operates within feminism to structure who has access to feminist spaces is that those points are received by those who have more power. And that is quite a reception: you end up challenging people’s self-perception of themselves as critical of power.

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Bramble, 24th April 2011 - 21st December 2013

2013-12-31T00:20:54Z

I lost Bramble a few days before Christmas, but didn't have the space and time to reflect on her life. Bramble came to me with her sisters Hazel and Ash, and was the last of the trio to leave.

Bramble was the most licky rat I've ever known. I'm convinced that she thought I was a giant faily rat incapable of taking care of myself, and she was the only one standing between me and my inevitable descent into socially unacceptable poor hygiene. I've had ratty manicurists before, but Bramble took this to a new level - she cleaned under my nails, nibbled my fingers, licked my hands, licked my face (especially my nose), tried to groom my eyebrows... Once, in the midst of thesis finishing, I took them into my bathroom to free-range and fell asleep on the floor. I woke to Bramble carefully grooming my hair and scalp with her teeth. It sounds alarming but it's the gentle nibbling they do to themselves and other rats, and I was charmed and honoured that she extended that to me.

When I took her to the vet recently to see whether she should be on metacam for her old lady hips, she ended up licking both the vet nurse and the vet. It made the horrible child on the bus ("is that a rat? will it bite? I don't like rats") even worse - Bramble was the least bitey rat I can imagine, and a great deal more pleasant company than a horrible child.

She completely charmed my mother by grooming her - when my parents were ratsitting my mum once phoned me with delight to say that she'd been groomed by Bramble. Their ratsitter was besotted with her to the point where I wasn't entirely sure I'd get Bramble back.

Bramble was a champion nest builder:

( cut for 2 photos )

I admit to teasing her a little - she especially liked large bits of cardboard to line her nests, and when I cleaned them out I'd move the biggest bits of cardboard to a different level to their hut and hammocks so she'd have to move between them, cardboard stuffed in her mouth. It was exercise!

She was also a shoulder rat:
( cut for photo )

She was chronically respy towards the end of her life and was increasingly thin and frail, but she didn't lose her spark until the very end. I found her dead in the morning; it looked like she'd just never woken up.

Goodbye Bramble, Bram, Brambly - you were loved.

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Three disjointed thoughts on fish

2013-12-21T02:16:21Z

The last few days have been hectic - I'm more-or-less running the abstract submission system and reviews process myself and it has involved a lot of emails to professors I don't know, me totally overthinking said emails in terms of positive and negative face, and assigning the abstracts, each one to two reviewers. Also, H flew back to the states today and I'm sad about not being in the same timezone as her.

I'm trying to wind down before bed and emeraldsword asked me about fish.

Until I was 16, I wanted to be a marine biologist. Admittedly I'm more interested in marine mammals and cephalopods but I like fish too. I'm particularly fond of sharks because I'm a sucker for a cute face but also because I like misunderstood and maligned animals. Great white sharks are amazing though - they're fscking gorgeous. Perhaps not elegant, but they're beautifully fit for their environment. Look at those pectoral fins - that's why they're so manoeuvrable. Look at how strong they look, how powerfully graceful they are. This is a creature we share a planet with! I've been on a boat and there could have been a great white cruising under me; how amazing is that?

I also hold snorkelling and scuba diving qualifications. I actually prefer snorkelling - you can just pull your fins on, spit in and rinse your mask and you're good to go. Part of the reason I love it so much is because my aunt and uncle gave me the money to fit prescription lenses to my diving mask when I was 14, and even though it's a very old prescription it's still better than nothing. I loved how this world was opened up to me. I actually felt totally able-bodied in the water for the first time, when until then my sister was basically acting as a guide dog and having to lead me around.

When I was a young and foolish teenager and snorkelling off a catamaran, I actually ducked under the hull to surface under the platform - and that's where all the fish were! In retrospect this was very, VERY stupid as I'd basically disappeared without a buddy and I was under the boat for fsck's sake, but I still remember popping up under the platform, the water reflecting blue and rippling on the hulls, and just shoals of fish everywhere. Black and silver striped ones, grey ones with yellow tails and yellow extending along their lateral line...and just flitting and flashing in the water, where only I could see them.

I'm also a vegetarian, and fish and seafood were the hardest things to give up. There's a lot wrong with commercial fishing and I can't financially support it - I love the ocean too much to do that, and I like knowing exactly where my food has come from and its environmental impact. There are too many unknowns with commercial fishing and what I do know about it troubles me. So I want no part of that industry. It sounds simple because the decision was a simple one, but the actual practice was difficult.

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That Meme

2013-12-04T01:22:05Z

So I can't promise posts on specific days, but is there a topic you'd like me to write about?

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Links for Transgender Day of Remembrance

2013-11-20T16:32:12Z

Ava Vidal: Transgender Day of Remembrance: why you, yes you, need to care
Eòghann Renfroe: Transgender Day of Remembrance Reminds Society That Trans Lives Are Valuable
Janet Mock: A Letter To My Sisters Who Showed Up for Islan Nettles & Ourselves at the Vigil
TransGriot: 238 names
Miss saHHara: I was jailed in Nigeria for being trans, now I’m proud and free
Kellee Terrell: Why the Transgender Day of Remembrance Matters to Black People
Samantha Allen: Transgender, dead and forgotten:

How could we shorten this list of the dead? What kind of politics would that goal require?

Because most people on the list lack basic economic security, it must be socialist; because the list is primarily made up of women, it must be feminist; because most of those women are people of color, it must be anti-racist. Because so many of these transgender women of color are sex workers, it must adopt a nuanced approach to sex work that respects its economic and personal necessity without ignoring its dangers. And because so many of these sex workers are in countries like Brazil and Mexico, it must be internationalist. If this politics seems impossible, consider that the safety of transgender people is impossible in its absence.

For the 238 people on this list and the countless others whose deaths were never reported, who were misgendered in death, or for whom suicide was the only way out of a world which rejected them.

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Ash, 24th April 2011 - 25th October 2013

2013-11-02T01:07:03Z

I was not expecting to lose Ash so soon.

Ash came to me in summer 2012 with her sisters, Hazel (whom I lost in February but was in no state to write about her) and Bramble (who feels frail and is chronically respy but bright-eyed and affectionate). They came to me because their owner had got bored of them and wanted a snake (of all things). Their breeder approved and they were introduced to Willow. They were actually a bit too boisterous for Willow and so she stayed with the babies (Fern and Meena) in my hospital/intro cage and the trio went into the main cage.

They were skinny with badly rusted coats when they came to me and I tried very hard to get them into decent condition. I think they all grew a bit - not just filled out, but actually became bigger all round. They were the first group I tried scatter feeding and I loved how it made them interact with their environment - rooting through the substrate, using their noses to plough through it, getting excited when they found something tasty. Ash was particularly fond of unshelled pumpkin seeds.

Ash was my big, beautiful, sleek girl. She was Russian Blue like Rowan, and like Ro, she became my PR rat. Because university is on the way to the vets, if I needed to take someone to the vets it was easier to take them in a carrier into the office and then go to vets rather than return home for them. I'd sometimes stick Ash on my shoulder if I needed to make myself tea or speak to someone. She rapidly acquired a fanclub to the extent that people would beckon me into their offices so they could fuss her - and, indeed, someone once stopped me in the corridor, looked disappointed when she noticed I didn't have Ash with me, asked after her then let me go on my way.

She had the biggest eyes of any rat I've kept. If I'd wanted to, I think she could have won shows. However, she also had a talent for pulling daft faces and as such, the photos I have of her all make her look a bit silly.

She liked being stroked firmly from head to tail, and would flatten herself and arch under my hand in obvious enjoyment. She and Fern squabbled but not in a serious way - if I heard squeaking and scuffling it was going to be those two.

She reached 30 months and didn't even look old until her final couple of days. It was pyometra - the only thing that could have saved her was an emergency spay and I wasn't going to put her through that. My mum looked after her in her final days and took her to the vet. She's buried in our garden.

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Jamie Oliver is a sanctimonious fvck

2013-08-27T23:05:18Z

I am interested in food (in another life, I think I'd want to be an anthropologist or historian of food) and have written about how I'd eat cheaply.

As such, I find Jamie Oliver's comments on chips, cheese, giant TVs and modern day poverty profoundly misguided. While I've fed myself for well under a fiver in a week (God bless Co-op's 20p turnips), cheesy chips are totally understandable when you're tired and hungry and just want something hot and greasy to put in your mouth. Cheesy chips are understandable when you've been on your feet all day and are too bone-deep exhausted to prepare food, cook and wash up. Cheesy chips are understandable when you don't have cooking facilities beyond a microwave. Cheesy chips are understandable when your time has been someone else's all day and now, when you can snatch a couple of hours between work and sleep that are your own, you don't want to use it cooking. Cheesy chips are understandable when your body doesn't let you hold a knife without hurting your hands or lift heavy dishes or stand up over a hob.

Here are some excellent critiques:
Lib Com: Guilt, choice, and responsibility in the austerity kitchen
A Girl Called Jack: Save with Jamie: Get rid of the ‘massive f***ing TV’ and ‘shop at markets’ instead… (see also 'Austerity cooking' has been hijacked by the moralisers)
North South Food: Dear Jamie Oliver...

The last is a particularly good roundup of all the things that make it hard for people to cook: food deserts, shop opening times, long working hours, disability issues, the lack of savings, high utility bills... Particularly damning is Jamie Oliver's own influence in this:

One of the biggest reasons we can’t all live the life of a Sicilian peasant with our handful of mussels and darling little pasta dishes is that our shopping options have been decimated by the supermarkets which now account for about 90% of food shopping in the UK. This would include the supermarket chain that you advertised for 10 years. And the other five or six that stock your ready made pasta sauces and branded foods.

I am also enjoying twitter's response on the #AskJamieOliver hashtag.

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Links about Chelsea Manning

2013-08-22T23:04:54Z

Have been reading for much of the evening. I've tried to link to articles that use Chelsea's preferred pronouns and/or are written by trans women, but consider this a content warning for transphobia and 'ware comments.

Chelsea Manning's full statement

Really, really comprehensive summary of Chelsea Manning's past
One of the less faily news articles: 'I am Chelsea Manning,' says jailed soldier formerly known as Bradley
Language Log: Manning's pronouns
Why Is It So Hard to Call Chelsea Manning ‘She’?
New Statesman: Behind the Wikipedia wars: what happened when Bradley Manning became Chelsea
Abigail Brady: Chelsea Manning: on pressing the button

Lauran McNamara: The Humanity of Private Manning
Sylvia Rivera Law Project: Chelsea Manning and the realities for transgender and gender non-conforming people in prison, jails and detention centers
Paris Lees: What made Chelsea Manning hide her true identity? and, from last week, Manning is a trans hero – I fear for [him] in prison
Janet Mock: Chelsea Manning and the battle for trans inclusive healthcare without bias
Courthouse News: Scarce Transgender Care Options for Manning
Jane Fae: What Chelsea Manning can expect in a US prison
Sophia Banks: Chelsea Manning, media bias and cissexism
Jennie Kermode: Going inside, coming out
Alex Sharpe: As a transgender woman in prison Chelsea Manning is commencing the greatest struggle of her life

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meme

2013-06-20T23:53:15Z

I saw this around (thank you sebastienne, silver_hare and annalytica!) and their answers were really interesting. I also feel I should post here but after my hectic month, haven't really been in the habit of writing stuff. So. Meme.

Ten years ago (2003, age 19), I:
1) Was essentially trying to un-fsck my A-levels so I could go to university and, as a result, ended up doing a two year A-level (in English Language, what else) in under a year. Within weeks I realised that actually, I didn't want to read English Literature at university and applied for combined Lit and Lang courses.

2) Went to university. It was not what I had expected and I felt very lost and alone.

3) Was in the New Relationship Energy period of what turned out to be a fairly bad relationship, but when you're 19 and in love you don't listen to anyone. Or at least I didn't.

Five years ago (2008, age 24), I:
1) Was mostly in the year I had between finishing my MA and starting my PhD. I worked on a dictionary for Oxford University Press and worked a bit as a classroom assistant for the teacher who taught me A-level English Language. I was mostly living with my parents with forays up North for another job's stuff.

2) Was also more-or-less single-handedly raising Charlie - this year, when my parents have been raising Penny, they've both (separately, and without prompting) gone to me "I don't know how you did it on your own! PUPPIES ARE HARD WORK".

3) Started my PhD and plunged into teaching myself about the suffrage movement and early 20th century British politics.

One year ago (2012, age 28), I:
1) Was having a fairly major panic about my PhD, if it was going anywhere and how to finish in time.

2) Was spending a lot of time in hospital because my mum was ill, and spending a lot of time supporting my dad who was on his own for the first time.

3) ...I don't know. It was a year that felt very grim and uncertain, with the sense that I just had to get through it and tough it out. I listened to this song a lot.

So far this year (2013, age 29), I:
1) Submitted a PhD thesis and passed my viva.

2) Went to Berlin and enjoyed myself immensely. The last time I'd been in Germany was in 2005 and that was in a small university town (with some time in Hannover and Hamburg) so Berlin was different and fascinating.

3) Read my creative work in public for the first time in ten years. It was scary, but people seemed to like it.

Yesterday, I:
1) Slept a lot - I've been at an intense week-long programming course in Lancaster between Monday and Friday, then caught the train to Stanstead for three days in Berlin with askygoneonfire and got back home at a revoltingly early hour on Tuesday morning, so felt I had some catching up to do.

2) Read about dead whales and the Triceratops vs Torosaur debate.

3) Did my laundry. Basically, I want to wash everything that has been in - or, indeed, come into contact with - my bag.

Today, I:
1) Received a very apologetic phonecall from the County NHS Trust Head of Equality and Diversity over some stuff I'm organising with her.

2) Was invited to a Public Health meeting to review a survey of sexual health provision in the city. I went to an LGB&T scrutiny and consultative meeting a fortnight ago and SJ, one of their friends and I basically sat in the corner and ripped into their survey, so for our sins they want our feedback.

3) Got an email that made me do a flaily dance in real life (I am not, and will never be, "cool").

Tomorrow, I will:
1) Do some actual (academic) work!

2) Clean my kitchen because it's a mess (o my glamorous life).

3) Maybe see sebastienne, pteranodon and shortcipher in the evening?

In one year (2014, age 30), I will:
1) Have a job, preferably one making use of my skills and experience. Please.

2) Be in a better position for getting top surgery, either through the NHS but more probably going private in the US.

3) Be a published academic.

In five years (2018, age 34), I will:
1) Have worked out better ways to take care of my mental and physical health - through being better at self-care, working out what kinds of physical exercise work for me, working out what I can do to relax.

2) Again - have some form of employment that makes use of my skills and experience, one that challenges me and that I enjoy.

3) Still be involved in LGB and especially trans* and genderqueer activism.

In ten years (2023, age 39), I will:
It's hard to think this far ahead - still some kind of employment as outlined above, still involved in activism and making the world a better, kinder place for others. Hopefully some kind of pet - preferably a dog or two, and the time and money to take care of them. Somewhere to live where I feel settled. Maybe a partner? I want to be making stuff and fixing stuff and growing stuff; having a balance between my thirst for knowledge and the satisfaction I get from doing something practical.

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[citation needed] stamps

2013-04-14T22:10:47Z

So, a friend and I decided that we needed [citation needed] stamps in our lives (he's a librarian; he likes stamping things). We asked a few friends if they'd also be interested in ordering a stamp. They were interested.

As such, we are now in a position to order over 50 stamps.

ANYWAY. If you are an irredeemable pedant, desire a time/hand/sanity saving device for marking, or the kind of person who derives childish glee from helpfully annotating advertising and/or the Daily Mail (this is probably most of you) you may register your interest at the following link and we'll email you when we're about to place our order - probably in the next week.

http://www.generalist.org.uk/stamps.html

At the moment we're looking at £7 for a stamp with P&P at £2.50 (UK) or £3.50 (US/Europe). Alternatively, if you live in the UK and likely to see one of us, we can hand-deliver them. We aren't making a profit on these stamps so any savings we make on bulk purchases will be passed onto you.

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