The Love of Problematic Literature

Periodically, someone pops up to tell us we shouldn't like literature in which Bad Things happen. The most recent iteration of this is a critique of the sexism and misogyny of the world and characters in George R.R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the critique. A writer friend recently had to fix a bad copyedit that consisted, in large part, of making the (non-historical, non-Earth) world of his book more sexist because "that's how high fantasy works." I understand that these things can be done thoughtlessly and pointlessly and in ways that contribute to the idea that "that's how the world works." But that doesn't mean that the presence of these elements mean that the work is thoughtless, pointless, or harmful to its readers.

Nor does it mean that the fans of that work, even if they disagree with you vehemently about the worth of the work, are drinking in the sexist Kool-Aid. We interact with what we read in complicated ways, even when we're deep in fandom. One of my favorite fantasy books sets the plot in motion by placing an almost supernatural value on beauty--which leads to a brutal incestuous rape. When I reread it, I often skip that part. I'm not up for putting myself through it, and while it's a necessary part of the story, I'm interested in what happens afterward.

Alyssa Rosenberg has that kind of complicated relationship with the Song of Fire and Ice, and she explains it, and what it means to read fantasy, beautifully:

And it seems particularly bizarre to assume that people read A Song of Ice and Fire because they want to live in the world depicted in it. The medieval era is a useful setting, because the conflicts are smaller enough than our contemporary ones that it’s possible to imagine that a single character can have an impact on the outcome, but big enough to feel that said impact is meaningful. Sady may find medieval warfare boring, which is her prerogative, but that does not mean that medieval warfare is inherently boring (the constant treatment of preferences as facts is one of the things I find most offputting about this mode of criticism), and the scale of it means that critics like Spencer Ackerman have been able to extract applicable lessons and metaphors about strategic thinking from it that are accessible to everyday readers. I tend to find the banking subplots both interesting and usefully, grimly analogous to our present situation. I read these novels with a profound thankfulness that I don’t live in this time period, but with a feeling of being energized by the characters’ triumphs. If I had an actual office, I’d have a replica of Needle over my desk, not because I want to live through Arya Stark’s privations, but because her strength in them reminds me of the smallness of my own obstacles, the tiny magnitude of risk I face in confronting them, and that spurs me on. People want to be part of the Brotherhood Without Banners not because they are really psyched to be peasants trying to survive in a country where the nobility is actively hostile to their flourishing, but because groups based on affinity for fiction can be really rewarding!

I recommend reading the whole thing.

I Do This Why?

I'll let you in on a little secret: No one reads this blog.

Well, that's not quite true. The people who read this blog aren't anything like "no one." There just aren't very many of them.

To put this in perspective, last Thursday night I wrote a blog post regarding a ridiculous letter published in Times Higher Education in support of Satoshi Kanazawa, the "researcher" who claimed that his analysis showed that black women were "objectively" less attractive than women of other ethnic backgrounds. The letter was causing an angry buzz in my Twitter feed, and I put that anger into words.

The numbers looked good to start with. A dozen people or so have shared it on Twitter, a couple of them quite influential. It's being passed around on Facebook a little. It was Tumbled and reblogged a few times. Go, me.

I know better than that, though. I passed the post on to the JAYFK as well, to give it its best chance of finding an audience. After all, the defense of Kanazawa isn't just ridiculous; it's damaging and outrageously hypocritical. So I also pushed the post more than usual, playing up the controversy aspect by retweeting John Rennie's "Possible to draw & quarter people while hoisting on own petards? @szvan does it to Kanazawa's defenders. http://t.co/oxWIjoQ" and Chris Clarke's "Note to self: stay on @szvan's good side. http://t.co/EEECI3q #kanazawa"

Jason at Lousy Canuck, very much not a "no one," also thinks the topic is important. He wrote a post yesterday reporting on my post and promoting it. Half a dozen people retweeted his post, mostly the same people who had promoted mine, including me.

Now, this is how my blog traffic works: In two hours, Jason's post--meant to get people to read mine--passed it in total traffic, at least on this blog. For the record, that's less time than it took to put my post together. Half a dozen people clicked through from his post to mine. One person retweeted my post again.

So much for timely and topical. So much for content is king. So much for networking and self-promotion. So...yeah.

Why do I do this again?

The Good Bad Girl

I've been watching the DC comics reboot commentary without much personal stake. It bothers me that the universe is losing Oracle in a redesign touted as promoting diversity, but at a slight remove. I'm not part of the audience for these comics. Watching a bunch of white guys of a certain age decide that they knew how to increase their appeal to everyone else was painful but predictable.

Then, while following a link from Bug Girl, I saw this.

The wonderful thing about Harley’s original design is that it’s inviting, welcoming even. If you saw her on the street, you wouldn’t expect her to suddenly draw out a gun and steal all your money. The general public would be won over with her megawatt grin until her mallet knocked them unconscious. If you put the new Harley in a city, people would start asking if Marilyn Manson was shooting a new music video, pedestrians would avoid her all together and the police would be called. She’s more intimidating and easily more suspicious than the original.

Uh-uh. You don't mess with my Harley Quinn.

Yes, my Harley Quinn, for two reasons: No comic book character stays static, and Harley's been part of several reimaginings. At least one has had a very different Harley origin story, which includes a female Joker. A few show us an older, grown up Harley. I'm not talking about those.

More importantly, Harley is mine because she's a beloved part of my id. You see, Harley is such a pretty little anti-feminist's nightmare.

No, really. What is Harley before she meets the Joker? We know what kind of practice and injury and self-denial goes into being a gymnast. More work and self-denial puts her in a profession that is all about helping others, thanklessly. And all of it done coming out of a family where the men are allowed to fail but Harley is supposed to remain a "good girl."

Then comes the Joker. Our little Harley falls in love, exactly as she's been told good girls do. And there is hell to pay.

Harley adopts Mr. J's ends as her own--and gets in his way helping him, when she isn't showing him up. After all, she doesn't have to be crazy to do what she does. It all makes sense in her world. She idolizes Mr. J, creating a fictionalized, idealized Joker in her own mind that he can never live up to. She maddeningly maintains her cheer when things are going wrong for him. She is so perfectly devoted to him that he has to kill her to get rid of her--or try, at any rate, since she insists on staying alive.

For all her mayhem, Harley remains the quintessential good girl, and I love that this only makes her all the more terrifying and formidable. Harley is the bit of me that looks out from under her eyelashes and says, "Yes, I can be exactly what you want me to be. I can follow those rules and present the front that you require. You're going to hate it."

That isn't this Harley. I don't know what this Harley is. Maybe she'll give us something else we need in the place of that chaotic, amoral creature we're told we should aspire to be. But if we lose our good girl in the process of remaking the bad, then we've lost too much.

Living in the Dark

It's no secret that my childhood was no sunny idyll. If you've managed to miss it, you can catch up some here and here and here. It's not much fun, though.

I've spent much of the last week swapping stories that aren't going to make it onto the blog with a friend. It isn't something I usually want to do, but this is someone whose experience was close enough to mine that it really is a way of telling each other we aren't alone--now. We made it. We may be broken, but at least somebody out there understands why and how and how far we've come.

That makes the timing of this WSJ article bemoaning the darkness of modern young adult literature all the more infuriating.

Now, whether you care if adolescents spend their time immersed in ugliness probably depends on your philosophical outlook. Reading about homicide doesn't turn a man into a murderer; reading about cheating on exams won't make a kid break the honor code. But the calculus that many parents make is less crude than that: It has to do with a child's happiness, moral development and tenderness of heart. Entertainment does not merely gratify taste, after all, but creates it.

If you think it matters what is inside a young person's mind, surely it is of consequence what he reads. This is an old dialectic—purity vs. despoliation, virtue vs. smut—but for families with teenagers, it is also everlastingly new. Adolescence is brief; it comes to each of us only once, so whether the debate has raged for eons doesn't, on a personal level, really signify.

Victorian romantic nonsense. Childhood wasn't a happy, sheltered period then for more than a handful of privileged kiddies, and it still isn't. Despite what a view from the WSJ might want you to believe, kids deal with an amazing amount of crap: unhappy parents, parental substance abuse, poverty, neglect, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, unreasonable and/or unreachable expectations, anxiety, depression, bullying. And that's just counting the kids who aren't somehow "weird." Few of us makes it out unscathed, and none of us make it out completely ignorant.

Jackie Morse Kessler (one of the scary dark authors mentioned in the article) does a good job of translating adolescence into numbers in her response:

According to the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injurious Behavior in Adolescents and Young Adults, “12% to 24% of young people have self-injured” and “about 6%-8% of adolescents and young adults report current, chronic self-injury.” According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, “about 1 in 10 young people will self-harm at one point.”

One in 10. So in a classroom of 30 teens, 3 of them either are or will self-injure.

According to the National Eating Disorders Association, 10 million females and 1 million males suffer from anorexia or bulimia, and another 15 million suffer from binge eating disorder.

I was one of those 10 million females.

CyberMentors indicates that “as many as 70% of all young people have experienced some form of bullying” and “1 million kids are bullied every week.”

Let me repeat that: One million kids, every week, are bullied. This is not okay.

Nor is it okay to deny that these kids and these stories exist in order to maintain your sunshiny, simplistic, privileged view of what their childhood should have been like (particularly when all you really need to do is ask someone to help you find the cheery books of your own adolescence). That just makes you one more abuser, even if you wrap your denial in concern:

Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue. That is not to discount the real suffering that some young people endure; it is an argument for taking care.

Well, now, you see, this is the sort of thing that actually gets studied. In fact, Dr. Madelyn Gould has made a career of studying the almost purely young adult phenomenon of suicide clusters. And what she has to say is somewhat different:

But the most significant and critical red flag that predicts adolescent suicide risk, according to Gould and other researchers, is the presence of an underlying mental health problem. In teens, that's most commonly depression, anxiety and alcohol or drug abuse.

"Even in the context of someone else's suicide, without that underlying vulnerability, they're not going to go on to attempt suicide or die by suicide," Gould says.

Are there reasons to take care when creating a book like this? Of course there are, but that isn't the argument being made in the WSJ. That argument is that things like this should remain hidden, that they shouldn't intrude on a parent who wants a happy book for their little angel (who is, of course, absolutely not hiding anything scary from said parent).

They were hidden when I was younger. What I had then was "oh-em-gee, growing up is so weird and embarrassing" books by people like Judy Blume (which would have been wonderful had my main problem been embarrassment, and which I'm happy to know exist for those kids) and a handful of read-this-and-be-defined-by-the-issue books. I read adult books to find what I needed--books where broken people did things despite being broken. Luckily for me, my parents had a large and good library of this kind of book. Most kids I knew in situations like mine had to go without.

Now, though, many of those books are classified as young adult. More books like this are being written for young adults and put places where they can find them easily. And, having had the good fortune to talk to a number of young adult authors and editors, I can assure that these people are taking extreme care with their material and their audiences. While it may not be the case in book reviewing, people who make books for young adults don't get very far by not knowing their audience or by treating them with disrespect.

So instead of concern trolling and wishing for a return to a nonexistent better past, maybe the WSJ reviewer (whose name, I admit, I haven't bothered to look up for this post) should read a few more of those books. Maybe, just maybe, it'll help her develop a better understanding of the needs of those kids. And who knows, maybe even a touch of empathy.

Good Female Game Characters

I can't think of one thing that needs to be added to this, except to note that the same goes for any kind of storytelling.

Campus Crusade II

To go with yesterday's Campus Crusade for Cthulhu poster, here's an election special from around the same time. There's even a possibility, as mind-rendingly terrifying as that might be, that this one informed some of my political thinking.



As I said before, if you know who made these, please let me know. I didn't. I've just loved them for a long time.

Writers Don't Spring from Zeus's Forehead Either

I've never done a proper fisking on this blog before, but someone seems to have been wearing his curmudgeon pants while reading yesterday's blog post. I use "curmudgeon" advisedly, in the sense that Jay Rosen does, given the nature of some of the sneers involved. Normally, I'd ignore something like this, but it's a misunderstanding that has been repeated elsewhere, although this is the only case I've seen that's reacting to my remarks in context and still missing the point.

Specifically, John Pavlus objects to my statement that "For her skills, sure, I would love to be Rebecca Skloot. It would not keep me from staying hidden. If I want to be recognized, I have to aspire to be Carl or Ed." Rather than characterize the response as anything more than curmudgeonly, I'll let it speak for itself in its entirety.

This is unfashionable to say, but the above idea strikes me as complete and utter horseshit.

Yes, the only reason I would object to Pavlus's statement is fashion. It has nothing to do with taking the idea out of its context, as I lay out below. Or perhaps it does.

Skloot is a world-famous bestselling author who wrote one of THE most read, praised, influential pieces of science journalism of the last decade (at least). (Plus she’s been on Colbert!) Ed Yong (for all his talent, and it is a lot) is internet-famous at best.

This, oddly, is exactly my point. In fact, in the post he's calling "horseshit," I said, "Rebecca frequently didn't make those lists, despite being widely lauded as having published the single best piece of science writing of 2010 and having reached an audience that most writers could only dream of. She never came first." This is a common problem when people make lists.

No, make that internet-famous among science bloggers. That’s like saying you’re king of the nerd table in a high school cafeteria.

Rebecca Skloot is also a science blogger. The blog is currently much more about the book, but I expect that will change when the craziness of her promotion and success steps down a little. She's not about to stop writing. She is part of the very community that frequently forgot to hold her up as an example, and all her success didn't change that.

I'm not sure what's supposed to be wrong with science blogging, but the use of a cultural slur in his simile suggests Pavlus finds something very wrong with it indeed. Thus, curmudgeon.

Write the next “Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and this precious “recognition” will soon follow, you can bet on it.

Here is the crux of the problem with this post.

Pavlus is a writer, among other things. I have trouble imagining that he doesn't understand how much work and practice it takes to develop the skills that are on display in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. And there's a reason writers groups and writing partners are widely recommended: It's much harder to develop those skills by yourself.

Skloot didn't develop her writing skills in a vacuum. She got a degree in writing and developed her skills among the magazines. She received feedback from editors and other aspiring and professional writers. And she blogged, receiving feedback more directly from readers.

In addition to her training and practice, Skloot attributes her success to "persistence, thick skin, pre-query research, more thick skin and more persistence." She also notes that the social aspect of dealing with other writers is "invaluable. It's also good to just get together and whine, because writing is hard. You help each other through it."

In other words, writing skills and writing careers do not develop in social isolation. Nobody just sits down one day and taps out The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, not even Skloot.

Also, there are limited options these days for even very good science writers to develop in a professional setting and receive the encouragement of professionals. Paid publishing jobs diminished over the last few years, which makes feedback from readers and peers more important than ever--particularly if we wish to increase the quantity of quality in our science communications. Thus blogging, and the visibility of that blogging, are highly relevant when we want to discuss who will become the "next Rebecca Skloot."

Saying, "Produce the work of breathtaking craftsmanship, and then we can talk about what you need to develop your craft," is 100% backwards.

Of course, Skloot also marketed her ass off.

Indeed she did, and well. The self-promotion discussion is happening at Kate Clancy's and Dr Becca's blogs, however, rather than mine.

But these two facts strike me as about three or four orders of magnitude more salient to achieving “recognition” than the fact of one’s gender.

They are indeed more relevant--if the topic at hand is popular success. This one was about visibility among peers. Those are different.

Seriously: who gives a rat’s ass whose name appears first in the program notes at some science-blogger love-in? Not Skloot, I’d wager. She has more important things to worry (and write) about.

I didn't suggest Skloot should get involved in the talk over who was cited. There's almost never any upside for any writer to get involved in discussions about their career or published work (see Anne Rice and Amazon reviews). But that doesn't much matter, as the discussion is actually about newer writers.

As for ScienceOnline: None of this happened in the program notes, which were linked from my post, but to which I otherwise didn't refer. There were bloggers, yes, plus entertainers, educators, researchers, technical developers, high school students, etc. And what's wrong with bloggers? Beyond that, what's wrong with a "love-in" (particularly when one is referring to the group of diverse colleagues getting together to share experiences, ideas, and challenges that ScienceOnline actually is)? After all, Skloot herself gave the keynote address in 2009, participated thoroughly in 2010, and hopes to again in 2012.

No, for the reasons I've already laid out, this conference and the community that participates in it are important to developing science writers. Their ability to fully participate in that community, and to be recognized by that community, matters. They give a "rat's ass" about it. So do I.

Readings in Geek Communication

This post continues the setup for a session I'm running at ScienceOnline 2011 with Maria Walters and Desiree Schell called, "It's All Geek to Me." We'll discuss what we can learn about communicating science by looking at differences between a general audience and science's most solid audience--geeks.

Geek is not the default in our society, so when someone describes the differences between geek and non-geek communications, they tell us about geeks. Still, by looking at what geeks do "differently," we can gain insight into both geeks and non-geeks. The following are posts that tell us what sets geeks apart from everyone else.

Toni Bowers at TechRepublic lays out how the communication mismatch is generally addressed and asks a question that reframes the problem:

“The tech worker, the geek, is a problem solver; the businessman, the suit, is a people influencer. The geek likes to fix things, the suit relies more on people skills,” said Zetlin. Technology for suits is a “means to an end”-business success-while for geeks (who see themselves as outsiders and artists) it’s a “living, breathing thing.”

This is one of the reasons you hear so many career professionals advising IT folks to develop good communication skills. The better able you are to interpret what the business folks are asking for and turn it into a useful tool or technology, the better off you’ll be.

So should the other side of that equation be the suggestion that business people hone up on their technical skills? Well, you certainly don’t hear that as much. Wonder why that is?

A post and comment thread at Geek Etiquette specifically looks at differences in behavior:

The best is enemy of the good. Geeks often seek perfection, where non-geeks are more prepared to accept “good enough”. Lots of arguments occur around this.

Relevance mismatch. Geeks think some things (eg. how someone dresses) should be irrelevant, and largely disregard them. Non-geeks tend to place greater emphasis on personal grooming and dress codes. Conversely, non-geeks might think that something like desktop operating system is irrelevant, when it’s highly important to geeks. Either group will disregard what they consider “irrelevant”, not realising it’s relevant to the other party.

Another Geek Etiquette post takes on multitasking and balancing it with non-geek expectations for interaction:

If we’re not running a sideband conversation about the presentation topic, we’re often googling for more information on the presenter’s topic, or downloading and trying out the code in real-time. Those of us who are presenting later on are probably working on our slides at the last minute, and those of us who are taking time off from work to attend probably couldn’t do so unless we kept up with our email. All worthwhile things, one might argue.

On the other hand, the one-day London Perl Workshop last December didn’t provide WiFi, saying (in their FAQ) “it’s rude to type during someone’s talk and when you’re out of talks you should be socialising :)”

And yet one more Geek Etiquette post addresses geek literalism and the differences in producing and interpreting verbiage with only social content:

Most non-geeks have outbound tact filters: they filter what they want to say and add polite noise as it passes through. Geeks have inbound tact filters: they take bare communication with no politeness and just wrap it in assumed politeness as they interpret it.

When non-geeks talk, geeks think the polite sounds they make are redundant.

When geeks talk, non-geeks just think they’re being incredibly rude.

Adam Bluestein at Inc. magazine produces a user manual for geeks that discusses motivating geeks and the particulars of geek psychology:

Systematic thinking. Geeks see nothing magic about technology, only problems to be broken down and solved. "They tend to view the world in black-and-white terms," says Frazer. "They're very good at looking at a problem and reducing it to its component parts."

Wrong? Never. Geeks often have a powerful intellectual vanity. That makes it hard for them to admit mistakes. Hence, the plethora of expressions that blame the victim (see glossary, below).

Competitive nature. Being smarter than their peers is really important for geeks. Developers are constantly honing their skills with the aim of doing something that no one's been able to do.

Rands in Repose provides a similar guide for women dating a geek (a nerdy one in this case):

Nerds are fucking funny. Your nerd spent a lot of his younger life being an outcast because of his strange affinity with the computer. This created a basic bitterness in his psyche that is the foundation for his humor. Now, combine this basic distrust of everything with your nerd’s other natural talents and you’ll realize that he sees humor is another game.

Humor is an intellectual puzzle, “How can this particular set of esoteric trivia be constructed to maximize hilarity as quickly as possible?” Your nerd listens hard to recognize humor potential and when he hears it, he furiously scours his mind to find relevant content from his experience so he can get the funny out as quickly as possible.

Bex Huff discusses one implication of the geek's strong problem-solving drive:

Now... empathy is not easy, and its extraordinarily difficult for engineers.

Most technical people have been brainwashed by years of "education" into believing that there's a "right way" to do everything, and that its our job to fix it. When something is "wrong," we want to dive in and tell everybody how to make it "right" again. Its a trained compulsion. This is why engineers make lousy lovers, but excellent terrorists. In both cases, its a lack of empathy that dooms us to this fantasy world of absolute right and wrong, making it impossible to see things from another perspective.

Sound like anybody you know?

Finally, a favorite of mine and one from a geek culture that isn't a computer culture. This has more to do with interpersonal interactions than online communication, but it's still worth reading for insight into the different ways geeks and non-geeks process social interaction. Cally Soukup summarizes a talk by a speech therapist on how science fiction and fantasy fans communicate differently than "mundanes."

What we say in those large word groupings is also different. We tend to use complete sentences, and complex sentence structure. When we pause, or say "uh", it tends to be towards the beginning of a statement, as we formulate the complete thought. The "idea" or "information" portion of a statement is paramount; emotional reassurance, the little social noises (mm-hmm) are reduced or omitted. We get to the heart of what we want to say -- if someone asks us how to do something we tell them, not leading up to it gently with "have you tried doing it this way?"

This leads us to body language. Our body language is also different from mundanes. We tend to not use eye contact nearly as often; when we do, it often signifies that it's the other person's turn to speak now. This is opposite of everyone else. In mundania, it's *breaking* eye contact that signals turn-taking, not *making* eye contact. She demonstrated this on DDB; breaking eye contact and turning slightly away, and he felt insulted. On the other hand, his sudden staring at her eyes made her feel like a professor had just said "justify yourself NOW". Mutual "rudeness"; mixed signals.

We use our hands when we talk, but don't seem to know what to do with our arms. When thinking how to put something we close our eyes or look to the side and up, while making little "hang on just a second" gestures to show that we're not finished talking. We interrupt each other to finish sentences, and if the interrupter got it right, we know we've communicated and let them speak; if they get it wrong we talk right over them. This is not perceived as rude, or not very rude.

So, what other good resources are there for describing the differences between geeks and non-geeks in communication and expectations?

I Am Geek; Hear Me Mutter Pedantically

This post is an introduction to a session I'm running at ScienceOnline 2011 with Maria Walters and Desiree Schell called, "It's All Geek to Me." We'll discuss what we can learn about communicating science by looking at differences between a general audience and science's most solid audience--geeks.

It's been months since I last saw a geek. He was emceeing a burlesque show and occasionally entertaining us with old standards like pounding a spike into his nose. He was a lousy emcee but a pretty good geek.

That's where the term geek came from--performers who got very good at doing things most of us would never even consider. Of course, these days the term has been co-opted by people who do not generally bite the heads off chickens, and geeks of old are mostly known as freaks, lumped in with those with physical features unusual enough to be worth paying to see. Geek has changed.

Still, the origin of the term is useful for understanding the modern geek. In particular, understanding that geeks are set apart by their interests and the lengths they'll go to to pursue those interests is critical to understanding geeks as an audience. And there may be no better place to go for an explanation than Patton Oswalt's recent piece on geek culture.

I was too young to drive or hold a job. I was never going to play sports, and girls were an uncrackable code. So, yeah—I had time to collect every Star Wars action figure, learn the Three Laws of Robotics, memorize Roy Batty’s speech from the end of Blade Runner, and classify each monster’s abilities and weaknesses in TSR Hobbies’ Monster Manual. By 1987, my friends and I were waist-deep in the hot honey of adolescence. Money and cars and, hopefully, girls would follow, but not if we spent our free time learning the names of the bounty hunters’ ships in The Empire Strikes Back. So we each built our own otakuesque thought-palace, which we crammed with facts and nonsense—only now, the thought-palace was nicely appointed, decorated neatly, the information laid out on deep mahogany shelves or framed in gilt. What once set us apart, we hoped, would become a lovable quirk.

Our respective nerdery took on various forms: One friend was the first to get his hands on early bootlegs of Asian action flicks by Tsui Hark and John Woo, and he never looked back. Another started reading William Gibson and peppered his conversations with cryptic (and alluring) references to “cyberspace.” I was ground zero for the “new wave” of mainstream superhero comics—which meant being right there for Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and Neil Gaiman. And like my music-obsessed pals, who passed around the cassette of Guns n’ Roses’ Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide and were thus prepared for the shock wave of Appetite for Destruction, I’d devoured Moore’s run on Swamp Thing and thus eased nicely into his Watchmen. I’d also read the individual issues of Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again run, so when The Dark Knight Returns was reviewed by The New York Times, I could say I saw it coming. And I’d consumed so many single-issue guest-writing stints of Gaiman’s that when he was finally given The Sandman title all to himself, I was first in line and knew the language.

Geeks are specialists, uber-specialists in fields that other people scratch their heads over if they even know they exist. Geeks are informational deep-divers in their own esoteric specialties. Geeks are...well, they're a lot like scientists. Many of them are scientists.

They are also the main self-selecting audience of science communicators. After all, who but a geek gets excited about opening up new sources of information by learning how to read scientific literature? Who else has overcome (or never internalized) the social prohibitions against asking dumb questions in order to participate in their own education? Who else fills the comment sections of various science blogs with their own vaguely related bits of esoteric knowledge to create the fascinating conversations that can happen there?

I phrase it that way because there is a "who else" who are not geeks and who don't self-select for engaging with science communicators. They're still an important audience to reach. To the extent that science communication has a game plan for changing the world, they may be an even more strategic target audience than geeks.

This non-geek audience, however, has different goals for how they spend their time than the geeks do. They are often distracted and distractable. Instead of wanting to incorporate all the knowledge there is, they're looking to have information winnowed down to that which is relevant for them. They're ready for the 50,000-foot view rather than the deep dive.

This geek/non-geek dynamic is, of course, a bit of a simplification. Your average non-geek may have a head full of sports statistics or bread recipes, available on a moment's notice, and your average geek has plenty of topics in which s/he just isn't that interested. "Geek" is as much a method of engagement as anything else, and which method a person brings to a particular piece of science communication depends greatly on the topic at hand.

Then there is the pseudo-geek, the person who takes the broad but shallow dive. Patton Oswalt again:

The problem with the Internet, however, is that it lets anyone become otaku about anything instantly. In the ’80s, you couldn’t get up to speed on an entire genre in a weekend. You had to wait, month to month, for the issues of Watchmen to come out. We couldn’t BitTorrent the latest John Woo film or digitally download an entire decade’s worth of grunge or hip hop. Hell, there were a few weeks during the spring of 1991 when we couldn’t tell whether Nirvana or Tad would be the next band to break big. Imagine the terror!

But then reflect on the advantages. Waiting for the next issue, movie, or album gave you time to reread, rewatch, reabsorb whatever you loved, so you brought your own idiosyncratic love of that thing to your thought-palace.

This is the person who has absorbed the easily available information on a topic but hasn't engaged to the level of grappling with it. In science communication terms, this person knows the Wikipedia articles and the three paragraphs available in a textbook overview of the subject but has no idea what the recent studies say or what the disagreements in the field are. This is the person who shows up in the comments of a blog post discussing a tricky issue to tell you that you suck because you aren't saying what "everyone knows" about the topic.

All three of these engagement methods or types of audiences require different treatment. There are plenty of people out there telling geeks how to reach non-geeks, but ironically, much of that information alienates its intended audience by not treating them as the geeks they are. Bora had a lovely take a while back on what such a book would look like if written by a geek for a geek audience.

There's much less information out there on how to communicate with geeks. In another post tomorrow, I'll collect some of the information that exists. [Update: now available here.] Be forewarned, however, that it largely doesn't come from peer-reviewed research, a fact that will make geek audiences twitch. However, it does give a (default) non-geek perspective on communicating with geeks that should shed some light on the differences between the two.

Then, come Sunday morning at 10:15 EST, my co-moderators (both with plenty of experience translating from geek to non-geek and back) and I will host a discussion on how understanding the differences between these audiences can help us define and reach the target audiences for our own communications. And we'll try to find a productive solution for dealing with those pseudo-geeks.

I believe the session should be live-streamed; I'll add a link as soon as one is available. It can also be followed on the Twitter hashtag #scio11, and we'll try to have at least one person in the room monitoring that feed for anyone who wants to participate remotely.

I hope to see you all there.

The Telephone Game

If you get the opportunity to see The Telephone Game, do it. This will be more difficult if you're not in the Twin Cities, but more worthwhile if you've ever done theater, particularly experimental theater, or like your movies slightly odd.

I just got back from the premier. I went without great expectations, knowing this was a local, low-budget production. Not that you can't do great things on a budget, but that usually means attracting the cast you know rather than the cast you can afford. Ben and I were there so he could take a few pictures. It turns out he's also taken pictures of approximately half the cast, but that's a bit beside the point.

The Telephone Game tells the story of the production of a play, from auditions to opening night. It also follows the relationship of the playwright, Marco, who insists on directing and starring in his own production, and the leading actress, Zelphia, who understands the core of the play better than Marco does. Both storylines are greatly complicated by the fact that Marco is the least coherent individual on the face of the planet. Far less coherent even than a politician with the last name of Bush.

Despite that, he seems to have written a delightfully evocative play, and we're given enough of a glimpse at it up front to be concerned when Marco's doubts cause him to start messing his production. What actually happens to the play over the course of the movie is something I won't spoil by describing it.

The cast of the movie was much better than I had expected going in. Haley Chamberlain was stunning as the female lead, both as the actress and in her role in the play. The movie would be worth watching for her alone. However, nobody fell to the level of "strictly local talent" that I expected in a movie this low budget.

That might have something to do with the fact that the script was improvised. There was, at most, one character in the movie underserved by her writer. The rest all stood out as individuals. And you really have to admire a movie that can work in a line like "Then I puked a projection of Peter Piper's pickled peppers onto the poor percussionists in the pit. That's why I don't act," and not have it completely derail the scene.

Beyond that, I find myself unwilling to describe the movie. I went into it without any good idea of what I was going to see, and that served me well. However, if you're not ready to take my word that the movie is worthwhile, you can always watch the trailer below. But really, just see the movie.

Disability Bingo

I'm deeply ambivalent on the subject of social-interaction bingo cards. On the one hand, I see them warp discussions, as people who are arguing with each other shoehorn nuanced statements into dogwhistle boxes in the name of...oh, I don't even pretend to understand why someone would have that kind of discussion in the first place. On the other hand, they really can be quick, accessible, visual introductions to the kinds of things people say over and over again that are far less than helpful, or even thoughtful.

My friend Lynne knows how to use a bingo card, which is only one of the reasons she's awesome.

Caitlin is not "confined" to a wheelchair (a term I saw used recently in another LJ community that drives me absolutely nuts). She uses a wheelchair. It is a tool, that helps her to be mobile. Like a car, but smaller. In a world that, frankly, isn't as well designed for alternative modes of mobility as it should be, given how many of us over time will need to use similar tools.

We are not trying to "overcome" or fix Caitlin's disabilities. We are adapting our life and hers to her current abilities so that she can have the fullest life possible, in a society that is not particularly structured for her to, you know, leave the house on a regular basis, interact with other people, etc.

Don't worry, Lynne doesn't leave people with just a list of don'ts, which tend to make people self-conscious and lead to the kind of avoidance that isolates people with disabilities. She gives things you can do when someone else's disability leaves you feeling helpless. You should read them all, so I'm only going to share one:

Be the person who helps to drive demand from libraries and publishers alike for more stories about people with disabilities. Buy them. Read them. Read them to your kids.

Lynne also links indirectly to a fiction contest at the new Redstone Science Fiction (the first issue of which includes an interview with a payload rack officer on the ISS). The contest is asking for short fiction that doesn't use disability as a shorthand for character traits or group identity or treat it as something to be cured and which is set in a future that sees and accommodates disabilities. If you're a writer, I strongly encourage you to play. Even if you don't win, you'll come away with a story that will do someone some good.

Off to go plot.

On "Crap"

A friend of mine is currently experience an increased demand for entertainment. After noting a couple of Facebook updates related to television shows that are constantly in syndication, I recommended Hulu. I noted that it offers a lot of crap, but that it allows you to choose the crap you want to watch on your own schedule.

I got some pushback on that as being a negative statement, "passive-aggressive" to be exact. It shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. I think most people don't have the same relationship to the word "crap" that I do.

A lot of that has to do with the general version of Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. Theodore Sturgeon actually said, "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud," but nobody else says it that way. It's always "crap."

The fun part is that nobody really agrees on which 90% we're going to label "crap." Lost is and has been a major television phenomenon. It's near and dear to the hearts of millions, but I can't watch it, and I'm not alone. On the other hand, I'm a big fan of Stargate SG-1, at one time the number one television show on the planet. However, it makes large portions of science fiction fandom yawn.

I don't watch movies to get embroiled in other people's emotional drama, and (physical and emotional) slapstick makes me cringe, so I've seen almost no Oscar-winning movies and have no idea what most of the taglines being used around me mean. I can guess that they've got something to do with Will Ferrell, but that's about it.

On the other hand, it would never occur to me to suggest that my views on movies were anything like objective. The statement that so-and-so "is crap" confuses the hell out of me, even when it's applied to something like Twilight. After all, if that many kids are driven to read, the books are offering them something. It may not be the same thing I want, but it doesn't become less compelling to them just because I don't value it.

I know too many people who sneer at cozy mysteries or find "literature" impenetrable to think there's anything that can be comfortably categorized as "crap." Yet we still all do it. Officially, I think that makes 100% of everything crap. So if I refer to your favorite movie, book or show as "crap," don't take it personally.

After all, my opinion on the subject is probably crap too.

Questions About Genre

Those of you who read genre fiction know that there are two general approaches for a writer interacting with the genre: hewing closely to the tropes and messing with them, doing the unexpected. Of course, in practice, most writers do some of both.

If you read genre fiction, I'd love your input on two questions. First, are you more likely to pick up a genre book or story if you can tell from the cover and description that it's more true to the genre or less? Second, which kind of story are you more likely to interact with, to discuss, to recommend friends read or avoid, etc.?

Gaga, Palmer, Madonna

Amanda Palmer and her ukulele make some interesting points about popular art.

Tell Me a (Political) Story

Terrified Tabetic is getting a bit cynical, it seems. Commenting on PZ Myers' commenting on Making Light's commenting on Boing Boing's commenting on Peter Watts' experience at the U.S.-Canadian border:

I am completely unsurprised that border guards would rough someone up and treat them disrespectfully. I am also unsurprised that another arrogant white dude seems shocked that people are mistreated by law enforcement officials.

The ennui, it burns.

TT, you're not shocked by the treatment Dr. Watts received. I'm not shocked by it. PZ's not shocked by it. Nobody who's paying any attention to the world around them is shocked. Some of us are still outraged, as we've been outraged all along.

Isis, on the other hand, is amused.

Many of us in the blogosphere quietly chuckled because this thing that happened to Watts, horrible and unjustifiable as it is, happens to brown people all the time. And it generates no outrage.

Now, as someone who wrote about Dr. Watts' situation last week, I've got a couple things to say on the situation. First, my reaction to the news was not shock. The only surprise for me in the story was that the U.S. border patrol was stopping people leaving the country.

That didn't stop me from using the story to draw attention to the problem. This is a pervasive problem, not just at the border, not just for white (although I just had to look that up to be sure), Canadian science fiction writers with doctoral degrees in marine mammal biology. In fact, like any pervasive problem, I'm well aware that it's going to have a disproportionate impact on the "invisible" people--ethnic and religious minorities, the poor, the uneducated, people with mental and physical disabilities, people with unpopular political views.

However, because I have close ties to the online science fiction community (and Dr. Watts participated in last year's run-up to ScienceOnline), this was the opportunity that got pushed across my screen. I grabbed it, hoping to push it into another sphere and make people who haven't been paying attention as outraged as I am. And yes, I looked at it and chuckled to myself, "Yeah. Just try to do your oh-they-must-have-been-asking-for-it-cause-they're-somehow-scary dance on this one, jerks. Time to face up to the fact that this problem can bite you too."

I don't like the fact that the vast majority of people are empathy-challenged. I'm doing what I can to change that, to get people to understand that different doesn't equal wrong doesn't equal not entitled to the same basic rights. I want a world in which no one needs, as Isis said, "some white patrons to show them to the majority culture."

That is my goal, but in the meantime, I'm not a purist. If somebody hands me a political sledgehammer for use on one of those pervasive issues, I'm going to use it, because the vast majority of people can't be moved to political action by anything short of that. I'm going to use it even if it exploits something in society that I hate, because it is still a "real injustice" and because, even if the sledgehammer is of the majority culture, that doesn't change the fact that most of the injustice happens to minorities.

Zuska compared PZ's post to the news coverage for a missing white woman, but I don't think that's quite the right analogy. Ryan White was the face of AIDS research. Gay men largely stopped dying from the disease. Minority homeless people benefit from the snow-white appeals for Christmas donations to shelters. Who stands to benefit from the enforcement of due process and a curb on the arbitrary exercise of nonexistent police authority? Everybody who isn't already too powerful to have to worry about it. It's cynical as hell, but it's doing something.

That brings me to my second point. Terrified Tabetic noted that he had a friend, Mohammed, who experienced similar problems. I asked (responding to cynicism with the same, I'm afraid), why this was the first time he was telling me about it. Isis talks about brown injustices being shunted aside, but she doesn't provide any stories.

Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that either TT or Isis isn't walking the talk. They both do. But what they're both doing in this situation is responding to white-guy story with minority-inclusion critique, and critique just isn't as powerful as story.

Dr. Watts is a science fiction writer. That means that unless he's very, very good--in terms of sales, not writing--he's squeaking along moneywise. For a pasty guy, he's not very powerful. There's no good reason for his story to be noticed over any other pasty guy's. In fact, the press was entirely uninterested.

However, Dr. Watts knows Cory Doctorow, otherwise known as Boing Boing (yes, I'm simplifying slightly). Doctorow wrote a short narrative piece on Dr. Watts' ordeal. Boing Boing made sure that plenty of people saw the story, and it stuck and spread. It spread successfully, in part, because the people passing it on were also storytellers and because Dr. Watts' own version of the story is short, bitter and shows why his work is award-nominated.

Story works. Story matters. Story is remembered in a way that arguments and reasoning aren't. Without story, we wouldn't have so damned many teenaged (of whatever chronological age) libertarians running around. Story is what I do all over this blog, whether I'm talking about science or politics or art--even when I'm making a logical argument--and that's what gives this tiny blog an influence entirely disproportional to its small readership (and by the way, I love you guys).

To bring this back to the topic at hand, Isis has a point about repackaging. Some experiences do get repackaged. However, I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I took "Carrie's" parents' Facebook status updates--pure worried experience--and repackaged them and my knowledge that portion of the anti-vaccine movement that isn't motivated by profit into a story about the consequences of non-vaccination. I did the same thing with another friend's outrage on Twitter over not being able to get health insurance for his daughter. These aren't my experiences--I'm not even a parent--but I translated them into stories aimed at particular audiences, and the people whose experience I used thanked me for it. I got them heard.

Dr. Watts is not a brown person repackaged. He's an individual who had an all-too-common experience. If brown people's stories need to be repackaged, from personal conversations or as excerpts from blog posts or whatever, in order to be heard (and yes, they do), the situation isn't that different than that with the political sledgehammer. The need may be distasteful but it still exists. We can do that. It doesn't subtract anything from the original story to add more stories. And those of us privileged enough to be heard by the majority can tell those stories even as we work to eliminate the need for repackaging.

The Great Explainers

If you haven't seen Coupling (the British version; there is no American version as far as I'm concerned), you're missing out. It may be the best-written sitcom in the history of television. There's much that's hilarious, but the best bits may well be the explanations.

The Last Bastion


How to Seduce a Man


The Sock Gap

Warning, Revisited

When I am retired I shall dye my hair purple
With a red eyeliner that scares the grown-ups, and delights the children,
And I shall spend my savings on absinthe and Turkish bells
And shiny nose rings, and say we've no money for morning coffee.
I shall dance beyond the reach of thought until I collapse,
And flirt with the pretty boys and kiss drag queens,
And tell the gossips what I think of them,
And return to the freedoms of my youth.
I shall wander city streets in the night
And chat with street musicians and panhandlers,
And learn to tango.

You can stay up 'til dawn and stagger home,
And let your mascara run to your chin,
Or bat rhinestone-studded fake lashes,
And hoard art and artists and bartenders and feather boas.

But now we must have bedtimes to suit a working day,
And be on time and dampen the sparkle,
And look appropriately sober for the clients.
We must make polite conversation and attend happy hours.

But maybe I ought to dance more often now?
So my body remembers me, is not too shaken and sore,
When suddenly I retire and dye my hair purple!

For Catharine, whose baby has such lovely purple hair, and with apologies to Jenny Joseph.

Happily Ever After and the Locus of Control

Alma Alexander has written about happy endings over at SF Novelists.

I don’t really believe in the happy ending. In my early reading, few of the old myths had them; when I graduated to fairy tales I tended to prefer Hans Christian Andersen’s dystopias than ache to be in Cinderella’s wedding party – I might have cried bitter tears at the fate of the Little Mermaid (the ORIGINAL Little Mermaid, not Disney’s red-haired sea princess with a chorus of singing sea slugs) but somehow I had more in common with her than I ever had with Sleeping Beauty. I mean, I might not have grown up with a spindle in my hand either, but I think I could be kind of trusted to see a damned sharp point if one came under my hand, and I would like to think (faery curses aside) that I would have the motherwit not to impale myself on one.

I don't particularly agree with her about...well, about anything except that happy endings can be done badly. Happy endings do happen in real life. Happily ever after doesn't mean no work, just not working alone or without hope or reward. Sometimes the cost of happiness really is paid up front.

What really caught my attention, though, were her feelings about Sleeping Beauty.

Both kind of fairy tale endings hinge on a sort of fate or destiny – Maleficent’s curse or the Little Mermaid’s desire to walk on dry land no matter what the cost – but the difference in my head between the Sleeping Beauty tale and that of the Little Mermaid is that Sleeping Beauty almost literally sleepwalks her way through her life (the curse is something that WILL HAPPEN, no matter what she does or thinks about it) and the Little Mermaid makes her own choices, lives with her own pain, and finally turns her back on the dearly-bought salvation that her sisters have paid for because it is not her OWN choice, her OWN destiny. One of these protagonists is in control of her own life. The other is not. I saw the difference.

This bothered me quite a lot, this preference for willful self-destruction over a free release being offered to a young woman who is suffering for her parents' actions. Some of my reaction is a particular hatred for blaming the victim, this time for being passive in a situation in which she truly has no control. Some of it is that this fetishization of control has nasty consequences.

The most sure way to ensure control over what happens to you is to arrange a nice, quiet suicide where no one can find you until you're dead. Failing that, the next most certain is to make lousy choices with known consequences. Good things will happen to you by accident occasionally, but there's no surer way to get kicked out of wherever you live than to stop paying your rent or mortgage, no surer way to see your marriage destroyed than to walk away from it, no surer way to avoid getting an education than to refuse to study, no surer way to keep from being published than to refuse to write.

These things happen to some percentage of us anyway, because when it comes down to it, they are not under our control. Not completely. But they are much more under the control of those who engage in self-sabotage.

Not surprisingly, we see this in politics too. There is no issue so important that someone won't come along to say they're sitting on their hands because we'll never get the outcome we really want. We saw it last year before the election. We see it right now in the people who want a public health insurance option but act as though the decision is up to Rahm Emanuel.

The fact is, defeatism (anticipation of the unhappy ending) just isn't that reasonable. Bad things happen, but good things happen too. One hundred years ago, women couldn't vote. Poll taxes were allowed. Interracial and same-sex marriages weren't allowed in many places. We had a weak antitrust system, no formal national park system, no Interstate system, no Social Security, no Medicaid, no free school lunches, no Title IX, no Pell Grants, no VA, no education subsidies for the people who serve in the Armed Services.

Focusing on that unhappy ending means we are ignoring what we have accomplished--and losing sight of the power we have to accomplish more. We can't control all of our environment, but every decision we make, every action we take has an effect on it. We can choose the more certain path of failure, or we can the risk to try to improve our lot. We can reach for that happy ending. Sometimes, we even get it.

And that is every bit as much a Truth as any presented in the most dismal literature.

More Writer Don'ts

Living online makes it very easy to interact with readers. Social networking tools, from Amazon reviews to friend-based webs like Facebook, put a writer in touch with fans--and not so much fans. Once again, it's very important to differentiate between what the internet makes easy and what is smart behavior from a writer.

Seriously.

I have gotten into some pretty heated discussions with friends on Facebook. None have resulted in cut ties. The only incident of “defriending” on my part involved someone I could only call a spammer who, IMO, misrepresented themselves. I did nothing of the sort with Mooney. I have been nothing but supportive until now. So, either he does not like criticism, or he does not want it to influence his book sales which might ensue from his personal relationships on Facebook.

When selling books becomes more important to me than defending what is in them, I hope that someone will dig up this blog post and show it to me.

Criticism is not fun to hear. When it is accurate, it hurts. But I think it is important to hear it.

When criticism is unfair, I refute it or ignore it, but I do not censor it unless it is excessive, offensive (in a social, not intellectual sense), or incomprehensible. Most of the bloggers I read follow a similar philosophy.

Read (for the rest of the content as well). Learn. If you are a writer, don't let this be you. We'll cringe in sympathy over the temptation, but we will not love you for the bad behavior when we find out. And in case you haven't noticed, in this age when everyone blogs, we will find out.

Thanks to Abbie for the link.

The Tyranny of the Original Idea

Despite our society’s romantic, individualistic notions, ideas don’t spring fully formed from the aether. There is no cosmic fountain of creativity. The muses, just like all the other gods, are relics of superstition.

I'm committing heresy today over at Quiche Moraine. Feel free to join in or throw stones.