November, 2006

Ok, this is going to be very short, because I’m very tired, but I’m trying so hard not to miss a day! I’m really excited because I just got back from a crit group where we’re going over Cualcotel. My readers got new, from-scratch written text (as opposed to edited and reworked), because this is where the novel takes a sharp turn from last draft and enters undiscovered plot country. So, I hesitantly added several cans of plot to thicken the stew, hoping I wasn’t totally botching it because you know me and plot. So…both readers thought it was good, and the queen of plot actually said I’d done a fine job. Damn, if it wasn’t like getting a smiley face sticker or an A++ on a paper. Skills, slowly and painfully acquired, while you wait. That’s what I’m talking about!

Anyway, the rush of joy is so great, that I give you freebie text. Have some bits of Cualcotel that I liked very much but had to go, for plot reasons. So it’s nothing that will ever appear anywhere except right here:

It was as though she were still dreaming, or maybe watching herself across a courtyard from a balcony in another building. It wasn’t really she standing before a broken palace. Chelia laid her hand on Punyami’s neck and stroked his ears. The velvet smoothness of them anchored her in a way that her own feet did not. Smoke clung unnaturally to tumbled down rocks. It didn’t disperse in the cool mountain breeze. The air was especially cool on her bare arms, making her wish (again) that she’d had a chance to dress and get an overshirt. She shivered. Chelia had stopped, and everyone around her still moved. She was jostled aside by a trio of sun virgins carrying large bouquets of flowers. The guard was far ahead. He had neither stopped nor acted surprised at the sight of the wrecked palace. She darted between the crowds to reach him. Punyami followed.

and then a bit later this line of dialog from the guard was also excised : “No battle, keeper-to-be, the Kingdom of the Sun takes its wars to others. War is not brought to us.”

See? When the writing goes ok, we all win!

But that’s not enough, is it? Alright, then, here’s the text that replaced what was cut in a never before seen preview of my work in progress Cualcotel:

Chelia’s throat closed up, stifling the whimper rising in her. She laid her hand on Punyami’s neck, calmed by the motion of his muscles as he walked with her. She would never enter that trapezoidal door again. Her father would not allow it. He’d given her Punyami. They kept one another safe.

I’m going to have to do something about that word trapezoidal. So far slanted and leaning have bombed as replacements, and really, they’re trapezoidal. Le mot juste and so forth. I think it stops the eye on the page, though. Anyway, plenty of time to think about something other than trapezoidal to put there after it’s finished, right?

That’s all, folks. Have a good night.

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Quick business note, here. Last weekend I happened to notice that a legitimate comment got swallowed by Kurt’s Mighty Mighty Spam Filter. I usually wouldn’t even know this, but the system emailed it to me instead of just dumping it on the floor (though it did not post said comment, so the filtering part was in order). Why it sometimes emails me and sometimes doesn’t is a mystery I have not yet solved. At any rate, after fooling around with the blocker and such, I realized that anything in a comment marked http:// will be marked up by the commenting software prior to posting, and that the spam blocker reads that as two URLs. So, remember when I said limit your URLs to four? Your new limit is one. Feel free to post as many comments as you need to in order to pass along the URLs you’re dying to give me. Thanks.

Alright, admit it, you didn’t think I could do a whole week of posting daily. We’ll see if I can make it two.

So, the snow didn’t come last week, and we are actually supposed to hit mid-sixties this week. Thus the thing that had become a trend to me, snow before Thanksgiving two years in a row, seems to have ended. However, there was frost everywhere this morning, sub 30 degree temps, and the windshield had to be scraped.

Today I went into a (small, very organized) used book shop I’d never been in before and found Elizabeth Bear’s new book Blood and Iron. I snapped it up with great eagerness, unable to believe my luck. In the last two months I’ve almost bought it like four different times, but the price tag is just a little too steep for me. To be fair, I did buy the whole Jenny series out and out, so I’m not totally stealing food out of the author’s mouth. I also referred to my experience of salivating over Blood and Iron as “almost buying it at the unused books store” which my husband thought hilarious. I’m not sure why. I checked for Dhalgren and Little, Big while I was there, but no dice.

So even with my reading holiday coming up (I mentally think of my visits to my in-laws’ gorgeous lakeside home as reading holidays. They don’t care at all if I just hole up and read all day, only communicating at meal times. Their house is a reader’s heaven of comfy chairs and huge windows with tons of natural light.), I think I may have more books that I want to read next! now! today! than I can realistically take care of over this anticipated vacation. So, I’m thinking about posting a list of a dozen and picking the top five recommended ones to bring with me. Stay tuned. There’s always at least one book foisted onto me while I’m there (last year it was The Kite-Runner. Visit before that it was The Da Vinci Code) so I have to leave some space for that.

I keep hearing about the imminent collapse of the world’s fisheries. I’m starting to feel guilty about eating sushi.

I need to buy seville oranges, but all the local grocery stores only seem to carry navel. Ideas?

P.S. Deirdra I fixed your comment by dropping one of the URL’s and reposting it. Thanks, that studio is just down the street and I’m going to check it out as soon as I can and maybe take a class or two with different folks to see if any suits me.

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Disclaimer: I’ve not read any of Dawkin’s work fully. I couldn’t get through The Selfish Gene, though I tried at least two times (sorry, David W.). I’ve read this review of his new book, and of course the Wired magazine article that I’m basing most of my ruminations here on. You can see the flaw in taking just one source to base an essay on, so feel free to add your grains of salt. It just made me think, is all, and at least one person requested my thoughts.

I suspect part of Dawkin’s misconception of the intellectual capacity of religious people probably has to do with the number of religious people he has met. I imagine he doesn’t hang out with the great religious thinkers, probably not even in books. Why should he? He doesn’t think they have anything to tell him. So, having little direct experience, I imagine his main contact with religious people is the PR machine of televangelism. Those charismatic folks he occasionally makes look foolish and confused in formal debates. You know the ones I mean. Despite its pre-eminence, I don’t think TV religion approximates real religious intellectualism (or real religious experience, for that matter) any more than I think headline news has depth, or sitcoms represent real life, or that the nature channel is the essence of science.

My own experience can only be anecdotal, at best, and proves nothing, but I contend Dawkins’ premise that dumb people are religious and smart people are atheist isn’t exactly a provable point anyhow. That won’t stop me from inflicting my own personal experience on you anyway, because it’s my little space here, and I can. As you know, I was raised in a Christian religious environment, and have had a lot of contact with a variety of preachers, theologians and believers. That’s exactly the opposite of what I imagine Dawkins’ experience has been. I also happen to know a lot of smart people. I’m interested in intelligence and attracted to it. I cultivate smart friends and acquaintances because they make me think, and I like that. If I think about the top five smartest people I know personally, probably three of them are atheist and two of them are religious. All five are male, all five are white. I’m not, of course, going to presume that highly intelligent people are mostly white and male from that insignificant statistical sample. And while three out of five atheists is a majority, strictly speaking, it could pretty easily have gone the other way too. When I expand this number to ten, however, my data gets more interesting : I suddenly get women, and people who are not only religiously devout, but who are even theologians. I also suddenly get different types of intelligence, perhaps not as easily IQ measurable. I get some more Phds as well (only one in my top five). So now I’m at about six of ten for religion, four atheists. Still nothing to go to the bank with, if you know what I mean. If I widen the net to fifteen or twenty, I start to get an even greater variety of educational levels and life experiences and intelligence types. The exercise becomes moot at that point, though, because I am not certain of all those people’s stances regarding religion. I can guess, but I don’t actually have statistics, which would be necessary to support or defeat my case that there are (and have been) plenty of smart religious people around. Unlike what I sometimes hear assumed by atheists, I’m not in the business of quizzing people and/or persecuting (or not voting for) people on the basis of their beliefs (for examples of what I mean by atheist assumptions, you can read the comment thread of Scalzi’s review of The God Delusion, linked above).

There’s something more distressing about Dawkins’ statement about basic intelligence, though, when it’s taken together with his evangelistic atheistic zeal. If atheism is largely only for brainiacs, what happens to the rest of us? You can convert people to atheism, I suppose, but you can’t convert people to higher IQs. This reminds me of Seventh Day Adventists and the 144,000, a problem I’ve mulled over since mid-adolescence. There are only 144,000 saved slots, and there are more than 144,000 Seventh Day Adventists. So…some of them are destined for hellfire and brimstone. Right? So what’s the use, then, of seeking converts? There are now and will always be stupid human beings. There are now and will always be religious human beings. There are now and will always be geniuses who say and do dumb things. If the brights run things, what happens to the religious and/or the merely dumb? In Dawkins’ view the religious, at least, cannot be tolerated. They are a malignant menace to children and to society. Are we discarded as evolutionary dead ends, impediments to the progress of humanity as a whole? That’s some uneasy territory, there, territory that many have defined as one of religion’s greatest failings.

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Meme, because that’s all I have energy for (so that’s how memes happen). Works thusly: you read over the Science Fiction Book Club’s “The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002” list and then you italicize and bold and mark up stuff about each one, and everything you mark up means something. Only I haven’t done enough of these to figure out what’s what, so I’m taking a page from my fellow VPer cicadabug’s book and just grouping them instead of all the crazy highlighting. Makes more sense and you know, I just cannot resist putting like items together. I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with a friend about spec fic and how much I’ve been reading of it lately and whether that’s a departure for me or not. Perhaps the list will illuminate.

• 1 The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
• 5 A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
• 10 Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
• 11 The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
• 12 A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
• 26 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
• 27 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
• 29 Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
• 30 The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
• 33 The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
• 42 Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
• 43 Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (though I liked The Diamond Age better, to be honest)

• 2 The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
• 3 Dune, Frank Herbert
• 6 Neuromancer, William Gibson
• 9 The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
• 37 On the Beach, Nevil Shute
• 41 The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
• 47 Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock

• 4 Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein (am I the only person on the planet who really dug The Puppetmasters and not much else Heinlein?)
• 21 Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey

• 23 The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
• 48 The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks

• 8 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
• 20 Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
• 36 The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
• 45 The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester

• 16 The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
• 19 The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
• 22 Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card*
• 28 I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
• 32 Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
• 31 Little, Big, John Crowley*

• 14 Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
• 15 Cities in Flight, James Blish
• 17 Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
• 18 Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
(to be fair, I totally met my Ellison quota, because I read the mammoth retrospective tome)
• 24 The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
• 25 Gateway, Frederik Pohl
• 34 Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
• 35 More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
• 38 Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
• 40 Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
• 44 Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
• 49 Timescape, Gregory Benford

• 7 Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
• 13 The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
• 39 Ringworld, Larry Niven
• 46 Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
• 50 To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

It may seem weird to you that I’m not all that sure what I’ve read. This is part of my impetus toward better record-keeping. I forget what I read. I’m also pleased to see how I’ve loved most of what I’ve read, and hated very little of it. Even the two haters were instrumental in their way to my adolescent self. Before I read them, I read anything, uncritically. It took stories I hated to make me see not all stories are worth it. So, not counting the five I may or may not have read (they look familiar, but if I did read them it was over ten years ago and I can’t exactly remember), I’ve read twenty three of the fifty. Not quite half, but close. Some of the most loved ones I’ve read multiple times.

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So I half-expected a knowledgeable word person to tell me in the comments of my Samuel entry,”Oh yes, of course, you’re talking about l’espirit du auditiff” or something and no one did. So maybe there is no universal descriptor for my experience.

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It’s been a while since I’ve talked much about yoga. I’m still taking yoga from the same lady I found shortly after I moved here. She’s great, and I love her, and the yoga I take with her is greatly beneficial. She also conveniently teaches classes through the local community college’s continuing ed program, which means that her classes are extremely reasonably priced. But her classes are basic classes. That’s all they’ll ever be. So I talked to her after class on Tuesday and she strongly recommended I take classes from other instructors, and look for a more challenging class than she offers. Also, her classes generally follow a semester timeline, so there’s huge gaps around Christmas and in the summer.

I mentioned here that I tried a yoga class through my city recreation center. I was glad I did it because I discovered that Kundalini style yoga is not for me. I don’t much care for firebreathing, and I hate being told when to breathe. I don’t mind at all if a yoga teacher occasionally reminds me to breathe, but all this “in/out, in/out, in/out” business was driving me crazy. One of the things I have concentrated on in the last year or so is Pranayama, specifically sustaining Dhirga Pranayama throughout the whole of a practice (that would be somewhere between an hour and ninety minutes for you non-practitioners). In addition to full, deep breathing, I also tend to practice 2:1 breathing, making my exhale twice as long as my inhale. This relaxes and focuses me fully. Breath of fire completely upends this and though I came out of the sessions with the same level of relaxation as at any other yoga I’ve been to, during the session I felt like I was always struggling to breathe and like I couldn’t get into a rhythm. I’ve been working on Ujjayi Pranayama in the last year too (which complements Dhirga nicely), but I wouldn’t really say I have that mastered; I tend to constrict the throat a little too much.

I should mention that I did like some things about Kundalini yoga. I surprised myself by truly enjoying the chanting aspect, for example, which with my completely western upbringing I thought I’d find weird and uncomfortable. ‘Sat Nam’ is just beautiful to repeat, especially long and drawn out the way we did in class. There were also different ways of getting into poses that I enjoyed, such as stepping back into Warrior II Pose, when in most other classes I’ve stepped forward into it.

The second time I went to the rec. center yoga class, the teacher twigged to the fact that I was not a complete newbie and asked me if I’d been taking yoga a long time. I added it up and said,”About five years.” She asserted this was a long time. I’d not said it aloud before, or thought about it, and didn’t realize I had been doing it for half a decade. It does seem like a long time. I still feel like quite a newbie at it, though, so I was glad for the encouragement of my primary yoga teacher to branch out and go for something a little more challenging. She says if she were me, she might be bored in her class. Sometimes I have a mild wish during class to try new things or old poses I haven’t done in a long time, but it had not occurred to me to be bored. I guess that means I have a pretty good practice, at least in terms of being in the moment.

When I think about having taken yoga for five years already, it makes me reflective. What have I learned exactly? What have I accomplished? I have increased my muscular flexibility. I am sometimes astonished at the things I can do. In a seated forward bend, my nose is sometimes on my knees. It’s kind of exhilarating. I am stronger as well, though not as strong as I’d really like to be. My balance has improved. When I find myself struggling with the balance aspect of a pose I am invariably surprised, until I remember in the beginning this was always very hard for me. My posture continues to be improved by my regular practice, and though I spend many hours a day at a keyboard, I suffer from much less shoulder and neck tension than I used to. I’ve learned that I have to bend my knees slightly always, because my mental idea of straight knees is hyperflexing. This, perhaps, is the cause of some of my childhood fainting episodes. My knees lock too easily. Well, that and the low blood pressure.

I’ve also been doing this long enough that some of my poses have altered. Just in the last three weeks I had a revelation about down dog. I had for months been focused on my shoulder blades and shoulders, and my teacher made a small adjustment that made me see I had completely neglected the front of my body. I was overarching my back because I was so focused on it, and I needed to have been seeking a balance instead. It was like getting to a new level in the pose. And that’s one of the reasons yoga doesn’t get boring for me, even if it’s just repetition of basic poses. There’s always some part of the pose that can be done deeper, or that can be better aligned or that can be adjusted for intensity. If everything else in the pose is fine, then there’s breathing to focus on, or engaging the abdominal muscles. I’ve become convinced that down dog is the most fundamental yoga pose there is. I mistrust instructors who don’t rely heavily on down dog. A practice without a single down dog is a flawed practice. I’m probably starting to sound militant, but really, it’s that critical.

I’ve discovered that there’s not a total correlation between poses that I love and poses that are easy for me. Nor is the converse true. I’m pretty good at bow pose, but I don’t really care for it. I love Supta Baddha Konasana, but if I stay in it for longer than thirty seconds or so I have to use my hands to push my legs back together while my hips complain. I love poses that put my head on the floor: wide legged forward bend, headstand, rabbit. I’ll also take any chance I can get to put my hands and my feet together. I feel like I’m closing a circuit when I do that. So my favorite arm variation in forward bend is to stand on my hands, if a teacher doesn’t explicitly tell me I have to extend my arms for child pose I’ll grab my feet, and regular Baddha Konasana is always a delightful chance to cradle my feet with my hands. In short, through yoga I have discovered things about my body and my preferences that I don’t think I’d have found out any other way. I hope, in another five years, to be looking back on a decade of yoga practice and a deeper knowledge of my body and my self.

If you are in or near St. Louis and know of a yoga studio or yoga instructor who regularly teaches an advanced class in any style but Kundalini, let me know in the comments, please.

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When I start one of these posts, I always hear that Semisonic song “Closing Time” in my head because I clear out all my opened tabs.

We’ll start with the freaky, cool science news : vampire bats can find you by your breathing, arctic warming is killing polar bears, the bigger the dinosaur the hotter the body temp, the Royal Society issues a statement on the teaching of evolution, a child who engages in pretend play learns to speak with ease, a unique view on gender bias in science from a person who is transgendered, the same genes act differently based on gender, and beautyberry repels mosquitoes. Yes, Science Daily is awesome.

I’ve had a lot of fun pretending to be an abstract painter with this cool little app. Sophia even used it some. Also very visual and very cool is the presidential speeches tag cloud. How come presidents don’t talk about labor anymore? Or the treasury?

The “common fantasy tongue” is fascinating, if you’re at all a language geek.

Need forms to help you get organized? Try these. I’ve been using the freezer inventory form for almost a year now. Handy since the freezer is on a completely different floor than the kitchen.

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Last night I woke to someone calling my name. This is one of those odd little unexplained and unexplainable things that happens to me now and then, though it hasn’t happened for a while. I like to imagine this sort of strangeness happens to everyone, or to at least a lot of ones, although I suppose its possible that it’s just me. What happens is this : I am asleep or completely absorbed in some activity and I hear someone calling my name, usually with a level of urgency. Sometimes it’s just once (as last night), sometimes it’s two or three times. Almost always it is my name and nothing more, but once when I was alone in my dorm at college it was my name followed by “Wake up!” When I get up and try to go find who might be calling, I’m either completely alone or the people in the house claim it was not they who called me.

When I was little and I would come running in asking,”Did you call me?”, my mom used to laugh at me and tell me that if I heard it again, I was to say “Speak Lord, for thy servant heareth.” My experience pretty closely follows Samuel’s, which I guess is one reason I think it must be a universal or at least common sort of experience.

Thing is I don’t ever hear anyone talking about this happening to them. Granted it’s a small thing, a trivial thing, but surely the people who have it happen to them find it as disconcerting and weird as I do. I literally hear someone say my name. Then no one around will admit to having called it. Synapse misfire or auditory hallucination or glitch in the matrix or voice of God, I’m kind of surprised no one’s coined a suitable French word for this experience.

Generally, I hear a generic male voice. In the past I’ve heard specific voices, like my mother’s. Last night it was my husband’s voice that called my name. I woke from a deep sleep, got up and out of bed, and called for him and he was like “What? what?” and I said “Did you call me?” and he said,”No, why would I call you?” He was puzzled. Then I crawled back into bed and said, sleepily, “You were using your worried voice.”

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