Twenty-five years ago I arrived on the campus of Michigan State University to begin the six weeks of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop. Donna had driven me up, along with a friend (because I didn’t want her driving back alone—which led to a small bit of confusion because while Donna was catching a nap in my dorm room, everyone else met Drea and then when Donna picked me up, there was some, as I say, confusion…) and then left me there for six weeks of the best pressure cooker experience I’d ever had. I’ve written about it here and here.…
Month: June 2013
Colloquial For “Why, I Didn’t Mean Nothin’ By It!”
I confess when everyone started talking about Paula Deen this past week, I had a moment or two of complete cultural disconnect.
Who?
Oh, she writes cookbooks and does a show on Food Network. Hm. So what?
I’m still not altogether sure what she did, what trial she spoke at where she rather obliviously let it be known that she thinks using the N-word is just fine. I’m not really interested enough in her—or any other cooking personality—to give much of a damn. I don’t read cookbooks (I have several, I couldn’t tell you who wrote them) and I don’t watch Food Network (we don’t have cable or dish), so this is a part of the popular zeitgeist of which I am rather oblivious.…
Because I Haven’t Done This In A While
New photograph. Forgot I took this one, back in March. Something to cool the imagination in the coming swelter.
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On The Extraction of Feet From Mouths
I’ve been thinking deeply about the recent eruption of controversy in SFWA over sexism. Seems just about anywhere we look in the last several years there are examples of men behaving stupidly toward and about women. While this is nothing new, where it has been cropping up seems surprising.
There have been several incidents, both online and out in the world, within the skeptical community. The boys came out to try to tell the girls to get their own clubhouse and stop invading what for some reason these males had regarded as somehow the province of people with testicles. Prominent women—skeptics, humanists, atheists, scientists—have been treated to high school-level chauvinism by males intent on…
On what?…