A small child’s voice: “Wait, Daddy, wait! Don’t we have to PAY?”

I posted just this quote the other day and decided it was too cryptic and angsty:

[workers were] generically called ‘the Hands,’ – a race who would have found more favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs… (Chas. Dickens, Hard Times, Book 1 Chapter 10)

So here is the decryptified version: I think those people now like to imagine that workers are just Dixie cups with MS Office skills. As a result of having been unexpectedly crumpled and thrown into the trash, I have not felt like blogging the last few days. Which is funny, since now I have eight extra hours in which to do so….

Today I was perusing the headlines on the BBC website, and I saw this one: “Zimbabwe’s feisty freedom fighter.” No picture, just the words. And I thought, that article is about a woman. And I was right. I realized that I cannot remember EVER hearing the word ‘feisty’ applied to a fully grown, heterosexual man. Maybe a little boy. Maybe a gay man. I can’t remember those absolutely¹; but I’m pretty damn sure of the other.

Dictionary.com defines ‘feisty’ thus:
feist·y
adj. feist·i·er, feist·i·est
1. Touchy; quarrelsome.
2. Full of spirit or pluck; frisky or spunky.

I would have guessed #2 was more common than #1…I practically never hear it used as a blatant insult. But those definitions do certainly seem to support a feeling I have — that there is an insult under the skin of the word, even when it’s supposed to be a compliment. The ‘spirit’ of the second definition is underlain by the volatility of the first definition, and there is a certain dismissiveness in the whole that grates on me. I’m sure the BBC only used ‘feisty’ for alliterative reasons, but surely a lawyer defending the rights of journalists, who says she was “only doing her job”, could be better described in some other way? Is it ‘spunky’ to defend the Fourth Estate? Is it ‘frisky’ to be a lawyer in general? The word seems somehow infantilizing.

And what am I going to do about it? Well, I guess I’ll blog about it. There was a time when this kind of thing would fill me with an impassioned rage. But now I fear that fighting EVERY battle loses the war. If I complain about women being ‘feisty’, and small women being ‘firecrackers’ and ‘spitfires’ then I’m taking a large battle onto a very small battlefield. And possibly, just possibly, being ‘feisty’ myself.

¹ In case it needs clarification, boys, gay men and women are the traditional opposites against which virile, dominant masculinity is defined. Thus, they are often compared to and maligned with each other.

For years, all over the Internet, I have heard people claim that their freedom of speech was being infringed. Not by the government creating ‘Freedom Zones’. No. Because people got angry at them for being an ass on a message board, or a forum’s administrator suspended them for homophobia, or a blogger deleted their comments. “Censorship!” they scream. “WHAT ABOUT FREE SPEECH!?!!?”

This annoys me to no end. If you write an Amazon review that disobeys their review standards, it will get pulled. If you flout the rules of a discussion space, you will get banned. Your presence and your speech there are privileges, not rights, and they have just as much right to boot or gag you as you have to pull up a Bush/Cheney sign that someone put in YOUR yard.

It gets even sillier when a person with an unpopular opinion claims that people disagreeing with them — or even trying to debate them, or calling them names — constitutes ‘censorship’ or ‘quashing my freedom of speech.’ Wow! Merely by saying someone’s an ignorant asshole for thinking all Muslims are terrorists, I’m quashing his freedom of speech? AWESOME! I have the Voice! I have superpowers! TREMBLE BEFORE ME!

Or not. At any rate, this disease of believing that disagreement is censorship appears not to be limited to the internet. In fact, I would really, really have hoped that lawyers

would understand that their freedom of speech is wholly unaffected by people making T-shirts about them. But apparently not.

There are a bunch of computer geeks out there who think that the video game industry has a constitutional right to paint a bullseye on your back and on your officers’ backs but that I do not have a constitutional right to point out on 60 Minutes or anywhere else that they do not have that “constitutional right.”

Sigh. Those gamers making fun of you on the intertron sure are oppressing you, Mr. Lawyer. I must have missed where a bunch of angry geeks were suing to suppress…anything. Or using their vast governmental powers to quash you and send you to an offshore prison camp. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if a game company

were to sue you for libel. But, we the small people of the internet, hating you with all our might? Nothing to do with your right to make a display of your ignorance and illogic. Some of us may be badly socialized, illiterate, ineloquent and vituperative; but none of us can shut you up, no matter how much we’d like to do so. If you still don’t get it, give the ACLU a call and see if they’ll prosecute the Gaming Hivemind for you.

Rage on, little ragebeam. Fight the power!

I have never taken part in National Novel Writing Month before this year. I have quite enough novels half-written without adding a sub-par rush-job to the stash, thank you very much! But for some reason I feel like doing it this year. I feel like writing a terribly pulpy novel with international intrigue, hard-boiled dialogue, and quite possibly violence. Why do I feel like doing this? The spirit of procrastination delaying my ‘quality’ novels? Shouldering the burden laid down by sister sledge last year? I am not sure, but I think I’ll have to go with Captain Kirk on this one. Because it’s there.

Now taking opinions on whether to serialize the thing here or on another blog, or to wait until it’s done and post all 50,000 words of it somewheres. To leave your opinion, please press the friendly ‘Post Comment’ link and type after the beep.

I’m lying. Please don’t wait for a beep.

I’ve figured for a while that German would be approximately six barrels of monkeys to learn and speak. It first came upon me whilst singing a Bach hymn that sounded like a drinking song, back in high school. And today, the resolution to learn this language came upon me with renewed force. For I am researching logistics for the World Cup in Germany. I am not sure what kind of flight or flying machine flugzeug might be (pronounced something like floog-tsoig, I would guess), but by all the Muses, a language that can produce a word like that is one that I should know.

Other gems:

• flughafen. I’ve heard this before, but it never gets old. (means ‘airport’.)
• Judging from the English site, unsere zimmer means ‘our rooms’, but I seriously assumed it meant ‘the height of luxury’ at first (the photos assisted me in forming that impression.) How much more fun is ‘zimmer’ than borin’ old ‘room’? I ask you.
• Freizeit sounds a bit more excitable than ‘leisure’, but I’m sure I could get used to it.
• lichtdurchflutete. I infer this means ‘furnished’. I am speechless.

Perhaps I’m morbid…actually, scratch that, I know I’m morbid. At any rate, one of the symptoms thereof is that sometimes, I wonder what would happen to my blog if I were to die. One of its functions, after all, is to prove I was here, that I did something, even if it was silly…even if I never get a novel published, here’s my existential impression upon the world. If I die and stop paying domain fees, will anyone save the contents for posterity? Will they keep them on the web, or just make copies for my family and friends?

Yes, I have actually pondered these things. But stop backing away slowly, this is actually a point that should be pondered. All over the world, people pick up blogs and put them down, like children with fad toys. What if someone’s blog is really GOOD and they stop updating it? Don’t you wonder what happened to them? I know I’ve wondered sometimes, when Baghdad Burning goes a long while un-updated. I don’t know that girl’s real name (and even if I did, good luck finding reliable civilian casualty lists). How do I know whether there’s just even less electricity and telephone than usual in her suburb of Baghdad, or whether she’s part of a scrolling headline on CNN?

So here’s what I propose. All you folks with blogger blogs and diaryland blogs and so forth — choose someone you really trust (preferably someone you don’t think will be in the car if your car is struck by a meteor) and give them your blog password. Then, if you ever die, the untold millions that doubtless troop by and appreciate your humanity will be advised of your mortality. It’s like ‘porn buddies’ on Coupling. Except instead of moving your porn before your bereaved parents see it, they let the internet know that your comic book has become a graphic novel, that the intrinsically serial medium has stopped its series.

I don’t like to think about the vast waste of abandoned blogs frozen in time, proclaiming the sharpness and immediacy of thoughts and concerns long gone. It’s eery. Even I am not that morbid.

By Prudence Bonhomme, staff reporter

Footwear scientists have discovered an incredible concept: fabric or animal hide can be stretched from one side of the sole to the other, thus enclosing the toes and protecting them from low temperatures and precipitation. “We’re very proud,” said Dr. Wyonna Pickle, Professor of Footwear Studies at Big Important Science University. “Too long, humans have wandered the earth with only a sole attached to their feet by a few straps. This revolutionary invention, which we are calling ‘the closed toe’, insulates the toes from cold, shelters them from precipitation, and protects against stubbing. It’s a remarkable design breakthrough.”

Graduate students modeled several of the new ‘closed toe’ designs at the press conference, and it’s evident that many shapes and styles are possible. “Eet’s practical, but eet can be boatiful, also. Zee toe, she is érotique. Vee hide her, vee enhance zee mystère.” said Yvonne von Geterre, a prominent shoe designer, “I ’ope to ’ave a Toe Closed collection on zee runway by zee ’Olidays.”

“It’s wonderful to see how the fashion community is embracing the change,” said gratified scientist Dr. Pickle. “I just hope that early adoption by Paris won’t mean that closed toes are stigmatized as an expensive luxury. Everyone should be able to afford an enclosed shoe. That’s my dream.”

As we survey the streets of a temperate suburb this brisk October morning, and see the bare toes picking their way among the puddles and avoiding the slugs, Dr. Pickle’s dream seems remote indeed.

In the interests of my promise to keep the world up to date on my cinema trips, and recognizing that my effusions on the occasion of the Serenity sneak preview I attended were perhaps not, strictly, a review, I will do a few paragraphs about the movie.

Serenity is a sci-fi movie with a Western heart which continues the story from Joss Whedon’s TV show Firefly, but which was written to stand alone. I have now seen the film three times. I have been able to look past the witty dialogue, the pretty pictures, and the appealing universe, and what I’ve seen is this: this movie is absolutely beautifully paced. It builds and pays off excitement, adds lulls and emotional notes, in just the right rhythm to engage you. Both the plot and the emotional mood change and move perfectly, until, by the last few scenes, you basically feel as if your emotions are a canvas that Joss is daubing at as he pleases, and you like it.

As to the rest, the music was exactly right for the movie; the direction was interesting without being distracting, and the script was funny, smart, and engaging. And oh, the fight sequences. Few movies manage to strike the balance between style and nature; some have beautiful fights which look like gorgeous dances and seem just as planned, while some have brawls which have no real personality or charm. The fight scenes in this movie have both character and grace, and that more elusive element, organic believability.

Funny, touching, intelligent, and very, very exciting. Exceedingly well crafted. Go unless you are allergic to sci-fi (and maybe even then).

In a tall tower of soft stone at the edge of one of the quieter seas lived Eishlin, who was the daughter of one of the greatest of the Dreamers. During the day, she went to endless classes, honing her Dreamcraft and cementing the history of the Dreamers in her mind until she was sick as well as bored. At night, she lay down by her window and rested her head on the sill, and watched the great pearl of the moon, and thought how much she was wronged by her elders.

One day, after hours spent in the halls of Dream-nets tracing every fluffy frill of a single feather, she stomped back to her room in the seaward tower, too angry to be tired by the day. “A feather!” she said to the room, which started at the unexpected noise. “I could Dream a feather with my eyes closed when I was six. And six hours they’d have me spend on one! When shall I have a challenge?” And it was true, for all her bluster; Eishlin’s skills far outstripped her years.

She looked out the window, and saw no moon hanging over the ocean. If she bit her tongue and narrowed her eyes, she could see the dreams of merchantmen plying the far waters; a troupe of merry children carrying fish lanterns appeared and were gone, and a captain wandered in a garden maze whose secret he could no longer remember. She shut the window and the curtains against the scent of the sea and the sight of the dreams, and lay down in bed, but her anger still plucked at her, and she could not sleep. She lit a candle and muttered again, “I will not be treated like a child anymore. I will show them what a Dreamer is. I will Dream…” and she caught, in the soft glimmer of the candlelight, a flash of her tousled hair and frowning face in the tall mirror. “I will Dream the most beautiful girl that has ever been!”

And so Eishlin rose from her bed, pulled back the curtains, and sat on the windowseat so the soft light of the stars would touch her Dream, and said, “Let me see. She shall have dark hair like a shade of mystery, and skin both pale and rosy, like the sky at dawn. Her eyes will hold all love’s secrets, and her lips all of them that can be spoken or felt.” And, as if merely speaking it had Dreamt the Dream for her, the girl formed from her breath in the starlight, each feature swimming out of the vague brightness of her when Eishlin spoke its praises.

Eishlin looked at the girl, and gasped at her own powers. “You ARE the most beautiful girl who has ever been!” she stammered, and if anything, the face she saw was more beautiful for the words she had spoken. Eishlin tried to say something else, perhaps tell her her voice, or speak her dress into less nebulous effulgence. But she found she was so tired, she could not catch the words and make them follow each other, let alone force them from her lips. Perhaps Dreaming was work, after all. She stood, leaning on a chair, and led the girl away from the starlight. She showed her to a large soft chair in her dressing room, for she felt uneasy sleeping under the luminous gaze, and closed the dressing room door before falling into her sleep and her bed.

But you cannot shut away a dream so easily. The lovely hand found the doorhandle in the dark, and the lovely form fled gracefully to the sweet soft light at the window. There, across the glinting darkness of the sea, there were lights and music, voices and shapes, and she lifted the latch and floated out into the night.

It was past three when Eishlin woke, teased by the tapping of the open window against the walls. She was confused at first, but then the window and the dressing room door told their tale, and she hurried to the windowseat with less grace, if more purpose, than had her dulcet Dream. There was no sign of her. A mist of dreams was gliding through the night, the old, disused dreams of grown children and lost sailors. No matter how far she strained her tired eyes, Eishlin could not see her Dream, or even any vibrant dreamland walked by a drowsing soul.

What would the Dream do, out there in the world? Here the Dreamers kept each creation close, tethered to the nets until it was ready to fly free. Would her mother know what she had done? If the Dream were shattered, would Eishlin feel it? None of this did she know. And so, as the curling paleness of the mist passed, drawing with it the faded flotsam of years, she leapt from her window, and caught hold of a long-forgotten row-boat which flapped solemn, silver wings.

She was tired, it was true, but she was young and strong, and she lent the old planks substance and strength, ‘til they creaked under her as she clambered in, and the blue paint on the prow once again appeared: The Right Bartholomew. She set her course by the distant murmur of sleepers, and the Bartholomew answered, and after many hours in which the stars did not move, the boat’s prow brushed softly to rest in a windrow of forgotten oddments, becalmed against the buttress of a beautiful old dream. Eishlin stepped out, and patted the boat goodbye, and it flew off, its vigor restored, towards the bright colors of a little child’s dreams in the offing.

The stone halls of the dream were not real enough for footfalls to sound, but they held her, and she noticed a trail of shimmering glamour in the air ahead, which she followed hopefully. The corridor’s pillars abruptly changed to bamboo trees, and when she looked behind her all was green, while above and below were both bright, sun-touched tree-tops. She shook her confusion away and fixed her eyes on a few motes glimmering like dust in sunlight. She forced her way through the leaves, which clung like lint instead of rustling before her, and continued through the limbo between dreams.

This place was both shapeless and full of shape, for as she walked, dreams tried to form around her, to give and take meaning and form. But she would not look at the shadows or listen to the whispers, and would not turn her head from the trail, and so whatever beauties, whimsies, or horrors she might have beheld, we know none.

The Beautiful Girl had passed through the nothing untouched and unshifted, and stepped into the dreams of a great town. She little understood what she saw, but she walked through the dreams of a mason’s son, and he forsook his trade for paint and tried to capture her glory. She passed by the dance in a young lawyer’s dream, and he awoke and looked at his wife discontentedly. She left her shimmering trail in a little girl’s dream, who went searching for mica the next day and found an orphaned kitten instead. She turned her smile on a village belle, who woke certain of her own ugliness. Her face appeared in the sleep of an elder whose eyes had seen nothing, dreaming or waking, in twenty years, and in the morning he bade the townsfolk to seek the witch who had tried to touch his slumber with her spells.

Her light broke the gloom in the dreams of a young nobleman, who had been in a blood-stained oubliette until she wandered by. The darkness fell apart and he stood, gazing after the vision, but he did not wake. Dimly, he knew something had changed, and as one raised to expect obedience, he began to reorder his dreams that she might return, his angel.

Eishlin had followed the skein of her Dream through a boiling bog, through a market where the animals spoke and the humans had no tongue, through a cramped house and a store where a little old woman sold chipped marbles. Sometimes it nearly disappeared as a dream collapsed, too fragile to survive its dreamer’s waking, but she caught onto it, and pulled herself through the wreck of a village fair, clawed out of a rich tidepool, and marched resolutely through a graveyard where the dead had been buried alive. Soon, she reached a polished checkerboard floor, and saw the distant lights of a party commencing; but the path led to her left, across the burgeoning dreamscapes of two childhood rivals, now hundreds of miles apart, and through a shiver in the air that left her feeling somehow drenched.

She looked around. There was no ground, no sky, and yet no walls. It was all the shade inside your eyelids, and somehow just as close, for all the lack of walls. She felt suffocated. Far off, she could hear someone crying out in pain, and nearer, the sound of a sleeper churning, his breath, body and mind flailing for a truer rest. There was a dripping, insistent and dank, and a smell she did not like. She tried to force her eyes open, but they thought they already were.

And they were. There, there was a scintilla once more…and beyond it, as if she were also a mote, was the Beautiful Girl, held close by the folds of the nightmare. Eishlin reached out with the hands and voice that made her, and called. The light rushed towards her. She turned, and together they fled, matching each other’s fleetness, until they could barely run more, and they fell through the coldness.

They were on a checkerboard again, smooth…but this was not the party. It was some older dream, fixing itself to the life of the new by this tenuous thread of similarity. For it was a checkerboard in truth, a marble checkerboard, huge upon a huge desk. Bottles of ink loomed like hitching posts, and quills, pencils, fountain pens, lay in untidy piles like lumber. Eishlin, rolling on her back and catching her breath, saw the checkerboard again above her, and every pen and giant blotter mirrored there, looming near like academic stalactites. She rolled back up to her knees, and saw the Dream fading from her again, wafting towards the light of the party.

The music started up, soft and sweet; a waltz. The young nobleman turned from the scene, from the flowers of women dancing in the arms of faceless, dark-clad men. She was coming, as he knew she would. She was drawn to him, to the gaiety and power of him, and he caught his breath as she came nearer. Her eyes could hold a man more surely than the velvet of night held sleep, her hair was finer than gossamer, and her lips inspired a thousand metaphors and adjectives each more fanciful than the last, each discarded in its turn until he formed the one word, ‘indescribable’. Her graceful arms reached for him, and he cried out…

For her gracefulness ebbed with a stumble, and she fell towards him with her ineffable lips parted in a silent scream. The sharp point of a solid, well-defined fountain pen, as big as a spear, broached her luminous breast. From it, ink flowed, but there was no blood, and as he caught her, she faded and passed over his hands with the swish of falling silk.

He looked up through his tears, and saw Eishlin, and she saw him, not as he had been, but as he was in the world, a nobleman’s son in a dark blue suit, of about her age. “Why did you do that?” he said.

“Because she wasn’t real,” explained Eishlin. “She was a Dream. It had power, but no substance. It had no potential, no will. It would have taken all you offered to it, and you would have given yourself to no purpose, wasted something on nothing. You cannot love a thing which does not exist. Dreams should enrich the waking, not rob and shame it.”

Eishlin reached out her hand, but the young man turned away, and she walked alone through the dreams and the mist to her window, and, shutting it, climbed into her bed.

And while Eishlin rose to great honor among the Dreamers, they often remarked how queer it was that she never Dreamt a human form. And while she sometimes wondered, she never again heard of the noble boy in the blue suit.