Posts tagged with "portland" - Faerye Net

Readings ahoy!

2013-01-28T19:42:43+00:00

Somehow I’ve neglected to remark on it here, but if you are in Seattle or Portland this week, you should stop by and hear me read in the SFWA Northwest Reading Series!

I’m reading at 7 pm on:
Tuesday, January 29 in Kirkland, WA at the Wilde Rover Irish Pub, with host Cat Rambo and fellow reader Grá Linnaea.

Wednesday, January 30 in Portland, OR at McMenamin’s Kennedy School, with host James Patrick Kelly and Grá Linnaea.

And if you can’t come, there’ll be a little free fiction (to relieve a cliffhanger) online…stay tuned! Many thanks to SFWA and to Jim Kelly for this opportunity!

The 5 Stages of Street Harassment

2012-07-18T21:08:58+00:00

1. Denial. Wait, did someone just say “PROSTITUTE!”? Was that the word? Was it that guy? Was it to me? No, surely I misheard. Let me just listen to the extremely disturbing replay in my head a bit, I’m sure it wasn’t that. Or to me. Shit, it really was.

2. Fleeing. Doooon’t look over your shoulder, fast fast walky walky fast, car around the corner, no one following me, it’s just nerves anyway. It’s a beautiful day, you’re no less safe just because someone reminded you it’s an ugly world.

3. Victim-blaming. Holy shit, is my bra showing? No, it isn’t. Also, what the what, Felicity, you’re a feminist. Cut that out. It’s about him, not you. [Ed: I bet you want to know what I was wearing. I would too. Because it’s how we make sense out of this crap, and unfortunately, shift the blame.]

4. Stubbornness. Stop, stop, stop looking in the mirror and checking your outfit for sluttiness, Felicity. You’re a feminist. You know that this is about that dude and his feelings about women, and the Patriarchy and its inability to allow women to just be, summer clothes and all, without carrying the signification of “SEX” around their necks like a burden and target. That guy is an enforcer. A creepy, crunkle-faced enforcer who wants you to be ashamed of wearing a tank top on a sunny day. He doesn’t get to win.

5. Blog fodder. Just another lovely reminder, folks! Patriarchy Makes Every Day Special!

On beauty and bridges

2011-08-11T09:35:03+00:00

Marquam Bridge, photograph by Dave Feucht

When I was young, I remember reading some opinion piece or quote in the Oregonian about the Marquam Bridge: how ugly it was, what an eyesore, a concrete monstrosity. I turned to my mom and asked which bridge that was. She patiently managed to explain it to me, despite the utter ignorance of which freeway was which that I cultivated in those pre-driving days.

She had extra difficulty in explaining because I simply didn’t believe it was ugly. Yes, it’s notorious for ugliness, I now know. Just in choosing a photo of it on Flickr to illustrate this post I have come across several comments on that score. But I didn’t agree, and I still don’t.

Here’s what the Marquam is to me: once you merge onto the top deck, there’s a curve and a bank and all at once the horizon opens up around you. The city’s on your left with a progression of pretty bridges, but on a good day you don’t care at all because on your right is Mount Hood, and ahead is Mount St. Helens, your friendly local volcanoes fresh in white or burned out in grays and blacks on a blue canvas. On a clear day, it takes your breath away. That is a beautiful experience of a bridge.

I thought of that admittedly odd perspective recently when I was listening to Medicus, a historical mystery set in Roman Britain. A British viewpoint character is being asked her name in Latin — quid nomen tibi est? — and thinks about how ugly Latin is. Again, I was shocked. Latin, ugly?

Well, yes, I suppose it might be. I have only one year’s formal study of Latin, in addition to some childhood lessons from my Latin teacher grandma and years of singing liturgical Latin. I understand from Latin 101/102 that the way we pronounced Latin in choir was grossly unlikely to be how Romans pronounced it. The hopefully accurate rendering robs it of some of its dignity: kikero, not sisero; weni, widi, wiki. It’s full of hard noises, abrupt sounds. I suppose I can understand that to that imaginary Briton, it might be ugly. Unlike some of its Romance offspring, you can’t imagine it being called ‘flowing’ and ‘musical’.

But to me, even with my imperfect understanding, its a beautiful language. It communicates so effectively, so efficiently: the endings tell you precisely what the word is doing in the sentence, so that you can move the words about for aesthetic or rhetorical effect and lose no meaning. It has a set of assumptions that clip out unnecessary words. It allows for clarity and nuance. It’s a beautiful machine of a language, even all these years later. It is elegant. It is awesome.

Or, you know, it’s just a concrete double-decker that gets you from one place to another.

I suppose I think beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder — it’s in where she stands.

Anecdonutal

2011-05-25T21:48:27+00:00

In Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Ryan tried to attract my attention to a question of logistics. I could not answer, I was entranced by a pink box passing near me.

“Look, it’s a box of home!” I said.

“What?”

“That girl had a Voodoo Doughnut box!”

“Why didn’t you knock her down so I could take them?” Ryan said.

“You’re way bigger than me, why shouldn’t you knock people down in this scenario?”

“So I can have the donuts!”

Observation of the day

2011-05-11T21:35:50+00:00

I like to observe things.

Today’s catch: A twenty-something white man in Buddy Holly glasses with a hot pink skateboard strapped to his backpack. He was practicing the moonwalk at a bus stop in the rain.

Portland Monthly Magazine article out!

2011-04-29T09:10:53+00:00

I am not 100% sure the issue is on newsstands yet (it’s the May issue, with a cover story on Farmer’s Markets), but Portland Monthly Magazine has put their article about Portland Nebula Nominees Mary Robinette Kowal, M.K. Hobson and me online!

Here is the link! Article by our own Camille Alexa and photograph (complete with Marla face) by Michael Cogliantry.

I will cop to finding this pretty exciting!

Anomalous Austen

2010-10-13T16:25:28+00:00

If you’re in Portland this Fall and have an interest in literary history or Jane Austen, I recommend stopping by this exhibit upstairs at Central Library, “Lit Chicks: Verbal and Visual Satire in the Age of Jane Austen”. (There’s a reception Thursday, October 28, 4:30–6 p.m — sadly, I will be out of town at a convention.)

My friend Kelley and I stopped by here the other day for a quick peek, and I definitely want to go back. This is part of the description the library gives:

This exhibition puts Jane Austen and women writers of her time in context by displaying manuscript letters and first editions of plays, poetry, and early epistolary “novels” written by Austen’s predecessors, as well as first editions of novels by Austen and women writers who were inspired by her. Women’s periodicals of the day, items from Regency-period life, and later Austen editions and biographies add to the context.

This immediately reminded me of Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which I read last year. In Chapter 8, “Anomalousness”, Russ writes that one of the various ways in which women’s writing is dismissed and winnowed from the literary canon is by rendering it “anomalous” or singular. Single works by remarkable authors are isolated — I daresay many people with BAs in English don’t know that Charlotte Brontë wrote not one novel, but four and a half. But more importantly, perhaps, and more pervasively, those authors who cannot be forgotten or expunged are themselves rendered singular: the long line of female writers that emboldened an Austen or a Brontë to pick up her pen, and moreover to seek publication, are removed.

Russ quotes Claudia Van Gerven’s paper on “Lost Literary Traditions” (which, in a painful irony, I cannot find):

…the inclusion of only the most extraordinary women [but not only the most extraordinary men]…distorts the relevance of those few women…who remain. Since women are so often thus isolated in anthologies…they seem odd, unconventional, and therefore, a little trivial…

(bracketed note in Russ)

and further:

Since women writers are thus isolated, they often do not fit into the literary historian’s “coherent view of the total literary culture.”…As each succeeding generation of women…is excluded from the literary record, the connections between women…writers become more and more obscure, which in turn simply justifies the exclusion of more and more women on the grounds that they are anomalous—they just don’t fit in.

I remember my undergraduate class on British Writers, which I believe covered up to 1800, and I can’t recall a single work by a woman that I read in it. I was pleased to fill in gaps in my literary knowledge: I read works, like Paradise Lost and Faustus, and even Rape of the Lock, which are often referred to or quoted elsewhere. Most of these gave me little reading pleasure. Most of them (sorry, Marlowe fans — and yes, I know the text we have is mangled) did not seem to my subjective eye “great”. And yet they are assigned, recognized, mulled over: canonized.

Just as Van Gerven says, the male writer appears to us in a family tree. The female writer does not — and as a result there are richnesses and allusions made by the few “remarkable” women in canon that the averagely educated reader will not spot. The goddesses of our recorded literature, emerging “like Athena from the head of Jove” as Russ says (I would have gone with Zeus), are without mothers, without sisters.

So let’s see that quote from the library again:

This exhibition puts Jane Austen and women writers of her time in context by displaying manuscript letters and first editions of plays, poetry, and early epistolary “novels” written by Austen’s predecessors, as well as first editions of novels by Austen and women writers who were inspired by her. Women’s periodicals of the day, items from Regency-period life, and later Austen editions and biographies add to the context.

You can’t read the copy of Camilla on display, nor indeed Lover’s Vows, but there’s something thrilling about seeing so much context, so much evidence (not to mention the voyeuristic thrill of reading these authors’ letters and judging their penmanship). And who knows, maybe a few of the visitors, some of the more Austen-mad perhaps, will track down one of Frances Burney‘s books, or Maria Edgeworth’s. Maybe the enduring appeal of Athena can drag her handmaidens and midwives out into the light.

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig

2008-10-01T15:28:45+00:00

Since Ryan let the cat out of the bag, it seems time to mention that I’m in the midst of a big ol’ move. Ryan’s dream job was, as advertised, both dreamy and jobby, and has proven so dreamy that they will let him telecommute from home. I kid you not, his boss said “work should enrich life, not vice versa.” Really. People say that.

Anywho, I’ve been an endless ball of whine about moving down here, and I know it. As Anya said once, “This tone in my voice? I dislike it more than you do, and I’m closer to it!” I can tell that I’ve been a kvetch about the (cloudless) weather, the crazy traffic, the constant merging, but I just couldn’t stop. I’m an alien here. I’m a creature of water. My skin needs it, my lungs need it, my soul needs it. I’m dry, itchy, asthmatic (smog and smoke, more than lack of water) and grumpy. It’s time to go home.

So home we go! I’m moving closer in to Portland than I’ve ever been before, which is quite exciting. I’m hoping to utilize Tri-Met and my own two feet and let the Poky Puppy rest a bit. Walking is good time to ponder plot and pick up details from the real world to cram into my writing. I feel like walking’s more or less our primary mode as humans, and that we don’t do it enough in modern America.

So that is one of the reasons (a recent push of story submissions is another) why I’ve been posting less lately, and I’m sure in the next few weeks I’ll be sporadic about it. But then I will be home, and a happier blogger for it. Let’s face it, adaptability is not one of my greatest virtues, at least when it comes to leaving my home region. Webs between my toes and they never go away.

Elsewhere

2008-09-22T09:45:32+00:00

I’m on the last day of a long weekend in Portland. I had an excuse for coming here, a high school reunion, but the truth is I missed the place. Missed Powell’s, rain, Schmizza, my friends…I even missed things I didn’t realize were different, like there being squirrels everywhere.

So that’s why I’ve been less communicative than is my wont: I’ve bought half a dozen books at Powell’s (and one at Powell’s Beaverton), eaten lunch at Pizza Schmizza, browsed the stock and watched the letterpress at Oblation Papers, had a pot of tea at the TeaZone, bought necessities at Fred Meyer, had a Porter or two off the nitro at McMenamin’s and another pint at the Bridgeport Brewpub. I have gone for many walks, listened while a rainstorm built from shower to deluge, sat about reading companionably with my friends, taken the bus and the Portland Streetcar.

All this and the promise of a baby oliphaunt…huzzah for home!

Adventures at Readings: Notes from a literary event

2006-07-07T23:31:44+00:00

So, having been so pleased with my heady entré into the local literary world, I was eager for another taste. To this end, I perused my Powell’s electronic newsletter with greater attention, and came up with several events to attend. The first one was tonight.

So we gathered, those who were anxious to be seen to Know People, those of us eager to remain in our isolated bubbles, and all of us watching each other, no doubt all to write about the experience in our blogs (we’re all too old to have moved on to MySpace. I hope.) As I said, people-watching was everywhere, and all of us were a bit self-conscious as a result. As I sat, unfashionably early, I read one of my MFA reading-list assignments, Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Darker Side of Human Nature, scribbled notes and musings, and wondered how pretentious I looked. Half the women (as I did) pulled at their shirts to force them to meet their fashionably low pants in back, exposed by the folding chairs. Half the people (as I did) sported Timbuk2 bags — I guess I’m wearing a uniform, unbeknownst to me!

The reading was fun, and I bought a book of stories by Aimee Bender, whose story, reading, and demeanor I liked most of all. Of course they have the three readers sitting at one table to sign, which creates a subtle dynamic of competition. Poor writers; but poorest for another reason.

MOBILE PHONES. Dear Goddess on a Lotus Leaf, MOBILE PHONES. We complain about poor courtesy at movie theatres when one or two phones among 200 viewers go off in two hours. How about five phones among 90 people in less than an hour? 90 people listening to live humans with feelings read things they wrote? I guess I was spoiled by the attentive audiences at the Residency!