Nov. 17th, 2010

emma_in_dream: (Default)
Her blood tests show that she has normal levels of vitamin D and iron. So probably no hypotonia!

The very best of news.
emma_in_dream: (call me a cab)
Pearl has mixed feelings about Ruby. She draws pictures for her and constantly wants to look at her. On the other hand, she has bitten her multiple times and flipped her over once and whacked her head a couple of times. I think she is slowly getting a little better.

On the bright side, I think she has reached a new developmental stage - She asks 'why, why, why'.

And she told me her first pun/joke. I am so proud and actually kind of amused.

Me: 'We have to go. Quicksticks.'
Pearl: 'Quackstacks.'
Me (thinking): Nice vowel substitution.
Pearl: 'That's what birds say. Quack.'
emma_in_dream: (avon)
#30 - Tanya Huff, The Fire’s Stone (1990)

This is one of Tanya Huff’s earlier works, and you can see this from the clunkiness of the action scenes. It’s high fantasy so there are a lot of sword and sorcery scenes - so that’s a shame.

I do like it a lot, though. Because it has a canonical bisexual pairing which is rare and partly because I like the ridiculously over-the-top heroism of the characters.


#31 - Terry Wolverton, Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman’s Building (2002)

Terry Wolverton’s biography is fascinating. She was involved with the Woman’s Building in LA in the 1970s to 1980s. This was the place where the American west coast feminist art movement coalesced.

Wolverton is a writer and a performance artist and she worked as an administrator and fund-raiser at the Woman’s Building in the 70s and 80s. The book provides a really interesting insight into the lesbian art scene in the 1970s, the feminist art movement, the history of women’s art and separatist art, and also Wolverton’s personal creativity.

What I find most interesting is the tension throughout the book in the vision of the Woman’s Building. It was intentionally an outsider organisation, showcasing feminist art. But this vision always made it difficult for it to survive as a long-term proposition (and indeed it folded in the 1980s with the Reagan era move to prudery and funding cuts).


#32 - L Timmel Duchamp and Eileen Gunn, The Wiscon Chronicles: Provocative Essays on Feminism, Race, Revolution and the Future (Vol 2), 2008

This is a miscellany arising from Wiscon 31 (2007) - the feminist sf convention.

As is apparently customary for Wiscon, there was a very focussed online row following the convention - in 2007 about race and revolution.* The pieces include a partial transcript of a panel on race and revolution which sparked the debate, reflective pieces on the panel, pieces written in the immediate aftermath and pieces written some time later.

There are also a range of other papers, including prognostications by authors on the issues likely to be pressing for feminists at Wiscon ten years in the future.

The key word for me was ‘range’. The collection has male and female authors, gay and straight, and a lot of non-WASP authors. I really enjoyed reading a collection where the effort had been made to ensure diversity.




* In 2010 the row has begun before the convention. See: http://community.livejournal.com/wiscon/

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