bruceb

I've been depressed lately and realized that, yes, part of it is from my research reading. Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice is the single most discouraging thing I've yet read for New Horizons.

It's not the most horrifying and enraging. That would be Slavery By Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon. Blackmon's book is about just how much of the slave-owning structure of Southern society survived and even flourished in the decades from the end of the American Civil War until World War II. Anyone who can read it and not come away enraged and horrified isn't someone I'd care to know. But there's this: it's about the abuses of power, and every decent person of any political outlook must know that power...I don't think power corrupts, just that it offers more opportunities to indulge in whatever corruption is already lurking within. The raw theme that people with power can and will do monstrous things won't be a surprise to many of my readers, even though the scope and nature of particular abuses may be surprising indeed.

Arc of Justice is different because of its focus, the racial violence in Detroit in the summer of 1925 that culminated in the trial of Dr. Ossian Sweet and 10 others for murder, with the lives that brought them and others to that spot. It's depressing in that it looks at the violence and cruelty of those without power, the working-class neighborhoods which could and did turn out hundreds of people to attack black people and destroy their property. The big picture is, again, not likely to be news to many of you: prejudice is alive and well, and flourished then and there. It's the depth of it, and the stupidity of it, and the horrors of the deformations wrought in lives because of it.

(Edit: Specifically, it's watching person after person in the lynching mobs explain how they as working-class white people felt that having a black doctor move into the neighborhood would bring the threat of violence for their men, rape for their women, and general degradation and chaos, and that therefore they had to engage in violence and various kinds of assault to protect their peace and well being. Reading this while seeing anti-health-care mobs on the news was particularly grinding, and certainly contributed to increased pessimism about the risks of violence this time around, too. The lies told by authorities then and now to back up the mobs and protect them once incited contributed, too.)

I just didn't expect it to be quite such a drain on my soul, and I note it in a cautionary way for others. It's an important subject and Boyle handles it well. Just...wow. It's time for a few days with fluff, I think.

This is a first take on something that's actually going into New Horizons.

=-=-=-=-=

One of the most important questions you need to ask yourself, as player or GM, about a campaign involving characters outside the social mainstream is, "Who are the heroes here?" There's a particular trap that's really easy to fall into that I want to give particular attention to.

Western literature is rich in characters whom it's very sensible to call "outsider heroes", both historical and imaginary. One of our classic frameworks is the community where something is wrong—an external threat, internal strife, or both—into which an outsider comes who illuminates the problems and plays a crucial role in their solution. We see it in the lives of prophets, in tales of chivalry, and right on down into pulp's own era with Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (successively riffed on in film as Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, and Last Man Standing, among others). When roleplaying games take up social interaction, they often do it in this spirit, too, with the characters bringing to bear something the rest of their environment lacks and needs.

It's good stuff, too. If you think I'm going to tell you to knock it off, fear not, nothing of the sort.

But there is nonetheless a recurring problem here when it comes to stories involving people of color, or groups of women, or GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transexual/transgendered, and otherwise queer), or politically marginalized, or for some other reason cut off from the political, social, and economic center of their world.

( Read more... )

There's some controversy in the sf world about Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, and about the defense of its author list mounted by Paul di Filippo. Angry Black Woman has the roundup, in her inimitable style, and it would be fair to say that di Filippo is not covering himself with glory on this one.

The key question is, should an editor trying to sample the field widely pay attention to writers' personal backgrounds—their ethnicity and sex, for starters—or not? I want to argue here that an editor interested in the best sweep should for the simple reason that writers' lives matter.

Lives don't determine writing. There are lots of engineering magazine editors and only one Gene Wolfe, but he writes the way he does partly because of what he did at Plant Engineering. I don't know of any other trout fishermen and masters of frugal living who write like Howard Waldrop, but his life shapes his prose, and the way he writes them. Robert Heinlein didn't write The Forever War or 1968 and it seems like a safe bet that Joe Haldeman isn't going to write Starship Troopers, in part because each had such a different experience of war. The Draegera series wouldn't be what it is without a painful divorce along the way. And so on.

This is all a commonplace. We—that is to say, the readership that is mostly white and mostly male—recognizes all of this, as entirely true on the individual level. We are not surprised to learn that Caitlin Kiernan is a paleontologist or Peter Watts a biologist, and while we may be surprised to find that behind the facades of Cordwainer Smith and James Tiptree Jr. were two people who knew the intelligence community from the inside, we take that information and see fresh things in their work. We accept it: lives matter.

The idea that, however, lives across the big social fault lines, like ethnicity and sex and gender and orientation, do not matter rests on nothing much more solid than the desire that they not. In spirit it's not wildly different from the creationist's grudging admission that, sure, breeds exist and breeding works, micro-scale evolution like antibiotic resistance in bacteria does happen, and all of that, but there mustn't be larger-scale evolution because there just musn't be. But lives keep on mattering. Steve Barnes has lived through things none of his co-authors have, and they've all had experiences he can't, because he's black and they're not. Alice Sheldon dealt with things Eric Linebarger didn't. And so on, and so on.

So yes, if you want to survey a field in search of the sweep of its current set of cool ideas, you need to cast your net widely enough to actually get out of your particular little cove, no matter how important it may seem from this vantage point. It may actually be important: you may be fishing in San Francisco Bay, or Puget Sound, or off Cape Cod. But there are still bays and rivers and oceans beyond where you are, and if you don't make an effort to go look in them, you simply can't have any idea what you're missing.

Weight: Well YEAH! Down 2.2 pounds for the week, and across my first threshold. I now weigh a touch under 95% of what I did when I started on Weight Watchers, 11 weeks ago. I'm in touch with my doctor about the pace, and he agrees that it's fine, and mostly the result of early improvements from changes in carbohydrate intake for the sake of diabetes management.

New Horizons: Solidly back in the research groove, and hoping to commit actual prose this week. I've also got a hook my playtesters like - essentially, Leverage 1925. More on that during the week, I hope.

Weight Watchers, week 9: down 2.6 pounds for the week, for a total of 11.2 in 9 weeks. And this takes me across a weight threshold, so that my daily point total goes from 44 down to 43. Progress!

New Horizons: I think I'm over the highest hurdles of this ongoing set of new medical challenges, and I'm settling back in to research and zeroth-drafting chunks of the introduction and general advice. Progress!

It's hot and I'm tired and I do have a lot of broody spells, but I'd say the trend is solidly good.

Back when I set up the New Horizons research, writing, and playtesting schedule, I built in a month's worth of slack time, figuring that inevitably I'd have health-related or other troubles that would keep me from work some weeks. Well, this is that.
If you just read the New Horizons reports, you can bounce back and catch my general health news in this public entry

I'm really just not thinking very much about pulp or history this week, because I'm busy preparing for the overall goals discussion with my counselor and waiting for test results and researching specialists to discuss with the doctor. And then next week I'll be dealing with what I learn this week. So I figured, don't fret it, just take the time off. I'm going to take the current crop of research reading back to the library and take some time to get my bibliography updated, and figure out where to proceed once I'm through this medical-focus stretch.

Comments are on for this one, since it's an unusual and unexpected entry.

 Been a good week! The research has been productive, and I've had some small but useful conceptual breakthroughs which I'll write up.

But that'll be delayed, because I have to get set to see a new doctor tomorrow. This is work-related, really, in that getting my long-term health crud in order will make the project go better. So, more stuff later this week: "extraordinary heroism" rather than "pulp" as an anchor, preliminary thoughts on the roles white people have played in the lives of adventurous people of color of the sort who'd be good inspirations for New Horizons, and the truth vs. truths.

This is a general bit of encouragement and warning to keep in mind about posts coming up in the next few weeks. I'm not exactly doing the first draft of New Horizons yet, but I am drawing together pieces in more coherent format, particularly so that my playtesters can get characters together to help me put the rest to the test.

The language found in a lot of serious, informed writing about matters of bias and privilege often sounds strange to the inner ear. (The third ear? If you hear enlightening things enough...never mind.) What I ask of my readers here is very simple: when you encounter terms you don't know, please ask in a simple, un-editorializing way. Take a moment to throw the terms into Google, and if you don't see anything very helpful there, or you're not sure which of several usages I have in mind, or anything like that, please do feel free to ask, but like this: "What does 'fnord' mean in this context?" or "I'm not sure what 'fnord' means. Could you explain?" Not like this: "What's this PC 'fnord' crap you're throwing around?"

What I really want is for you to do the same thing I'm doing. Suspend your aesthetic-to-moral judgment long enough to really get a feel for unfamiliar language and see what it does in action. You don't have to like it, but I will stomp on rants that seem to be born in just plain ignorance.

Remember that as gamers, we've assimilated a lot of unfamiliar and sometimes ugly usages ourselves. "Splatbook", for instance, can sound startling and disconcerting to non-gamers, and even most of the people who use it in gaming don't really grasp the context in which it originated. (For those playing along at home, the term was coined out of "*book" to refer to any book covering one of several factions in a roleplaying game - clan, tribe, army, whatever. The "*" is here working as the programmer's symbol in many languages for a wild card, telling a computer "get me anything in the list of options". By old-time hacker convention, it's pronounced "splat".) They seem familiar to use mostly through repeated experience.

Well, it's new frontier time for a lot of us. And just as we wouldn't particularly greet with enthusiasm someone who stomped in and demanded that we rewrite all of gaming usage, even if some of the changes individually made a lot of sense, so with people who've been spending more time and effort understanding how we interact as individuals and groups and seeing what can be done to make those interactions not be so ghastly. Accept that we're on unfamiliar ground, grant yourself enough time to really get a sense of things, then make your judgments...and even when you personally (as I do in some case) would prefer alternatives, don't get hung up on the usages any more than you really need to.

To recap:

1. Read.
2. Use Google.
3. Ask questions freely, but courteously or at least neutrally.
4. Read some more.

That'll cover it. :)

It's been a good week. :)

Play of the Tuesday campaign wrapped up nicely, the PCs liberating the brain of Mark Twain from his Soviet captors and deciding to join him on a trip up the Yenisei River to see what's at that Tunguska place anyhow. The Sunday campaign will wrap up this coming Sunday, with our heroes prisoner in the capitol of an evil genius' empire in an alternate Earth.

Research reading continues apace.

Coming up, a few weeks' pause of play while I start writing some actual New Horizons content. Look for snippets to appear here for commentary.

Whoof.

+ Had a very satisfying Spirit of the Century session. I've nailed down some things that were making my sessions not so much fun and applied fixes, and it sounds like it worked for the players as well as me.

. Had an excellent morning walk, as noticed in previous post and photo.

+ Had a fine Mother's Day visit with Mom.

+ I'm not yet actually signed up for Weight Watchers (I'll be doing that as soon as the next check comes, sometime this month), but I've started tracking the point cost of what I'm now eating, to establish a baseline sense and sharpen my awareness of what in particular needs to change. And I ended up very much closer to Weight Watcher's recommended total for my weight range than I'd have guessed.

- Took part, probably too much part, in a very, very long, often grueling exchange over at Tor about the handling of Native Americans in Pat Wrede's new novel. (This is not an invitation to have that debate here, and if you post comments about how I'm all silly and wrong, I'll nuke them and snarl as I do it. The subject is not open for discussion here at this time.) I feel worn and discouraged from it, even with the revitalizing jolt of good gaming. Hope that rest will sort it out.

It is interesting to see just how far my views on a lot of prejudice-related topics has come. I think I just plain know a lot more than I did, and that New Horizons will benefit from it. I know it won't be the book some folks insist it should be, but I'll deal with that in due season.

Now to kick back and rest some.

BruceMri: She frowns again. "You must one of ze enemies he often speak of."
BruceMri: The police sirens are getting closer. Wiggins straightens his tie.
Thornstone: "Who is this man?" Thornstone asks Dallas. "And trust me, Gretchen, whatever Talizian relics managed to travel here did so without these people's knowleged; they are scholars, not grave robbers."
Dallas_Pane: "Happily, yes. But listen, if we want to talk about Doc Z, I suggest we not go over it now. Let's head over to the museam and get this worked out. You wouldn't be the first group that he pulled the wool over on."
Dallas_Pane: ((This conversation belongs in a museam! ))
• BruceMri loses it completely. 

Anyone read these stories of 18th century Ojibwe brothers modeled after Asterix and Obelix? Looks like a good time.

Something really struck me on this pass through Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism: how little attention she pays to the role of business in the workings of the state in her own time (late 1940s to late 1960s, through successive editions). As far as she's concerned, the era of commercial influence on world affairs is over, with the superpowers' national budgets driving the Cold War era's imperialism and businesses gaining or losing depending on how much they can attach themselves to agendas that are fundamentally political rather than economic.

Certainly, that's not the way I'd describe the current state of affairs, to put it mildly.

This is where it gets interesting. It's true that the superpowers were spending vast resources on agendas that absolutely couldn't be rationalized within the prevailing commercial worldviews. But it's also true that the agendas were shaped, pushed, and parasitized on by individuals and groups who did have economic concerns, for whom politics was just a means to the really important stuff. She missed that because she didn't think to look for it. She clearly knew that that sort of relationship had been important in the past - it's all over part I of her book. But she thought that it had burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp of wartime destruction and postwar realignments. So there's no hint in work of what would, in a few decades, make the biggest economic and political crisis in nearly a century, even though the economic capture of the postwar order had begun...well, really, as she was doing the first edition of her book.

And this is where it gets practical. Knowing, or thinking she knew, that the eclipse of economically-driven social agendas by political ones was a major factor in the rise of modern totalitarian and other oppressive regimes, she focused on life under economic focus in its decline. She's concerned with long-term losses of influence here and rises there, and so on. Whereas when I look this week at, say, how the US' balance of internal power shifted after World War I and people with influence over the wartime mobilization struggled to keep hands on its controls for their own peacetime ends (and for that matter how "peace" wasn't always a very good word for what was going on), I am likely to pay extra attention to how economic authorities tried to persuade and intimidate political counterparts so as to use state power for business interests. Where an initial perusal suggests political control of economic influence without a strong counter-flow of influence, I'm much more likely than Arendt would have been to say "Oh yeah?" Because that's not part of the story of my time, nearly so much.

This is another thing I need to touch on for New Horizons: recognizing the limits of one's resources, and recognizing that this is both inevitable and okay. It's just something we have to deal with, and can.

Finally, I can only wonder what it is I'm overlooking that will make any readers I might have in 2040 say exactly this kind of thing about me. :)

I'll do this up at longer length another time, but...doing my New Horizons homework has freshly reminded me of one of the really major trends in 20th and 21st-century history writing is the increasing attention to individuals, and the decreasing emphasis on really big generalizations. It's a stock criticism of modern history (and the humanities in general) that thanks to vile political correctness, everything is now about blocs and factions, and individuals get lost in the shuffle. I find just the opposite in my reading.

Take a really good writer of accessible history - that is, not aiming at specialists and a purely professional audience, but written with undergraduates and non-scholars in mind. Barbara Tuchman, say, or Richard Hofstadter, or Samuel Eliot Morrison, or Jonathan Spence, or Hannah Arendt - genuinely good writers out to convey important information as well as to provide pleasurable entertainment. (Or, in same cases, instead of that.) The farther back I go, the more I find usages like "The whole nation was concerned by..." and "Nobody in the city could talk about anything but..." and "To Austria, the Jew was..."

Now take someone talented and writing in the same general way from the last decade or two - Eric Rauchway, or Lynn Pan, or E. Fuller Torrey, MD, and Judy Miller, or Stephen J. Diner, or Douglas A. Blackmon. There are generalizations, sure, but there's nothing wrong with that. Scenes need setting. But with the foundations, I find all these authors being a lot more specific, with usages like "The aristocracy mostly supported these claims, with dissent confined to..." and "The major newspapers all gave front page after front page to the story, but it got few column inches after the initial revelations in small-town papers, or the labor and religious press..."and "Priorities weren't just different but diametrically opposite further south, and we must approach an examination of circumstances south of the Mason-Dixon line with as few assumptions as possible based on experiences reported in Chicago or New York."

This is just what I want out of my histories: an understanding of specifics, as well of the context. There'll be no way I can do justice to historical complexity and variety in New Horizons, but I can try, and hope to point readers toward opportunities to go further.