From the Department of Bad Ideas... @HipsterFeminist!

So a little while ago I got the terrible idea to start a daily joke Twitter feed called Hipster Feminist-- "She buys into the masculine hegemony ironically." But now I've actually decided to do it. Along the lines of Feminist Hulk or The Goddamn Batman, it will have a daily post of whatever joke I can come up with on the subject that fits into a hundred and forty characters.

If you care to subscribe, the name is @HipsterFeminist and I have just begun today with its very first joke tweet. Follow HF in her daily defiance of the mainstream and the patriarchy.

Let's see what nonsense I can do with this. ;-)

"Chinese peonies and a sea of sheets": my photoshoot with Haz

This past Friday I had the privilege of being the subject of a session of hazliya*'s fabulous photography. I've been admiring her work for a while now-- particularly her fantastic shoot with morethings5 in which she turned him into an ethereal antlered spirit of the woods --and was really delighted when she agreed to do a shoot with me.

Me and my vanity have a strange relationship with photography. I've never felt I photographed particularly well, and my typical response to pictures taken of me was to marvel how little they aligned with the person I see (and, honestly, so much prefer the look of) in the mirror. Plus my skin always comes out blotchy and my hair is always somehow wrong. I know the camera doesn't lie, but I think it emphasizes things that aren't necessarily as prominent, like the redness in my skin, in real life. And yet, with my Narcissus-like absorption with my own image, I really enjoy being the subject of photographs. The only times pictures work out to my satisfaction has been when the photographer has taken a little care with the lighting and everything, and frankly since I don't have the best skin I think wearing the makeup I usually eschew serves to even things out.

Haz is an awesome person to work with. She is great with every aspect of a photoshoot-- she does fabulous hair and makeup, she knows how to dress the set, she sets up gorgeous shots, and she gives great direction that really helped me figure out what to do with himself. I have done a little bit of modeling before, mostly very closely proscribed shoots involving "wear this costume and get x, y, and z shots on my list," but I really liked the way Haz experimented and gave such helpful direction.

I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised by how much the whole process felt like doing theater. Getting into hair, makeup, and costume (such as mine was, heehee), having to put together a set, and then take direction to do the piece. But the few other times I did something like this didn't have that familiarity, so it was a pleasant surprise.

All the pictures are on Facebook now, if you'd like to see them. Haz is a whiz at photo editing as well, which also blows me away. It helps downplay all those little imperfections that I fixate on. That's the mark of a truly vain person, by the way-- not that they know everything that's right about that, that they know everything that's wrong about them. Though I like all of them, here are my three favorites:

So many thanks to Haz for being so awesome. I actually like these photos, that useless pointed corner of my room actually was good for something, and I like the way I look in yellow here. All very, very amazing things.

Pepperface

My dad takes pictures of stuff he's doing and sends them to me. The other day he was picking some things that were ready to be harvested in his garden, and he sent me this.

It is, in case you can't tell, a face made out of various kinds of hot peppers laid out on the kitchen counter. He has a banana pepper nose, jalapeno eyes, and chile pepper mouth and eyebrows. His hair may be made of out slices of red onion.

My dad is fun. :-)

Merely Players script finished

At last, I have completely edited and polished up the script for Merely Players. I confess I am still not totally satisfied with it. The edit took me a long time because I was stuck on not being happy with a couple of areas and wasn't quite sure how to fix them. There's still a place or two where it doesn't feel quite right to me. But at least it's done and ready to go. I have sent it off to several trusted readers to examine and give suggestions on if any come to mind. The first reader I've heard back from has been positive, so perhaps it's better than I fear.

Now I must begin on really blocking it. There is some blocking incorporated into the stage directions, basically to convey to the reader how the blocking is supposed to support the melodramatic humor of the piece, but there needs to be a lot more stage business than just that. As I've mentioned, it's very important that this piece use space and interact with the audience differently than a typical show. I want the entire space to be utilized for the performance, not just the small auditorium stage, with all the characters being visible for most of the show, moving among the audience, unusual things like that. I know the space we're going to have and how we're going to arrange it. That's enough information to get started. I like going into a production with at least a solid idea of the blocking; it makes rehearsals go more smoothly. Of course you have to be willing to let things grow and evolve once the actors are involved, but I find everything works better when they have a jumping-off point.

Representational nature of theater

One of my favorite things about theater as a medium is the conventions that are peculiar to it. I particularly love that it is acceptable for theater to be highly representational as opposed to strictly literal in its portrayals. For example, a single tree on stage can be understood to stand in for a whole forest, a woman dressed and carrying herself like a man is understood to be playing a male character, or a puppet with the puppeteer clearly visible can be accepted as a child or a dog or a spirit. Due to that conventions, audiences will go in to see a piece of theater with the willingness to suspend certain disbelief and buy more readily into the conceits of the representation. You'd never get that in a medium like cinema a higher degree of literal realism is expected, and people constantly complain about effects that look fake. I tend to really enjoy pieces of theater that make use of this. I could see myself leaning towards writing a lot of things that require an interesting representation to depict something that is not easily exactly imitated onstage.

Dia de los Sobres approaches

Coming up this weekend is Dia de los Sobres, or Day of the Envelopes, the Saturday where natbudin* and I run Resonance and wired_lizard* and mllelaurel* run Stars Over Atlantis back-to-back. We've got an excellent player group for both games, so I'm very excited both to run my larp and play in theirs.

I must say, Stars didn't immediately jump out at me. The blurb didn't give me a very good sense of it, and given that it takes place in a BDSM club I was concerned the subject matter might not be my cup of tea. But Tory and Lily are really good writers-- I thought The Sound of Drums was excellently written --so I wanted to give it a try. I just got my casting the other night, and from the looks of my character sheet there is something very interesting going on with the plot of this game, so I feel pretty good about it. I will be playing Rhiannon Sinclair, the author whose book reading all the characters are attending. Costuming shouldn't be hard, it's chic artsy-gothy, but I don't really own the pieces I'm picturing. I really wish I had a fitted v-neck blouse with drapey sleeves, because that would be perfect. Maybe I'll wear one of my scarves as a poncho over my mesh shirt. And then maybe my long black skirt I bought for Labor Wars on the bottom, with my black leather tall boots. That might work. I'll have to mess around, maybe give the Moody Street thrift store a quick look.

Jared and Bernie are going to be our AGMs for Resonance. Jared played the game at Festival and had a really good time, which pleased me to no end. Bernie will be in charge of the casting mechanic. We are running it very simply this time around, which was the original plan, but in previous runs there was a bit more managing and handling rather than just letting the data speak for itself. I think this way will make it go a little more quickly. Other than that, the previous run proved that the concept works quite well, and I think this group of players will be suited well enough to the material to give a very cool run.

It's nice to get some larping in the summer, which is typically a real dead season. Yay for roleplaying in my life again!

Mrs. Hawking 1.1

A little late, but here is the product of my first "write apiece of theater every two weeks" cycle. It's a scene from a larger play rather than a ten-minute stand-alone. I don't know, I might go somewhere with it. 

            (NATHANIEL HAWKING, a well-dressed gentleman in his late twenties, is discovered onstage. He sits in a stylish Victorian parlor and appears to be waiting. A large portrait of a man hangs over the mantelpiece. Before long a bell rings, and he leaps up to answer the door. MARY STONE enters, a plainly dressed working-class young woman. She clasps a suitcase and is bundled against the rain.)

NATHANIEL: Ah, Miss Mary Stone, I presume?

MARY: Indeed I am, sir. And you are Mr. Hawking, then?

NATHANIEL: Call me Nathaniel, if you please. I am very pleased to meet you. I trust you have recovered from your voyage?

MARY: Well enough, though the London weather was quite the shock. I shall certainly miss the Indian climate.

NATHANIEL: I am sure. Oh, allow me.

            (He places her suitcase aside, then takes her coat and hangs it for her.)

NATHANIEL: I am certainly glad to find you here. Your turning up in London may be the solution to our problem.

MARY: I understand you advertised on behalf of a relative?

NATHANIEL: My aunt Victoria. She was the wife of my dear uncle, the late Colonel Reginald Hawking of the Afghan campaign. Remarkable woman, I’m terribly fond of her, but… she has queer ideas at times. After my uncle’s passing she dismissed all the staff, but I’ve convinced her that she’s in need of someone around the house. It isn’t right for a lady to go on alone in the world. Almost more than the help, I think she could do with the company.

            (Enter a lady in her late thirties to early forties, businesslike and stern, MRS. VICTORIA HAWKING. She regards them, then silently approaches until she is just behind NATHANIEL.)

NATHANIEL: But I must warn you, miss, she is not warm to the idea just yet. She’s stiff-necked, you see. Fiercely independent. You mustn’t take offense if she seems… brusque or standoffish to you, she only just hasn’t quite come round to the notion of needing help.

MARY: I quite understand. I know how difficult it can be to begin your life all over again.

MRS. HAWKING: Is that the girl?

            (Startled at the sound of her voice, NATHANIEL spins around and, in an effort to keep from running into her, stumbles backwards onto the ground.)

NATHANIEL: Aunt Victoria!

MRS. HAWKING: How you must suffer for me, Nathaniel.

MARY: Oh, let me help, sir.

            (MARY helps him to his feet with practiced ease.)

NATHANIEL: Thank you, miss. Auntie, I am only too glad to be of service. Miss Mary Stone, may I introduce you to my dear lady aunt, Mrs. Victoria Hawking?

MARY: A pleasure to make your acquaintance, madam.

MRS. HAWKING: I’m a fair ways off from my dotage yet, Nathaniel. Do you think me so frail that I require a nursemaid?

NATHANIEL: What are you talking about, Aunt Victoria?

MRS. HAWKING: I consented to hiring a house girl, and you’ve brought me a nurse.

NATHANIEL: Aunt, I’ve done nothing of the kind. Miss Stone isn’t a nurse. You always think you know my meaning before I say it, but truly sometimes you decide in haste! 

MARY: I am, in fact, I suppose. In a manner of speaking. I nursed my parents through the last months of their illness.

NATHANIEL: Indeed? Ah, well, see, she is an even more capable lady I’d thought. 

MARY: May I ask, ma’am, how did you know?

MRS. HAWKING: The practical way you just now lifted my nephew. You’ve done a great deal of helping bodies in and out of bed.

MARY: Oh, my. That’s it precisely.

NATHANIEL: My dear aunt has quite the keen sense of people, you see. Please, sit here and let us get to know one another, shall we?

MRS. HAWKING: At least this one can string two words together. Unlike that last girl. Wherever did you find her, the lobotomy ward at Colney Hatch?

NATHANIEL: Aunt Victoria, please!  

MRS. HAWKING: But now you’ve brought me this girl. Your given plain meek unmarried young woman, new and friendless in London, I see. I would not have left India for this dreary place, but I suppose there are circumstances that can’t be helped.

MARY: That’s the truth of it, ma’am. I see you’ve been told something of my history.

MRS. HAWKING: Only by your dress. A lady who wears Indian linen beneath her greatcoat is one who has not long had need for warm clothes. Very well then, if I must have you then I shall see that I get some use out of you. I would hope a woman who’s lived abroad a time would not be a useless fainting flower. Tell me your accomplishments.  

MARY: Accomplishments may perhaps be too strong a word, madam. But I have many years’ time keeping house for my family, hold to a budget, cook well and sew capably. I have attended some school so that I can read and write in English and French—

MRS. HAWKING: Enough of that. You are educated, that is well. Can you keep an appointment-book?

MARY: Very well, Mrs. Hawking.

MRS. HAWKING: And have you the good sense God gave you?

MARY: I very much hope so!

MRS. HAWKING: So too I. I can’t abide a woman who forgets her own head on her shoulders. Well, it gives you a leg up on the other dull-witted chits he’s dragged in front of me. Provided you can hold your tongue and keep your own business, I supposed that you shall do for me.

NATHANIEL: So you’ll have her on?

MRS. HAWKING: I suppose I can stand to.

MARY: Thank you very much, madam! I will not disappoint you.

MRS. HAWKING: I may hope.

MARY: When shall I move in my things?

MRS. HAWKING: I beg your pardon?

MARY: I shan’t need much space. And I can wait for your convenience.

MRS. HAWKING: Nathaniel, I said did not want anyone in the house.

MARY: Oh, dear. I was told that this would be a billeted situation.

NATHANIEL: Aunt Victoria, I explained to you that this would be the way of it. Such is Mary’s situation. And may I point out that you have chased all your other options off?

MRS. HAWKING: Ah, very well. Your claims shall be tested straightaway, it seems. I warn you that I am not a sociable creature, Miss Stone. Heed me well and things shall get on. Well, I suppose that settles that. Can you arrive at ten-thirty sharp tomorrow?

MARY: I will not be late.

MRS: HAWKING: Good. It is another thing I cannot abide. Now you may go. Thank you for your assistance, Nathaniel. I have done.

NATHANIEL: Of course, dear aunt. The Colonel would have wanted me to take care of you.

MRS. HAWKING: Bless him for that.

            (Stand and exit MRS. HAWKING.)

NATHANIEL: I am very glad she’ll have you, Mary.

MARY: She seems very displeased with the whole matter.

NATHANIEL: Don’t you worry. Compared to what she thought of the others, she seems quite taken with you.

MARY: Oh, my.

NATHANIEL: She’ll come round in time. My aunt has always been of odd habits, but she’s become… withdrawn of late. I worry for her should she continue on this way. I think you may be precisely what she needs.

Pathological fear of awkwardness

I have an excessive fear of awkwardness. I don't know why, but I absolutely can't stand it. It makes me uncomfortable to the point where I will go to enormous, often massively inconvenient lengths to avoid it. Generally, this just means I don't like being around constantly awkward people. But other times it means that I will not risk dealing with any situation with which I'm not totally comfortable for fear of things becoming awkward.

The thing that bothers me is that my tolerance for it is so low is that sometimes it even keeps me from seeking out my friends if there strikes me as the slightest possibility of it. There are a fair number of people I like who I am sometimes afraid to contact for fear of having an awkward interaction. Unless I am absolutely assured that they will be a person I can socialize with without having to stress over what to talk about and how to keep things going smoothly, often I can't make myself reach out at all, even if I want to. I can't even initiate an IM conversation, no matter how much I want to talk to a person just to enjoy their company, if I'm worried I won't have enough to say. Sometimes I can only see certain people in groups, not because I don't want to be with them one-on-one, but I'm afraid that without more people contributing I won't be engaging enough.

You know how more and more I hold dinner parties as my preferred form of social interaction. It's in part because I have the control in that situation to keep them working the way that makes me most comfortable. The guest list is chosen by me, the activity and setting and context is all acceptable to me, and it can be managed to minimize the potential for awkwardness.

There's other things tied into this, like how I sometimes half-expect people to find my asking for their contact a bother, like I'm nagging them for their attention. Though I do in fact actually know that my friends wouldn't be my friends if they didn't like spending time with me, it can be hard to shake the paranoia sometimes that people who don't contact me very often are only just being friendly when I am around to be polite. But it's a two-way street, maybe they're feeling the same way as I do about me. Maybe they're just as afraid of awkwardness as I am, or that they might be bothering me if they do contact me. (I couldn't say I'd blame them for that, given what a grumpy person I am.)

I think this goes back to the fact that I rely a lot on etiquette and nonverbal communication to interact with people. I was brought up to believe the height of good manners was the ability to take a hint. Do not, for example, force someone to SAY they are uncomfortable with something you're doing, but rather, be able to SEE that they are uncomfortable and then act accordingly to relieve it. It is awkward to have to say something like, "I need to be alone right now, so go away," or "I don't want to go out because I can't spend the money," so the well-mannered person tries to be sensitive to the projected feelings of others to not force them into having to articulate things that make them embarrassed. And accordingly, I would like people to be able to be just as sensitive to me. But unfortunately there are plenty of things that there is no real reason to feel uncomfortable about saying and therefore would be better to just SAY. But those things can be really hard for me because of this sensibility. Like, this situation wouldn't be awkward if I just have the savvy to keep it from becoming awkward. I was in a situation recently where just throwing out the things I was feeling verbally was the best way to handle it, but even though I was speaking to a good friend I trust, and managed it and I'm ultimately glad I did it, I really wish I could have found a less awkward way to make myself understood.

Since my depression really set in there are a handful of people who are truly important to me that I kind of slipped out of contact with. Not completely, fortunately, but spending as much time as I did shut away moping did not do anything positive for those relationships. I feel so bad about losing touch that I feel awkward about getting back into touch because it will highlight how long I've ignored them. Which just leads to staying even longer out of touch. And then I am further distanced from those important people.

What I need to do is just get over it. Trying calling, IMing, even hanging out with people I want to have in my life. And if things are awkward well... I'll just have to deal. And if I can't, nobody has more "escape in case of awkward" plans than I do. It's not going to kill me if I try. And things might just get less awkward in the future because of it.

Hemingway's manufactured masculinity



This originally started out as a casual remark on Twitter, but I think long tweet chains are silly especially when you have a blog you are devoted to. So I am doing some of my reading for school, which right now is almost entirely ten-minute plays, when I see "Hills Like White Elephants," a short story by Ernest Hemingway has been included. You know my feelings on Hemingway by now, I assume, which I sum up with the pithy criticism that he reads like a drunken telegram. His prose always leaves me cold, though I guess somebody must enjoy it, and I dislike his cardboard-cutout-cookie-cutter main characters. I can understand why he is enjoyed, I suppose, though I don't really see why he has attained classic status. The only thing I can think of is that people have decided to accept Hemingway into the canon as one of the major bards of masculinity in a way few other writers do. I think he appealed to men struggling to feel masculine who used him as an interpreter, believing he explains what they're missing, supplying them both with a notion of a manly identity as well art that reflected it. But I really don't think that Hemingway really HAD a sense of what "true manhood" was, nor do I think he failed to recognize that. His work is his attempt to reconstruct masculinity, to figure out what it really was. The manhood represented in his work is an educated guess at best. But lots of men read it and, lacking their own sense of what masculinity was and the ability to evaluate the truth of Hemingway's portrayal, allowed the work to tell them what they thought was the answer to their question. They took Hemingway's word for it, unaware that he wasn't actually an authority.

I think my opinion of Hemingway's work is deeply influenced by the fact that I don't like his postulation on the nature of masculinity. I think he got it very, if not totally, wrong. I think his construction of manhood consists of taking his own problems like drinking too much and not being able to get along with any of his wives and calling them "manly things" to make them justifiable. Men want to be masculine, it's a good thing for men, so under this model he's not dysfunctional, he's just manly, which is what he is supposed to be. And I think that spoke to all the men who wanted to be real men but had those same stupid problems. They were happy to hear those problems weren't problem after all, just signs that they were real men. That's an over-generalization, of course, but I think there's something to it.

Musing before A Dance with Dragons

I bought A Dance with Dragons for Kindle on my iPad the day it came out. I haven't had time to read much of it, but I'm very much looking forward to it. I confess I'm a little apprehensive, as most of the characters I've thus far liked less or been less interested in (Jon Snow, Arya, Daenerys) are this book's POV characters. Jon feels too cliche to me, Arya's been on a downward spiral into becoming a murder-machine non-person, and Daenerys I started liking in the first book but after that was annoyed by. At least Tyrion, my favorite character, comes back. Read no further if you want to avoid spoilers.

A quick aside on Daenerys, since she's everybody's favorite except mine. (Oh, how often it turns out that way.) I thought she started out really cool in A Game of Thrones. I liked her arc of being thrown into this totally alien world of the Dothraki but ends up finding her place in it and growing. But she is jam-packed with Mary Sue qualities and by the next book they started to get to me. She's young and gorgeous, of course with silver hair and purple eyes, and despite having no education in any kind of leadership or statecraft she is spontaneously able to lead and inspire and wage a war with a reasonable degree of progress. I also dislike that she has never once stopped to examine the notion that she takes for granted, that of course she should storm into Westeros and and take over its rule. Um... why must you do this? What do you expect to make better? Yeah, it sucks that the ruling family you came from was murdered, but your granddad the king was a MADMAN and a TERRIBLE RULER, and to a certain extent kind of brought his death on himself. You also know nothing about ruling (except what you magically develop because you're a Mary Sue.) Besides a slavish devotion to the idea of birthright, a notion my modern, meritocratic mind resists, why should thousands of people die and all those nations be plunged into war to put a pretty crown atop your uniquely-colored locks? She has no answer, because she's never bothered to think about it. Bugs me.

Anyway. It also gets me thinking about my personal pet issues that the series put into my mind. Shortly after I first started reading the idea occurred to me that Lyanna and Rhaegar might be Jon Snow's true parents, a theory that apparently many fans have had independently of each other. I have become quite attached to the idea, as I've never quite bought into the notion that siring a bastard would be in Ned Stark's character. But if this is in fact true, then it makes me very angry with Ned. I've gone off on this to some friends before. I imagine what he did would have been to promise Lyanna that he would never tell anyone the baby's true parentage, which because he's Ned he held to the letter. But him not telling Catelyn really burns me. A woman shares your life, raises your children, and loves and supports you in any way, and you don't let her be the one person in on the family secret that otherwise causes her enormous pain? Catelyn had to live every day thinking the man she loved fathered a child on another woman during their marriage, suffering a great deal for it in addition to causing Jon (through no fault of his own) a lot of pain because she couldn't manage to treat him with any love. If Eddard had been willing to just bring his wife into the secret-- "We have to pretend he's my bastard to keep him safe and because I promised Lyanna!" --I'm sure Catelyn would have completely understood and kept the secret with him. She then would have been able to love Jon and treat him properly. But no, yet again the devoted woman suffers so men can keep their manly standards. Her pain was less important than the letter of an oath made to a dead woman. Every man I've spoken to about this understands Ned's point of view. Every women I've spoken to about it is appalled.

The other thing that dug its way into my brain was the events leading up to the death of Tywin. I felt like his sleeping with Shae was really out of character. It struck me as so petty, an act that could have no meaning except to hurt Tyrion, and while Tywin has so many other negative qualities, that is not one I would have assigned to him. Because he did at least seem strong, with standards, and that seemed beneath him. I was really fascinated by his character, and had sort of framed him in my mind as a tactician of ruthless practicality, with the need to protect the image and status of his house so fiercely that it factored into everything he did. Nothing in the world mattered to him so much as that. I get that he has issues with Tyrion, most of them rooted in the fact that a crass dwarf son doesn't fit in with the shining House Lannister image he wants to build. But I didn't see him as being so small and base as to take pleasure from hurting Tyrion. And come on, there are enough whores in the world that to sleep with the one his son had developed affection for could only be as a way to hurt him. Yeah, maybe he never expected Tyrion to find out, but even so, why her in particular? He had no attachment to her, and as I said there is no shortage of whores in that world. And yes, I know he'd hurt Tyrion in other ways before this-- the Tysha incident being the huge one --but it was always in the service of protecting the Lannister image; the pain to Tyrion was incidental, it was never the point. It wasn't that he intended for his son to suffer, per se, it's just that suffering was part of the means to his much more important end. There was literally no reason to use Shae except to cause Tyrion pain. And I would have thought he was above torturing someone just for its own sake. Perhaps it's due to my personal biases, but I tend to think that truly strong people, regardless of whether they are good or evil, are not petty, or at least to do allow their feelings of pettiness to express.