The Last Bastion Of Absurdity

Today, I am indignant about Heidegger. Specifically, about his opaque and rambling speech to some architects being foisted on us in a poetics class with zero context. Yes, Martin, it is certainly an excellent idea to give people an essay to talk about, then tell them they are all wrong because the essay is impossible to fully understand wihout reading a bunch of other essays you did not give them, nor indicate they ought to find, not that they would have anyway since three assessments are due in this fortnight, one for your subject.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Thinking more about my LURK MOAR epiphany, possibly I should make use of it in class. That way I will figure out that stuff like the above has happened BEFORE I start shooting my mouth off about thing-ness and neuropsychological synthesis and get told off for being too teleological :P

(I did not, incidentally, mean that people who read my journal should lurk moar. TALK TO MEEE)

...I am doing a class in which I can get told off for being too teleological. Ohhhh academia.

Okay, okay, I TRIED to stay out of it because I KNEW it would be full of the same old infuriating People Who Just Don't Get It, but I caved. I read up on the blowout currently going by RaceFail 09. And I found to my surprise that I did, in fact, have something to say about it.

Okay, firstly, to get it out of the way, ( my take on writing characters with a different cultural background to my own )

Now, on to the actual controversy. EDIT: I got distracted and ended up waffling about something only vaguely related? So my actual comments about the actual internet kerfuffle are in the next post. *looks sheepish* All right. So. The thing about fantasy is - quick summary of my understanding of the background here before I get into what I think I can actually add to the discussion. The thing about fantasy is that offensive themes are very easy to disguise in it. Mostly subconsciously. Because, of course, it's not our world. Back before anyone was really talking about Coded Language and whatnot it was very easy for someone whose personal worldview was very self-centered to create a fictional world in which all those pesky things which do not fit either don't exist or are warped into something that doesn't make them uncomfortable. It's still easy, it's just nowadays people actually notice and talk about it. And nowadays most good fantasy writers are not quite so blatantly xenophobic as, for example, H. P. Lovecraft. The problem is that most good fantasy writers regardless of race grew up READING fantasy written by white people for whom race was a d'n'd style straitjacket. Like Tolkein, who imagined the whole world to be a cookie-cutter clone stamp of about a hundred acres of British countryside. Can't really blame him. After all, the man lived on an island.

( and some more waffle )

This post has been getting more and more poetically incoherent as the time gets closer to four am. What I'm trying to say is I believe our lack of humility is in part geographic, and our construction of race in opposition, of whiteness and Other, is influenced by that disconnect. (Obviously I realise that non-island nations also have racist and nationalist dialogues. But go and count how many of them are not primarily based on territory, religion or both, go and count how many involve an conflict that did not begin across a national border or a line of scripture.)

And western framing leaks, we impose our ways of dividing society on the rest of the world whether purposefully or otherwise. Information flows OUT from us, and it is SO easy not to look elsewhere, not to look in any other way than this one. Is it any wonder that our fantasy worlds take on that same affect?

I want to see a fantasy Eurasia. I want to see countries upon countries upon ex-empires upon conquerors upon conquered, I want to see DEPTH to the history of fantasy universes, I want to see a character get six completely different Once And Future Exposition speeches from six different Wise Old Folks who live within sixty kilometres of each other. I want to see descriptions of racial characteristics that don't stand out like a sore thumb because everyone but that character defaults to fantasy-caucasian, I want to go through ten characters before one repeats a skin colour. I want friendly four-way arguments about religion in which none of them are barely-disguised Wicca or obviously-coded Christianity or Generic Oriental Philosophy X.

...

Possibly what I want is more Ursula K. Le Guin. Yes, I do! I want people who have learned from her! After all, it's fantasy. If you can write anywhere full of anyone, why write Grandad Tolkein's Good Old Days?

It's poured down like a motherfucker all day long, and I have finally finished enrolling in next year's classes. Thanks to Stan I now have an appropriate word to use on my university's website: Cuils. It had at least 2.5 of them. Where shall I start? The byzantine linkage-tunnels of the UTS website? The inescapably random nature of my course outline? The various oddities created by the less-than-smooth transition from my version of the course to the one next year's intake is getting?

I put it off a week or so because I was confused by the category names on my "study plan" - a completely unnecessary part of the process in which I have to "expand" various branches of credit point clusters that do not appear to be structured either chronologically or by class progression streams. The relevant branches need to be expanded before I can choose subjects from the options for them. However, there is zero benefit to having them un-expanded in the first place, so I have no idea what the thing's FOR in the grand scheme of things, and why I couldn't have just proceeded straight to the subject choosing phase. Anyway, the category names - it was pretty easy to figure out things like "200 level professional stream writing subjects" but what, I wondered, was the difference between "200/300 level disciplinary cultural studies subjects" and "200 or 300 level disciplinary subjects" and WHICH ONE AM I DOING IN 2009. "Fuck it," I said, a week ago, and went to play some breakout or read some fanfiction or something. I am easily discouraged. The next time I thought of it, a few days later, it turned out that the web enrollment function stops functioning after ten pm, and since I wake up well after midday lately and am sort of forgetful it took me a while to catch it.

So yesterday I logged on around five only to find that the website appeared to have accidentally the whole sidebar with all the student admin functions in it. This was not helpful. A quick !? over msn determined that faerie_mistress was not having this problem. Thinking the system may have suddenly discovered an allergy to Linux I went and tried it on my dad's PC - no dice. So that was another day out. Today, inexplicable return of functionality! Hurrah! I dealt smoothly with the category naming issue by "expanding" everything that was available to expand, figuring I'd determine the category that was actually relevant to my next session by checking the subjects in it against the subjects listed in my outline.

At this point I realised that the site was in the process of being updated for the new curriculum. This meant that the course outline immediately available was completely useless to me, and also that half the links in the enrollment page went nowhere - or rather, to a smug-sounding declaration that my bookmarks must be obsolete. My bookmarks!? Your goddamn fancy online enrollment system! Anyway, I noticed a little "archives" link in the handbook and cunningly deduced that I could access the outline I was given by looking at an old handbook.

...then I discovered that my first two subject choices for that stream were already full. OBVIOUSLY. And my third choice turned out to have a prerequisite... which turned out to be one of the subjects that was full. I am not sure what it was doing on that subject list in the first place if its prerequisite was ALSO first listed for that semester. So, long story short, I'm totally doing Cinematic Cultures. Should be fun.

My maternal grandmother and I share a strange sort of bond. Until quite recently I just found her irritating, and while it's still annoying to be constantly offered food some humour has crept in under the door. She and my grandfather were over here tonight, and grandad had insisted on having a "pesach" "seder" - and I use both terms loosely, even in quotation marks as they are. For one thing, the matzah on the table was completely at odds with the three loaves of bread and countless biscuits remaining in the house.

My grandad has resently had a resurgence of religious feeling, so he had lit a candle in the window and was wearing a jaunty white headpiece which kept falling off. He also insisted on loudly mispronouncing some prayer or another at dinner. And then doing it again. Because he felt like it. Meanwhile my mother was desperately trying to feed my brother his (totally not kosher-le-pesach) porridge, an event which escalated into him crying and her yelling at him and trying to shove the spoon in his mouth, still to the tune of grandad's incomprehensible Hebrew, and my grandma and I just shared this Look. It went something like "you've gotta laugh or you'll cry."

Then my grandad started going on about how we were supposed to have an egg, and bitter herbs, and a shank bone, whatever that is. So I rolled my eyes, got up, pulled a raw egg, an onion and a random piece of meat (raw) out of the fridge and dumped them on the table.

"And apples! Apples and honey!"
"Grandad, that's for Rosh Ha Shana."
"Apples! Ira, pick up my hat, it's fallen down again."

My dad was fiddling with things in the kitchen (because there weren't enough stools around the tiny table and he couldn't be bothered going and fetching a big chair) and my brother had exhausted my mum's supply of persuasive techniques and was climbing on the couch. I retreated back into my corner with a jar of mulberry jam and a spoon, and some matzah. Then my mum asked for the prawns, so I got up to get them, and what do I hear but a crack and the following (and do remember that all conversation is primarily in Russian):

"Whoops."
"What's the matter?"
"The egg's raw."
"I thought it was boiled?"
"...it's not."

I return to find that yes, my grandad has indeed tried to eat the egg. Which was now sitting drippily in a bowl on the table.

Naturally, we all cracked up laughing.