adrian_turtle | Entries tagged with twig-bending

I've lost track of how many romantic comedies I've seen, based on how cute it is for some charming hero to pursue a reluctant sex object until she (usually "she" in this sort of story, though not always) gives in to his charms. I don't mean the kind of story where the audience sees into the ingenue's head enough that "reluctant," is obviously different from "unwilling," and his pursuit is a quest to find reasons for her to change her mind. I mean stalking stories, where her repeated attempts to get away from him are regarded as cute and foolish, and his persistence is supposed to look resourceful, and the whole thing is played for laughs until the dramatic clinch at the end. You know. Like "Green Eggs And Ham."

I hadn't noticed it before. I was at the library with the 5 year old recently, playing a computer game with text and animation. It might have been the animated body language that made me look up and think, "Sam-I-Am is flirting!" but the animators weren't putting anything in there that wasn't in the original drawings. And as soon as I looked back down, it was really obvious to me that Sam-I-Am was flirting with somebody who did not welcome his attentions. I no longer see that as cute. Even when the stalker is chasing the victim down with a cute little cartoon car, and it's perfectly obvious that nobody is hurt even when they runs into the path of an oncoming train in an effort to get away...somehow, it's not quite as cute as it once was. Still incredibly catchy, though. When I said, "Wow. Sam-I-Am is really being mean to not let him get away," we didn't reach much of an understanding. But I'm glad I said it anyhow, just to plant the seed.

I won't be online much in the next few days, but I will respond to comments when I can.

"Herb, The Vegetarian Dragon" tries so hard

I read Black Beauty to Whitebird this winter, starting when she was almost 5. (Many, many, times. We made up stories about the characters. Do they count as fanfic if one acts them out with little plastic ponies instead of writing them down?) We read the abridged version by Robin McKinley, which simplifies the plot and makes it less racially specific (and leaves out the rape imagery), but keeps most of the rest. The pictures are great.

The book is so popular I expect everybody to be vaguely familiar with it, but it's often abridged or only regarded as suitable for horse-mad little girls (ie, fewer people are more than vaguely familiar with it.) It's a sentimental Victorian story of a horse who has a hard life despite his good looks and noble character. It's also a parable, preaching against animal cruelty, slavery, fox hunting, exploiting poor workers, drunkenness, laziness, and breaking the sabbath. I used to love it uncritically, seeing only the horses and a passionate general opposition to hurting the powerless. Now...I can see something cringeworthy in the equation of wage-slaves, slaves, and animals; even as I appreciate compassionate efforts to make powerful people stop hurting all of them through cruelty or irresponsibility. The ideal of social justice has changed so much since Anna Sewell died 130 years ago. Condescension and othering didn't used to be recognized as so problematic.

Anyhow, Whitebird *loved* it. She wanted to hear it over and over. The toy ponies became Black Beauty and Ginger, or Black Beauty and her mommy. ("Beauty" sounds like a girl's name to her, and "Ginger" like a boy's name. She reversed the pronouns so persistently I started doing it by accident. Confusing, when reading aloud.) Another point of confusion was that she very much wanted to see each bout of trouble as punishment for bad behavior, and each respite as reward. That's how stories work! But this story is about exploitation, so it didn't work that way. (Why did Black Beauty hurt her knees? What did she do wrong?) Then she asked if there was a movie, and we checked it out of the library. In my limited experience of movies...the horses are pretty. So are Sean Bean and David Thewlis, if one likes that sort of thing. The relationship between Black Beauty and Ginger looks a lot more like sexual pursuit than the friendship of the book. The child abruptly started calling BB "he" and Ginger "she."

A few days later, she asked if movies were always better than books. No. She meant when there was a movie and a book of the same story. I explained that even for those, I usually liked books better than movies because the book tells more of the story.

WB: But with a movie, you can see exactly what it's supposed to look like, with the people and everything. You don't have to imagine it for yourself.
A: Sometimes that's not so good. With a book, you can imagine it yourself, and see it the way YOU want it, not the way the movie-maker wanted it.
WB: How do you know which way is right?
A: Well, you're the one reading the book. If you like the story you imagine when you read it, you're ok, even if it's different from the movie. I mean, when somebody reads it to you.
WB: I mean, how do you know if the movie looks really right? Was the Black Beauty movie right?
A: Sometimes you can ask the author who wrote the book if the movie looks right. We can't do that with the Black Beauty movie, because the book was written a long time ago and the author died before they started making the movie.
WB: *shock* DIED?
A: She lived a very long time ago, before cars were invented. In the cities where she writes about horses and carriages everywhere, people drive cars now. I'm sure she'd be happy if she knew people were still reading her book after so many years.
WB: Do you think he would have liked the movie?
A: Probably. The movie-makers found some very pretty horses to play Beauty and Ginger. I'm sure they did the best they could. There's another author...do you know Harry Potter book your sister is reading, about the wizard school?
WB: Oh, sure.
A: When they made a movie of that book, the author helped them choose the actors and the scenery, so it would look exactly right.
WB: What's scenery?
A: All the background stuff in a movie or play. But authors don't usually have anything to do with making movies. Usually the movie-makers say, "We know how to do movies, so let us decide how it should look." There was another book about a wizard school, where the movie got it all wrong.
WB: What happened?
A: Well, the book was called "A Wizard of Earthsea," and a lot of the main characters had dark skin. When they made a movie of it, a few years ago, all the actors had light skin. The author, whose name is Ursula LeGuin, got very upset. She said it was an important part of the story that those characters had dark skin, and they should have African-American actors playing them.
(My mind was racing ahead, wondering if she would ask "What happened next?" or "Why does it matter?" or "How do you know?" What level of explanation should I give her?)
WB: What do you mean, girls can write books?!
A: *gasp* *sputter* *stay in lane* Yes, dear. Of course. Lots of girls do. Ursula LeGuin was a grown up woman when she wrote her books, but she used to be a girl. You could write books someday, if you wanted to, but you have to learn to read first.

How Do Dinosaurs Go To Boskone and convince children they exist and write children's books? It's hard to get back to Earthsea from there. I didn't try. Then again, I don't have a time fairy. *grin*

(I posted this to LJ yesterday, then thought to share it here.)

Whitebird wanted me to play all the people while she played all the horses. (They're all Playmobil. I am just impressed to bits by Playmobil.) She's 5, so she told me when I was doing it wrong, and I generally let her. No, the horses aren't falling like that because they're sick. It's not that kind of story, Adrian. There's a bad guy making them fall. And the people can't go argue with the bad guy, or do anything to make him stay away from them and the horses. There has to be a fight. I was pretty bemused by how little I was controlling these people she wanted me to play, so I asked her where the bad guy was.

WB: He can be here, under the chair.
A: Ok. *I take a Playmobil figure with a painted-on handlebar mustache, and empty plastic pistol holsters, and put him under the chair*
WB: *she looks at me like I'm out of my mind* THAT'S not the bad guy!
A: Which one is the bad guy?
WB picks out the humanoid figure with the darkest hair and skin, from the crowd of toys on the floor. I cringe.
A: How do you know that's the bad guy?
WB: He has bad hair.
A: What do you mean, 'bad hair?
She points at it. Black, straight, hair. Like the hair of more than half the people on the planet (as represented by molded Playmobil plastic.) Her hair is light brown, like my hair was when I was her age. The first doll I suggested has yellow hair, bright yellow like a dandelion. She thought cartoon central casting had sent him for the heroic roles, apparently.
A: Do you mean 'dark hair?' {I believe her exasperated response was supposed to be "Duh!" in horse language. It was clearly affirmative.} No, this is serious. People aren't bad guys because of what they look like, they can only turn into bad guys if they do bad things. It's dangerous-
WB: This is in the GAME. Stop talking about that serious stuff and play the game!

I don't know how to respond to this effectively. She's FIVE. She doesn't have the abstract-thinking skills to see how Disney, etc, push her sentimental buttons (nor does she see any reason to value abstract thinking more than the pleasure of having her buttons pushed.) When I tell her something that clashes with her existing view of the world, she doesn't believe it, doesn't want to hear it. I don't know if anything is getting through at all.

And five things make a post, right?
http://hobbitbabe.livejournal.com/756013.html
It doesn't seem to be one of those memes that everybody on LJ is talking about, but Hobbitbabe picked great topics for me. I suspect I could have made them converge if I kept at it long enough, but I'm posting now because I'm running out of notebook space.
>do you want five things to elaborate on? if so, i propose tea, children's fiction, failure analysis, gadgets, and winter weather.

When I have company for tea, I bring out the petit point tea set that used to belong to my horrible grandmother. ( Read more... )

I love children's books. In my extreme youth, my reading was completely uncritical. I didn't care that books were full of moral advocacy--if I liked the characters enough, I could swallow anything whole. Now that I'm in a position of introducing books to little girls I love, I worry about moral advocacy being in a direction I approve of. ( The horse-obsessed 5 year old loves a textbook example of didactic literature. )

I really want to go on ( tl;dnw )

I began to study formal failure analysis about ten years ago, in the context of a profound, systemic, industrial failure. ( Read more... )

My favorite gadgets tend to be simple or non-electric, and those are rapidly falling out of the category called "gadget." Sometimes I think, "Wow that's clever!" But it's easy for that scale of gadget to fade into the background. ( examples )

I am thoroughly tired of winter weather. ( Read more... )

Part of the reason I had such a disappointing experience at Readercon was that I did not arrive until late Friday afternoon (after work), so I missed a lot of the best discussions. Based on the descriptions in the program, I expected a couple of the Friday evening panels to be so interesting as to make it worthwhile for me to come to the con Friday, even though I couldn't stay for the late-night events. (The "Meet the Pros(e) Party" started just after the last bus left. And I'd been up since before 5am, so it seemed unwise to stick around and try to juggle other transport possibilities.)

"If All Men Were Tolerant, How Would You Shock Your Sister?" looked like it had the potential to be provocative in several interesting directions, but there was a very brief nod to Sturgeon before the panel went off into codslap territory. I was hoping "What is the future of transgression and the shocking in a society that prides itself on its ever-increasing tolerance?" would mean some discussion of new taboos (if not analyzing the transition from unpopular to taboo, maybe just talking about a few examples), but all the panelists seemed to believe there weren't any new taboos. *rolls eyes* Once upon a time, human beings were subject to taboos and social pressures, and it was part of the work of fiction to challenge those taboos. Modern literature has grown beyond such things, as modern enlightened liberals cannot be shocked. I kept hoping to hear a punchline. Maybe I missed it, from where I was sitting at the back of the room.

A panelist whose name I didn't catch (but who went to some trouble to affirm his credentials as a modern enlightened liberal who could not be shocked), asked CTan about the transgressive nature of her own work, which she denied. She's not trying to shock anybody, but rather to seduce them, therefore there's no social taboo. And her characters aren't doing anything particularly transgressive within their world.

One panelist did raise the question that some kinds of violence might be dangerous to write about, because readers would copy it, but nobody tried to answer it. The main effect it seemed to have on the conversation was constrain the general concept of "dangerous ideas" to "writing about dramatic acts of violence." Towards the end of the panel, another panelist was talking about not being dangerous or transgressive, and this panelist who was trying to limit the question to violence asked if there was anything she'd consider too dangerous to recommend to a young person. There was some dithering about violence, while I thought about my elementary school library in the 1970s -- lots of traditional children's books were clearly in favor of violence. The dangerous counterculture books were more likely to be *pacifist*.

Somehow, of all the times I've read or re-read a book and wondered if it would be appropriate for me to recommend to one of the little girls I love, there has only been one occasion when I thought it might be inappropriately violent. (It was _White Fang_, and I thought it would give her nightmares despite her great admiration for wolves.) Much more often, I'm concerned when authors use female characters as standard decorations and prize tokens, without agency. It seems more problematic for a young person to find an idea like "Girls are to be passive, decorative, rewards for male heroes," in a book I gave her than in something she found at the library by herself.

The day before Readercon, I re-read _The Hot Rock_, mostly for my own amusement. The thought crossed my mind that the older of my little monster cousins might be almost ready for it, as she is not really a little monster any more. It startled me to realize that I did not want to recommend it to a 10-year-old without explaining some context to her. The language is not really aggressively racist, but it's insensitive. Somehow or other, in the 25+ years since I read _The Hot Rock_, in the 38 years since Westlake wrote it, the social boundary around racism shifted (I think it's a good thing, even if the coded dog-whistle attacks are harder to recognize than the straightforward "sure, doesn't everybody hate these people?" I can remember hearing as part of the mainstream public discourse.) As I said, _The Hot Rock_ is not aggressively racist. No character attacks another for racial reasons. I just flinched a little at how some of the people were described, because I'm no longer accustomed to looking at human beings as so very alien, no matter where they're from or what they look like. (This is Dortmunder. I'm sure he could find sufficiently exotic aliens in Schenectady. [Without even going to the post office box.]) So, I found a book that touches very lightly, in passing, on something shocking and transgressive. When I read it in my early teens, it was not shocking or transgressive, because the taboo wasn't there.