Dreamer Easy

are we made of math

Edit: I don't know why Dreamwidth went ahead and published this plaintive note, but it's hilarious, so I'm going to leave it here. :)

Stumbled across the strangest little bit of porn I think I've ever seen -- a Quora answer to a question about flight safety, from a civilian pilot. We start with two young, muscular marines, proceed to command them, and then bask in their glory. I especially loved the heroic tale of the marines getting wined, dined, and laid for successfully restraining... a middle-aged woman. Bizarre. (As far as I can tell, it's not the text of a chain email.)

"Gender is not the issue. Gender is the battlefield. Or the playground. The issue is us versus them. Any us versus any them."

-- from Kate Bornstein's play Hidden: A Gender, reproduced in Gender Outlaw (1994). This book has blown my mind.

I have a bee in my bonnet at the moment: that human conflict can generally be boiled down to "our side good, your side bad". Our culture is divided again and again into opposing factions. In many if not most cases, one faction is more highly valued than the other. Crucially, we must stay in our assigned factions -- or be punished for being uppity or sissy or just unreadable. (This last is critical for gender, but also for other kinds of categories: find an online argument on a controversy like Creationism or genetically engineered foods, and ask questions, declining to identify which side you're on. You'll be assigned the opposite side -- by both sides. You cannot be neutral.)

Watched Cast Away (2000). I enjoyed its cleverness very much -- I even picked the director, although I couldn't think of Robert Zemeckis's name for quids -- until the interminable series of endings. Anyway, what struck me was that Chuck is obliged to recreate civilisation piece by piece to fulfil his basic needs: blades, fire, art, religion. What made me think of this is an article which I can't find, which compares Shamhat's seduction of Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is intended to civilise him, with a mother bringing up a child -- got it! It's Rivkah Harris's chapter "Images of Women in the Gilgamesh Epic". What does Chuck drink first? Milk, of course.

Someone could probably get a thesis -- probably has got a thesis -- out of this tale of a lone, heroic white man creating the civilised world anew. (He looks like a caveman, then a "native".) This brings me to another thing: the reality show Alone (2015-), of which I have watched a few episodes on demand from SBS. Ten white men are plonked down in the chilly Canadian wilderness to do or die. At some point I thought to myself, "This is how people used to live." But of course, that's nonsense! People live in groups, sharing and passing on skills and equipment. (Would Chuck have survived without the packages?) This is not to say that hermits never happen, but this man-on-his-own narrative doesn't reflect any human social arrangement. Another thesis there, perhaps on the horribly destructive idea of "independence".

Can Trump really stage a coup? Experts weigh in on whether it's possible (Salon, 11 November 2020). Personally I think he's going for the coup, but he could also be whipping up enthusiasm for upcoming Senate races, or just piling up the green via donations.

Physical stress caused by interruptions in workplace (news-medical.net, 28 October 2020). I wonder if this is related to my difficulty in writing at home -- a space with multiple uses, not just for work. (I get a lot done in cafes.)

Let’s Stop Talking about “Battling Cancer” (Scientific American, January 2020). For many patients this metaphor turns their illness into a moral issue.

e.e. cummings' pity this busy monster, manunkind. You know the end of this poem.

But the end of Laura Gilpin's Two-Headed Calf bit me in the soul.

South Dakota nurse says many patients deny the coronavirus exists — right up until death (WP, 17 November 2020)

I think I understand why.

Those of us living in the real world probably have a mental picture of what will happen when a COVID denier catches the virus (which we've probably wished on them). At last they'll admit they were wrong and we were right, they were stupid and irrational while we were intelligent and reasonable.

Which is weird, because we know beliefs like this aren't based on facts or logic, but other, more powerful, cognitive machines, like group membership and world view, supported by a fire hose of propaganda.

How long does it take to completely shift your world view? To not just admit you were wrong about one thing, but to discard most of what you believe, most of the ideas that have organised the way you think and act? Could you do it in the space of a few days, while sick and terrified?

No wonder these patients double down on their wrong beliefs. In a crisis, those beliefs are the tools you have for making sense of what's happening, for coping with it. Alongside that, there's the simple denial that any seriously ill person might feel -- the brain's lag in integrating new and enormous information.

Well, the patients stop abusing the nurses once they've been intubated. They get their comeuppance in the end, in death, or permanent injury. We have our moral victory. I think as human beings it's very hard for us to fight against an abstract thing, like a virus we can't see, like propaganda that sets the stock market above human lives: it's a hoax, get back to work. We need individuals -- flesh and blood human beings that we can deplore.

This text is from the defunct Tracker magazine, and was written by Chris Munro. It's from an account of Wiradjuri men Yarri and Jacky Jacky's heroic rescue of nearly 70 people from the 1852 Gundagai flood, now commemorated by a statue. The Wiradjuri people had been warning the town that an environmental disaster was inevitable. Anyway:

"John Spencer, a relative of the town’s punt owner and also the Inn Keeper spent 36 hours in a tree until Yarri came for him. Spencer was near frozen and completely naked at the time, save for a cash box strapped around his neck."

"That book [Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals] aimed its fire particularly at the prevailing belief of our time: that of the inevitably steady forward progress of humankind brought about by liberal democracy. When the book came out, as George W Bush was demanding 'regime change' in Iraq, it struck a particular nerve. In the two decades since, its argument that the advance of rational enlightened thought might not offer any kind of lasting protection against baser tribal instincts or environmental destruction or human folly has felt like prophecy."
-- John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

(I guess this is what the Dadaists understood about culture.)

ETA: lol, the next sentence of the interview is "Gray never bought the idea that his book was a handbook for despair."

... the slight change in meaning that results when you find out which bits of a Kpop song are in English.

Here's how I heard ACE's "Undercover":

Undercover! Hey!
In your heart!
Yes you Humpty-dumpty OK

But the actual lyrics are:

Under Cover 해 네 맘에
Yes 넌 흠칫흠칫 okay

It's not just the singer producing the title of the song; "Under Cover 해", that is, "Undercover-hae", is a verb: "I'm going undercover in your heart", something like that. Humpty-dumpty turns out to be (roughly) "heumchi-teumchi", the sound of something sparkling; his beloved is dazzling.

Eight years of on and off struggle with Korean and this is the best I can do. Also worth mentioning: the rhyme between 원해 wonhae "want" and 구원해 guwonhae "save". The lyrics of Kpop songs look ridiculous translated into English, but there's often a lot of rhythm, rhyme, and wordplay going on, just beyond the reach of my ears.

These ideas are so interesting, so compelling. I have no way to tell whether this is the end of depression or the start of hypomania. I only know I can't trust my brain, and that when I am hypomanic, I am prone to nonsense regarding sensitive subjects. Luckily no-one will see this!

Anyway:

This morning I had the mixed pleasure of reading Eevee's demolition of J.K. Rowling's online essay against trans people. Rowling offers no data to back up her statements (since, lbh, she couldn't) and in fact avoids saying things outright if she can. She also makes telling omissions. But what's relevant for my next paragraph is this phrase from Rowling: "I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class".

I keep coming across this idea and again -- that human beings must sort people into clear categories -- no, that human beings must sort themselves into categories, clearly. Tonight it was in Cory Doctorow's Locus column from last year about Jeanette Ng's speech on winning the John W. Campbell award for best new writer, when he used the phrase "women and racialized people".

I was on the treadmill and my eyes popped out a little. How many times have I used the phrase "people of colour" -- as opposed to normal people, who are colourless -- or the phrase "non-white" -- as opposed to normal people, who are white? And here's an expression that gets across the fact that "race" is an invention, a series of artificial categories unreflected in the genetic facts, assigned to people for a reason.

And there it is in the same breath with the category "women". Doesn't that have interesting implications!

What if "women" is another artificial category, ill-supported by actual biology? A category into which a group of people must be placed so that we will know who makes the sandwiches? Because if we get confused about that question -- who is assigned to menial and/or unpaid tasks, who is paid little or less or not at all -- the jig is up. Slaves make the sandwiches. Immigrants make the sandwiches. Get into the kitchen, woman, and make me a sandwich.*

But what if you're not sure who is a woman? You might have to make your own damn sandwich.

Of course, J.K. Rowling will always be able to pay someone to make her a sanga, which has to leave you wondering why she is terrified of trans people, who offer so close to no threat at all to cis women as makes no bones -- even Jo has too much shame to outright say "men will put on dresses and sneak into the ladies loo and assault us", as she'd be laughed off Twitter. But by her own words, this is about the thick black border around the category "woman".

The other categories which are relevant here are Us, The Good People, and Them, The Bad People. This is something I tried to address, with frustrating clumsiness**, at the start of my essay on Talons of Weng-Chiang. I'm fortunate in that I've never particularly liked the story***, so I don't suffer the cognitive dissonance of the majority of fans, who love it, but can see that, however hard they deny it, it's racist as fuck. The thinking goes this way: if you like a racist thing, you are a racist, one of the Bad People. But you are one of Us, The Good People! Therefore, if you do like something, it isn't racist. Cue the list of excuses, the blather about book-burning, etc etc.

Tumblr user what-even-is-thiss addresses a variation of this, in which Rowling is disconnected from Harry Potter -- presumably leaving a clean text, free of transphobia, unable to contaminate the reader. Apparently this is a frequent tactic.

Drop the Good vs Bad categories, and you're left with flawed creators, flawed texts, and flawed fans, capable of screw-ups, hatred, learning, improvement. And no fear of contamination; you can like even a bigoted thing or person, and comfortably acknowledge that bigotry, alongside the text's virtues and its personal meaning. For online culture, built out of headlines, kneejerks, and outrage porn, it would be no less confusing than doing away with categories like "Asian" or "man".

(If there's anything to these ideas, these connections, then I certainly won't be the first or only one to have made them. I have so much reading to do.)

ETA: Of course, Rowling divides trans people into two categories as well: a small number of real trans people who "just want to live their lives" on the one hand, and "trans activists" (malevolent) and trans teens (confused) on the other. The moment you stop being humble, grateful, and silent, and stand up for yourself, you lose membership in the category of "real" trans people; your permission to be trans is in danger of being taken away. The only "real" trans person is the one who can be safely ignored. Any feminist should recognise this tactic.

* Somewhere I read that these were the three categories that made up the Other for the Ancient Greeks -- slaves, barbarians, and women.

** Here's an extract from an article which looks deeply at this problem. "By making displays of bigoted behavior as the ultimate embodiment of evil we have a built-in justification for moving selfishly within the system because we’ve displaced our shame of our own cultural complicity with the destruction our way of life causes onto a convenient scapegoat. This, it turns out, opens the door for people to use bigoted language we have deemed “too far” as a show of power and dominance."

*** Come to think of it, I'm also lucky that I don't give a damn about Harry Potter.