Livre d'Or

Book: Threshold

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:58:38 GMT

Author: Caitlín R Kiernan

Details: (c) Caitlín R Kiernan 2001; Pub ROC Horror 2001; ISBN 0-451-45858-3

Verdict: Threshold is very good, but too scary for me.

Reasons for reading it: rysmiel recommended it to me strongly, even knowing that I don't really read horror.

How it came into my hands: I bought it when I was visiting rysmiel in Montreal years ago, and then didn't get round to reading it because I kept looking at it and deciding I wasn't in the mood for horror. And then rysmiel saw it on my shelves and persuaded me again that it's worth reading even though it's scary.

Actually in some ways I kind of wish I hadn't let rysmiel talk me into this book. It is very well written in a range of respects, but it is also too distressing for me. It's too horror-ish and too gory, but I would have put up with those things were it not for the fact that it's also quite upsetting on a realistic, psychological level in addition to the horror elements. There's multiple suicides in the first dozen pages, and I really do not deal well with vivid descriptions of suicide. I should say that I'm not complaining; rysmiel has been very successfully recommending me books for years now, they're really good at judging both what I'll like and what will be too much for me, and this is the first time they've picked something that's just over that line.

The thing is, the very high quality prose makes the descriptions of all the horrors and monsters all the more emotionally real. And Kiernan makes you really care about the characters, so it's all the more upsetting when their lives inexorably get consumed by evil. There's also a lot of real-world awfulness as well as the more obviously monstrous stuff, poverty and loneliness and social exclusion and alcoholism and violence. And it follows the common horror trope that encountering the horrific things drives the characters mad, only Kiernan portrays this as actual, realistic mental illness, not Romantic madness.

I think that's a lot of the strength of Threshold, actually. It's taking the obvious horror tropes and making them seem psychologically realistic, not stylised or melodramatic. There's a whole arc about the archetypal Lovecraftian "non-Euclidean" forms and Kiernan manages to make the idea of a non-Euclidean figure actually horrifying. The characters have realistic, plot-related reasons to split up and go into the dark scary tunnel separately, they're not just being gratuitously stupid to make the plot happen. Chance is a wonderful viewpoint character, she fits in the horror trope of a Man of Reason who tries to apply scientific thinking to the inexplicable goings-on, but you can really believe in her as a scientist and it feels emotionally real when her rational, empirical approach fails her because what's going on is just not rational. Part of how rysmiel sold me the book is that Kiernan herself is a paleontologist, and she really uses her background both to create a plausible scientist character and to imagine ancient monsters.

Apart from the fact that I found the book just too upsetting, I was not totally convinced by the character of Dancy; I am not sure if she's subverting the "creepy albino" trope or just perpetuating it. I did like the fact that the story gives Dancy's point of view as well as showing her through the eyes of the other characters, so she's at least sympathetic as well as creepy. But I did feel a bit uncomfortable about it. I also don't get the ending at all, or rather there seem to be two endings, one the obvious horror one where everything ends in doom, and then a kind of alternative ending, which isn't quite "and then it turned out it was all a dream", it doesn't undermine the book quite that much, but it does somehow cast doubt on the previous ending. I think possibly the alternative ending is even more creepy if less of a disaster, but I confess I didn't properly understand what was going on.

The writing is really beautiful, almost poetic, without being mannered or hard to read. Kiernan does have one rather annoying tic which is that she keeps running words together, especially adjectives, like uglyblack instead of ugly, black. Sometimes this is successful and creates a strong sense impression and a rhythmic sentence distinct from just using standard English paired adjectives, but when it's several times on a page, it gets irritating.

It's taken me a month to read Threshold, and it's not long, mainly because a lot of the time I just couldn't quite bring myself to pick it up and start thinking about such awful things. But if you like horror at all, it's a really good example of the genre, it's both genre-aware and very much in dialogue with the traditional horror tropes.

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First foray into baking

Sun, 19 May 2013 19:49:38 GMT

So a few months ago I made a post asking for easy baking recipes. And in spite of making a public commitment that I was going to start baking before Passover, life and procrastination got in the way. Then when I was asking for topics for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, an anony person asked if there have been any results from the baking experiments you mentioned a while back... I was embarrassed to have to say I hadn't got started, and that motivated me to pick up the project again.

Last week when I did my major store-cupboard restock I made sure I had most of the ingredients mentioned in the recipes people had suggested to me. And this weekend jack was here to provide moral support and help with QA, so I decided to take the plunge.

I picked forestofglory's butterscotch brownies, because it looked reasonably technically simple and didn't involve creaming. I'm going to write up my experience in detail just because I'm so new to this, so I want to document things to help me improve at this.

Recipe calls for an 8'' x 8'' pan. I'm judging that it probably needs a fairly shallow, tray type of deal, rather than a deep cake tin. The nearest I have is a 10'' round flan dish. I calculate its area and figure it's about 1.5x the suggested dish, so I determine to multiply up the recipe by 50%. The pan has to be greased (good thing I have the scientist's habit of reading through the protocol before I start, or I might have got to that stage with hot mixture and not had a greased pan ready). OK, I know how to grease pans, that's something I've seen my mother doing, you get a butter paper and rub the remnants of the butter all over the base and sides of the dish.

Next problem: forestofglory is American, so she measures ingredients by volume, not by weight. (Converting between Imperial and metric units is no problem, but converting between volume and weight is harder!) British butter doesn't come in "sticks", and I don't fancy trying to squish the butter into tablespoons, especially not twelve tablespoons, in order to measure its volume! So I ask the internet to convert from sticks to ounces. 1 stick of butter is 4 oz, so I weigh out 6 oz of butter. I do however have a measuring jug marked in US cups so I can do the dry measures by volume. I hesitate a bit; if I've converted the butter into weight, but I do the rest of the ingredients by volume, will the proportions work out? I decide to take the risk anyway, rather than faffing about trying to figure out the weight equivalents for all the suggested measurements.

I start the butter melting on a low heat. I assume that stirring it with a wooden spoon from time to time probably can't hurt, so I do that. Then I attempt to measure out 1½ cups of very dark brown sugar. Since forestofglory had mentioned molasses, I assumed that something sold as molasses sugar was the nearest equivalent. Though maybe that was too rich, I should have mixed ordinary brown sugar (Demerara? Muscovado?) with a little molasses sugar? Anyway, molasses sugar is quite clumpy and sticky. I kind of crumbled it with my fingers into the measuring jug, pressing it down a bit to fit it into the volume. But I don't know if that was the right thing to do, maybe I was supposed to measure 1½ cups of loose, clumpy sugar? Or maybe I was supposed to tamp it right down so it was tightly packed? This is why measuring by weight seems easier to me! Anyway, by the time I'd done this, the butter was all melted and was starting to bubble, so I added a big thermal mass of room temperature sugar to keep it from boiling or burning, and stirred it a bit.

The next stage takes place when it is nicely melted and there are no lumps. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to actually dissolve the sugar in the melted butter (is that even possible?) or just make a smooth suspension. I also wasn't sure if I was supposed to mix up the eggs before adding them either. So I took a guess and mixed two eggs, and when that was done the sugar was still grainy and somewhat distinct from the melted butter, and didn't seem inclined to actually "melt" or dissolve, so I decided to just add the eggs anyway. But then I forgot I was supposed to be doing only 1½ eggs, and added the whole 2 eggs by mistake. I hoped that was going to be ok! My experience of cooking savoury sauces with eggs told me that I probably ought to stir the mix to incorporate the egg without turning it into scrambled eggs, so I did that. When I had a homogeneous mixture I added the 1½ cups plain flour. I stirred that in to the mix as well, and at that point realized (based on my vague general concepts of baking) that I probably ought to have sifted it first, because it was a bit lumpy in the mix and I couldn't make the lumps go away by stirring. I tried for a while, and decided I wasn't getting anywhere, but that I had a texture not completely unlike my experience of raw cake batter , so I reckoned cooking it was doable.

The mix went into the tin ok, it was kind of sticky but just about liquid enough to reshape itself to fit the container. 350 °F is approximately 180 °C. And I have a nice fan-assisted gas oven so I reckoned it would likely run fairly hot. Lots of people in the thread had advised me to get an oven thermometer and not trust the temperature on the dial, but I have generally found my oven to be reasonably good at cooking savoury dishes evenly and at the temperature given in the recipe, so I decided to risk it and not wait until I get round to getting specialist equipment. After about 16 or 18 minutes the cake starts to smell cakey, so I decided to take it out at exactly 20 minutes, no longer than that.

The cake looked as far as I can judge like a cooked cake. It hadn't risen much, but it had a bit and the recipe didn't seem like the kind of thing that's supposed to rise. I prodded it in the centre with a knife and the knife came out clean, which is something I've vaguely read somewhere is a good sign. Slightly under an inch deep, and just starting to be a little crisp at the edges, but as best as I could tell reasonably cooked in the middle. I waited 20 minutes for the delicious-smelling cake to cool, and then attempted to get it out of the tin. My shallow flan dish doesn't have a removable base, so I thought this bit might be tricky. Actually it came away from the sides really nicely, and I was almost able to invert the whole thing onto a plate. Except that the middle was very slightly sticky, so part of it was left behind and the rest kind of cracked a bit.

So not really pretty enough to offer to people other than my nice patient husband, but not obviously disastrous either! We tasted some, and for a first attempt it was really pretty good. The texture was almost exactly perfect, cakey and rich but not too fudgey for most of it, and even the "sticky" bit in the middle was perfectly nice, just a teensy bit gooey. The lumpy flour wasn't too bad at all, but there were just a couple of pea-sized lumps in the mix. It tastes really nice; I think maybe I could have got away with a little more vanilla, but basically it does in fact taste of butterscotch!

That was encouraging enough to make me fairly ready to try again! Many thanks to forestofglory for the recipe and to hadassah for bequeathing me her cake tins when she left Sweden. And to all of you for encouraging me to believe that I might be able to learn baking if I put my mind to it. And of course to jack for helping me taste the finished product. I think I will probably make a separate journal for documenting future baking attempts, I'm going to need this level of detail for a while until I build up enough experience to feel confident experimenting and troubleshooting. Equipment I could have done with: sieve, proper cake tin for storing the finished product.

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NHS

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:37:19 GMT

This post is full of UK political detail; please feel free to skip if that's totally irrelevant to you!

So I was chatting to a senior academic who works in health policy and she mentioned that about a third of the people who used to have senior roles in the now-abolished Primary Care Trusts have resigned. Some on ideological grounds because they strongly disagree with the political climate regarding health and social care, some just in disgust at having put all that work into building up the PCTs and making them function well, only to have the whole system swept away and replaced by something new. I was already pretty worried about the NHS situation, but hearing that from an insider has definitely reinforced that.

Then I went to a talk by Prof Paton, a political scientist, about the political context in which our health reforms are taking place. I shall write up some of my notes, because I think people other than me might find some of this interesting, though it's admittedly speculative, it's too soon for anyone to do a serious academic analysis of an Act that's only a few weeks old.

Paton is a lefty of the old school, like political science professors are. He thinks the new H&SCA is a terrible idea, at least partly because he thinks market economics in healthcare delivery is inherently terrible. In spite of that bias, he made a very interesting, and to me surprising contention, that he thinks Cameron, Lansley and Hunt are actually driven by ideology and not in fact by populism or personal financial gain. He thinks that the meme floating around about how the NHS is being "sold off" because all the influential politicians want to increase the value of their shares in private healthcare companies is mostly just a paranoid conspiracy theory. Cock-up, not conspiracy, was the Leitmotif of his talk.

What ideology, then? According to Prof Paton, Lansley especially but the other senior Conservative drivers too, sincerely believe that devolving budget decisions to Clinical Commissioning Groups run by GPs will really genuinely lead to more patient choice and better individualized care. Unfortunately, in Paton's view, it's not actually possible to balance patient choice with the degree of central planning and risk-spreading that is completely essential for running healthcare delivery. Hence the new structure of the NHS is inevitably going to be a bad compromise between fundamentally incompatible needs. Essentially the the H&SCA abolishes all intermediate levels of regulation and governance between central government acting in a top down way, and the CCGs, if the GPs are actually willing to put their time into making commissioning decisions when they could be treating patients. He thinks that GPs who are keen to actually try to make financial decisions in the interests of their local patient populations will get frustrated because it's not feasible for them to have as much freedom as the government is promising, due to the need for central planning. And that the bureaucratic institutions that have been abolished will end up having to be reinvented, at great cost.

The marketization thing: on the optimistic side, Paton thinks that private healthcare companies such as Virgin are finding it a lot harder than they might have expected to slice off the profitable bits of the NHS and turn them into shareholder profit, though a little of that is going on at the edges. He also thought that the only way that England and Wales ends up in a situation anything like as bad as the USA is if businesses decide that the NHS is inadequate and that they are likely to lose too many key workers to poorly treated illness and injury, and therefore start purchasing private health insurance for their employees. A more serious problem is that, in spite of attempts by the House of Lords and lobbying groups to tone down the H&SC Bill, the act we've actually ended up with as legislation still insists that there must be competition, that everything must be put out to tender. And that Hospitals are now (at least according to the letter of the law) businesses subject to EU and international competition law, so they may not be allowed to do things like band lots of CCGs and hospitals and service providers together to negotiate as a large unit, or designate preferred providers, because that would be anti-competitive if a healthcare institution is in fact a literal business.

Paton had rude things to say about the government trying to legislate as if to run a "banana market" (lots of different traders set up their stalls side by side and try to hawk groceries to you) when they should be running an industrial market, if they must have a market at all. Theoretically the legislation states that the tenders must be on the basis of quality, not price, but how enforceable is this? Also it doesn't deal with the problem that having to commission all services in a competitive way creates loads of friction and wastes money that could be better spent on actual healthcare provision, if you made the non-market assumption that basically what happens is that the NHS provides care as well as funding care. Paton also expressed concern that this competition scenario may make it difficult to provide integrated care, given that all the different organizations involved in treating a particular individual are legally supposed to be in competition with eachother!

The political history of how we got to this point: New Labour was not seen as ideological, they did a lot of fiddling and reforming, which cost / wasted a lot of money because they kept tinkering with how the NHS runs, but it was all done with very short term aims, either making money by selling off NHS assets, or gaining popular support at significant moments in the electoral cycle. The Lib Dems apparently wanted elected health commissioners like the irritating police ones we've ended up with, so that there would be direct accountability to the electorate for the people who ultimately controlled the budget. Since it isn't really possible to compromise between this and abolishing the PCTs in order to transfer control to GPs (directly electing GPs would be a complete non-starter!), this gave the Conservative party the excuse to essentially throw out all the Libs' policies to give an almost purely Conservative H&SCA. However, the Lib Dems, the House of Lords and people who have substantial influence in medical politics did tone down the Bill as originally proposed to make it less aggressively market-ish. So now nobody is happy; the old-school dyed in the wool neo-liberal Tory backbenchers think the reforms don't go nearly far enough and there's still too much central control, and the left (broadly defined) obviously thinks that marketization is way too much like privatization for comfort.

Paton thinks that the best outcome if we get a swing to Labour at the next election is that Labour will replace full-on competition with "contestability," allowing the NHS to be more protected from the EU and international laws meant to regulate for-profit business. He thinks that Burnham would favour a model fairly similar to what the Tories are trying to implement, but with NHS having a default "preferred provider" status rather than insisting that absolutely everything has to go out to tender. He also pretty much dismissed the National Health Action people as naively idealistic; in order to accomplish their goals they'd pretty much have to tear everything down and start again, which they're unlikely to be able to do even if they are implausibly successful at the ballots. He mentioned that Labour peer Lord Hunt of Kings Heath is about the most committed and most effective NHS defender currently in the political system, so that's something useful to know.

I am so very much not a natural Labour voter, for a large number of reasons. And I'm really angry with the party for lying to Parliament and to us about weapons of mass destruction and committing our troops to an illegal war in Iraq with massive loss of civilian life. In spite of this, I am sort of considering voting Labour because the NHS is such a huge issue for me. But Paton kind of confirmed my impression that Labour really don't have a great track record on the NHS recently (even though, yes, the NHS was a Labour policy under Attlee's government in the 40s; that was a long time ago, though!) And the promise to repeal the damaging H&SCA sounds like it's probably not worth much, though I'm not going to base my voting decisions purely on one talk by one guy, just because he happens to have an academic title. But I don't know whom I can vote for to mitigate the threat to a functioning, truly national, truly public NHS, even if I make that my sole voting issue.

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Scientists don't have feelings

Mon, 13 May 2013 11:27:35 GMT

Wow, Three Weeks for Dreamwidth went by fast. I have run out of time and haven't even come close to posting all the stuff I thought I was going to talk about. However, I obviously still want to carry on creating content after the fest is over, so I will work my way down some of the queue. I made 8 substantial posts I think I wouldn't have made otherwise, plus another 4 long thinky posts which I didn't tag as belonging to the fest since they were more personal than I quite wanted to promote to strangers following the site-wide tag.

So that's a dozen "big" posts in three weeks, which is verbose even by my standards. It has felt a bit like DW has consumed more of my time than usual during the season. Then again, it's a time of the academic year which is relatively quiet for me. And I've had a blast, met lots of cool new people and got some really lively discussions going; I'm going to carry on exploring some of these things in the comments.

Anyway, one of my Three Weeks posts was a discussion of why I'm interested in the research I do. forestofglory quite rightly pushed me on talking about my feelings rather than just abstract factual things. She says:

I'd still like to hear more about how you feel your research is going. I know scientists aren't supposed to have feelings, but I want to know how you are doing as well as what you are doing.

This seems a very reasonable request, and although I do most naturally talk about more abstract things, I've often got some good out of being a bit confessional here.

I have thought for a long time that academic scientific research is an awesome job but an atrocious career. The further I progress in it the more that is true, and honestly I'm one of the lucky ones because I have managed to land a faculty position with job security and a decent salary.

My absolutely unfiltered honest initial response to being asked how I feel about my research is excited. I find it endlessly interesting doing experiments to find out things that literally nobody ever knew before I poked at some particular detail. I was also really lucky that I had a pretty clear idea from a young age what I was interested in, and I've been able to pursue that interest through university, post-graduate training and beyond. I probably could have succeeded at research into other topics than cell biology, but I have found something I really really care about and genuinely want to know every possible tiny detail of.

The other thing I really love about research is that I can carry on learning. I was very good at being a student, and a lot of what's wonderful about this career path is that in lots of ways I haven't had to give that up. Every time I read new articles or listen to talks from other scientists, I learn something new and interesting, and although I don't get the immediate reward of a high mark for reproducing it in an exam, I do have to recall and synthesize this information in order to understand my research data. It's hard to describe how much I enjoy that. The new information, the new parts to an endlessly complex and interesting story, yes, but also the challenge of my future depending on being able to learn it, not just note that something's interesting and then forget about it and move on.

My conversation with forestofglory was in the context of talking about being a PhD supervisor. Back in January, I wrote that post, because I had a moment of despair that kind of corresponded with PhD application season. I don't know what the hell happened, but the post made Hacker News and got 60 thousand hits within the first 24 hours of putting it up. There's over 200 comments on it here and another 200 at Hacker News, and it got discussed extensively on Twitter and when I turned up at Eastercon total strangers came up to me with, oh, you're the person who wrote that PhD post! The thing is, even though I think the apprenticeship-style system by which we train academics is incredibly broken, it's the system we have, and one of the things that's expected of me as a PI / Lecturer (US equivalent: Associate Professor) is that I supervise PhD students. And given that's what I'm expected to do, I really hope I can do so to the best of my ability and provide a useful, non-abusive training for future scientists.

I have a lot of different feelings about this, and tentatively I'll start talking about feeling committed. In some ways I've been extraordinarily lucky in that my first ever PhD student is particularly able and particularly well suited to me. I don't have much to sell to really brilliant students, since I'm working in a small provincial university with a shoestring budget, and I don't yet have much of a research track record because I'm at the beginning of my career. However, the way it turned out was that my Minion, for her own personal reasons, positively wanted to be in a smaller, more nurturing environment, and is also really really excited about my research. And she missed a First Class degree by one mark, and these days PhDs are so absurdly competitive that it's hard to get into the top places with a 2:1.

Minion is really unusually mature compared to starting PhD students. She's organized, dedicated, hardworking, and has a really good long view of the ultimate point of what she's doing, both to progress her own career and to contribute to the field. She is technically very good, partly because she had a year in industry between finishing her undergrad degree and coming to me, but also because she's meticulous and careful and has a talent for the kind of fiddly things that are involved in molecular biology research. She's a tortoise where I'm a hare, in that she works steadily and carefully and I procrastinate with occasional flashes of brilliance; fjm argues cogently that tortoises do better in the PhD system. I hate to say this, but the fact that she is a native speaker of English and was educated in a UK university also makes my life a lot easier; we share a common language and a common culture, both in general social terms and academically. When I take on more students in the future, I am going to have to work very hard not to be biased in favour of UK based students, because I really do not want to be racist or xenophobic. But for someone coming to this incredibly complex responsibility for the first time, having someone-like-me to work with is a real bonus.

I really enjoy working with Minion. Every time we have a meeting (which I insist happens weekly because one mistake I don't want to fall into is abandoning my student for months at a time with no guidance or contact) I come away from it feeling energized and excited. I love discussing her research in detail, looking at this particular image of a cell or delving into the numbers, troubleshooting, thinking of more rigorous ways to test our hypotheses. And we are building what seems to me like a pretty good working relationship. I was a bit scared that because Minion is quiet and somewhat deferential, and I'm loud and extroverted and domineering, I would end up bulldozing over her and not giving her a chance to develop intellectually. But actually, no, she is more than prepared to stand up for her own views, and six months in she's starting to take intellectual charge of the direction of the project. The things she's most interested in are not necessarily the same things I'm most interested in, but that's more than ok, even though I jokingly refer to her as the Minion I actually see her as a colleague, not a slave, and I think her vision for the project is really sound, even though it's not what I imagined would happen when I was planning it.

In some ways I'm more cut out to be a supervisor than a bench researcher. Because honestly, I have the intellectual chops for research, but I'm only middling good at the practical stuff. I'm somewhat clumsy and somewhat slow, and I'm never the person with the magic touch who makes the tricky temperamental equipment work. That's ok in that modern research is very standardized and almost automated, so you don't have to be a mechanical genius to be a successful biochemist. But it's still better if you are a mechanical genius!

The reason I'm not in the lab at the moment is mainly financial; I only barely have enough money to pay for the consumables for one person, and that's got to be Minion ahead of me. On the one hand, if I really passionately wanted to be pipetting and tending cells and all of that, I would probably have found a way to make it work in spite of the financial barriers. On the other, it's not entirely a good thing. At the moment it's fine because I happen to have a very technically competent student who doesn't need me, and I'm sharing a technician with my collaborator, and he's doing fine at teaching her the day-to-day practicalities of actually doing experiments. But this isn't always going to be the case, I might not have access to a good technician and I might have a student who needs more handholding than Minion does. So I do need to keep my own bench skills up, and it's worrying me that I am not in a position to do that. When you get to a very senior level, you're expected to spend your time doing admin and management and delegate the bench work to more junior people, but I'm a bit aware that it's rather early in my career for me to drop out of actually doing the day-to-day experimental work, and if I carry on not doing that I won't have the CV to get to a senior post. Because in the end, you can never quite "own" an experiment if it's carried out by someone else according to your instructions, you have to have seen things with your own eyes to be able to analyse results, just having numbers and error bars doesn't cut it. You have to actually be on the spot to see the unexpected thing that you weren't looking for that opens out a whole new aspect of the system.

In some ways I miss being a working scientist, in other ways the actual physical manipulation of cells and reagents has never been my favourite part of this job. I used to like it because I felt it gave variety to my life; sometimes I would read papers and think and plan or interpret experiments and do intellectual stuff, other times I would do near-mindless (but concentration-requiring, so often good for flow-state) experiments with my hands, and that was much better than spending all day every day doing either one or the other. But now that I have a proper teaching position I have plenty of sources of variety in my life and I am secretly happy to have dropped the aspect that honestly, I found least stimulating. So I guess what I feel about only being a supervisor, not a researcher in my own right, is frustrated (but a tiny bit relieved).

This is where I get sharey and personal. When I think about my career, rather than the specific experiments I'm running right now, I feel intensely anxious. The having no money is awful, partly because it really restricts what I can do, but also partly because it makes me doubt myself, surely if I were good enough to have an academic career I'd have attracted at least some funding by now? (The tiny bit I have comes from the university, so while I'm very grateful for their support, I didn't obtain it in open competition.) And because I have no money, I haven't published since 2009, and 4 years of CV gap means that there's a high chance I don't have a future, even if from today everything goes completely brilliantly.

The thing about being an academic scientist is that you can't be merely competent, you have to be brilliant. It's such a steep-sided pyramid, and there's almost no place for scientists who aren't good enough for promotion. The funding situation is that a charity or research council has enough money to fund maybe 10 or 12 projects each year. And they get a hundred applications, and 98 or 99 of them are good enough to fund, they can't be rejected on technical grounds. So you have to be in the top decile, effectively, or you get no money at all, and the competition isn't everybody in the world, it's people who've already got to the top of the highly selective and competitive process of becoming a lab head in the first place. And of course one of the criteria that will be used to tease out the top 10 proposals is whether the PI has a "track record" of making good use of the money they've received in the past to generate interesting science. If, like me, you've never received any money in the past, it's a big risk for anyone to invest in you just because you have a good idea. And because I've been desperately trying to get money ever since I moved to my current post in 2009, but haven't yet succeeded, I've more or less aged out of most of the schemes that are designed to give a leg-up to people starting out in their careers. This means I have to compete for funding not just with my peers but with people who have ten or twenty years more experience than me.

I am going to sound arrogant here, but I am pretty sure that the problem isn't that I'm not intelligent enough. Intellectually, I can hold my own with scientists with the most glittering CVs. The problem is that I'm not hungry enough. I haven't put every waking hour into trying to get funding over the last four years. I've invested the great majority of that time into teaching and educational stuff which is the other half of my job. Besides which, I've taken time off most weekends and rarely worked more than 40-50 hours a week, and I have a work-life balance which includes a lot of time for community volunteering and a fair amount of time for socializing either on the internet or in person. That's not what the picture looks like for most of my colleagues who have been successful. I don't think it's that I'm lazy, or not entirely anyway, it's that I can't bring myself to gamble everything on an attempt to be one of those who make it to the top, when there's such a high chance that I still won't even if I put in every waking hour to trying. But that comes straight back to the problem that there aren't really any jobs for people who are reasonably able and reasonably hard-working, only for people who are outstandingly brilliant and almost inhumanly dedicated. And really lucky; even among those who are brilliant and dedicated there is still a fierce competition for tiny scraps of funding.

And the truth is, I have a real vocation for teaching in a way I just don't for research. But I do believe that teaching at university level ought to be carried out by people who are research active, otherwise what they teach is stale and unlikely to inspire the next generation of academics. And most of UK Higher Ed believes that too; there are very few decent jobs for even the most talented teachers, if they don't also have a regular stream of peer reviewed publications in good journals, which means regularly succeeding in getting grants, and it means being much more effective than I am at the aspects of a research career which go beyond designing and carrying out experiments.

So one possible direction for my career is that I carry on as I am, keeping my head just above water, doing just enough research not to actually get sacked for incompetence, but always worrying that I won't quite make that minimum level. This pretty much means staying in my current institution though, because at this level there's not really a reason for anywhere else to hire me. If I'm lucky, I rise above that minimum level and make a discovery that's important enough to establish a reputation. Even then I'll have to justify what on earth I was doing between 2009 and whenever I get my lucky break, but I might then have a chance of a "traditional" academic career, the thing I thought I was going to do when I was a high-achieving student, eventually getting a professorship or perhaps even a Chair.

An alternative is that I build up the education and management side; I'm enjoying the latter a lot more than I thought I would. That might allow me to get a job doing something like running the biology department in one of the universities from the bottom half of the league table, where they would like to be engaging with research but realistically can't compete. I think I would really enjoy this in some ways, but at the same time, it feels like it's not really the kind of contribution to society I want to make. At the back of my brain for the past couple of years, I've been poking about trying to come up with ways of being creative about where I go with my career, some way of doing something that is science-related and probably within academia because that's the environment where I feel most comfortable, but that uses my skills and enthusiasm for teaching in some way that would be both satisfying personally and meaningful. Or else I simply desert the whole sinking ship that is the UK Higher Education sector (outside the really major institutions like Oxbridge, Imperial and Manchester) and start from scratch with a new career.

Even with all the negatives I've written in this post, I still feel extremely reluctant to let go of my dream of being a researcher. Partly because I want to know, dammit, I don't want to abandon the story halfway through, I want to find out what happens. And just reading journals isn't enough, you have to be embedded in the research community to really be abreast of what's going on. There's also the gender issue; I can't help thinking that if I move sideways or leave academia altogether, I'll be doing exactly what people stereotypically expect women to do. I'll be admitting I'm not able to hack the pace of real research, I'm not obsessively dedicated enough, which it what everybody says is the problem with women scientists. In some ways I want to prove I can succeed while also maintaining a work-life balance, being interested in everything, giving a lot of time to volunteering etc. And goodness knows that as a childfree woman I have it a lot easier than my peers who are struggling with all this plus parenthood.

So there you go, that's what keeps me awake at night. I do welcome advice but please be a bit tactful; if there were an obvious answer to this I'd have figured it out by now!

comments

3W4DW: Anglo-Jewry

Fri, 10 May 2013 21:24:52 GMT

kerrypolka asked for:

what you think about Anglo-Jewry and its funny internal politics, the Board of Deputies, how well all the branches get along (and don't)

I said that sounds more like a late-night booze-fuelled rant than a DW post, but she still wanted to hear my opinions, so here goes.

In the words of Jane Austen, this is an account by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian; it's not based on anything resembling scholarship, just impressions I've picked up from being in the middle of Anglo-Jewry. The thing is, Anglo-Jewry and its funny internal politics is basically my family: my grandparents were from Eastern European immigrant backgrounds, from established Anglo-Jewish families with connections by marriage to some notable names, and from ethnically English backgrounds via conversion. My parents were brought up Liberal and Orthodox, and my immediate family has been very much involved in Reform synagogues and the Reform movement. I've dated various flavours of Jews, including an Orthodox-raised now Masorti guy and a Reform-raised now unreligious guy, but ended up married to a non-Jew. So this stuff comes from dinner-table gossip and conversations with influential people.

Also. There are about a quarter of a million Jews in the UK, and it's not quite true that we all know eachother, but people who are engaged in community life at all do tend to have connections to everybody else. We play a party game called "Jewish geography" where you meet someone for the first time and try to discover a common acquaintance; I've won in some spectacular circumstances, including meeting the abbot of a monastery (!) who turned out to have been born Jewish and was related to me by marriage. Anglo-Jewish politics is a total fishbowl.

I'm gonna talk about the 20th century and mostly about my own lifetime, because this is just personal opinions not a researched history. But I need to give a bit of background to explain how the last century got to be the way it was. There were certainly Jews living in England at the time of the Doomsday book, who probably came over in William the Conqueror's retinue. Pre-Norman times evidence isn't clear; there may or may not have been semi-itinerant traders. But anyway, there was a Jewish population in England from at least 1066 to 1290, when England expelled its Jewish population. They had a very weird relationship with Mediaeval Christian society, sometimes rising to positions of influence but sometimes being subjected to violent attacks and of course ending up getting thrown out. Although it was technically illegal for Jews to live in England from 1290 to 1656 when Oliver Cromwell invited the Jews back to the country, there's evidence that a few were tacitly tolerated.

From 1656 to let's say the middle of the 19^th century, the Jewish population in England (later the UK) remained small but we were around. Part of Cromwell's motivation for ending the expulsion was humanitarian, part of it was religious (he was convinced that the Bible indicated that having Jews in every country of the world would hasten the Second Coming of Jesus), but also part of it was pragmatic: he wanted a mercantile class with strong links to continental trading empires. So the Jews who did settle here tended to be that sort of people, educated, with good commercial connections.

Contrary to stereotypes they were by no means all rich, but some of them were, and with the Enlightenment and the rise of the middle classes and an increasingly egalitarian social spirit, it became more and more possible to be successful in society even if you weren't descended from Norman barons or even Protestant. The major Anglo-Jewish families kept a fairly strong insistence on marrying within the faith, meaning that everybody ended up multiply connected by marriage – this historical group is sometimes referred to as The Cousinhood. It was reasonably common for ethnically English people to "marry in" and convert to Judaism, becoming absorbed into said Cousinhood. Most of the English Jews in these couple of centuries originated from Northern Europe, France, Germany, the Netherlands etc, though many of them were originally of Sephardi origin ie their families had been based in Spain up until their expulsion in 1492. As a broad generalization, religiously they tended to be fairly secular; they kept the major Jewish holidays and possibly a greater or lesser degree of religious observance, but it was much more a cultural and community thing than a religious commitment specifically. They participated enthusiastically in Enlightenment society which was all about the secular humanism and also very much saw themselves as British.

This is where we get the Board of Deputies from, basically. Mid-eighteenth century the Jewish community wanted to formally declare loyalty to the British monarchy, so they had to form a group who could be considered to be representative of the Jewish community. There was a bit of argy-bargy over several decades regarding exactly who had the right to represent the Jews. Tensions between Jewish sub-groups of different ethnic origins, primarily, mostly an Ashkenazi (mainly Northern European origin) versus Sephardi split. Since it was the era it was, everybody was obsessed with parliaments so eventually the Board formalized into a quasi-parliamentary structure where different communities could elect representatives, who then met regularly to have parliamentary debates. They tried to provide a reasonable, moderate "voice" of the British Jewish community so that when reporters wanted a quote about some matter of Jewish interest, there was an official body to talk to and hopefully steer them away from interviewing extremists who would provide headline-grabbing nationalist, separatist statements. They tried to project a civilized, respectable, assimilated image of Anglo-Jewry to the non-Jewish world, and also supported some of the early proto-Zionist movements within UK politics.

It's also where we get Liberal Judaism from. Some people from within these established, assimilated Anglo-Jewish families wanted a religious commitment that really engaged their values, not just attending Jewish events in order to socialize with people like them. They wanted a religion where they, born and brought up in the UK, felt comfortable, that wasn't full of quaint foreign rituals. Britishness was an important value, and so was Liberalism in the 19^th century politics sense of the word, they were committed to women's lib and what we'd now call social justice and anti-racism, and they felt that religious communities should be involved in practical philanthropic projects. They partly looked to the Reform movement which was thriving in Western Europe (and had a minor presence within the UK), but rejected a lot of it as too foreign. So they had services in English which everyone could understand, and rewrote the prayers to reflect modern values so that people wouldn't be reciting prayers they understood and completely disagreed with! They took inspiration from the Biblical Prophets more than to the traditional Jewish legal codes. They also experimented with things like having services on Sundays because that was more "British" and also more practical for people to attend if they had to work on Saturdays, though that aspect didn't quite last! But they did have services that would not look weird to someone used to Anglo-Protestant models of religion, with things like unison reading, hymn singing, dignified and solemn services rather than everybody doing more or less their own thing as is typical of Orthodox prayer.

There were also Jews around who weren't part of this influential, anglicized group, of course. Recent immigrants who were pedlars, small-time merchants, later on with the industrial revolution, people who migrated to the new industrial cities and very often took on the secondary jobs created by the existence of the factories and the workers with somewhat more spending power than that social class had previously had. Things like running shops to sell mass-produced goods and ready-prepared foods, or sometimes acting as clerks, secretaries or similar within the factories themselves. The kinds of people who show up as Dickens characters, whether portrayed in a negative light like Fagin in Oliver Twist or a more positive, but still seen as a poor outsider forced into moneylending, like Riah in Our mutual friend. So I think as well as ethnic tensions within the Jewish community there were also class tensions; sometimes the richer, longer-established Jews acted philanthropically towards the recent immigrants and poorer members of the community, sometimes they tried to distance themselves from them.

Towards the end of the 19^th century, the demographic picture changed dramatically because there was a substantial influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe. They were a mix of economic migrants who saw Britain as a booming economy with far more opportunities than existed in places like Russia and Poland, and political refugees who were suffering substantial social exclusion, persecution and increasing violence, especially in an era of nationalism and people starting to identify strongly with their ethnic groups. The UK in this era had full emancipation, as it was called, ie Jews could become full citizens and participate in almost all aspects of public life. These people mostly gravitated towards the major port cities, where there was a high demand for labour and housing was relatively cheap, so the East End of London, also Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow and so on.

These immigrants were really not at all popular with most of established Anglo-Jews! They generally didn't have access to a secular education and most professions were closed to them in their countries of origin. Even those who were more educated spoke low-prestige languages like Yiddish and sometimes Polish, maybe Russian, so they didn't appear educated to the British observer. Many of them were already poor in their home country, anyway they certainly were poor by the time they made it across Europe the UK. There was a lot of anti-immigrant feeling among the general British population, and the respectable, middle-class sorts of Jews felt this reflected badly on them. However, again, there were also philanthropic efforts to help the immigrants, provide housing and basic medical care, teach them English etc.

Anyway, people whose ancestors come from this section of the population have been the huge majority of UK Jews for the past 120 years or so. Religiously they were mostly Orthodox-by-default because post-Enlightenment religious denominations hadn't really penetrated much further East than Germany. There was a split there between the mostly Polish-influenced version of Ashkenazi Judaism which tended to the popular and sometimes partly mystical, and the mostly Lithuanian-influenced version which was rather elitist, intellectual and legalistic. This isn't really a big split any more but I know there was a time when it was considered intermarriage for people from different communities to marry, as happened in my family. Some of them continued practising more or less as they had back in their countries of origin, some rejected religion as another of their outdated, peasant customs they were trying to get away from in order to become modern, civilized people. But as Golda Meir is supposed to have said, the synagogue they wouldn't set foot in was usually Orthodox.

Like a lot of immigrant groups, this cohort wanted nothing more than to become middle-class. They put a lot of emphasis on education (which was accessible to most people in the UK at this time), and encouraged their children into the Professions. Mind you, some of them were quite socialist and were deep into the International labour movements, anarchists and communists and all sorts. As far as I can work out the same people often held both these values at the same time, they wanted to overthrow the class system and they also wanted to be on the right side of it. It took a while for them to be respectable enough to intermarry with the old Jewish families, but it did start to happen and my own family is an example. Sometimes they socialized in Jewish contexts because they basically had to, things like working men's clubs and trade unions and sports leagues and so on weren't open to Jews. But they increasingly had non-Jewish friends and married non-Jews (some of whom converted and some didn't).

The other thing that is demographically significant is the rise of Nazism in the middle of the 20^th century. A lot of people left Germany, Austria and other Nazi-influenced and later occupied countries in the 30s, and some of them ended up in the UK. These people were typically highly educated middle-class folk, because until the 30s Germany had been a highly integrated society where Jews had many opportunities. A couple of significant groups of people within this set: the scientists who were rescued from Europe by academics over here, who quickly became major figures within the UK academic establishment. And the Kindertransport people, kids who were sent to live with British families until the Fascist problem blew over, many of whom in fact never saw their birth parents again.

Religiously these Europeans were often entirely secular, though a high proportion were Reform, the Reform movement being very much established in Germany. R' Leo Baeck was a leading light among a group of people who joined up with the small Reform community in the UK and tried to recreate the intellectual basis of Reform Judaism that had thrived in Germany in the early 20^th century over here. Although the Liberal Movement was very English and the Reform movement rather continental, they had obvious common interests and worked together to provide a serious alternative to Orthodox Judaism which had become the predominant religious stream in this country due to all the Orthodox Eastern Europeans. The secular people often attached themselves to Reform communities because hanging out in Jewish circles was the only way they could get a taste of the cultural life they'd left behind in Europe, German speaking but polyglot, highly cultured, engaged with politics, connoisseurs of art and music and so on. And being secular themselves they felt less uncomfortable in Reform communities than Orthodox ones.

So post-war, what do we have? A British society that largely rejects anti-semitism, out of horror of where it can lead, though historical traces still remain. A Jewish community that is predominantly Orthodox by the numbers, mostly people descended from the wave of Eastern European immigrants at the end of the 19^th century. A small but highly engaged, and mostly cooperating, Reform and Liberal movement. An increasing proportion of people who are secular or have a very minor religious commitment, but again, the religion they don't engage with is usually Orthodox just for demographic reasons. The division between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews has all but disappeared, though sometimes it is politically relevant, but anyway the Sephardi element is numerically tiny by this stage. But the division between Orthodox and Progressive denominations becomes more and more entrenched.

One reason for this is to do with the State of Israel, I think. The State was established in 1948, and the way things panned out, the definition of "who is a Jew" ie who has the Right of Return to immigrate to Israel ended up in the hands of the Orthodox Rabbinate. Israel is an overwhelmingly secular society, and the Orthodox minority have been moving further and further to the right in the last 65 years, possibly in order to maintain their existence as an enclave within intensely secular society. This has massive knock-on effects for Jews in the diaspora, the rest of the world. Partly everybody looks to Israel because it's seen as the centre of authentic Judaism. Partly everybody wants to make sure their kids have the option open to move there if Europe should turn hostile again (and this is not mere paranoia, if you look at the situation of the Jewish community in Hungary currently it is not pretty, and even France is becoming increasingly difficult). So if the Israeli Rabbinate says that only people who follow their increasingly strict definitions are really Jews, diaspora Jews are heavily pressured to go along with that.

As a result partly of this, Orthodox Judaism within the UK has also moved quite a long way to the right in the last six decades. Another issue is, Orthodox Judaism prohibits travelling on the sabbath (and because of the move to the right, this prohibition is taken increasingly seriously), which means that in order to participate in Jewish life, you have to live in a fairly close (walking distance) proximity of other Jews. Increasingly strict definitions of what food counts as kosher also contribute; you need to live with a sufficient concentration of Jews to justify the existence of kosher shops and restaurants, if you're not willing to count food as kosher when it's sold in non-kosher establishments. These factors mean that it's more and more difficult for Orthodox communities to continue to exist other than in areas with high concentrations of Jewish populations, and this is a positive feedback system, because more and more people leave the small Jewish communities and move to the Jewish suburbs of big cities, making it even harder for provincial synagogues to survive. So Orthodox communities are becoming more and more insular and segregated from general society, which in turn contributes to ever-stricter definitions of what counts as valid Orthodox observance.

The major political issue is always going to be status, aka "who is a Jew"? The Israeli Rabbinate hews to a more and more Orthodox-centric definition, and because of the Israeli citizenship question it's extremely hard to resist that. The situation is that people are Jewish if they have a Jewish mother or convert to Judaism. Maternity should be simple, but it isn't, because it's becoming more and more an issue that non-Orthodox communities can't certify anyone's mother as Jewish to a standard that will satisfy the Rabbinate. A bigger problem is that only Orthodox conversions are recognized, with a more and more strict definition of what counts as a valid Orthodox conversion. Currently I believe it takes an average of 7 years to convert to Orthodox Judaism in the UK, and during that time you have to prove your willingness to live a strictly Orthodox life according to the most stringent interpretations of the law. There are also more and more multi-generational investigations of not only an individual's conversion, but their mother's conversion or their mother's mother's conversion or their great-great-great grandmother's conversion. So anyone who marries a non-Orthodox Jew has to contend with the possibility that the Rabbinate will refuse to recognize their offspring or even distant descendants as Jewish.

The issue of who-is-a-Jew is also tied up with the issue of who has the right to ordain rabbis, because a conversion can only be accepted by a Beth Din, a rabbinical court. In theory, any rabbi may ordain any other rabbi. However there's a big argument about whether it is legally possible for a woman to be a rabbi. The current Orthodox movement (particularly the Israeli bits of it, there's some softening in the international community) holds that women can not be rabbis under any circumstances. Therefore any non-Orthodox rabbi's legitimacy can be questioned because at some point in the "chain" some rabbi is likely to have been ordained by a female rabbi, and therefore their rabbinical authority is not valid, and therefore anyone ordained by them isn't a real rabbi either. And anyone whose conversion is accepted by a non-valid rabbi isn't a valid Jew according to irritating divisive definitions. This really shouldn't matter as much as it does, it should be possible for Orthodox Jews to insist on male rabbis and everybody else to go on being happily egalitarian, but because of the immigration status issue, it is a very difficult problem to get round. It's not only women rabbis, it's technical details of the process of how conversion works, and the fact that non-Orthodox movements are (definitionally) not going to insist that their converts take on the obligation of following the strict letter of Orthodox law and stringent practice.

This whole thing creates a ratchet where not only do Orthodox authorities have disproportionate amounts of power over non-Orthodox Jews who might otherwise just ignore their rulings, but the rightmost wing of the movement can drag the moderates rightwards, because there's always the danger of not being strict enough to meet the Israeli rabbinate's definition. Example: a practising Orthodox Jewish couple apply for a place for their child at the prestigious Jewish Free School. The child is not considered to be Jewish because his mother was a non-Orthodox convert, even though she has been practising Orthodox Judaism along with her husband for years now. The couple end up taking the school to the secular court for discrimination, which is as far as I can determine a complete disaster for everybody because we end up with a High Court ruling that the traditional definition of Jewish status (having to have a Jewish mother) is racist.

Jewish schools, argh. When I was a kid nobody went to a Jewish school except maybe the most strictly Orthodox families. Now the huge majority of Jewish kids, of all denominations, are educated in Jewish schools. This is partly an artefact of the thing where more and more of the community are concentrating in a few small Jewish areas (more than 4 out of every 5 Jews in the UK currently live in a single London borough these days). But it's also to do with this utterly awful status anxiety; parents are more and more desperate for their kids to marry other Jews, not just any Jews, but Jews with completely impeccable Jewish status, because otherwise there's the chance that their grandkids or descendants will not be recognized as Jewish by the Israeli rabbinate and if the next Hitler comes along they won't be able to escape Europe and move to Israel. This means that the generally good integration of most of the Jewish community into British society is seen as a threat, not a positive thing, because the more integrated you are into wider society, the more likely you are to marry a non-Jew. And people are trying to achieve this by sending their kids to Jewish schools so that they have an almost exclusively Jewish social circle. I am a hardline multi-culturalist, I think this is a disaster. I'm against religious schools in general, and I'm particularly against this trend of Jewish kids only having Jewish friends, and quite often going to university and continuing to hang out with the people they knew as teenagers, schoolfriends and neighbours and pals from the Jewish youth movements.

Tied up with this is the fact that the Jewish community is tearing itself to pieces over inter-marriage, which is to my mind entirely needless and borderline racist. I mean, if communities throw out their members for marrying a non-Jew, it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy that any offspring the couple have are not going to feel engaged in the Jewish community! But the fact of having a non-Jewish spouse is blamed instead of the actual problem, namely the community's rejection of them and their kids. It's also deepening the divisions between denominations, because the Orthodox movement is so hardline against inter-marriage or even marriage to non-Orthodox raised Jews who might have non-Orthodox converts in their ancestry. The Reform movement isn't very happy with intermarriage, but is trying not to be absolutely awful to people in mixed marriages or their offspring. The Liberal movement is largely supportive of inter-marriage, and particularly regards the offspring of Jewish fathers but non-Jewish mothers as fully Jewish. This has massive status implications because anyone who's ever had a Liberal Jewish ancestor may potentially trace their ancestry back to someone whom the Liberal movement would regard as Jewish and the Orthodox movement wouldn't.

Other political issues: same-sex marriage and general rights for GSM groups within communities are kind of hot at the moment, but I think that will sort itself out, it's becoming increasingly politically impossible for anyone to be seriously homophobic. The Orthodox movement is still officially holding to homophobic positions but I think they'll come round eventually. Right now the Reform and Liberal movements perform same-sex marriages and campaign politically for legal recognition of such. The Reform movement was slow to come round on this, Liberal Judaism has always been more pro-actively positive towards LGBT+ folk. But both denominations have pretty much always been willing to ordain gay, lesbian and bi rabbis including those in same-sex relationships, for about as long as there's been such a thing as a gay identity. In fact there used to be a kind of wry joke that the whole intellectual base of Reform and Liberal Judaism was made up of disaffected gay Orthodox Jews, who brought their traditional Orthodox educations with them when they had to leave the Orthodox world.

It's possible I'm being too optimistic, the Orthodox movement might dig in its heels and make hating gay people an identity thing (as in, we're not like those awful Reform people who include all those weird people in their communities who aren't even heterosexual), as they have done to some extent with full inclusion of women. However, that can only work to a certain extent, because eventually the gaps between religious communities and normal society just grow too wide. A good example is the thing of bat mitzvah. The Reform community gave girls the opportunity to celebrate a bat mitzvah from fairly on, that is the exact equivalent of a boy's coming-of-age ceremony. And the Orthodox movement initially condemned this as totally unacceptable in every way, and later introduced the idea of a bat chayil, which is sort of like a consolation prize bat mitzvah, in that it takes place on a Sunday and doesn't include reading from Torah. And over the years, bat chayil has kind of drifted more and more towards being like a bat mitzvah to the point where the terms are nearly interchangeable. The worldwide Orthodox movement is ordaining women, it's still controversial yet but it's happening, and I think in a few years it'll be, perhaps still exceptional but undeniably something that Orthodox people do, and at that point the UK Orthodox community will discover that in fact women rabbis were acceptable all along.

I think a more pressing issue that there is increasingly less and less space in Anglo-Jewry for people who are religiously observant (whatever that may mean to an individual) and also fully integrated into British culture. That partly comes back to the issue with everybody flocking to Jewish areas and all the kids going to Jewish schools and being cocooned in a nearly exclusively Jewish social life. But it's also partly that everybody is getting so entrenched in their denominational and political positions, and so much trying to keep up with Israel (and to some extent the US) that we're kind of losing what I see as particularly valuable about the Anglo tradition, which has been multicultural for centuries before the word was invented.

I can't really discuss this without mentioning the Jacobs affair. R' Louis Jacobs was a leading Orthodox rabbi, a respected scholar, I've heard it said he was tipped for chief rabbi. And somehow or other he managed to get himself excommunicated (which, by the way, is not something that Jews normally go around doing!) He wasn't especially small-l liberal by the historical standards of Anglo-Orthodoxy, though he kind of looked it compared to where the movement is these days with the ongoing rush to the right. The ostensible reason was for writing a book that argued that the first few chapters of the Bible are mythological and metaphorical rather than literally historically true, which really really should never have been a controversial position whatsoever. Jews haven't been into Biblical literalism for a couple of thousand years at least.

So he went on to found the Masorti movement, which is more or less the UK equivalent of Conservative Judaism and is largely a good thing. Masorti Judaism is a halachic movement, one centred around traditional rabbinic law, but taking a pragmatic, realistic interpretation of the law informed by modern scholarship rather than always trying for the most stringent possible interpretation due to worry that the Israeli rabbinate will declare anything less invalid. It's currently tiny but growing. The problem is that it's seen as in some ways more of a threat to Orthodoxy than the non-halachic movements, because it's similar enough to attract people away from Orthodox communities. This in turn has caused some Orthodox groups to get even more entrenched, unwilling to countenance any sort of forward movement because they need to differentiate themselves from the Masorti. And of course there are status issues and arguments over whether Masorti conversions are valid and it's a whole big mess.

The other thing that's going on is that Jews in this country are becoming more and more disengaged from communities based around synagogues. Lots of reasons for this, one being the growing lack of any synagogues that are big enough to be viable outside the major centres. And in the major centres, all the kids are going to Jewish schools so there's a feeling that they're kind of getting enough religion during the week and they deserve a break at the weekend. Another is to do with the changing relationship between the rabbis and the laity. Immediately post-war there was a problem that communities were basically expecting rabbis to do religion on their behalf. This was partly influenced by the Christian model where priests have specific ritual roles that only priests can fulfil (and therefore moving away from the more traditionally Jewish role of a rabbi which is simply to be a source of Jewish knowledge, education and where applicable legal decisions.) And partly because the communities had been fragmented three times in as many generations, the refugees who came over at the turn of the last century and either deliberately discarded or lost access to religious knowledge, the massive death rate of the younger generation in WW1, and then the influx of more refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe.

The pendulum has been swinging away from this in recent decades. In lots of ways this is a good thing, more empowered and knowledgeable and engaged laity, Jewish communities that are flexible and interested in aspects of religion like social justice that go beyond simply turning up and holding services. The problem is that you're getting a generation of Jews who think they don't need a rabbi... until they do. Rabbis are poorly paid in this country, compared to either the level of education they have or the salaries rabbis can attract in places like the US. And the dwindling provincial communities increasingly can't afford to pay a full-time rabbi and it's pretty grim trying to scrabble together a living by acting as quarter-time rabbi for two or three different small communities, plus free-lance funerals and the odd paid radio or TV gig.

Very few English Orthodox men want to train as rabbis, so the Orthodox community ends up hiring people from America or Israel or from the Chabad movement, all of whom are much more hardline than the Anglo tradition has historically been. The Orthodox shul where my parents were semi-regulars for the first years of my life (though we actually belonged to the Reform shul) found itself in this position. The new Chabad rabbi insisted on replacing the nominal mechitza, the division between the men's and women's sections, with an opaque, 8-foot high wall. And when the community complained that women felt unable to take part in the service if they were behind a big wall, the rabbi claimed that it was desecration to remove part of the fabric of the synagogue building. And anyway the men were mixing far too freely with women anyway and it could only lead to immorality. That's the kind of thing you hear quite a lot from small Orthodox communities, when it isn't the perhaps even worse news that the shul has had to close because there just aren't enough people to keep it viable and they can't get a rabbi at all.

And very few non-Orthodox people want to train as rabbis either, partly because the Progressive communities are increasingly not willing (and in many cases not financially able) to pay someone a professional salary when they can lead their own services and download educational materials from the internet. And besides who needs a formal religious service when you can create meditative, spiritual Experiences with a loosely Jewish flavour? Plus there's still the issue of inter-marriage: right now no denomination is officially prepared to ordain anyone with a non-Jewish partner. They used to kind of turn a blind eye to same-sex non-Jewish partners, but now that we have same-sex marriage or something that's nearly as good, the prohibition on mixed relationships is starting to bite a lot more. Nobody can really explain why a denomination that doesn't follow the strict letter of Jewish law anyway is so hung up on the idea that rabbis must only be romantically involved with other Jews, but that's the way it is. And frankly, outside the increasingly insular Orthodox enclaves, more and more engaged committed Jews have non-Jewish partners, so freezing them out of leadership (to some extent lay positions as well as formal ministry) is creating a serious gap in the community.

Informal communities can be great in some ways. They can answer a need that people really have, they can be far more inclusive than liturgy which can only move at the pace of re-editing prayerbooks (at best). They're getting back the "gap generation" the young adults from 13 to 30 who tended to avoid traditional, synagogue based Judaism because it was so pedagogic, so focused on giving kids an education that it had little to offer to people who were too old to actually be kids and too young (in our society with its prolonged adolescence) to have kids of their own. And they're much more social justice engaged because the kinds of people who form their own alt and indie communities see religion as meaningless if it's just pious words not accompanied by action.

The downside is that if there is no motivation for regular prayer in a central location, there's no continuity. The only people who can get involved are those who are already friends with the ones who start the alt communities. So often these communities are sorely lacking in diversity, particularly age diversity (though they're probably better than many mainstream communities at gender and sexual identity diversity). If people are going to only bother showing up to something that speaks to them personally, there's a big temptation to spend all your religious time with the same people who are your obvious social peers anyway, who are going to be all into the same things. This model of Judaism isn't very useful for people who don't have particularly great social skills, who maybe aren't going to be seen as shiny assets to an indie group that gets to pick and choose who counts as a valuable member. There isn't much of a place for people who have become alienated from religion for many years and find they need to come back at a time of crisis – how are they going to find anything to come back to? There isn't support for that rather obnoxious old man when he finds that being prickly at everybody throughout your adult life leaves you isolated in your widowhood.

People who only want to take part in religion if it's "meaningful" don't bother doing the boring grindy things that you need to keep the infrastructure going. It's all a bit tyranny of structurelessness; if you don't have boring things like a managing committee and you reject authority, you end up having your community run by the people who happen to be able to put lots of time and energy into it and are best at persuading. Sometimes those people burn out and then the community falls apart, sometimes they just shout over the parents of young kids and the older people and the carers and the people with disabilities. And when there does come a crisis that needs serious religious education and pastoral skills, a group of random enthusiastic people with no training can't cope. At the moment what happens is that they come crawling back to the mainstream communities they broke away from as being too stuffy and boring. But my worry is that if everybody is off having meaningful experiences in informal indie groups, it won't be long before the boring mainstream communities fade out of existence altogether.

OK, this is over 5K words, I had better shut up and post it! I may do a separate post on how this relates to the Board of Deputies, particularly since both my parents are currently Deputies, so I might ask them for some input. As before, if you have any questions I am happy to try to answer them, if you have factual corrections that would be great because this is mostly just my personal opinions with a lot of over-simplification. kerrypolka, I hope this satisfies your desire to see me ramble!

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3W4DW: My research

Tue, 07 May 2013 12:37:58 GMT

forestofglory asked to hear more about how your research is going. Goodness only knows I'll take any excuse to talk shop, but I have to be a bit cautious about what I post online regarding work that's currently in progress. So I'm going to take a slightly different tack approaching this question, and instead talk for a bit about why I'm interested in what I'm interested in.

The old fashioned word for the sort of thing I care about is cybernetics. These days cybernetics refers almost exclusively to computers, but in the late 20^th century, it was to do with regarding biological systems in terms of the flow of information. How does an organism, or an organ, or even a cell, receive a whole bunch of inputs from the environment and alter its behaviour appropriately? In informal language I tend to refer to this as decision-making, though it isn't a literal conscious decision process.

I got into cancer because it's one of two sub-fields where approaches to this kind of question are most developed. (The other is embryonic development, which put me off because I'm kinda squeamish about directly performing experiments on mammals and didn't fancy spending my career breeding flies or teeny worms.) And yes, of course I was somewhat motivated by a desire to help find a cure for such a terrible disease, and there were fairly chance elements as there always are in any career path.

So let's say you have a cell in the epithelium of the glands of the breast. Epithelia are the layers at the edges of tissues, so they frequently get sheared off, just by physical abrasion. So that the epithelium doesn't get worn away altogether, it has to produce new cells. Producing new cells means converting nutrients from the diet into the substances of cells, such that the "parent" cell doubles in size. It has to make exactly two copies of its genome, with no extra DNA and no genes left out. Part of this is the semi-conservative replication most people learn about in high school biology, where the two complementary strands of DNA separate and enzymes copy both strands by means of Watson-Crick base-pairing, allowing each strand of the helix to act as a template. That's all fine and good, but the cell still has to "know" when it is time to copy the DNA, and when it has completed the task. Once you have a cell that is twice the size of a typical cell of its type, containing exactly two copies of every chromosome, the cell divides into two "daughters", with each one receiving exactly one copy of each chromosome and (usually) half the cell contents. That's mitosis, which again you may be familiar with.

The thing is, though, the cell can't carry out this process based on purely internal cues, though even that is complicated enough! It needs to divide to make more cells when the epithelium has worn away enough to need replacements, but no more than that as that would lead to excess cells. And excess cells are, well, we have a word for that: a growth or a tumour. In addition, the cell has to change its rate of division based on all kinds of information, such as whether it's in a male or female body, whether it is in an embryo / foetus which needs to undergo some rapid growth, or a child whose breast tissue is growing only in proportion to the rest of its body, or in a girl experiencing puberty whose breast tissue expands rapidly (but not indefinitely!), or indeed whether it's in a pregnant or lactating woman and exactly what are the demands for milk at any given moment. I could tell a similar story for the cells of many other epithelial types, but breasts are a good example.

One way that the cell integrates all these inputs is that chemicals are produced in different parts of the body, hormones or substances produced under the influence of hormones usually, but there are neurological factors as well, and some inputs that respond to conscious experience of the environment. These are carried in the bloodstream to the relevant epithelium, and bind to specialist proteins called receptors either within the cell or more commonly on its surface. Receptors are activated by the binding of these chemicals, and they initiate signalling processes which can alter the cell's behaviour. At any given moment there are going to be several signalling processes going on and the outcome is going to depend on the exact balance between all of them. For example, if somebody is undergoing puberty, and also starving, it's probably better to concentrate resources on survival rather than growing new breast tissue, so the cell is going to have to receive "puberty time" signals as well as "not enough nutrition" signals and act accordingly.

The signalling processes typically involve a cascade of chemical modifications to a series of proteins, the receptor modifies protein A, which in turn is activated to modify protein B, which produces a chemical to activate protein C and so on. I sometimes care what's going on on a chemical level, eg has the charge of the protein changed by the addition of an electrically negative phosphate group, causing it to adopt a new configuration which is now more energetically favourable? But a lot of the time I actually don't care very much; the level of abstraction that I'm interested in is more about regarding each protein in the cascade as an abstract entity, which is either in an active or a repressed state, and how that is going to affect how the cell behaves.

Short term changes in behaviour can often just involve enzymes which alter the chemical properties of the cell, but longer-term changes, such as committing to division, usually require changes in gene expression and production of new proteins. This is really important because obviously all the cells in the epithelium will have the same genome, yet some will divide and some will not. Not only this, but cells of all the other tissues of the body have the same genome too, and most of them aren't breast epithelium at all, they are brain neurones or kidney filtering cells or immune defence cells or whatever. In order to achieve this, the cells also have the ability to turn genes on and off more or less permanently, as well as in short term response to the current state of signalling. This happens through making chemical modifications or marks on the DNA itself, as well as the structural proteins that hold the DNA together, changing a particular stretch of DNA between a closed state which can't normally be switched on, and an open state which is ready to be expressed if the appropriate combination of signals is present.

To focus down a bit further, I'm particularly interested in a process called apoptosis. From the Greek meaning "leaf fall", this is effectively a fail-safe mechanism by which cells can commit suicide. There are several possible reasons why cell suicide is beneficial to the organism as a whole. One is to remove structures that are needed at one stage and then cease to be needed (eg the lactating mother weans her child), and one is to help maintain exactly the right amount of cells in a tissue, eg if slightly too many are produced for some reason. But another reason for cell suicide is if there is serious damage to the cell; it is far better to remove one cell out of the billions in the body, than to propagate the damage by making more copies of it. This process is one of the key reasons why 2/3 of people never get cancer at all, and most of the rest live 60 years or more before they get it. Even though cells are constantly bombarded with radiation, chemical damage, for some cell types infection by parasites, and all acquire genetic mutations, the great, great majority of the harmful ones trigger apoptosis before the affected cell has a chance to divide out of control and cause a tumour.

During my PhD I worked on a protein called p53, which does a whole bunch of interesting things but the one relevant to me is that it detects cells that have faulty, contradictory signalling and turns on genes that cause apoptosis, before the cell has a chance to turn into a tumour, or if that doesn't work, it can also make cells go into apoptosis before a tumour becomes malignant or metastatic. I was trying to find drugs which would hyper-activate p53 so that tumours would destroy themselves through cell suicide, whereas normal cells would largely be fine because if everything else is normal, one signal alone isn't enough to trigger p53.

As part of that study, I discovered interesting things about p53's monitoring of a part of the cell called the nucleolus. The nucleolus is probably best described as a meta-factory: it makes the ribosomes, which are the parts of the cell machinery in turn responsible for making other proteins. In order for a cell to divide, it needs to make extra ribosomes so that it can make extra proteins in order to increase in size. And if that process is disrupted, its probably a good sign that something is seriously wrong, which will be picked up by p53 and most often the result should be apoptosis, rather than the cell continuing to make incorrect ribosomes and proteins or carry on dividing in a generally messed up situation. So I went off to do a post-doc working on another protein, c-Myc, which again does lots of different things but one of them is regulate this process of ribosome production. As a generalization, c-Myc is activated when the cell receives signals to grow, and if it starts getting activated even when the signals are absent, it may force inappropriate growth leading to tumour formation.

I was interested in finding drugs to prevent that process, but I didn't get very far during my 3 years in Sweden. So I'm still interested in it, and in the interaction between the p53 pathway and the c-Myc pathway, because they're in fact not entirely independent. Right now I don't really have any funding to work on this question, though. What I do have is funding to study a completely new protein, which just to be extra-secure I'm going to call X. X seems to be a master-switch protein that can control whether cells grow and divide, if more cells are needed, or whether cells die by apoptosis, if there are problems or fewer cells are needed. The cell signalling systems involving X probably also involve p53, I'm trying to find out more specifically.

Because it's a completely new protein, only recently discovered (by my collaborator as well as some other independent researchers) as something that seems to be important in cancer, almost anything we find out about it is going to be interesting. I want to know why it sometimes makes cells divide faster and makes them continue dividing even when you poison them and they ought to be committing apoptosis, yet sometimes X itself makes cells halt division and die by apoptosis even when you haven't otherwise stressed them. I want to know what other proteins X interacts with, what it signals to and what signals to it. I have a very faint thread of possibility that X itself may be involved in switching genes on or off, but if it doesn't do that directly it likely affects other proteins which will change gene expression. I have some friendly surgeons who are going to lend me the tumours they cut out of patients (the ones who give permission for us to use their removed tumours for research), so I'm going to find out if X is mutated or changes its activity in some way in cancer. And it might turn out that X is useful in genetic tests, perhaps for cancer diagnosis or for making decisions about which treatment is useful. Or else we might possibly be able to look for drugs which change X from the cancer-promoting state which makes cells divide and evade apoptosis, to the cancer-preventing state which makes cells halt division and die. But that's kind of a long term aim, we'll need a whole lot more information first.

I am going to have to keep the exact details fairly vague, but with that caveat I'm totally happy to answer any questions. These sorts of essays always end up being both too technical and over-simplified, especially when I just type them as the thoughts occur to me, without very much planning.

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International I-disagree-with-everybody day

Mon, 06 May 2013 18:55:39 GMT

Politically speaking, I am firmly committed to a body-positive stance. If I want to sum up a fairly complex set of ideas, I would say that means I don't think people should be judged or face discrimination based on what their body is like, whether that's on aesthetic grounds, or health grounds, or (as so often happens) a convoluted mixture where the two are confused or treated as interchangeable. I also am positive about bodies, in that I don't think it's virtuous to mortify one's body for the sake of attaining some higher spiritual or similar goal, I think people are their bodies, and bodies should be treated with respect and care. But that's not the aspect of body-positivity that I want to talk about here.

As part of being body positive, I include fat bodies. There are lots of different groups trying to improve fat people's experience of the world, using labels such as fat acceptance, fat positivity, health at every size, fat pride and so on. And they all have slightly different ideas of what it means to be an activist in favour of fat people. I broadly agree with all of these movements, but I don't subscribe in detail to every aspect of their philosophy, so I don't consider myself as a member of any of the movements supportive of fat people. For me, it's part of my general belief that people are their bodies and people are worthy of respect; there isn't a certain weight or BMI or whatever above which that principle ceases to apply.

Given this, and given that I generally love Body Impolitic, you might think I'd be all over this recent post on International No Diet Day. In fact, it really bothers me.

It has often been my experience that when I, or other people on the internet, say we are fat positive, people react by assuming that we must hate thin people. Maybe some fat activists do, but I strongly doubt it, and I certainly don't. Thin people, just like fat people, have the bodies they have because of their genetic inheritance, their upbringing, their environment, their lifestyle choices based, I can only hope, on much more important priorities than whether I find them aesthetically pleasing. It would be hypocritical in the extreme if I were to react negatively to thin people just because they happen to be thin. As far as I can tell, the people who hate thin people are those who are desperately trying to lose weight, who believe that thin people have the highest value in the social pecking order, and therefore "hate", or perhaps more accurately are jealous of, people who are more successful at achieving the thin ideal.

The other assumption that people make, though, is that I and my activist allies hate dieters. And it feels to me like Oelbaum's project, as described by Murray at Body Impolitic, is contributing to that false impression. The thing is, I have personally chosen not to diet, because based on the evidence I have seen, I conclude that most weight-loss methods are not effective for most people. Further, while I am aware that there is a correlation between being extremely overweight and poor health, there is almost no compelling evidence that a fat person who loses weight will have health outcomes as good as someone who was always thin to start with. That's partly because very few people do in fact lose substantial amounts of weight in the long term, so what evidence there is is based on small and quite likely exceptional populations. For all that's a personal choice, not a political stance, I can see why people sometimes become defensive if I refuse to participate in their hobby, and furthermore doubt that their weight-loss plan is going to do them as much good as they think it is.

Politically, though, I am strongly against the pressure exerted on many people (especially fat people, but on quite a lot of relatively thin people too) to diet, to the point that it's almost compulsory. If I have decided that the putative benefits of dieting aren't worth the cost, I want other people to have the right to make that judgement call too! And like Oelbaum, Murray, Chastain as quoted in the Body Impolitic article, and many others, I am in fact angry with the weight loss industry, which puts almost unimaginable resource into pressuring people, both individuals and healthcare providers and purchasers, to spend lots of money pursuing a chimeric goal of weight loss.

But that doesn't in the slightest mean I am against individuals who want to lose weight! The medical orthodoxy is still after all that weight loss is good for you, so it is entirely reasonable to follow that view. Some individual health conditions may be improved by weight loss – type II diabetes may be, at least for some people, ditto PCOS, and some joint problems and pain can be alleviated by reducing the weight borne by the affected joints. Some people can't access needed treatment unless they meet weight goals; I might have a problem with doctors restricting healthcare access on that basis, but from the patient's perspective, it only makes sense to do what it takes to get your condition treated.

And some people just plain feel better when they weigh less; it's not for me to judge whether that's because they buy into beauty standards that I consider artificial or for any other reason. People have autonomy over their own bodies, people have the right to decide that it's worth going hungry in order to have the body shape they feel good about. Wanting your body to look a certain way isn't "superficial" or trivial, it's a valid desire, because people are their bodies.

Furthermore, just because most people don't lose substantial weight in the long term through dieting, doesn't change the fact that some people do. Estimates run at around 5%, which isn't that tiny, 1 in 20 people have a metabolic quirk which means that when they consume fewer calories and do more exercise, they get thinner. Not just a little bit thinner, which nearly everyone does, but substantially and sustainably thinner. I don't want to argue those people out of existence because it suits my political cause! Well-known Fat Acceptance blogger Kate Harding at some point said something like Congratulations, you're literally a freak of nature, which I considered really unhelpful, calling people freaks is never good politics, and anyway, people who lose weight through changing their calorie balance are in real terms not that rare at all, it's only slightly less common than being left-handed. From a HAES perspective, I'm all in favour of people changing their lifestyle to be more healthy, and for many people that means doing more exercise and eating less or differently, and some (a relatively rare few, but some) are going to lose weight if they do that. It would go against my principles entirely to have a problem with that.

Sometimes this feels a bit like some of the debates within feminism about expressions of conventional femininity. Feminists may passionately argue that women shouldn't have to wear makeup and high heels to succeed in the world or be taken seriously. And some people are always going to hear that they're wrong or inferior or somehow "unfeminist" if they do want to wear makeup, high heels etc. People shouldn't have to diet; that doesn't mean people who do diet are the problem. I try to be as supportive as I can of friends who are aiming to lose weight.

I don't agree with Oelbaum characterizing dieting as always being about self-loathing or measuring our worth on a bathroom scale. And I don't like Murray referring to a dieter as the infinitely exploitable sucker. I have a big problem with her dragging in eating disorders, and with Murray endorsing this by calling diet books "Create Your Own Eating Disorder" books. People with mental illnesses are the worst possible people to blame for social problems! Someone who has an eating disorder is not a gullible fool taken in by pro-diet social messages, no more than anyone else is. And people who diet and worry about their weight shouldn't be inappropriately diagnosed with eating disorders to make a rhetorical point.

So, much as the Willendorf project – making replicas of the Venus of Willendorf out of papier mâché made from ripped up diet books – is cute, Oelbaum's ad campaign I think misses the mark, and I am really quite uncomfortable with Murray's write-up of the project. I also feel quite uncomfortable with today being designated "International no diet day". I like the idea behind the project, and in some ways I'm marking it by making this post setting out my body positive, partially anti-diet stance. But I am very uncertain about the implementation; apart from anything else, I think the idea of having a "No Diet" day is potentially quite damaging. Because nearly all weight-loss diets have, whether formally or in practice, "days off" when you're excused from your diet for just one day. That's part of the reason why diets are often quite unhealthy in the first place, because people are encouraged to use their days off to stuff their faces with as much of the forbidden foods as they can possibly eat, knowing that they'll have to go back to abstaining when the day is over. It's all tied up with the idea of "naughty" foods which are bad for you but you can indulge in them occasionally as a treat, and that itself is very much the message of weight-loss marketing, and marketing from other industries which piggy-back on keeping people hungry, dissatisfied and insecure so that they can more easily be tempted to part with their money.

Have I alienated everybody yet?

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Decade

Thu, 02 May 2013 17:47:59 GMT

I officially started using DW as my main journalling / blogging home 4 years ago. That's not when I created the account; I was helping with documentation and testing and a teeny-tiny bit of development when the site was still in closed beta, so I had one of the first small handful of accounts back in January 2009. But I didn't want to "move in" here until it was opened for people who weren't connected with developers to use as well.

Dreamwidth celebrates its birthday on 1^st May, so this seems like a reasonable point to count from. Four years on, I'm still pretty happy here. DW provides pretty much everything I want from a blog host. Most importantly, it's stable, both in terms of near-impeccable server uptime and as a business which has a solid financial plan but no grand ambitions. The WTF system and the reading list make it extremely easy to meet interesting new people and avoid obnoxious people. I like having control over the appearance of my journal, including the option to tweak it with CSS. Threaded comments and a decent, non-obtrusive comment notification system. There's no advertising, which is such a big thing, I really really want to be using services with precisely this business model, that 10% of core users financially support the site for the 90% who don't pay but do create content.

Is DW perfect? No, I could certainly find things to quibble with. In particular, after the initial honeymoon phase, it doesn't really seem to be in active development any more. There are a bunch of really quite key features that have been floated around as being about to happen any time soon for more than half DW's lifetime. They never seem to get beyond spec, or at best, a half-hearted implementation that gives the desired functionality but isn't fully usable or documented at all. I mean, this is better than the other extreme of constantly rushing to add new features that detract from the core purpose of the site and break things, and certainly there is active, meaningful bug-fixing, the site's not just being left to rot.

In some ways this really does slot DW very tightly into the niche of being perfect for people who really miss LJ as it was before brad sold it to a company with serious VC investment. I am one of those people, certainly, I like that it's small and quiet and a bit old-fashioned and text-centric. I like that it's properly in the spirit, not just the letter, of Open Source, even though that does have the disadvantage that the only way to get new features is to get someone from a very small core team of experienced volunteer developers passionate about the same things you care about. And I like that the site is not trying to grow beyond its capacity, it's trying to be sustainable. But obviously with any site like this there's going to be a huge network effect and I think at this point I have to admit that DW is never going to be big. It's always going to have the dream of being the absolute ideal blogging / journalling / networking site that's run for the benefit of its users, and I like being part of that dream, but it's an ideal, not a reality.

The thing I don't love about DW is its employment practices, it's seriously underpaying most (all?) of its paid staff. I suspect that DW isn't actually worse than a lot of other tech start-ups, it's just that the culture where the staff don't just dogfood but actively use the site and are fully involved socially means that nosy people like me can keep their ear to the ground and find out that people are working for considerably less than the market rate because they're passionate about DW and for other reasons connected to their personal circumstances. It's a vicious circle, too; without being able to offer competitive rates to attract programmers, DW will never be able to develop enough features to grow to the point where it can afford to pay said programmers properly. It's little short of a miracle what DW has been able to achieve with volunteers, including a whole heap of volunteers who don't otherwise have backgrounds in programming or Open Source. But even that I suspect isn't quite enough.

Anyway, while I'm marking time passing, I have been blogging for most of 10 years; DW opened just a couple of weeks before the 6^th anniversary of starting my LJ. I've made just over 1500 posts in that time, and I reckon that probably puts me close to 2 million words since most of my posts are long-winded. Certainly a couple of million if you include comments. And those words have described getting a PhD, several different romantic relationships including the one with the person I eventually married, three jobs, living in Scotland, Sweden and moving back to England again, a bunch of travelling, reviews of several hundred books, and some pretty major shifts in my thinking about topics such as politics, feminism and others. I've met any number of new friends and got glimpses into the lives of, oh, a good several hundred people, many from very different backgrounds to me and whom I might never have imagined if I hadn't been on LJ/DW. I don't know if I've achieved the kind of competence that is supposed to come with writing a million words of crap, but I do think I'm a better writer than I was in 2003. All in all it's been a blast, and I'm certainly looking forward to the next ten years.

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Wrong person for the job?

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 08:34:11 GMT

This worked really well when I had to lead a seminar about obesity, so let's try it again. I've somehow been volunteered to run a first year session on childbearing and reproduction. It's a bit of a grab-bag of stuff, like a lot of our first year curriculum it's pretty much just introducing the students to the issues that exist. They will revisit this stuff later in the course, don't worry, we're not trying to teach them absolutely everything they need to know about childbearing in a single afternoon.

The rest of the module is about the actual mechanics of reproduction, conception, pregnancy, labour, foetal development etc. This session is about childbearing in social context. So, does anyone have anything they'd like me to convey to some future doctors about:

Teenage pregnancy and young parenting
Treated or untreated infertility
Involuntary childlessness (ie unwanted childlessness caused by not finding a partner or not being in life circumstances to have children, as opposed to physiological inability to successfully sustain a pregnancy)
Deliberately delaying childbearing for career and other economic reasons
Social gender roles and expectations affecting childbearing decisions
Cultural variation in all of the above

Like I said, quite a grab-bag, and to me the glaringly obvious hole in it is that there's absolutely no GSM perspective, but that's tied up with other stuff about the way the curriculum is structured (basically we don't really introduce complicated advanced concepts about gender and sexuality until the third year). Though at least there is explicit acknowledgement that this stuff is important for men, it's not purely a women's issue.

Me, I'm happily childfree, and I haven't even experienced much of the pressure to reproduce that some childfree women report. So I can't bring the same degree of personal experience I did to talking about the medical profession and fat people. But if there are any misapprehensions you would like me to address, or hurtful stereotypes and ways of talking about these issues that I should avoid, I'd be glad to hear about them! Again, I want to be very aware that these issues affect the actual students in the discussion as well as their hypothetical future patients; some of them are mature students who might have had any kind of life experience, a minority but a few of them are right now combining parenting with medical studies, and I shouldn't make assumptions that none of this stuff is relevant to the more "traditional" ie 18-year-old students straight from school.

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3W4DW: The exodus to Facebook and Tumblr

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:08:34 GMT

Got into a discussion with damerell about the fact that so many people have left LJ and DW and all gone to Facebook, which is just unspeakably awful. And ayngelcat chimed in with the comment that it is't Facebook that everybody's gone to, but Tumblr.

I tend to pontificate about FB fairly regularly, but hey, one more can't hurt. I absolutely agree that Facebook is unspeakably awful, and it's not because I'm some enlightened super-geek who can see through their façade; everybody thinks FB is awful. The awfulness of FB is a standard small-talk topic among grandparents who are only just getting to grips with using their first computer. But we're all using it anyway. Well, some people have managed to stay out of its tentacles, but "I don't have a Facebook account" is really the new "I don't have a TV" for showing off one's elite status.

So what, exactly, is FB's killer feature? I'm coming to think the answer is in fact not just one thing. It's not quite a boiling frog thing, it's that it's gone through so many incarnations where it was providing some useful feature, and when the PTB decided to revise what it was trying to do, everybody was already there so it was easier to use FB for whatever new purpose than to leave when it stopped being good for the old purpose.

Who remembers when FB was restricted to just a few American university campuses? Then it was very useful, a low-key way to meet people at your uni and friends-of-friends. That created an atmosphere where people felt very comfortable being startlingly open under their real names. I mean, it's a bit silly to trust everybody who happens to go to the same university as you, but it's less ridiculously self-destructive than trusting, like, everybody on the internet with your innermost thoughts. But the trusting your classmates thing set up the atmosphere where people talk about about their personal lives online, and why FB was far more successful than earlier incarnations of automated systems for meeting friends-of-friends (Can you say Friendster with a straight face? Orkut?).

So when FB grew beyond being an electronic version of a campus noticeboard, it was already primed to be a much better replacement for things like classmates.com and Friends Reunited. I appreciate as per the discussion on my earlier post that some people would rather stab their eyes out with a rusty spork than have any contact with the people they were at school with, but the majority of people are quite glad to have a low-effort way of satisfying curiosity about people they've encountered at earlier stages of their life. The culture of using wallet names and real-world contact details that had already built up helped with that, and indeed for a while FB acted like a magical self-updating address book. I remember being quite excited about it when that's what it did, jumping through hoops to get an Oxford alumni email address in order to get a FB account.

Then I think there was a phase where several different things coincided to give FB a lot of traction. They had some really good publicity going for a bit back in the late 2000s, I remember when every newspaper I picked up had an opinion piece / advertorial on how FB was going to be the future and everybody had better join it quick or they'd be left behind. The self-updating address book thing combined really well with the events system, which many people who have come to hate FB still consider the absolute killer feature. Nothing on the spectrum between sending out group emails and using a dedicated events management site that people have to sign up to or at least remember to check can possibly compete with the convenience of setting up an event on FB and allowing people to RSVP with one click and see who else is planning to go and communicate with fellow attendees.

The other thing that I think allowed FB to enter its log phase growth was that it was almost spam-free. The walled-garden effect meant you could set things up to only get messages from people you'd actually chosen to communicate with. So pretty much everything in your FB inbox was wanted, useful messages. Not Nigerian scams and penis enlargement spam, which yes, can be dealt with by decent filters, but not everybody knows how to set up decent filters. And perhaps equally importantly, not promo emails from every company you bought products from once, not mailing lists you signed up to because one message in 50 is actually useful to you, not pointless messages inappropriately cc'd or reply-all'd to the whole organization. Nowadays I consider FB to be pretty spammy, but the fact is it's still pretty secure against bulk-messaging, the only way to spam FB is to convince human beings to spam their friends. So (even though humans are pretty gullible) it's still better than just about any blog or pre-FB social network or less than aggressively filtered email. This means that FB, certainly back in the day, gave people plenty of opportunities for the reward, the hit, of wanted messages with very little of the negative reinforcement that comes from information overload.

Then Zuckerberg and co realized they were sitting on an expletive gold-mine. You had this mass influx of people, many of them very little internet-savvy, all in one place, sharing their real-world identities and details, ripe for the plucking. FB needed to move on beyond simply displaying lots of adverts to serious monetization. I think that's the moment FB "turned evil", though it was certainly never benevolent. The introduction of apps, to encourage people to actually spend time on the site rather than just checking it occasionally, was the start of the rot. For a while, FB was making most of its frightening amounts of moolah from Farmville and similar addictive without actually being fun social games. The security also got a whole lot worse, because anybody could write an app which had access to a massive amount of personal information about the people who chose to use it.

The social gaming thing is still around, but it's no longer the big thing about FB. Nowadays the big thing is companies having their own pages and using FB to get advertising directly into people's trust networks. FB's customers are no longer the advertisers in the sense of the people who pay them to put "lose belly fat now!" ads on frequently visited pages, those are bottom-feeders that I imagine contribute negligible amounts to FB's revenue. FB's customers are major companies who can buy both valuable demographic information and even more importantly, direct access to customers' emotional hooks. Hence the whole awful parasitic ecosystem of click-jacking, like-stealing, the works.

So why are people still using FB when it's become this much of a cesspit? Partly because of lock-in and the network effect, and after all the event organizing thing has outlasted all the various incarnations of the site. But also I think because FB has become almost a job, rather than a leisure activity. You have to (not literally have to, but there are strong pressures) be on FB because it looks suspicious if you're not, and besides there are lots of bits of economic life you can't participate in, like when you can only book a place at an event via the organizers' FB page. And you have to carefully manage your reputation and what information can be found about you and what image you want to promote to, say, potential employers. I said I was just going to talk off-the-cuff and not look stuff up, but I have a couple of links that have been in my posting queue for a while that fit quite well here:

Rob Horning's Data self piece, which is rather technical and academic-y, but I think makes a really useful point, and is worth it for the marvellous pull-quote: “Becoming oneself” has turned into a crappy job — a compulsory low-paying, low-skill job.

Erin Boesel's Your feels as free labour is magisterial, really collecting together all the most useful recent writing on the users-as-product hamster wheel.

She also wins my heart because she's a (former?) LJ user and has lots of asides about why LJ is just so obviously superior to FB. But it doesn't help, because in spite of the marketing, FB isn't a social network any more, in any meaningful sense. FB is a constant arms race to keep your own personal brand buoyant while all kinds of companies are employing experts whose entire full-time job is to persuade or trick you to provide free advertising and information gathering for them.

Eastercon this year really made me understand emotionally that LJ as a community-forming tool is dead. First of all it's the fact that Eastercon isn't even using an LJ community for pre-con chatter any more, it has a bland little Wordpress blog. And then when I went to the con I put Liv on my badge and everybody was confused as to why on earth I'd have such a quaint thing as a handle. And I met a bunch of interesting new people, but can I maintain connections to them after the con's over? Can I heck, people are not exactly going to give out something as personal as a wallet name / Facebook name to a chance acquaintance who happened to be in a late night discussion with them at a con, but they don't have (active) LJ presences any more, so they can't give me access to a pseudonymous yet personal aspect of their life. I think some people were kind-of using Twitter for this sort of thing, but I've never really got the hang of using Twitter as a way to get to know new people without being intrusive. And most of the pro authors have blogs, but a lot of them are more about publicity than interacting with people, and there's little or no fan community anyway.

I don't think it's the case that people have left LJ to go to FB. It's that people have left LJ and people have gone to FB, more or less independently. People have left LJ partly because everything online is fragmented now, whereas it used to be all in one place, so you had a mix of essays, personal diary stuff, artworks and photography, fannish activity, memes and sharing funny pictures, ephemeral one-liners, links to interesting content etc, and now all those things have their own specialist sites. People have also left partly because the interaction barriers are just that bit too high. Hand-coding HTML was cutting edge in 2000, but now people can't be bothered when most other places on the internet make multimedia posts and comments as easy as simply typing into a box or selecting items from a GUI. That's also partly exacerbated by the fact that people are increasingly accessing the internet from phones rather than desktop computers; that pushes it much more towards a read-only or read-and-click-like, read-and-share, rather than read and respond with a thoughtful comment or your own spin-off post.

So how does Tumblr fit in? I fully admit that I am too old and boring for Tumblr. I've been sitting on the edge observing it for years now, and I still don't really get it. I have a Tumblr, and you're very welcome to follow it if you want to see my random pretty or cool things. But I don't really fundamentally understand what Tumblr is for or how it works.

Of course, this is exactly the place where I write long speculations about things I don't really understand. My theory of Tumblr is that it's precisely the anti-Facebook. It's completely and properly anonymous, it doesn't even have the danger increasingly present on pseudonymous sites including LJ clones that you can easily identify people by analysing their networks and patching together personal information from their indiscreet friends. Because you can't really tell who someone's friends are on Tumblr, or not automatically anyway. And there's almost no advertising (indeed, I am substantially worried about what on earth Tumblr's business / revenue model is supposed to be; surely Tumblr Radar can't be enough to make megabucks?) And there's very little danger (or at least very little perceived danger) that people are going to get screened out or fired or otherwise get into real world trouble for what they put on Tumblr. There's a culture where all kinds of grey-legal things are acceptable and indeed expected, from various kinds of exotic porn to making gifsets of clips from extremely valuable commercial properties such as the Game of Thrones series.

The other thing about Tumblr is that it's much more about curating than creating original content. Pretty much every Tumblr I've ever seen has a majority of reblogs from other Tumblrs, far outweighing content actually created by the Tumblr author. Some of it is, like mine, a random stream of everything-that-catches-my-eye, and some of it is literally curated, gathering together stuff with a distinct theme. And it certainly does fit in to the not quite passive, but very low effort, read-like-share model of using the internet. But that can't be the whole reason why Tumblr is successful; after all, SixApart, the company that bought LJ from its original owners and later sold it to SUP, tried to make a site where it was extremely easy to share multimedia content, and it was a complete flop (in fact, you probably don't remember Vox unless you're as much of a giant social media nerd as I am!)

Some people do use Tumblr for writing thoughtful, blog-style essays, and apparently get some benefit from the fact that there are no comments and the only way people can respond to your stuff is by reblogging and adding their own commentary. I don't comprehend how that works, but it certainly exists. It may be because the negativity generated by the entire internet falling on your head when you post something controversial is far greater, for some people, than the positivity of getting lots of comments and feedback.

I can sort of see how that works for certain types of media fandom. It used to be a truism that fanwork creation was really driven by feedback, but perhaps that's not actually true. Perhaps getting your stuff liked or shared is enough of a reward that people don't need comments. I can imagine there's a sort of freedom in knowing that your stuff is unlikely to be criticized if it doesn't work or offends someone. Plus the free playground of a subculture that apparently hasn't heard of copyright must be great for fans!

I don't see Tumblr as an alternative to LJ/DW, though. Or only in the sense that people have limited time for online activities, and time that's being used for Tumblr is probably taking away from time that might otherwise be used for DW. For me, the main features of DW are comment discussions, which Tumblr lacks, and the ability to get to know people two hops away from me or who have something in common but aren't otherwise connected, which Tumblr is pretty poor at.

Is there anything DW can do to get these people back? One thing that would help would be having a usable mobile app, and another would be replacing the sack-of-crap RTE with a modern point-and-click system for posting, including pictures and embedded media without having to hand-code your own HTML. But I suspect that even if those features ever get further than a half-hearted spec, it may not be enough or too late to deal with fragmentation. Trying to be a rival to FB and Tumblr is a mug's game, that much is sure. The only hope I have for getting people back is for DW to be a place people go as well as Facebook and Tumblr (and Twitter, Pinboard, Instragram and any number of other sites that wouldn't be on topic for this post). However, to end on a positive note, these days DW is far more active and lively with ongoing conversations than LJ, and in lots of ways I like that it's small, I like that it still has the ethos of what denise calls a "Mom and Pop business". And, y'know, I've been here 4 years and I'm still very content with my online home; four years in to my time on LJ I was already casting around for some less evil / annoying alternative.

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Hairy tale

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 22:14:46 GMT

[Sort of a response to Hel Gurney's Hair, very rough, I want to write some of this down and I don't know if I'll ever knock it into a shape I'm contented with.]

The first three years I had blonde curls. I wasn't a cute child, and very far from pretty, but I had a cherub's hair. People don't believe my baby pictures are me because of it.

According to custom, I had my first haircut at three. I can't remember if it was traumatic, or exciting, or just one more among the incomprehensible experiences young children are put through. After that my hair grew back brunette and straightish. Not enough curl to be wavy, not enough straight to be neat or manageable. A friend called the colour "dark mouse" once.

For the next ten years, I was dragged to the hairdresser every six weeks. Literally kicking and screaming, I fought and fought against having my hair cut in the style of a respectable little boy. I was respectable enough that I stopped making a scene when we got to the hairdresser, but not boy enough to meekly accept being taken for one after being shorn.

(Diana has short hair, and she's a princess. So what if she's a tall willowy English rose with a team of world-class stylists at her beck and call? Surely dumpy plain tomboyish bookish pre-adolescent me could still aspire to... No.)

Just a few times we were too busy for the scheduled haircuts. Just a few pictures of me where my mop of hair falls into my eyes and over my neck. Precious stolen weeks when I could just begin to see myself in the mirror. All the more misery when it had to be cut back to "respectable".

I reached 12, the age of religious majority. Old enough that it was unseemly for mother and daughter to physically fight over my hairstyle. We still argued over it, an ongoing bone of contention through my awkward teens. It grew out straggly, messy, shapeless, short-back-and-sides never meant to be expanded. My mother wasn't wrong that it looked dreadful. Once my father ventured "nicely styled, it might look nice long". There was a row, and there was the knowledge that the one singular time my parents broke their united front it was over my too-long too-unruly not-worth-the-effort hair.

Some particularly bitter fight when my mother failed to understand the soul-deep horror of being fourteen. As a peace-offering, I agreed to one more haircut. Somehow I ended up with a short bob, still toolongtooimpracticaltoodrippytoogirly for my mother, still devastatingly too short for me.

Five years before I let a blade near it again. Small mercy, the bob grew out the "right" shape for long hair. I couldn't style it, I could barely keep it brushed and untangled. To other girls my age I was too irredeemably "sad", too unfeminine, to be party to hairstyling games. My mother had no advice but "cut it short again, it'll be so much easier to manage".

My grandmother bought me a luxury Mason-Pearson hairbrush and tried to pass on her experience of managing long hair. Mine was totally unlike her fine, straight, groomable glory. And her decades out of date styles cast me further out of the circle of "proper" girls. I was grateful for my one ally all the same.

A "gift" of a grown-up session with a stylist for my first formal dance. My hairdresser called colleagues and other customers over to mock my hair, by now below my waist, never styled, never trimmed. She threatened and cajoled to cut it all off, the condition was so bad it was hardly worth keeping. Still respectable, I didn't weep or curse, I politely negotiated for the sacrifice a mere 18 inches of split ends. What remained they piled up on my head in an elaborate sculpture of artificial curls, held up with hairspray and all kinds of strange devices. I held the tears in while the party lasted, and when I came home Granny and my sister sat up with me til 4 am, patiently unwinding all the tangles and combing out the glue-hard hairspray.

It was years again before I could brush it without pangs of absence, my inexpert strokes aborted too soon. I dyed it magenta once, and for one brief night I tasted what it is to be beautiful. Then notorious for a week, nobody had thought I was bold enough for vivid colours. Then the dye faded to a reddish sheen, and I didn't have a whole afternoon to spare to redo it for such a brief moment.

I fell in love with a woman with hair like liquid poetry. She initiated me into the mysteries of long hair that is also thick, not-quite-curly but making its ethnic history known. Taught me patience rather than roughness to work out tangles and alchemical tricks to reduce their occurrence. Helped me bind my hair so tight it still looked freshly dressed after a day of rushing and a night of dancing. If I couldn't reach beautiful hair I at least managed competent.

I cut it again to celebrate my doctoral graduation. Professionally dyed a shade of auburn to make my eyes green and match my inner self. Straightened and tidied, almost pretty. And eighteen precious hard-won inches too short again.

angelofthenorth offered to trim my again uncut and ungoverned hair ahead of my wedding. I trust her, even after all these years of people wielding scissors to cut me away from who I am. And she made it neat without taking away much of my mess, my styleless guileless hair that is after all my own. Then she invented a style formal enough to get married but simple enough for me to feel like me, dressed up but not some elaborate doll-bride.

Since then it's grown back thicker and stronger, for the first time I've been able to grow it past the tops of my thighs. If all this tangle makes me feminine, well, I suppose I shall have to live with that. There are other versions of the truth, but I won't sacrifice my long hair to be able to tell them.

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3W4DW: Maccabees

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:15:11 GMT

In my original 3W4DW post I asked for suggestions of topics for me to ramble about, and wychwood asked for the Books of Maccabees:

Could you talk about the Books of Maccabees? Like, are they part of Jewish scripture? What do they mean to you? I read something about them being marginalised as part of a political agenda, but Hannukah has obviously survived - what's up with that?

In short, no, none of the Books of Maccabees are part of Jewish scripture. At least Maccabees 1 and 2 have acquired more importance than most other Apocryphal books because of chanukah, as you Wych points out. To dig into that a bit more, though:

The Jewish Bible is often referred to as the Tanach, sometimes spelled Tenakh. This is an acronym, it stands for Torah, Neviim (prophets) and Ketuvim (writings). Taken together, the Tanach is very similar to the canonical form of the Protestant Old Testament, except with the books in a slightly different order and some minor differences in verse and chapter numbering. The Torah (in its narrow sense) is the Five Books of Moses or the Pentateuch, the first five books in the OT. These form the absolute central scriptural text, everything else about Judaism traces its origins to these books. The Five Books are what gets written on scrolls and read ceremonially in synagogues. The rest of the Hebrew Bible is considered sacred, but in some ways it's not very central to modern Judaism, it's instructive to read, it's considered Divinely inspired, it's used as part of liturgy, but it's illustrative of the Torah and rabbinic laws can not directly be derived from these sections of the Bible.

Fixing the final canonical form of Tanach happened in the early part of the rabbinic era, when they were already starting to move to a religion based on detailed legal systems ultimately derived from Torah, rather than a Biblical religion in the sense that Christians might understand it. Torah itself was already pretty much fixed by this time; though there are hints of disputes about manuscript variants, it's set almost down to the exact sequence of letters, let alone which books are included. The books of Prophets were also already fixed by the time we have written records of people discussing the constitution of the scriptural canon, though there wasn't quite such a strong system to ensure fidelity of copying. The important thing about Prophets is that they are considered to be written down by people who were directly transmitting God's words. Not all books about people we might think of as prophets are in the Prophets section of the Torah. These books are Joshua through Malachi (but not including Chronicles, which is at the end of the Jewish ordering of the Hebrew Bible).

The controversy arose over the "Writings"; we have records of several debates about whether books had enough holy status to be included in this section. In fact there's a lovely story about R' Akiva arguing in favour of the inclusion of Song of Songs, because it's basically just erotic poetry, but he considered it to have holy status on grounds that more or less amount to literary merit. The ones that actually made the cut are Psalms, Proverbs, Job (which is very Hellenized, by the way), the five so-called megillot which are read separately at particular times in the liturgical calendar ie Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther, three random prophets who are not Prophets namely Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah, and Chronicles, an alternate version of Kings which has somewhat lower status though still holy. There are other books that were written during around the same era as the later books of Writings and in a similar style, which did not make it into our Bible; these ended up being the Apocrypha for Protestants and (some of them?) are included within the Catholic Bible.

Normally the Apocryphal books don't really have any status within normative Judaism, but they are sometimes treated as early collections of midrash, which are teaching stories used to illustrate and expand on Biblical and legal material. Several people have pointed out the similarity between rabbinic midrash and fanfic, because it frequently fills in gaps in the text or fixes perceived theological problems or just explores relationships and backstories of the characters. The books of Maccabees are part of this set of books, or at least Maccabees 1 and 2 are, Maccabees 3 and 4 were, if I remember correctly, probably originally written in Greek and then back-translated into Hebrew, and therefore really never had any possibility of being in the canon.

wychwood is right that the reason for the exclusion of Maccabees is partly political. The Maccabees themselves established the Hasmonean kingdom, a brief period when Judea had political and military autonomy and was ruled over by this dynasty of priest-kings. This was politically unacceptable in early rabbinic Judaism, partly because they were trying to move the seat of power away from the inherited priesthood (let alone any kind of monarchy) and plant it firmly within a quasi-meritocratic intellectual system where scholars, later known as rabbis, ran things. If you think of the debates in the New Testament between the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the Sadducees were kind of politically aligned with the Hasmoneans and wanted to preserve an inherited priesthood, whereas the Pharisees were busy trying to establish what became rabbinic Judaism. Also because under Roman occupation it was a really bad idea to remind the ruling authorities that Jews had ever had any kind of military or statehood ambitions! So as the rabbis rose into ascendancy, helped along by the destruction of the Temple in the middle of the first century, the Hasmoneans and therefore the books of Maccabees were falling seriously out of favour.

The reason that the books didn't just completely fade into oblivion is, as wychwood is aware, chanukah. Chanukah is the ultimate ironic festival, because it celebrates a movement of zealots who resisted integration into Greek culture by... following the extremely Greco-Roman custom of establishing a new festival to celebrate a military victory. The early rabbis were very unhappy with this, but they were faced with the practical problem that people on the ground were in fact enthusiastically celebrating chanukah, because who doesn't love an 8-day party in the depths of winter? So what they did was to try and spiritualize chanukah in some way, they created a story whereby chanukah wasn't a celebration of a military victory when Judea achieved independence from the occupying Seleucids, but rather a celebration of a temple miracle involving lights continuing to burn even when there wasn't enough fuel.

Chanukah continued to be a minor but popular festival for all of Jewish history. It gained status in modern America and from there spread worldwide mainly because of its proximity to Christmas. For many generations now it's been used as a consolation prize for kids who are left out of the massive partying and present-giving fest that is modern secular Christmas. And misguided attempts at multiculturalism have tried to package chanukah as the "Jewish equivalent" of Christmas. We don't ever formally read the books of Maccabees (unlike reading the megillot at their appropriate seasons), but we do incorporate retellings of stories that have their origins in those books into our celebrations.

The books have also become tied up with the Zionist mythos, which is a topic far too complicated for me to get into when I'm talking completely off-the-cuff like this. But basically for most of the period between the Romans ransacking Jerusalem in the first century and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the story of the Maccabees has been a kind of revenge fantasy for Jews living under more or very often less benign occupying powers, a talisman that one day we'd get an army again and then Christian and Muslim pan-national powers won't be able to push us around any more. By the end of the nineteenth century that fantasy starts looking nationalist and even imperialist, because those were the prevailing cultural trends in late nineteenth century Europe.

What do the books mean to me? Not a whole lot, I have never actually sat down and read trhough even 1 Maccabees. I've just picked up the stories from my general culture, and gone through several rounds of problematizing and reclaiming them over my lifetime. For one thing I'm a thoroughly rabbinic Jew, I am not interested in nationalism based on military power or an inherited priesthood/monarchy. For a second thing I am a thoroughly assimilated Jew, I consider myself very much part of British, European and general Western culture, I have no truck with trying to make Judaism "pure" of outside cultural influences or separating ourselves from our surrounding cultures. Much less of committing acts of violence against Jews who are insufficiently fundamentalist.

So there you go. Brain dump of what I know about the Books of Maccabees. Corrections from people who are more expert in any of this stuff most welcome! Any more topic suggestions, anyone?

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After death, holiness

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 20:27:49 GMT

Which is not a very profound title, it's just that the assigned Torah reading for last week was two sections back to back, and the sections are named after the first word (significant word, that is, otherwise half of them would be called "it came to pass" or "[God] spoke" or "the"). But anyway, this particular Torah reading includes the Holiness code of Leviticus, which is a somewhat miscellaneous collection of laws that must be kept in order to be holy, because God is holy. Which in turn includes that infamous verse about a man lying with a male, the one that some fundamentalist Protestants seem to want to try to base their whole religion on: And a man that sexually uses a male, with the sexual habits of a woman, they have both done an abomination, they must certainly be put to death, they are blood-guilty [Leviticus 20:13]

So I read that out, Ezra-style, which is to say reading a verse at a time with a running translation, as I learned from my teacher R' Hadassah Davies. And I prepared a somewhat milquetoast sermon saying that I could preach my whole sermon about a single verse, an uplifting one like You shall the love the stranger as yourself or a controversial one like putting men to death for sexual acts with other men, but instead I would talk about the whole context of the Holiness code and what holiness means and the concepts of "just laws" which seem to fit with ethical instincts and "statutes" which seem to be entirely arbitrary. In fact my lovely lovely community didn't let me get through more than half a sentence before they started arguing with me. Well, not so much arguing with me as arguing with the Torah I'd just read.

Somebody declared indignantly that she didn't particularly fancy stoning Graham Norton to death (I didn't know who he was but I assumed he was an out gay celebrity and later confirmed this on the internet.) Another member of the congregation, who has quite debilitating social anxiety and would find it pure torture to speak up in a lively debate, came up to me afterwards and confirmed, making an obvious effort to speak beyond social pleasantries, that we wouldn't need to execute Graham Norton because whatever he did with his boyfriend would be in private and there would not be the two kosher witnesses required for the death penalty. This is in fact the correct rabbinic answer and one of the ways that Judaism has historically dealt with the Torah mandating the death penalty for sexual behaviours. But it's not really satisfactory if you're looking for a proper gay rights perspective, having a theoretical death penalty which is absolutely never going to be enforced as part of your religious teaching is still extremely hurtful.

I had been reluctant to speak too critically about the man-with-a-male verse, basically because I didn't want to offend my community's Orthodox sensibilities. But by failing to challenge it directly rather than being wishy-washy about it, I offended their basic human values, which is far worse. And when they delighted me by being outraged at finding that verse in their beloved Torah, I continued equivocating, I didn't say: of course I don't want to execute Graham Norton or any of my gay brothers or my own bi self. I'm not closeted within the community, but I'm not exactly out either, I've only made the kinds of comments that other Queer people would correctly interpret to mean that I'm one of them, not the kind that straight people pay attention to.

A couple of days later, Keshet tweeted this really amazing article, where a gay man imagines the speech he could have given at his bar mitzvah when he was assigned this week's Torah portion. Mutatis mutandis, I could have given that sermon on Saturday, and I didn't.

Today I was at a mini-conference, and one of the talks was an absolutely brilliant presentation of a PhD on the experience of elderly LGB people with nursing care. (It wasn't about GSM people in general, it was specifically about gay men, lesbians and bi women, because that is the scope of the research. No, I don't know why no bi-identified men were included, but anyway.) Basically as LGB people age they are being pushed back into the closet and forced to pass as heterosexual in order to not have completely miserable lives when receiving home care or in sheltered housing or nursing homes. And they tend to need this kind of care at younger ages than their heterosexual counterparts because fewer of them have spouses, children or birth families who can carry out informal care tasks in the early stages of age-related decline. For the same reason older LGB people are less likely to have relatives to advocate for them and make sure they get the best possible care if they're too frail to deal with the system themselves. Many of the interviewed subjects said they didn't want to be in a "happy rainbow" home for all kinds of people with GSM identities, they wanted provision specifically for gay men or lesbian and bi women respectively. Gay men didn't want to be in homes where the majority of residents would be women, even lesbian and bi women, because of the differences in life-expectancy. Lesbians particularly, coming from the older generation, had often had very little close contact with men for most of their lives, and didn't want to be stuck with "dirty old men" who might have lost their inhibitions about inappropriate sexual behaviour.

I talked to the speaker afterwards, asking a question about whether she thought the problem would diminish over the next decades as LGB people become much more integrated / assimilated into mainstream society. We had a happy bonding session when she answered that she thought the problem would continue, because some people are just visibly gender non-conforming and are never going to fit the marriage-and-kids heteronormative not too threatening model. And because the relatively accepting (at least accepting of assimilated not too visibly Queer gay people) social milieu is limited; there are intersectional issues notably including class. But even people who have spent their working lives in nice fluffy liberal middle-class bubbles, when they start needing care are having their lives governed by low skilled care workers who are often immigrants from countries with very different attitudes to gender and sexuality, and may end up depending on services provided by religious groups, and thus may find a much less accepting environment.

In some way I feel like the problems this researcher was outlining are partly my fault. Because I kind of give a pass to older people and more conservative religious people and people who aren't academics and professionals if they're at least somewhat homophobic, so in lots of ways I'm helping to perpetuate a heteronormative environment. Same at work, I'm really not particularly visible or particularly willing to stick my neck out and make a fuss about places where the curriculum isn't really inclusive. I'm not doing anything active to prevent my doctorlings from growing up to assume all their patients are going to be straight, which will contribute to the kind of difficulties described when people from GSM backgrounds are trying to access care.

I do welcome comments on this, but please do understand that it's fairly sensitive stuff. And if there were an easy answer I'd have found it some time in the past 20 years.

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Poetry

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:28:55 GMT

According to some, April is National Poetry Month. (Pace siderea: what nation? The Nation of Internet.) My brother is a poet, and I feel like a bad sister for not paying enough attention to poetry, not really having any opinions about it let alone engaging with the form. So I'm going to make some attempt to mark the season.

The other day I was talking to a friend from synagogue and he spontaneously recited WH "Supertramp" Davies' Leisure. It is an utterly terrible poem, it's Hallmarky and bathetic and doesn't even really scan properly. But my friend still has it by heart from his schooldays some three quarters of a century ago. I wonder if when I'm in my 80s I will be able to recite Stopping by woods on a snowy evening (which I learned for a recitation competition when I was seven) or some of the mostly Romantic poetry I learned from my father.

Talking of recitable, rythmic verse, legionseagle posted a rather good Kipling pastiche recently. It's very common to write more or less parodic versions of If, but surprisingly hard to do it well.

I've also been moved by several less formal, almost tending to the blank verse pieces recently. ursulav made a poignant post reaching out to Muslims in the wake of the Boston attacks and the inevitable wave of racism in response. And someone in the comments posted a snippet by Adrienne Rich which maybe helps, if anything can help in the face of shocking violence like that.

And in a locked discussion, a friend linked to a poem called Hair published in Stone Telling. That touched me somewhere very deep. It's not literally true of how I feel about my hair, but it's a poem, it's not a political manifesto for me to sign up to or refute. I'm not genderqueer in the way Gurney describes in that poem. But it's true that my hip-length hair is a part of who I am that is much more significant than the fact that I happen to be female, and it's also true that people make assumptions about my gender because I have very long hair. And I don't think I can claim the fierceness of that closing line: This is the flag I bring to the battles of my days., not for myself, but I am somehow heartened to know that someone out there is saying that.

highlyeccentric is one of the people who have been posting a bunch of poems, not just for April but for the whole of 2013. There's a lot of stuff that is completely new to me, some I bounce off because I don't have the degree of literacy in poetry I do in prose, and some I really like. In particular, this piece entitled The failure of language, by Jacqueline Berger (according to Wiki a contemporary American poet), really meant something to me. I want more people to see:

Everything we love fails, I didn’t tell my students,
if by fails we mean ends or changes,
if by love we mean what sustains us.
Language is what honors the vanishing.
Or is language what slows the leaving?
Or does it only deepen what we know of loss?

I am even considering copying it into my book of true things, which a dear friend gave me a long time ago when I was dealing with loss, loss of a friend and loss of a childish worldview built on a sense of fairness. Except in the 15 years since I've never quite found anything I'm certain enough of to write in the book, it's remained blank. If I wrote poetry, I'd write something about the symbolism of a friend comforting me with the gift of a blank book, and how it still comforts me that I might one day find something true enough and important enough to write down in it.

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and St George!

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:01:43 GMT

Back in 2010, I celebrated St George's day by setting up a book-recommending meme. I had a lot of fun with it, and discovered some cool new books, and expressed my fluffy-liberal-patriotism in a way that feels comfortable to me. It seems to be in the spirit of three_weeks_for_dw since people are making an effort to meet new folk, so I think I'll run it again.

The idea is that you comment and recommend me a book, and I will rec you one in return. If I don't know you you can give me some clues as to what you like, or you can let me guess based on a snap judgement from scanning your profile. I'll keep trying until I find something you haven't read and like the sound of.

For my tastes, here's 10 years of booklog, if you're really keen. I read most genres with some preference for science fiction. I want books with good characters, then plot tied about equally with interesting ideas, and I like beautiful prose but I'd rather have a book with merely functional language and interesting characters than the other way round. I don't particularly care for horror or most action / thrillers, especially not if there's graphic violence. But I'm willing to expand my horizons if you suggest something really good! In any case I'm very happy if you just suggest something that you yourself like and you think isn't well known. Oh, and as well as English I read French and can sort of manage Swedish if it's not too dense / old-fashioned.

Who's on?

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Three weeks?

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:48:44 GMT

I haven't seen any signs of people doing the three_weeks_for_dw thing this year. If we were doing it, I think it would start today, cos it's usually the end of April and beginning of May, around the anniversary of open beta. So let's say hypothetically 22^nd April – 12^th May.

It's no longer really the case that DW is limited because people here aren't actively enough posting content; people who want to be here are here, other people aren't, and lots of people have drifted away from this type of journalling / community-based long-form blogging altogether and probably there's nothing DW can do to get them back. There are still basically no active communities here other than RP communities, but personal journals seem to be pretty solid, I have plenty to read, I'm meeting new interesting people and most of my posts get lively comment discussions.

This time last year, I posted about community building. Although I didn't do a formal Three Weeks thing, because I was a month from my wedding at that point, I have for the whole of the year tried to follow siderea's advice and make more frequent "pointer" posts with links to other content. I haven't managed three link posts a week, nothing like, but I have definitely noticed that pointer posts do encourage discussion, and they do encourage me to post fairly regularly even when I feel like I don't have time to make a full, polished post. I was remarking to a friend recently that I love the curate / propagate internet less than I loved the original content internet that dominated a few years ago, but if that's the milieu we're living in, it certainly does seem sensible to participate in curating and propagating to the best of my ability.

Anyway, I don't want to commit to post every day during the Three Weeks, especially not if I'm the only person who has noticed the season, that really wouldn't make for much of a meme! But I would like to increase my posting rate a bit if I can, because I think that's good in general, and the season is just an excuse. In order to achieve this, I need to resolve to be less perfectionist, so I want to make some off-the-cuff posts, not waiting until I have a honed argument with lots of detailed citations (and ending up never posting half the things that come into my head).

What I'd most appreciate would be some suggestions of topics. Please comment with titles, questions, prompts, or just general topic areas about which you'd like a few paragraphs of my random opinions. And feel free to join in with any degree of challenge to post a bit more during the coming three weeks, you're very welcome to borrow my idea or not if some other motivation for posting more suits you better.

Post queue
The Books of Maccabees
Why has everyone gone to Facebook?
2a... or Tumblr
My research and supervising a PhD student
Anglo-Jewry, politics, the Board of Deputies
Baking experiments

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Play: Antigone

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:56:43 GMT

So my dad's best friend from university, who has known me all my life and is pretty much an aunt to me, has a real passion for amateur theatre. This season she's directing Sophocles' Antigone, in a translation by another member of that set who is now a classics professor. I really wanted to see this production, but I have no free weekends and getting to London for a weekday evening is a bit impractical. But then it turned out that I needed to be at a one-day conference in London today, and there's no sensible way to get to London without travelling up the night before, so all of a sudden I was going to be in London during the run.

A bit at the last minute, I invited khalinche to join me, and as I'd hoped she was actually free for a spontaneous theatre visit. And it was a really cool production, I'm very glad I went. Amazingly khalinche didn't know the play or the underlying myth at all, just imagine coming to Sophocles completely fresh! I haven't studied Antigone specifically, but I do know a bit about Greek theatre in general and my head is full of every kind of interpretation from Freudian analysis to Anouilh's version. I suspect my case is more typical of the kind of people who go to see Antigone in small amateur theatres.

I found the interpretation extremely successful; the play was done pretty straight, but reasonably naturalistic, without a pedantic emphasis on Authenticity. The costumes were sort of vaguely twentieth century with a Greek flavour, rather than being set in a particular period. The translation was poetic but not forsoothly, all the lines sounded completely natural, though in a formal register which I think works better for the play than a very colloquial translation. I particularly liked what my not-aunt did with the chorus; she had just four actors, speaking most of the lines in unison but with naturalistic acting, and occasionally breaking out to give a particular line or section solo. You really got the sense that the chorus was the voice of the narrative and a human group of Theban elders at the same time. Antigone tended slightly hysterical, though to be fair most of her lines are basically about how wretched she is and everything is terrible. Adam Sutcliffe's Creon was seriously impressive, you could absolutely believe him as a tyrant. He managed just the right combination of imposing with ultimately weak, really superlative acting. I've seen considerably weaker pro productions, and I'm not just saying that because of the family connection!

It was a wonderful evening in general. I felt a bit guilty about dragging khalinche all the way out to Ealing, but it was such a glorious spring evening that walking through the suburb with a friend was pure pleasure. And my not-aunt, in spite of the usual ration of directorial panic, was able to come and sit with us and invite us for a drink in the theatre bar after the show, along with some other friends from university and some of their children as well as me. I really hope my crowd will be like that in 30 years' time, still hanging out together and talking about anything and everything. Even travelling alllll the way across London to get back to khalinche's place was a treat, because it gave us such a good opportunity for conversation.

The conference was not as good a networking opportunity as I'd hoped, partly because all the sessions overran so we didn't actually have any mingling time, and partly because I had to leave ludicrously early because the last off-peak train is before 3 pm. Also because I was a bit silly and spent the only free ten minutes I had getting into conversation with people who work for British American Tobacco (I have a family connection with them too, you see), and they are utterly useless for networking because all cancer funders forbid their scientists to have anything to do with tobacco companies. But still interesting and fun; there was a very cute talk about using a slime mould based model for predicting which compounds are going to be too disgusting-tasting to be usable. Possibly only pseudomonas and coalescent will get why I find Dictyostelium endearing, but you know.

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Book: Pure

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:07:48 GMT

Author: Timothy Mo

Details: (c) Timothy Mo 2012; Pub Turnaround Books 2012; ISBN 978-1-873-26279-5

Verdict: Pure is a powerful and disturbing book.

Reasons for reading it: I generally appreciate Mo as a writer, and I was quite excited to see a new book of his after a long hiatus.

How it came into my hands: Library.

When people ask me what I've been reading, I've been replying that Pure is the story of a Thai ladyboy who ends up in an Islamic fundamentalist terror cell. It's very good, there's a lot of different stuff in it, good characterization, good examination of several complex issues that don't get much attention in most UK media, and an exciting and pacy story. It's also a completely repulsive book; I expect a degree of violence from Mo, but Pure makes it really relentless, terrorist violence, gender violence, torture, colonialist and military violence. In many ways I think Pure is a parody of the kind of thriller where upper-class English spymasters play a "Great Game" of sending agents to exotic locations and arranging assassinations and torture at arms' length and manipulating political factions to foment expedient violence. It undermines the genre because the viewpoint character is one of the expendable brown people actually experiencing the direct effects of Britain trying to extend its colonial influence.

Snooky is a very cool character, feisty, irreverent and also utterly terrified at being caught up in all the plotty stuff which in a lesser book might be just there to give the reader an adrenalin rush. There are occasional chapters from other viewpoints, some of the slightly higher up Jihadists and the spymaster Victor Veridian. These are utterly horrible and not glamourized at all, you get a really strong impression of narrow-minded religious fundamentalists obsessed with violence, and the unbelievably entitled posh guy who thinks he can decide politics in the Far East by entirely fastidiously giving orders for people to be tortured or blown up. At the same time, you do get a glimpse of what motivates these people, they have some sympathetic features and are much more than just caricatured villains.

Pure is offensive in pretty much every way it's possible to be offensive, because most of the characters have views that are eg racist and antisemitic and colonialist and extremely sexist and homophobic. Because it's all first person, there's no overt moralizing commentary on this, the reader is left to draw their own conclusions. Snooky liberally uses homophobic and transphobic terms to refer to herself and her ladyboy [sic] friends.

Overall I admired Pure more than I enjoyed it. It starts out darkly humorous but by the end, by the time you really care about the characters it's just dark. It's too subtle to be a polemic about colonialism is bad / religious fundamentalism is bad, but it really strongly shows some of the things that are awful about these political tendencies and how they're intertwined.

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Yay friends!

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 11:10:22 GMT

I don't know how many times in the last 10 years I've titled posts something with the theme of my friends being awesome, but it's still true.

Last weekend I went to doseybat's party and it was full of free-floating, interesting conversation with lots of people I'm always glad to spend time with, including khalinche, timeplease, ewt and others, people I haven't seen for years including aphenine, as bat and I go back a long long way and our social circles have merged considerably, and lots of interesting new people. I stayed over and so managed to squeeze further conversation from the after-party, with pseudomonas and morwen and blue_mai as well as doseybat and pplfichi, doing the tired nerd thing of browsing Wikipedia and Google Streetview and learning random stuff about the world. It was especially interesting to follow up on some of the Eastercon conversations about London with blue_mai who has some serious expertise in London history. Bounce!

I had to come home after lunch on Sunday in order to run a Yom HaShoah memorial at synagogue. Yom HaShoah is the Jewish day for commemorating the Holocaust, and having been so infuriated with taking part in the secular event on Holocaust Memorial Day recently, I wanted to do it properly. I asked people to bring information to help them remember, which made the community feel involved. One of the congregants lost first-degree relatives in Terezin (Theresienstadt) and has been doing some research into their lives and what minimal information there is about their deaths, so it was really important to incorporate that into community remembrance. Some of the readings weren't really successful, because not everybody in the community really knows how to pick something appropriate for the setting. I think I may need to exert more editorial control next year, but in other ways it's more important for people to express themselves and to feel part of the commemoration than to have a very polished event. And I was able to live up to my own views that you don't aestheticize this kind of thing, you read survivor and victim testimony and you try to remember, you don't have a multimedia Experience aimed to manipulate people's emotions.

Then I went back to work for three days, and then rysmiel came to visit. We had a completely wonderful time, having set aside those few days just to enjoy eachother's company and eat nice food and have fun, since we have way too much geography most of the time. We pretty much didn't stop talking other than to sleep, and I am absolutely glowing. I had social stuff in London again at the weekend, so I was able to travel as far as the city centre with rysmiel on the way to the airport, and continue talking for just a few more hours. Unfortunately some other passengers got annoyed with us for having a conversation in a (not Quiet designated) train carriage, so we had to spend most of the journey talking in whispers. I could get very annoyed by such bad manners, but on the other hand we have this deep joy and the curmudgeons evidently don't, so mostly I feel sorry for them.

Anyway, I met doseybat and pplfichi for dim sum at the wonderful Joy King Lau. I was particularly excited by the water chestnut paste, which was one of those gelatinous things right on the edge between sweet and savoury that really don't happen in European or more anglicized Chinese food. And then we got to spend the afternoon and the following morning drinking tea and setting the world to rights and geeking out about cameras and academic careers. And the batmother was around for some of it, and she's always great. Bounce again!

Sunday afternoon we beached in the Pembury for mirrorshard's birthday party. This was really brilliant, partly for the venue – I haven't been to the Pembury for far too long – which served me a particularly tasty wheat beer called London Fields, and some interesting cider. Partly for getting to see mirrorshard and mirabehn who are brilliant and we don't quite overlap as often as I'd like in real life. Partly because the group contained a whole bunch of people I feel really comfortable with, goths and geeks and people who find everything interesting and a really high proportion of people wearing purple. Most of the new people I met quickly turned out to have multiple second-degree connections and not only through the hosts, so we had several wins Kevin Bacon style games (including the strict version where you only count connections through shared body fluids, ahem). I was exceptionally happy and bouncy anyway, because by the time the party got started I'd been talking non-stop to people I really like for about 5 days solid. And on top of all those other very good things, angelofthenorth and gwyddno were there, and it's been far too long since I saw them. There are some specific ways that I'm able to be myself with that crowd that I don't get to express very often, not that my life is particularly restricted in that way, but still, it was a joy.

And you know another reason why my friends are wonderful? I've not only been too busy to be online for most of the past week, but I've had technical problems with internet at home so haven't even briefly checked in. (Turns out that my router had somehow reset itself, not to factory defaults but to some other combination of settings, so nothing could find the wireless at all and I assumed the internet was out. Even after I'd figured that out troubleshooting was fiddly, but anyway, I am back online.) So while I was completely ignoring the internet, everybody went on having highly civilized discussions about contentious topics like death, disability rights and sex even without me being around to moderate, so thank you all. I will try to get back to your cogent comments over the next few days.

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Stuff I want to talk about

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:04:08 GMT

There is absolutely no theme to these links. They're all interesting, they all deserve wider audiences, and they're all things I'd like to discuss with other people who may be interested in the topics.

taimatsu on curing disability. I really like this because it explains what academics call "the social model" and why many (not all, but not only a few fringe extremists either) disabled people can be resistant to the frame of always trying as hard as possible to cure / eliminate disabilities. It does this on an entirely personal level and without using a lot of technical academic language. Please do note the OP's request not to have the theoretical debate with her.
R' Debbie Young-Somers linked to this old but really wonderful essay by R' Rachel Adler on Beruriah: The virgin in the brothel. I don't know how much sense this will make if you're not familiar with analysing Rabbinic literature through a Queer lens, but I think it's absolutely brilliant, one of the best pieces on the Beruriah mythos I've ever seen (and people in my corner of the Jewish world talk about her a lot, because just the fact of having a woman who is quoted as a religious authority in the Talmud makes her kind of a big deal.)

Apart from being brilliant on Beruriah, R' Adler has some really good things to say about the relationship between teachers and learners, between the voice of authority and marginalized people grappling with religion. Or academia, for that matter; Adler starts out with the magisterial Our teachers break our hearts when they do not see how their Torah is bounded by their context and concludes The curse of scholars is the delusion of transcending context, all the while being trapped in a frame to which they are oblivious. If we translate Torah as "teaching" or "scholarship," this feels very applicable to the way that academia gets to be both the arbiter and the guardian of learning. I want to do something with that in the dissertation I'm still trying to write about teaching in higher ed.
Emily Nagoski, one of my favourite sexuality bloggers, has posted a transcript of a talk she gave at a Feminist Porn Conference (how much do I like living in a world where such events exist!) which pretty much sums up the philosophy of her blog, The Dirty Normal: Vaginas of science, vaginas of justice.

Nagoski starts by apologizing for her not very intersectional stance; she's basically interested in cis, binary gendered, mostly assumed to be straight women. She holds that this group of women have a raw deal in a world where narratives of sexuality are always male-centric, and she's trying to do something about that. Given her apology I reasonably trust that she's not actively aiming to make life worse for women and others outside the gender binary, but she doesn't really have much to say to such people. In some ways I read Nagoski in the same way that jack very generously reads Men are from Mars, women are from Venus: it seems useful to me to know that there can be differences in sexual style and there isn't only one mode for normal, healthy sexuality. I don't really care about why or even whether women are more likely to have one set of characteristics and men another.

Do people find these ideas of "responsive desire" and "arousal non-concordance" useful? Do they match anything in your experience?

In some ways arousal non-concordance seems almost obvious to me. Sure, increased blood flow to ones genitals doesn't necessarily exactly correlate with emotionally wanting to have sex at that moment in that situation, and lack of such change in blood flow can obviously coexist with desire. This seems to be almost trivially true, for just about any combination of genitals and gender identities. Nagoski persistently argues that for women (by which she means cis, binary-gendered, vagina-possessing women) non-concordance happens more frequently and in a higher proportion of the population than for men. Even though everybody has heard of men having unwanted erections or needing to take Viagra because they emotionally want to have sex but "the flesh is weak".

This view tends to piss off some feminists who feel that Nagoski's claim amounts to saying that women are irrational and mysterious and female sexuality can't be explained by science. This is not my read of Nagoski's view at all, and indeed I think part of the misunderstanding is that people have a bad definition of "science"; it's not "more scientific" to measure and quantify how much blood flows to the genitals than to do a carefully designed survey asking women about their subjective experience of arousal and desire. At the same time, talking about arousal non-concordance really seems to infuriate men's rights activists and pick-up artists and other internet misogynists, (plus, of all people, Alain de Botton got in a big flame war with Nagoski about it). This group of people think that such a horrific concept as actually asking a woman whether and how she wants to have sex rather than assuming that if she's wet she must be interested in whatever her (presumed male) partner wants to do would lead to pretty much the destruction of gender and the end of civilization. This kind of opposition makes me more inclined towards Nagoski's view; if people who barely stay on the right side of actively promoting rape find this idea threatening, then there's probably something in it.

The responsive desire thing I have more mixed feelings about. I can see the feminist objection that this seems to be providing a sciencey justification for the stereotype that men pursue, women are the gatekeepers. Men always want sex, women have to be coaxed and persuaded and possibly even bribed. Again, I don't think that's actually Nagoski's view, and to give her full credit she does put numbers on the proportions of women and men who experience the different desire styles rather than trying to claim that all men experience spontaneous desire and all women responsive.

I think part of my problem is that I am not sure I can tell whether I have "spontaneous" or "responsive" desire myself, which probably means I don't entirely understand what the two styles of desire are supposed to represent. When I first came across the concept, I thought, oh, I must be in the minority of women who experience spontaneous desire, largely because I think of myself as having a high sex drive (note that Nagoski argues that "sex drive" is a misleading term, but anyway, let's go with the popular meaning of it) and with established partners I initiate sex as much as I wait for them to make the first move. But equally, it's true that I'm not usually attracted to anyone unless there's some kind of context in which mutual attraction seems plausible, I don't fancy celebrities or random aesthetically appealing people or even people that I otherwise like and admire physically, if they don't give me any visible to my extremely clueless self signal of being maybe interested. I've said before that I somewhat recognize myself in descriptions of people who identify as demi-sexual or grey-A, in that my sexual attraction to individuals is both rare and dependent on having an ongoing connection. I don't speak for anyone else who is demi-sexual, but I could interpret my own experience via Nagoski's frame as being prone to responsive desire, rather than having a limited degree of sexual motivation.

When I was first exploring sex, I kind of believed some of the stereotypes about male and female sexuality. I didn't particularly like the idea of reluctantly offering sex in exchange for affection (much less for material gain, whether presents or commercial payments). I also believed the nonsense about men "thinking of sex every seven minutes" or whatever is supposed to be the case, and I somehow constructed a theory that this was the explanation for why men (supposedly) want more sex: they think about it more often, so they are already part way to being aroused before a particular encounter starts. So I deliberately set myself a mental discipline of occasionally (not every seven minutes, I'd have found that deathly boring, but whenever I had little else going on mentally) fantasizing about sex when I expected to be spending some time with a partner, so that I wouldn't be in a position of starting completely from scratch if the encounter were to develop in that direction, and indeed I would be more likely to actively desire sex and willing to initiate if that seemed appropriate.

Then I had a bunch of relationships with either women or people who have their own hang-ups about sex, so I didn't really get much chance to test the theory. By now it's kind of an established habit, even though I no longer believe all that gender essentialist stuff. So my guess is that I have some kind of baseline responsive desire but I have formed habits such that my desire has something to respond to other than my partner having to persuade me into being interested in sex, meaning that I behave more or less as someone who has spontaneous desire. Nagoski might argue that I've been somehow misled by sexist propaganda into thinking that a "male" style of sexual desire is better and therefore adapted myself to that.

Woops, that was supposed to be just a brief set of links. I am so not good at writing concise posts.

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Taboos, who needs 'em!

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:32:29 GMT

I made a big post talking explicitly about class and finances and the sky doesn't seem to have fallen in, so why don't I talk about death while I'm at it?

My social circle have been celebrating a sort of pre-death wake for author Iain Banks who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He's very well liked both personally and as a writer, and he's shockingly young, and people are devastated. papersky wrote a magnificent elegy and rant against mortality in his honour. She mentioned in the comments that: There's not a whole lot of comfort in the face of death for people who aren't religious. That sparked off a whole pile of thoughts which I think are better here than dumped in the comment thread full of grieving people.

I am religious (by most definitions), but I find more comfort in broadly secular responses to death than stereotypical "religious" ones. At least, if somebody tells me the equivalent of: 'don't be sad, they're safe with Jesus now', that's completely unhelpful to me. And only partly because my religion doesn't share that Christian view of the afterlife; more importantly, there is no comfort for me in a religious position which doesn't acknowledge my grief as real. Neither does it help me if you tell me it's part of God's plan for people to suffer debilitating illnesses and die young; my conception of God's plan is that humans were created to repair what is broken in this world, and I can't fulfil that plan if I go around being piously resigned to things that are patently awful.

Religious rituals can be comforting, of course. Gathering together with a community I'm connected to, having practical actions to follow, having familiar, resonant words to recite, all of those things do help even if I don't always agree with the content of the words, not in that moment of raw misery when someone is lost; faith that there will be some kind of resurrection and continuity doesn't alter that. It seems to me like the SF fandom community are doing pretty well at creating a spontaneous ritual to mourn Banks, and using the internet, blogs and Twitter and so on, to connect to other mourners. I think that doesn't always happen when the bereaved are outside religious communities; sometimes the burden falls on the people closest to the deceased, who may or may not be in a fit state to organize anything, sometimes non-religious people have to rely on a sort of watered-down Christian without the theism type of ritual. But I don't think the underpinning beliefs are the reason why religion may be helpful in dealing with death. Even then it only may be helpful; if either the deceased or the mourners are non-believers, religious rituals are just as likely to be offensive and uncomfortable as comforting.

pw201 posted an atheist response to the death of another well-loved geek celebrity, Roger Ebert. Ebert's own words quoted at the beginning fit in with some religious and some secular theologies; I am surprised to learn that the devout can’t abide such sentiments, because for me, I could easily restate Ebert's point in overtly religious language. The references to Hume and via Hume to Lucretius (also quoted in Paul's post) are I think good examples of the best kind of secular response to the horror of death. The Skeptics scrabbling around to look for a rational justification why they feel bad about death (in spite of these noble sentiments about how oblivion is no worse than the state of non-existence before birth) I think are missing the point rather. As far as I can tell, some religious people are extremely philosophical in the face of death and some fear it ( or perhaps fear punishment in the afterlife or something), some atheists are entirely accepting of death and some fear it. I don't think one's beliefs or lack of beliefs about the afterlife actually address the emotional issue of how it hurts to lose someone you care about, nor the moral issue that so much suffering and so many lives cut short seem unfair.

I do agree with papersky that it's somewhat easier to accept my own eventual death than other people dying. People have built academic careers arguing whether Plato's Socrates was a theist or secular, but I have always been a bit fond of his discussion of death at the end of the Apology:

Let us consider in another way also how good reason there is to hope that it is a good thing. For the state of death is one of two things: either it is virtually nothingness, so that the dead has no consciousness of anything, or it is, as people say, a change and migration of the soul from this to another place. And if it is unconsciousness, like a sleep in which the sleeper does not even dream, death would be a wonderful gain. For I think if any one were to pick out that night in which he slept a dreamless sleep and, comparing with it the other nights and days of his life, were to say, after due consideration, how many days and nights in his life had passed more pleasantly than that night, – I believe that not only any private person, but even the great King of Persia himself would find that they were few in comparison with the other days and nights. So if such is the nature of death, I count it a gain; for in that case, all time seems to be no longer than one night. But on the other hand, if death is, as it were, a change of habitation from here to some other place, and if what we are told is true, that all the dead are there, what greater blessing could there be, judges?

Which I read to mean, either there is an afterlife, in which case death isn't really an annihilation, something of "me" will continue on in some form, or else there isn't, in which case I won't be around to experience my lack of existence. There's also this poem, which is theist in that it mentions God in the penultimate line, but it's not really tied to any particular theology. The general sentiment, that there's more to celebrate in having experienced life than to regret that life must come to an end, seems to agree with the passage Paul quoted from Ebert and I think could be of some comfort to religious and secular people alike.

That doesn't completely help me to accept the deaths of other people, people I care about, people who it seems to me morally deserve to continue living for many more years, or at least to die gently without first enduring months and years of illness, loss of capacity and misery. I don't think there's much in religion that can really properly answer that, and religion that tries to be glib or forbid adherents from questioning this part of reality is religion I find difficult to respect. What we have is the collective wisdom of all of human history of grappling with this question, some of it from people coming from within a religious frame and others explicitly secular, but what's beautiful and profound in facing the reality of suffering and death I think can be of value irrespective of whether it takes this reality as "God's creation" or "just the way things are".

And then, what about the case when unpleasant and hated people die? I find it abhorrent that anyone might be said to deserve prolonged illness or premature death, and if an evil person dies peacefully at the end of a long and full life, that seems unjust towards much more admired people who don't get that benefit. Which honestly isn't much of a benefit, it's still their life being cut short, and I am not willing to concede that this is a desirable state of affairs, for anyone, of any moral standing. I said a couple of years ago that I might have to avoid the internet when former PM Baroness Thatcher dies, and today she has. I suppose that since I wrote that post I've come to realize that if someone has been so badly hurt by recent UK politics that they feel inclined to celebrate and rejoice in the death of a sick, elderly woman, then it's not my place to criticize. But I'm not going to join in. Just no. No resignation. Tears and rage. And that goes for all of illness and death, not just of people I care about or my friends care about.

Tell me, is there anything that you find comforting when you have to confront death? Texts, art, music, philosophies? How do you live with knowing about mortality and the enormous unfairness of it all? Or are you reconciled to living in a world like this?

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Book: A million open doors

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 11:40:10 GMT

Author: John Barnes

Details: (c) 1992 John Barnes; Pub 1993 Tor; ISBN 0-813-51633-8

Verdict: A million open doors is very much my sort of book.

Reasons for reading it: rysmiel talked about it in a way that made it seem like I really ought to read it, and now that I have I conclude that impression was right.

How it came into my hands: First thing I found and pounced on at an Eastercon dealers' table.

A million open doors has a protagonist from a planet where the culture is based on Mediaeval French troubadours, which already endeared it to me before I even started reading. A fairly convoluted set-up places him as a junior employee in the embassy to a planet where the culture is partly based on extreme Protestant northern Europe, as interpreted by internet Libertarians / Randians and rationality fans. So it's basically planetary surface type space opera, where the technology doesn't matter (the backdrop is that human-colonized worlds have discovered Star-Trek style matter transporters, bringing divergent cultures into sudden contact) and the plot hardly does, there are just some characters who showcase different cultures and have to deal with adjusting to new ones. Throw in a bunch of sex and death and melodrama, and a pinch of gender politics, and it's pretty much the perfect brain candy for me.

The writing is competent but not stunning. Barnes is pretty good at characterization and very good at intense emotional twists; the book grabbed me by the heartstrings in quite a few places. I was completely caught up in the story throughout, and rather sorry when it was over, even though the ending was entirely satisfactory. The protag, Giraud, is kind of a dick, or to put it more precisely, a self-absorbed twenty-something whose culture keeps him in an extended adolescence. Even though the narrative is first person, Barnes clearly signals to the reader that Giraud's POV is very limited doesn't admire his immature self-centredness. I enjoyed the psychological development of Giraud being forced to grow up, take responsibility and start noticing that other people are real, though it's not startlingly original.

In some ways the structure is a little bit like Le Guin's The dispossessed, only almost the opposite way round. Initially the Nou Occitan troubadour planet is portrayed as fairly Utopian, with unlimited resources and people using their leisure for the arts and romance, whereas Caledon is miserable and puritan and full of pointless, avoidable suffering for the sake of a twisted ideology. As the book progresses, it becomes apparent that Nou Occitan is decadent, backward-looking and sexist, whereas Caledon has a rugged beauty of its own and there is in fact some value in meaningful physical labour even if you do have robots available.

aMOD is recent enough that the gender politics look sensible. Not everybody is assumed to be straight, and there are several female characters showing a range of competences. The book even manages a Bechdel pass even though it's from the point of view of a self-centred and extremely sexist male protag. In fact, if there's a flaw I would almost say that aMOD is trying too hard. A major part of Giraud's character arc involves him learning that women don't in fact appreciate being placed on chivalric pedestals but would rather be treated like people, who knew? The symbol of his achieving self-actualization is that he falls in love with *gasp* an ugly woman. I did like the fact that the narration is careful not make its feminist point at the expense of pretty, feminine women; the airheaded bimbo turns out to be surprisingly competent when given the chance, and even the catty, hysteria-prone beauty is shown with some redeeming features. But even with all these positives, I must admit I felt a little preached at.

In some ways aMOD fits in the niche of books I could recommend to people who've devoured the Vorkosigan saga and want more like that. It's not as good as the best of Bujold, but it has some similar strengths, in that it makes fairly simplistic world-building seem rich by exploring the impact of technology and culture on three-dimensional characters. And the story is exciting and character-driven and offers a lot of political agency to middle-class, intelligent, sexually liberal women.

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Class analysis

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 09:54:28 GMT

So everybody's been playing with this class calculator, because who doesn't love a find your personality type survey? And this one has the imprimatur of respectability that comes from being on the BBC site with professional graphic design and slick special effects. It tells me I'm "established middle class," which I probably could have told you without going through that rigmarole. Duh, I'm a university lecturer and the daughter of two lawyers, obviously I'm middle class.

It's provoked some surprisingly interesting conversation, though. Some people are saying it's a distraction from the real issues of the sweeping changes to the NHS and social security system brought in this week. Well, yes it is, but the fact that people fill in silly surveys doesn't mean they aren't also engaged in meaningful political activism. This article someone linked on Twitter argues that the whole BBC gimmick is a poor popularization of sociology.

The interesting theme that's emerging is that there is a deliberate misdirection of people's thinking about class identity, and that this prevents effective political solidarity. blue_mai linked to a rather angry old-Left article which points out that it doesn't really make sense to treat low-level clerical and IT people as middle class just because they work in offices. I often don't find overtly socialist rhetoric very palatable, but Thee Citizen's post made sense to me. I can believe that there is a denigration of genuine working class values going on, and telling people they're middle class when in fact they have no real control over their lives or financial security is plausibly an subtle undermining of their ability to act politically as a collective.

helenic has a magnificent rant about a problem in the opposite direction: middle-class people are being manipulated into underestimating [our] class and relative wealth. helenic's post very much resonated with me; there is a sort of weird reverse snobbery going on where middle class people claim humble origins and / or feel hard done by even though they're pretty much at the top of the social heap, and absurdly wealthy people think of themselves as middle class.

Unlike a lot of people, I wasn't surprised to find I came out as middle class. I have a very typically middle-class job, I have a lot of middle-class interests and hobbies, my parents are both university graduates who had highly paid professional careers. Though my mother gave hers up when I was born, and always kind of meant to go back but never did, itself a very middle class lifestyle choice.

If you go back to my grandparents the picture gets a bit more complicated. Two of my grandparents were doctors (perhaps the most quintessentially middle-class profession) but they also came from immigrant backgrounds. One of my grandmothers was a domestic servant and later a shopkeeper. One of my grandfathers was Public-school educated and came from a family with a degree of inherited wealth from being absolutely classical capitalists, owning a middle-sized family business, but then again people of equivalent economic standing didn't accept him has a social peer because he was Jewish, and anyway his family disinherited him for marrying the aforementioned grandmother, so financially speaking things were pretty marginal when my mother was growing up. But ok, even if it's not very easy to define what social class my family was two generations back, there is such a thing as social mobility and my own generation are pretty solidly middle-class. I mean, my sibs have no money at all because they are a philosopher, a poet and a chef, and one of them is disabled which always intersects weirdly with class assignments. But they have a degree of social and financial security that a lot of people with their level of income don't have.

My own childhood was much like helenic describes: my parents scrimped and saved to pay to send us all to fee-paying schools, which meant we came into contact with people who were richer and higher on the social scale than us, and always felt like we didn't have much money or many of the obvious trappings of wealth. My father supported six people on one salary, which was a stretch but he earned enough to make that actually possible if one was frugal. Based on talking to my friends who went to state schools, I don't think the quality of education I received was vastly better, but I did get approbation and support for being interested in and successful at academic pursuits, rather than getting socially ostracised or even beaten up. In turn, that allowed me to go to Oxford, which in spite of stereotypes is reasonably socially diverse. Or at least, it doesn't perfectly represent the demographics of the country, but because it's a rich, prestigious institution that is currently putting a lot of resource into attracting the most academically able, extremely academically brilliant people can and do go to Oxford from any social background whatsoever. So at Oxford I met people who resented me for being "posh" or wealthy to the point of being spoiled, (as well as members of the actual nobility including minor royals). And now that I'm an Oxford graduate at least some people are forever going to view me as some kind of out-of-touch elitist, no matter how much actual money I have or what politics I espouse.

I am in fact quite happy to identify as middle-class. Middle-class values can be positive values: social stability, education, aspiration, political and social engagement, appreciating culture that requires a degree of effort and connoisseurship rather than just consuming entertainment passively, diversity of ideas. I appreciate that sometimes those things look more like conservatism and conformity, snobbery, meddling in others' lives, consumerism and so on, but on the whole I'm quite happy to be regarded as middle-class.

As for affluent, well. lavendersparkle ages ago linked to a much more detailed wealth calculator of where you fit into the population, rather than just putting you into a crude bracket based on your salary and very rough level of savings. I can't find that calculator again, but it told me I was in the top decile compared to the UK population. I was a little surprised to be at 90 percent, but I would certainly have guessed I was in the top quartile, I'm not ignorant of the fact I'm relatively well off. The thing is, I have a decent, though not vast income, but I'm rich because I have almost no outgoings! I don't have any dependants, which is probably the big one; colleagues at my salary band who are supporting two or three school-age children and an elderly parent or grandparent who needs substantial nursing care may very well feel really squeezed. I also live in a cheap part of the country, I don't run a car, I don't have expensive hobbies, I'm fit and able-bodied. I'm not servicing debt; being debt-free in my mid-30s really does put me in an unusually financially secure position, and one that is becoming rarer because of the way the economy and social infrastructure is going.

To a great extent I agree with hunningham's response to the recent budget. Yes, people like me should be paying more tax. Sadly no political party at the moment is offering me the option to vote for a tax increase against my own direct financial interests; I have voted for such in the past, like the Lib Dems years ago who proposed a 1% in income tax to be invested in education. But then I hesitate. First of all, you'd have to be careful to define who counts as "people like me". I mean, if you just did it based on income, that would hit people with huge mortgage and student loan debt and living in London and supporting families, who may be richer than the population average but are not rich. I remember the "fat cat tax" from the early days of the recent Labour government; sounded good, but in practice it meant that my grandmother lost a substantial chunk of her painstakingly saved pension. Yes, my grandmother, who was working as a maid at 14, at 74 counted as a "fat cat" because she'd put aside a tiny amount of her tiny income each month and invested it carefully. Now, it's true that there are people whose lives are so precarious that they literally couldn't save the equivalent of a shilling a month, but I can't buy the idea that anyone who has any kind of retirement savings at all is too rich and should have their widows' mites redistributed.

And then, well, with this current government I am not sure that increased taxes would actually help the people I want to be helping. I mean, if my tax money isn't going to the NHS, to education, to unemployment benefit or disability support, what's the point of voluntarily signing up to pay more? Maybe it's better to do as hunningham suggested and make a standing order to a food bank. Besides, even as an affluent, secure, Established Middle Class sort of person, I'm getting scared of the dismantling of the social safety net. If I had an accident or a serious illness. If I lost my job or the Higher Ed sector imploded. If if if... And if none of that happens one day I'm going to be too old to continue earning. So emotionally I feel like I have to hoard up every penny I can because if I can't earn money through my own labour then society won't support me, won't repay the contributions I've made over the years. This emotion is of course why the recession drags on and on, because anyone who has any kind of financial break at all hoards their money rather than putting it back into the economy, because everybody is scared.

The other thing about looking at all this business of ranking people by class and / or wealth is that I do feel it's far too easy and not really productive for people at all levels of society to resent and envy "the rich". In fact, most people don't know anything about people who are actually, seriously, rich, they're just impossible for ordinary people to imagine. Everybody comes into contact with people who are just a bit better off than they are, though. I was kind of horrified during the London riots when they interviewed people who were looting little corner store newsagents. They seemed to feel they were sticking it to "the rich": the people who have enough to rent a shop, who are just about able to work 80 hours a week and end up with more money than they started with. Those people are "rich" compared to long-term unemployed people or those who don't make ends meet even when they work all the hours they possibly can. The shopkeepers and others in low paid but at least relatively stable jobs are encouraged to resent lower middle class civil servants who have some degree of pension security, so the government can win popular appeal with really punitive cuts on that group of people. My peers who earn well over the national average wage complain a lot about City types and executives earning six figures. MPs cause howls of outrage when they complain their salaries and expenses aren't generous enough, but in fact their social milieu includes mostly people with considerably more earning power than current MPs. Highly paid businesspeople and opinion formers resent millionaires and anyone who has wealth as well as income. I expect even millionaires feel poor compared to "the 1%". It's all just a great merry-go-round of social and political fragmentation.

I'm not naturally inclined towards redistributive taxation. My economic philosophy is that people should contribute to infrastructure (which very much includes the welfare safety net), and after contributing a fair proportion of their income they should be allowed to keep what they earn. I would like to do something about the problem that some rich people and large companies can use their wealth to leverage avoiding having to pay any tax at all, but I don't think the solution to this is to raise income tax for everybody earning above the median wage.

I hope this isn't completely incomprehensible to non-Brits!

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Louise Livesey's Political Moment BSFA talk

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:51:25 GMT

Eastercon has a Hay lecture given by an actual scientist, and the BSFA instituted a talk by a social scientist to match this. This year's talk was by sociologist Dr Louise Livesey, about the politics of sexual abuse of children. The talk generated really a lot of discussion over the course of the con, and I'd like to carry on that discussion here. Please don't hate Dr Livesey because my summary doesn't do her talk justice; it was a very good talk and also a contentious one, and I wasn't taking notes and I'm not a sociologist.

The subject of the talk is what it is. It wasn't graphic, because it was mainly about the politics of how society reacts to accounts of child sexual abuse rather than the act itself, but still.

To summarize very crudely, Livesey's thesis was that there are two traditional frames for survivor accounts of sexual abuse of children: confession and testimony. Confession implies that talking about such an experience is an overwhelmingly terrible horrifying thing. Testimony implies that the only acceptable aim of describing an experience of abuse is to obtain justice against the perpetrator. Confession means everybody has to rush around panicking about the terribleness, and testimony means that the focus is determining to the highest possible degree of certainty exactly what happened. There's also an issue that these frames reflect badly on the survivor: confession implies guilt and a need for absolution, and there's the idea that having been molested as a child is shameful. Testimony means that, as notoriously happens, defence teams will do their utmost to question the reliability of the witness in order to avert the punishment that must follow if the accusations are true.

Livesey thus proposed an alternative mode: narrative. There ought to be a space to simply tell the story of what happened, a deeply unpleasant thing, certainly, but not a completely unspeakable thing completely outside all other paradigms of human experience. She mentioned that about 1 girl in 5 and one boy in 20 is molested as a child, which on one level is a horrifying statistic, but on another it seems fair to say that child sexual abuse is not actually so exceptional. Apparently something over three quarters of people molested as children do in fact disclose this at some point in their lives, but not necessarily in a going to the media to break a terrible scandal about how their life was completely ruined kind of way, nor in a seeking prosecution of the perpetrator kind of way. Just they tell people they know about something that happened to them.

Of those who don't disclose, it's assumed that the reason is because they are ashamed and feel damaged by what happened, but when survivors are surveyed, it's almost always because they fear they won't be believed. In fact, most people who do disclose... are not believed, so Livesey held that this fear is justified. It seems like the reason for non-belief is because people are assuming the only frames are confession and testimony. If child sexual abuse is the most unbearably terrible thing ever, people feel unable to even listen to an account of it. Or they may subconsciously judge that the speaker must be exaggerating, either because that means they don't have to accept that such a horrible thing happened to someone they know, or because they assume that anyone who went through something so devastatingly awful couldn't possibly be a normal, functional human being having a conversation. If disclosing child sexual abuse always means hunting down and punishing the evil paedophile, you have to start thinking about "beyond reasonable doubt" standards of proof. Also, if the listener has in their head an idea that a paedophile is the most terrible monster imaginable, they find it very hard to believe that a seemingly decent, socially adjusted, superficially pleasant person could possibly have done something so heinous. If someone's just telling a story about an unpleasant experience they had, they're a whole lot less likely to be retraumatized by someone they trusted not believing them.

Livesey focused on the Savile affair, partly because it's very much in the media right now, and partly because there's been some extensive studies of Savile's alleged victims. In line with the general view of survivors of child sexual abuse, most did tell someone when it happened, and most were not believed. Of those coming forward now the story has broken in the media, they are being forced into "testimonial" mode. People don't believe them because they didn't say anything until now (except they did, but nobody believed them), or because they are only in it for the fame and hope of financial compensation (which in fact hasn't been offered), or because they just aren't credible people (remember that headmistress who said that the pupils bringing accusations against Savile were "no angels"?) People don't believe them because Savile was a well-liked celebrity who made important contributions to society, so couldn't possibly have done something like that, or because it's unjust to posthumously accuse someone who can't have his day in court and should be presumed innocent.

She did this scary discourse analysis of The Sun and The Guardian's reporting of the accusations. The Sun came off much better: it tells human interest stories which largely show sympathy for the molested girls. The Guardian, on the other hand, either focuses entirely on Savile and doesn't mention any victims at all, or else makes the accusers look non-credible, portraying them as money- and attention-grabbing. It was only a very preliminary study, and some of the response to the lecture was about picking holes in the statistics there.

One of the ways that Livesey was controversial was that she advocated that, in narrative mode, anyone can hear a story of child sexual abuse; you don't need special training in child protection or helping someone to deal with a terrible trauma. You can just follow the basic common sense provisions of: give them a proper space to talk, listen respectfully, let them tell their own story as it seems to them even if it doesn't fit your preconceived ideas of what child sexual abuse is like, and believe them. You don't of course have to assume that believing them means going to the police right now, because for a start that might well not be what the person telling the story wants, and also you probably don't have good enough evidence to want to start that kind of train in motion. At the same time, she did point out that everybody has a moral and legal duty to report if they have any reason to believe that a child is being harmed. I felt she was a bit glib about simply trusting that if you report, the police, social services, children's charities etc would act proportionately and not start a massive investigation that would turn the life of both the child and the putative perpetrator upside-down without a good reason.

It was interesting to me how Livesey presented this material on a meta level. For a start, she followed her own advice, she simply talked about the topic in a matter-of-fact way with no disclaimers about how the material might be distressing, no pussy-footing around the topic. Very different to the ways that child sexual abuse is discussed in online feminist and social justice circles. In some ways Livesey was arguing that a culture of treating child sexual abuse as The Ultimate Horror protects the perpetrators; very few are the kind of "monsters" that people imagine paedophiles to be, so they get away with their crimes. And because the accusations are so horrible, any possible flaw in the victim's character or testimony is enough to protect them from any consequences, whether judicial or even social. But feminists insisting on trigger warnings and being very circumspect and respectful of the topic is aimed at protecting victims, yet may still contribute to the problem of the confession / testimony dichotomy.

Also she pre-empted the obvious objections. She said that she was mainly talking about sexual abuse of girls not because she thinks abuse of boys isn't important, but simply because that's her academic field. And because she thinks that misogyny has an important role to play in how this kind of stuff plays out in society. In fact very little she said seemed to me to be inapplicable to boys, but anyway, she laid her cards out up front. She also headed off the absolutely bog-standard response that if you automatically believe people claiming to have been molested, there is a danger of making false accusations. The whole point of the talk was that someone may simply be telling a story of their experience, not seeking police intervention or judicial punishment, so it doesn't make sense to apply a standard of "beyond reasonable doubt". In fact, if people would stop insisting on absolutely watertight proof before they even believed someone's story, it would be a lot more common to be able to get to the position of bringing cases to court where the accused would in fact have a proper chance to defend himself. And if one simply listened to the story, it might do the victim more good than haring off to punish the perpetrator.

One thing Livesey did which I think may not have been so strategically effective was that she blamed the bad situation where confession and testimony are the only modes on "neo-liberalism", illustrated with that infamous quote from Thatcher that there's no such thing as society. In other words, sexual abuse is seen as something perpetrated by an evil individual on an individual child, making it impossible to see any kind of social pattern to explain why this kind of thing is so shockingly common. And also reinforcing the situation where the person telling about their experiences has to be an absolutely impeccable, perfect witness in every way in order to be believed at all. From what I could gather from the conversations I was having about this later on during the con, this basically just alienated most of the audience because they assumed she was just talking left-wing sociology dogma. I don't think her argument was really strengthened by saying "because neo-liberalism"; without that, she contended that there is a problem because too many children are abused, and nobody believes them when they disclose this, and here's what I propose we can do to improve this. People can get behind that (or critique it on its merits) without getting entrenched in tribal political positions.

A more useful discussion arising from the talk was that someone said that they had had personal experience of someone making a disclosure of childhood sexual abuse which had later in fact turned out to be made up. Though as I believe is typical of false reports, they did not accuse an individual, just said that this had happened to them. So a reason for not believing accounts might not only be being brainwashed by the dominant cultural narrative, but one's own personal experience.

nanaya also linked to this article about living through rape which I think supports Livesey's points in many ways. The article talks about the harm that may come from treating rape (in general, not just child abuse, though interestingly several of Shane's examples refer to children's experiences) as the Ultimate Terrible destructive trauma which ruins your whole life. Unlike Livesey's primarily political talk, Shane's essay includes graphic descriptions of the exact anatomical details of some of the acts she's describing, again living up to her own view that this kind of thing isn't unspeakable, it is something that can be described in a matter-of-fact way.

Shane, more directly than Livesey, tackles the problem that if people can survive rape as an unpleasant experience and just get on with their lives, does that give an excuse to let rapists off lightly? She argues, I think sensibly, that violating someone's autonomy is a crime that should be taken seriously regardless of how well the victim copes with the aftermath of the attack. In some ways and in the right circumstances, people can be remarkably resilient; I know several survivors of the Nazi death camps or of extended torture as political prisoners who are extremely well-balanced, psychologically healthy people, for example. I also know people who have been raped and, like Shane, consider it an unpleasant experience they'd rather put behind them, as well as others who have been raped and still struggle with the aftermath. That doesn't make it in any way acceptable to brutalize people, and it also isn't intended to impute blame to people who do find it difficult to recover from trauma, the difference is not about moral strength but about being lucky enough to find yourself in the right circumstances with the right support.

One area where I do disagree with Shane is that she seems to have a very negative view of counselling. There is nothing wrong with seeking support from a trained professional to help you overcome a bad experience; getting counselling doesn't in itself mean you are allowing your whole life to be defined by your trauma and you are irreparably broken! I do agree with her, and if I understood her correctly I think Livesey would too, that if there is a single possible cultural narrative of how terrible it is to be raped, people trying to talk about their experiences don't get listened to, but instead the intended listener just imposes their expectations on the person telling the story. This may mean that they don't believe something so awful could really have happened, or it may mean that they respond in an exaggerated and unhelpful way and actively make things worse for someone who might otherwise have been coping pretty well.

So, in conclusion, if someone tells you they were sexually assaulted, you should at least default to believing them, and you should listen to what they actually say happened and how they feel about it, rather than assuming. But believing them doesn't necessarily mean you should get into a huge panic about how everything must be completely terrible, nor does it mean that you be in a rush to punish the alleged perpetrator. I don't know, does that seem like a helpful way of looking at things?

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Eastercon

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 21:17:13 GMT

My two main aims for this year's Eastercon were networking with the 2014 Worldcon crowd, and meeting lots of interesting people to have mind-expanding conversations with. I didn't entirely achieve these aims; I ended up spending most of the time chatting to people I already know, but I had some really good conversations and a lot of fun. It just wasn't quite as thrilling as Eastercon two years ago. I don't think that's really a reflection on the con, so much as the fact that I was already kind of tired when I arrived, and although I did manage to be sensible about getting reasonable amounts of sleep, I just didn't quite have the physical energy to match getting really excited about lots of people to talk to.

There's kind of a pattern emerging with Eastercons: I go to panels roughly about diversity-in-SF, and I get frustrated because congoing, literary SF fandom is many years behind online media fandom in thinking about these things and therefore a lot of the panel time is taken up by making really basic observations and dealing with questions that amount to "whaddya mean there's a problem with representation of [whatever minority]?!" At least part of the issue is the fact that we're even having panels about "minority characters in SF", as if we could cover the whole of science fiction and fantasy and speculative fiction and steampunk in literature and films and TV and computer games and graphic novels in an hour. On some level it feels like there would be more benefit in a few more panels, rather than the one token diversity panel for each type of diversity, and with more focused topics; I mean, the programme didn't have one single panel on "women in SFF" with everything else being assumed to be about men, for example.

Anyway, that said. The "Non-Western" panel was a particularly bad example, not so much because it tackled non-Western SF badly, but because the panellists decided to define "non-Western" so broadly as to be worse than meaningless. I was a bit annoyed by defining as "non-Western" SF written in English for the American market by American people of color, though I could sort of see the point, in that at least some of the writers mentioned were drawing on their ancestral, non USian cultures. I was pretty annoyed with SF written in continental Europe, particularly in non-English languages, as "non-Western"; clearly France and Germany are part of the West. The existence of Russian SF was briefly mentioned but nobody said anything about it. Literally, nothing, a panellist just said "there's also a long tradition of SF in Russia" and that was it. I was really really annoyed by defining SF written in English for the American market as "non-Western" when it has well-rounded female characters and a sensitive approach to rape. I'm perfectly happy that this is a desirable and unfortunately rare characteristic of SF novels, but calling something non-Western simply because it's non-normative or non-mainstream is not a compliment to non-Western cultures, it's just another Orientalism type thing where non-Western means anything that's different or exotic (even in a good way). I completely lost it when one of the panellists started enthusing about the robots in Homer, and I have to admit I heckled at that point. Homer, the father of Western literature, is non-Western now! The other problem with the panel was that aliettedb, and the moderator, a Filipina writer called Loenen-Ruiz, were trying to say interesting things about for example the legacy of colonialism and the trope of conquering new planets, and drawing on myths from non-European cultures but not being able to assume a mostly Anglo audience would be familiar with the stories, but the *cough* Western panellists pretty much just talked over them.

The non-white SFF panel was a lot better. They had two guys who introduced themselves as British Asians, as well as an African-American woman and aliettedb actually being allowed to speak usefully. I admit I find it much much easier to relate to British people from recent immigrant backgrounds talking about their experiences of belonging to an ethnic minority over here, than I do to Americans (of any ethnic origin) talking about race relations between Euro-Americans and African-Americans. The panel also had a bit more of a focus because it was somewhat about whitewashing covers and finding characters to relate to, so even though it rambled a bit it wasn't trying to be everything to do with race in all of SFF.

The LGBTQ* characters in SFF panel was... not necessarily a good panel but a really interesting event for other reasons. It was very well attended compared to other GSM panels I've been to at previous cons, though other people said that getting 50-60 people is not at all unusual and the organizers shouldn't have been caught out putting us in a room that was far too small for the crowd. There was something of a vibe that people were there to express an identity as part of the Queer spectrum, as much as to have a specific discussion about the extremely broad topic. And honestly the group was too big to have a very useful discussion, but we had a good go, and it was about nuanced and complex issues of identity and passing and homophobia and gender and all of that good stuff, with really only tangential references to SF works.

One of the panellists was a guy called Simon Ings, who was really interesting (as well as considerably angry I think). He said something good about the fact that it was politically essential to claim "gay" as an identity, as a way of responding to the fact that homosexuality was illegal and people were getting murdered for being thought to be gay, but now that we've addressed that urgent social problem, we're left with a situation where people are forced into a particular identity box when it might not be that important what gender their sexual partners are. Also he said that SF of the 70s and earlier was much more daring in its handling of sexuality, because nowadays it really costs nothing to have a token gay secondary character and people just aren't doing anything radical any more, it's all comfortable and assimilationist.

The other thing that was going on at this con was bits of discussion round the edges about codes of conduct. I think this is partly a response to the Readercon imbroglio last year, and partly to the recent PyCon incident. I wasn't at the panel specifically on this; from what I can gather, what happened was that in the course of the discussion, someone pointed out that the con newsletter had printed something that looks a whole lot like a rape joke. And it turned out that the Eastercon committee had absolutely no procedures for enforcing their code of conduct, which to me means that they never really had any serious expectation of actually needing to. There was somewhat of a consensus that the appropriate thing to do was probably to have a word with whoever had put a rather inappropriate joke into the newsletter and ask for an apology, which to me seems fair enough and proportionate to the original incident. But the consequence was not in fact a printed apology, but a series of increasingly annoying printed comments about how awful and repressive it is to be asked to apologize for printing in-jokes which could be interpreted as rapey in your con newsletter. I was only at the edges of all this, and as far as I can judge it wasn't a horrible awful disaster, but it just makes me eye-roll a whole lot.

My con was bracketed by a couple of basically random panels which shone as much as anything because they were well moderated. One on "Underground London" where rozk was her usual witty and incisive self and brought out the best from her fellow panellists. And one on changes in history which might have led to a different present, which was early this morning and quite refreshingly free of newly published writers who just wanted to talk about their books. And moderated by effjayem, who is just astoundingly brilliant. Every time I hear her speak or read her writing I learn something that sparks off all kinds of connections in my mind. She moderated extremely well, too; one of her fellow panellists kind of wanted to drag the whole discussion into "wouldn't it be better if the evil Zionists hadn't been so evil and colonialist and oppressed the Palestinians", and Farah just shut that right down, saying intelligent and nuanced things about the relevant period of history while also moving the discussion on without making the ranty person feel put down.

There were lots of just cool ideas there. What if the Romans had more successfully conquered the region that is now Germany and given us a more Latinized northern Europe? What if the contraceptive Pill hadn't been invented, would there have been substantial progress in women's rights in the last 50 years? I kind of wanted to challenge that on the grounds that feminism has thoroughly run away with the idea that women can be agents in their own lives and achieve important things, but society seems to be a bit shaky on the concept that mothers can also be agents in their own lives, it's not a fundamental fact of nature that bearing children means devoting the rest of your life to looking after them. First of all of course without the Pill women had other ways of controlling their fertility, which the panel did in fact acknowledge. But also I think that feminist progress would have been possible without the Pill (though it is undoubtedly socially important). The other one I really liked was "what if fossil fuels had been much harder to obtain, would there have been an industrial revolution?" We speculated a bit about whether the industrial revolution could have sustained itself purely on water power rather than coal (and later oil and gas), and what that would have looked like. Whether there could have been an alternate industrial revolution in China instead. effjayem made the excellent point that a lack of access to oil might have had much more substantial effects on the chemical revolution of the late 19^th and early 20^th century than the industrial revolution itself.

What else? For fun I signed up as a contestant for the Weakest Link panel game. I was utterly awful, since it turned out to be entirely SF questions rather than, as I was hoping, a mix of general knowledge and more specialist SF, and I basically know nothing about films or comics or fandom history (and was a bit unlucky with some of the book SF questions I might have been able to answer). But I lasted quite a long time because, as ever in Weakest Link games, I sound confident. The game was pared down since we didn't have the technical capacity to deal with the whole building up a collective score thing; it was fun, but actually the reason I like The Weakest Link is precisely that delicate balance between playing as a team to try and maximize how much money you get, and playing competitively to be the sole winner who eventually takes the money. (I couldn't care less about Anne Robinson being sarcastic at contestants, that's never been the draw for me, I just really like the format.)

And a bunch of us went out to a very nice, very Bradford restaurant called The Three Singhs and had extremely tasty Indian food. I eat kitniyot (pulses and rice) during Passover, which meant that I was able to have a proper meal, having lived pretty much exclusively on matzah with cheese or chocolate spread all weekend. And spent Sunday evening having one of those extended delightful conversations that cons are brilliant for, with IWJ and vyvyan and fivemack and damerell and jack and some people I don't know on LJ/DW and some people I hadn't previously met at all who drifted in and out. Mostly about global climate change (which is a bit depressing really), but we were really having such a good time setting the world to rights and going off on all kinds of tangents.

There was a cute if rather small scale goth disco with Witching Hour, who apparently know most of my friends. I liked their trad goth musical style, and I enjoyed wearing the kind of completely over-the-top dress you can only get away with at cons: shiny purple strapless bodice and ginormous flouncy black skirt with lots of petticoats. But as Saturday night balls go, it wasn't much to write home about.

The Hugos shortlist announcement was honestly fairly meh. I think there was some excitement about some of the smaller categories, but I don't know enough about what's going on with those to understand why this is interesting. The best novel shortlist was pretty much a bunch of fairly mediocre things by extremely well loved in fandom writers, the nth in Lois McMaster Bujold's long Vorkosigan series, Scalzi's latest, seanan_mcguire's latest. Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the crescent moon from all I've heard is extremely generic swords-and-sorcery, though with Muslims. And Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 which I haven't read, which is probably good because KSR is a thoroughly competent writer, but not exactly a new exciting development for contemporary SF.

Oh, and I bought a quite embarrassing number of books at the Dealers' room. John Barnes' A million open doors which I've been looking for absolutely forever, and both Ian McDonald's early Irish books (King of morning, queen of day and Sacrifice of fools), which I read years and years ago and very much want to reread, plus a new to me book of his, Hearts, hands and voices. Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan, which he very graciously signed for me even though I'd bought it second hand. (He was GoH at the con and I didn't interact with him very much, but whenever I did he was thoroughly charming.) And an early China Miéville, King rat which was mentioned at the Underground London panel, Mira Grant's Feed which I've been meaning to pick up for a while now, Le Guin's The word for world is forest, Vinge's Marooned in Realtime, RA MacAvoy's Tea with the black dragon, and a pile of other things which I can't quite reel off right now since jack very kindly took home my twenty or so books in his car so I wouldn't have to carry them. This, by the way, is one of the main reasons I haven't switched over to ebooks completely; a very big proportion of what I like is out of print but still in copyright, so the only way to get copies is to pick them up at second-hand bookstalls.

The other thing that generated a lot of discussion was the BSFA sociology lecture, which was given by Dr Louise Livesey who talked about the media response to the Savile affair and to sexual abuse of children more broadly. She was good, and contentious in the way the best academic stuff can be. I will talk about the discussions she provoked in a separate post I think, cos I don't want to suddenly segue from rambly con report into a topic like that.

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