Reading Wednesday

[liv]

Recently read: No new fiction this week. So have some links:

Cute personal account Jews and Muslims in France. I picked it up from Making Light, and it's nothing exceptional as journalism goes, just one person talking about her experiences. But it's a counter to the agitprop trying to turn Jews and Muslims against eachother, and valuable for that reason. It also very much reflects my own experience of interacting with Muslims, though mine is either in Britain rather than France, or more than 10 years ago.

Talking of positivity, I really enjoyed illusive_shelle's verse response to the horrendous anti-Muslim propaganda on American TV: #FoxNewsFact. And a bonus sweetly scathing response in prose from mrissa.

My Dad sent me this human interest story, which is rather cripspiration-ish, the thrust of the article is Deaf-blind guy marries and has a child, isn't that amazing?! But the thing is that I have a distant connection to this guy, because he was in the same ward as my brother when the latter had a serious accident in 2002. I've always been kind of haunted by the image of this young man waking up in hospital with no sight or hearing and no idea where he was and just screaming constantly. So I'm pleased to learn that things have worked out well for him, sometimes you just by chance get to the find out the epilogue of someone's story.

On a completely different topic, I really appreciated papersky's musings on mortality: Everything alive and dead to weep as one. It's not exactly fiction, but it's a lovely piece of prose, and to make it vaguely relevant to the Wednesday theme, the post and discussion contain various recs for historical biographies and collected correspondence available on Gutenberg and elsewhere.

Currently reading: Still in the early part of Imajica.

Also still following rmc28's Watership Down readthrough, which I forgot to mention last week. I was away at the weekend and I don't have a copy of the book here, so I'm a little bit behind. But there's some really fun discussion developing, and the book is holding up well not only as an adult reader but as something to savour and delve into in detail, we're doing one chapter a week and each chapter is only a couple of pages.

Up next: I still don't really have a specific plan. I've been chatting to cjwatson about some of the classic science fiction we both read, and thinking about new stuff to recommend eachother. Asimov, and how he's often better at shorter length due to having a lot more skill in exploring interesting ideas than in conventional novel techniques like plotting and characterization. Other people who do very ideas-heavy hard SF: Greg Egan, of course, and I have a ghost of a thought about Ted Chiang which I didn't quite get round to talking about.

I'm realizing there are quite a few books I really liked 5–10 years ago which I now can't quite remember well enough to recommend without rereading. And I generally don't reread very much because I'm always seeking out new stuff, but books that have stuck in my mind enough that I'm excited to share them but where I no longer remember the details seem good candidates. So possibly Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden, possibly Emma Bull's War for the oaks. (Gosh, I'm glad that I used to keep up with reviewing better than I do now, I should really get back into that habit!) Or else I should make at least a note of the examples that came up in conversation that I'm not familiar with: Stephen Baxter's Xeelee stories; Poul Anderson's Tau Zero.

Also I haven't posted to DW since last Wednesday, which does suggest that the Wednesday reading meme is good for me. I do have quite a few posts I want to make, but sometimes having an imposed structure helps with getting started.

Comments

[davidgillon]

I really enjoyed [livejournal.com profile] illusive_shelle's verse response to the horrendous anti-Muslim propaganda on American TV: #FoxNewsFact.

That absolutely needs setting to music and playing on the Now Show or something of the sort!

The worrying thing is research suggesting that for a reasonably significant amount of right-wing Americans, if it isn't on Fox, it isn't true, because them darn Liberals fill the rest of the media with lies, and I wonder if we have to view these stories in that light, as a truth they would prefer over reality, because it confirms their biases? And perhaps worse, as a calculated lie aimed at escalating levels of Islamophobia because that suits the aims of the really, really right-wingers

Asimov, and how he's often better at shorter length

Yep, I'm much more a fan of the robot short stories than the Foundation stuff (though I do have a soft spot for the Lije Bailey/R. Daneel Olivaw mysteries).

possibly Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden,

I love Geoff's writing (most of the time), but I can never remember if I've read that one or not!

possibly Emma Bull's War for the oaks.

Well it definitely gets my vote, Bull is another writer I love. War for the Oaks is possibly the novel that made Urban Fantasy a thing, as the members of a small time rock band in Milwaukee find themselves caught up in the war between the Faerie Courts - and if that sounds cliched it's due to all the people who have copied the idea since!

Stephen Baxter's Xeelee stories;

I remember the shorts from Interzone, but for some reason I never followed up Baxter at novel level.

Poul Anderson's Tau Zero.

Now there's a really big ideas story.

[liv]

Yes, it's easy to fall into the idea that news that doesn't support your biases is just propaganda. This is why I seek out news from other sources than what my friends retweet from the Guardian, but at the same time, I'm nervous of reading explicitly right-wing stuff, which makes it hard for me to outright condemn American conservatives for avoiding stuff they perceive as liberal!

Anyway, what looks like deliberately provoked Islamophobia really really scares me. And yes, my biases are to find an article like the one I linked that's basically pro-Muslim more credible than anything about teh ebul terrorists. Even though in fact some Muslims have done violent things, and of course those should be reported in the news.

[rysmiel]

The worrying thing is research suggesting that for a reasonably significant amount of right-wing Americans, if it isn't on Fox, it isn't true, because them darn Liberals fill the rest of the media with lies, and I wonder if we have to view these stories in that light, as a truth they would prefer over reality, because it confirms their biases?

The really worrying subsection of that set, for me, is the people who explicitly deprecate paying attention to factual evidence, on the grounds that it indicates one does not have sufficient faith and is therefore a bad person/not to be trusted.

[davidgillon]

Okay, that's scary!

Interesting Guardian article from yesterday looks at a similar problem from an unexpected cohort of people: Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person - this is something we run into a lot with disability hate crime, people can't believe it's real, so call us liars for talking about firsthand experience.

[highlyeccentric]

I am glad to hear your interactions with Muslims have been mostly positive. And glad to see that article, too. Most of my Jewish friends are either silent or quite convinced that the muslim community's anti-semitism is sufficiently large a problem that no one should care about islamophobia until they stop it (/or they learn to be Better Minorities and Negotiate right / or meet some other target). This is acos of the *most* outspoken person i know on this stuff being the kind of person who also thinks all young feminists these days are Doing It Rong and so on and so forth, so I *know* her perspective is skewed, but yeah, that's the state of my facebook/dreamwidth/twitter.

Other than that the only not-utterly-dismal pieces I've seen in the last six months or so on muslim-jewish interactions are hard-left collaborative pieces on supporting Palestine (which are great, and I applaud the New Matilda for sourcing and promoting Jewish writers and collaborative pieces on that sort of stuff). Could be a result of not being at uni anymore - I used to know plenty of people in interfaith groups (my church group was initially super keen on Affinity Interfaith until we discovered they discouraged *muslim* women from going unveiled although they didn't care what jewish or christian participants wore).

[liv]

I mean, part of my good interactions with Muslims has indeed been in a campus interfaith context, sure. But at the weekend I went to a Limmud, a Jewish learning conference, which had a fair number of Muslim speakers and guests. I feel an instinctive affinity with Muslims, really; they're monotheist and text-centric like me, but perhaps more importantly they're racially othered, and represent a religious minority within a primarily Christian culture. And in a more negative way, I feel scared when people attack Muslims, because to my eyes the sorts of things that are said about "those people" are extremely close to anti-semitic rhetoric.

There absolutely are Jews who are very negative about Muslims. Sometimes it's the thing of slightly older immigrants considering themselves a "good" minority and looking down on more recent and less assimilated immigrants. And sometimes it's the Israel issue and generally being scared of Muslim anti-semitism. There's far-left pro-Palestine solidarity stuff, which is great, and the other thing I tend to encounter is very safe and almost anti-political dialogue groups. But neither gets anything like the mainstream press coverage that mutual prejudice commands.

[highlyeccentric]

Yeah, I think in the case of a few of my Jewish friends they don't say much about Islamophobia because it all hits close to home. And there is that thing where a wave of islamophobic attacks almost always knocks on to some anti-semitic ones (sometimes by muslims, sometimes not).

My outspoken friend was at a Jewish gathering that was Moltov-cocktailed by muslim antagonists. Soooo... in cases like the recent Paris incidents she does not want to hear people criticising islamophobic reactions - hears it as ignoring the Jewish victims even when it really isn't. *sigh* But only another jewish person would be able to get away with saying that to her.

[liv]

Yes. There are really odd things where racists get very apologetic if their anti-Muslim proposals actually impact Jews too, but I personally don't feel very secure when some racist is all I don't mean you. (I got very scared by that headline UKIP says slaughter policy is not aimed at Jews for a moment, until I realized they were talking about laws to do with ritual slaughter, but it's got to the point where my brain doesn't find it implausible that UKIP might be talking openly about a policy of mass extermination already.) Generally I think there's a huge overlap between "reasons" to hate Muslims and applying the same sort of unlogic to us; I mean, Muslims are more likely to have darker skin and are more likely to be portrayed as stupid whereas Jews are seen as malevolently clever, but that's not enough of a distinction to make me feel comfortable, even if I somehow thought racism against Muslims was morally acceptable.

I think there was a lot of underplaying the Jewish victims in Paris, from the the pro-Charlie side as well as the anti-Islamophobia side. Like, there was a bit of JeSuisJuif alongside JeSuisCharlie, but it was kind of token, and frankly, if you were Jewish or even someone who actually cared beyond the clicktivism bandwagon, you'd damn well know the names of the people who were murdered. I'm not impressed by techno-libertarian types suddenly deciding they care about anti-semitism when it's an excuse to denigrate Muslims, but ignoring any attacks on us by white secular or Christian anti-semites. It's this thing of calling people you don't like "anti-semitic", because everybody agrees that Nazi = bad.

And yeah, Jewish people who have actually been personally attacked by Muslims or suffered directly from Muslim violence, I can see why they're going to be easy targets for this divide and rule thing of setting Muslims against Jews. It's just hard, I don't know how to deal with it at all.

[ajollypyruvate]

Books: I'm re-reading all my David Brin. I just finished Existance (borrowed from the library) and actually found a small error I would not have noticed if I hadn't been spending so much time reading up on Heian Japan. Nerdity in action!

I still have to post that book meme. I wrote it up and everything!