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April 28th, 2016


09:44 am - So I got hacked
Thanks for everyone who alerted me. I went through and tried a simple method of dealing with the hackers. We'll see if that's enough.

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July 26th, 2014


09:43 am - All Hail Macbeth! King of ...
So I'm the Artistic Director of Accidental Shakespeare Theater Company in Chicago and I am directing The Scottish Play set in the early Bush Administration, with a side of fries! Check us out, and if you can support us, please do! We need to pay the actors and the designers.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/accidental-shakespeare-company-s-macbeth/

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December 12th, 2013


06:31 pm - How do you know you want to keep someone in your life?
You melt down about stuff, things, and share some behavior that makes you sound like a terrible person and he compares you to The Doctor...

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December 10th, 2013


08:02 pm - How do you write about identity when you kind of think the entire concept is ... well ... icky ...
Google India ran an ad that is all the rage in both India and Pakistan. Go turn on the English captions and watch it if you feel like a good cry. But you won't cry as much as I did because your father is not my father.



My father resembles Yusuf physically, and sits around telling long stories like Baldev. He can savor a memory of a particular garden, or cake or sweet like it was a treasure. He can vividly evoke sneaking into his father's room to steal cigarettes. My father was born in a small town not far from Karachi, but grew up in the mountains of West Bengal, in a sleepy village where all the Hindus and all the Muslims got together and said there is carnage all over this country, but it is not coming here. Not in our town. No. And Darjeeling, India saw not one speck of violence. Karachi, Pakistan was another story.

My father is an old Sindhi man, like both the Hindu and the Muslim old Sindhi men in this advertisement.

The last frame of this video, with the two old men raising their arms with joy in the rain, is everything I've ever tried to do as an artist. No really, I do this over and over again. Because I don't believe in identity. Identity is a corrupt tool that creepy politicians employ to make boys like Baldev and Yusuf grow up apart, and the only thing stronger than identity is love.

This does not endear me to some people lately.

See, the fashion these days is to stroke our identities, to hug our grievances like they are our pet hedgehogs, to declare that Unity is for White Women, to talk endlessly about microaggressions and the invisible knapsack of privilege and it all makes me bloody miserable.

All these things are important, and yes there are inequities and injustices oh everywhere, everywhere, but there is a line where loving our injustices turns into the impulse to massacre, and what I want ... perhaps what I long for on a genetic level ... is Mandela's Ubuntu. Truth but also Reconciliation. Tear down the Berlin Wall and party on the other side. Desegregate the public schools in the South and experience the courage and terror so rarely appreciated of 12 year olds crossing to the other side of the cafeteria. Make music together. Remember stealing candy together. Two old Sindhi men raising their hands in joy in the rain.

At some point we have to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

I went to a Pakistani restaurant in Prague once, and the guy behind the counter looked at me and said, "where are you from?" and my friend Alan said, "She's American." and I said "No, its okay, I'm Sindhi Hindu, parents from India, brought up in the US," and all my white friends got freaked but the man said, "Oh, so you like the food!" and I said, "Yes, its like from home," and he said of course, of course, here have a free cup of tea by the way your money is no good here. He was so pleased I came to his restaurant, I was so please he was pleased. In time he would invite me to visit his home in Pakistan, and I said maybe I will come, but I never did.

I know that somewhere, some Indians and some Pakistanis really wants us to be at war, but I have literally never met one of those people. Most ordinary people would just rather have tea and say to hell with it.

And you know when you've been stalked by skinheads you tend not to sweat the small stuff so much. Sometimes microagressions are really just people being socially awkward, and I can't spend my life angsting about peoples intentions all day.

In the meanwhile, Partition was the result of centuries of the British policy of Divide and Conquer. Curiously enough, so was slavery in the American South. And the clusterfuck that is Israel and Palestine. The one thing we can't give them credit for is Yugoslavia. But even among the Balkans I know are Serbs and Croats who fell in love and had to leave the country. They told me that nobody knew who was what in Sarajevo before the war ... which is exactly what Dad says about Hindus and Muslims before Partition.

I mean think: Do you know who among your friends are Catholic or Protestant? Can you even really remember who the Jews in your neighborhood are? Okay, now you are all at war ... go! Can you figure it out?

No?

This I do know: I've read enough history to know that tolerance is never perfect, but it is always delicate. Akbar the Great is followed by the hardliners like Arangzeb. Rudolfine Prague is destroyed by the Thirty Years War. Southern France is wiped out by the Albigensian Crusade. And hey, who doesn't really expect the Spanish Inquisition. Its like there are pockets of peace and freedom and openness and they are NEVER perfect and they are always less than completely just, but they are free. They coincide with economic, artistic and intellectual flowering ... and then somebody ALWAYS decides that all this freedom just is too much, and then Many Things Ensue.

And we're overdue.

The great community organizer Gail Cincotta once said "We have met the enemy and it isn't us." I wish I could get everyone I know to imbibe this idea. We are not the enemy. The point isn't to meditate upon our sins and injuries so long that the folks who have already decided that we don't need all this freedom anymore and come and oh I dunno re-institute Jim Crow era voting laws (I am from North Carolina) while we bitch about whether or not Joss Whedon is really a feminist.

I dunno. I'm tired of identity politics.

I cannot really escape them, of course. I am after all a writer of color too. And I am subject to all the same pressures of all the other writers of color I know. My identity cannot be irrelevant because other people will always make it relevant. But oh, one day ... there will be none of this nonsense. One day we'll see that borders and labels are ugly things that keep us from joy and love and fond memories of stealing sweets. One day we'll all sit in the Monsoon and raise our hands in the rain together.

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July 17th, 2013


12:18 pm - Update on Tor Situation and generic meditations on fandom
I have resubmitted, thanks to the help of Jim Hines who hooked me up with the right information about how to do that. I don't expect anything more than a polite read and a thank you very much for your submission. I never actually had the chance to talk to whomever the new editor will be or find out if he or she will be interested. I do at least know they will look at it out of politeness, but my chances are little better than a slush pile submission.

This is what I get for going behind my agent's back in the first place I guess. I got the extra special screwed by this situation because Tor is apparently reaching out to people's agents and I'd blown mine off.

But I don't think I am returning to WisCon next year. I may not return to any con for a while. I know its supposed to be "good for my career", but this situation, which was precipitated by a conversation with Jim at WisCon 2012, actually turned out to be bad for my career.

Cons also supposed to be fun. Let me tell you the amount RapeCon 2013 was NOT fun. Maybe it was important or enlightening but I just felt bullied. I couldn't even go to the party for more than a few minutes, because I was so worn out.

There is a lot of talky the talky about safe spaces and inclusivity. I've got plenty of feels about the nature of that conversation and the turn it has taken. But the consensus that is emerging is that we are going to achieve safety by drawing a circle and keeping "unsafe" people out. Different groups of fandom have different circles they want to draw (Fake Geek Girls, Orson Scott Card), but its the circle drawing that I want to disconnect from.

(And hey, I guess that's what the country is doing to the world. Why should fandom be different.)

What I used to value about fandom is that it was the last place in America that you could have a lesbian radical feminist and an evangelical pro-life Christian bond over the mutual love of, well, Babylon 5 say. And they might disagree, even have deeply hostile views over everything under the sun, and end up giggling over Londo Mollari. And that opened the door to real conversation, which was the beginning of real change.

Shouting at each other, shunning and banning people, saying you can't be in our circle, that's not communicating. I know in this way fandom merely reflects the rest of the country which is also shunning and banning and separating into mutually not-speaking camps, but it still represents a profound change from Fandom That Was.

I will always love this genre. I will always have fond memories of this world. But I need a better class of fun.

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July 13th, 2013


10:27 am - In which andelku contemplates leaving the SF&F community for good and all.
So the editor at Tor who had my novel got fired, which means my book is now in limbo.

And if he had been fired for being a bad editor that might have been okay. Certainly he was infamous for taking utterly FOREVER on everything and generally being slack and driving authors mad that way. Its possible to view Tor's decision as this is the last straw. But he actually got fired because he was accused of sexual harassment, and now all the Right Thinking People are piling on, even people who say they've never had problems with him personally. People who don't even know him are informing me that he's a "known creeper".

Its swell and all although a) I've actually never seen or experienced him doing anything like that and 2) I didn't sexually harass anybody and I just got screwed over by this situation and PS) the American Taliban just happens to be taking over the South right now.

But we struck a blow against con creepers so We WIN! Except ... no there is no win here.

Okay, here you get to accuse me of being That Woman who tries to diminish the importance of sexual harassment. You have about five asterisks to get that out of your system so we can go on to what I'm actually talking about.

* * * * *

Feeling better now? Good. (I am actually going to be checking the comments to see who stopped reading and started yelling at me about how I'm the reincarnation of Sarah Palin.)

But moving on from the entire issue of Sexual Harassment Per Se, it occurs to me that the SF&F community ... even those in it who most claim to be politically engaged like the folks at WisCon ... are totally disconnected from the real world.

One of the other stories circulating in the community ... and seriously this was while the NC GA was passing one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country ... was that a female editor at Tor.Uk wrote a piece saying that they actually want to publish more women, but they don't get enough submissions from women in science fiction and horror especially. It was practically an engraved invitation: submit to us, we want you. But instead of reading it that way, instead there was huffing and dismay and blog posts about how she wasn't acknowledging that different people have different levels of privilege.

I was at the very same WisCon where the Sexually Harassing Incident Happened, and there were some striking things about it. First of all, while there are actual challenges to women's rights on the state level, not just in the South, but in Michigan and Ohio too, nothing whatsoever was said about it in my hearing.

Second of all, when I started to talk about the thing going on at University of North Carolina involving the rape and the honor court and mentioned that the awesome thing about it was that it was all out in the open now, because 30 years ago even the Women's Studies department wouldn't talk about date rape on campus, and entire room of Baby Boomer women jumped my case.

No seriously, I'm a tough cookie, and I burst into tears on that panel. Jim Frenkel at his drunkest never made me feel as unsafe at WisCon as those women did.

(In fact Jim has never been anything but nice to me, not just nice, generous, encouraging, let me sleep on his couch. I pitched my book to him drunk and in a party dress and he didn't even leer. Maybe he is a creeper to every other woman and I have Magickal Anti-Creep Dust. Or maybe I'm just really fat and unattractive. I don't know.)

In a different panel, different women told me that women should never write about rape because it is inherently exploitative. Really, this was RapeCon 2013 for me. Because basically if we don't talk about it, we will FEEL safe which is not the same as being safe but WHATEVER, this is about our FEELINGS and JESUS H. CHRIST IT'S TIME TO HAVE SOME PRIORITIES HERE! .

And I know not everybody is from North Carolina but I'm not sure I can take this anymore.

Its not everybody. I know people who are actually politically active in fandom, but they are the vast exception. (If one of them is a female editor and women's rights advocate who happens to live in North Carolina, well that's not a big surprise is it?) But most of the political folk in fandom restrict their politics to endless nitpicking of (say) the racism and/or sexism inherent in the television show Supernatural and generally bitching on the Internet about who has privilege and who doesn't.

Art doesn't have to be politically engaging. But if if an artistic community actually wants to be ... claims to be ... politically aware, maybe  its time to lift our refined and weary eyes away from whether or not Astrid was underserved as a non-white female character on Fringe. I mean, that's fun and all, but there is a whole lot of world out there.

Maybe this is not a community that wants to engage in that kind of art, and that's fine for it. But while I sit down and prepare to resubmit my book to Tor (oh yes, all Jim's authors have to resubmit from scratch! Isn't that fantabulous!)  ... while I do that, I am going to go away and have a hard think.

Do I want to?

Is this my community at all?

Do I have content this audience even wants? (There is rape in that novel on Jim's desk and its important to the plot. Will they be so offended that I can't sell the thing anyway?)

I mean that's not a just self-pitying whine. I have a total other career (two really) in theater (and formerly in journalism). Book publishing is sucky-hard under the best of circumstances. I'm REALLY crazy busy with Accidental Shakespeare Company.

Maybe I belong someplace else?

I dunno. I've been learning Tai Chi which means learning about The Way and flowing around obstacles and stuff. Maybe I need to think about this more.

But I will say this. I feel alienated in the world of progressive fandom. I think outside progressive fandom I'd probably feel alienated too for a different set of reasons.

Besides I now have a new brain. Maybe being in fandom was the Pre-Epilepsy Treatment Andelku anyway. 
Current Mood: thoughtfulthoughtful

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June 18th, 2013


03:54 pm - [hedgehog] Moping about that time my roommate got deported and other discontents of the Bush Era ...
True tale. Long story that aint going on LJ because it isn't mine.

I will in fact have to write the story of these years but I will have to leave the US to do it. Not because I fear my government. Even after all this, I kind of don't fear my government all that much, comparatively speaking.

I fear my fellow countrymen and women.

Because ... really you all need to think about this here ... Americans refusing to pay attention to civil liberties violations (until they realized they were not exempt) is not the same thing as The Government Kept it a Secret.

The awful thing about the NSA wiretapping is that the government didn't HAVE to keep it a secret. Actually, even the Bush Administration was quite open about its intentions. And, as awful as this sounds, the Obama Administration did make (very modest) improvements

... although I'm sure removing some of the racial profiling elements doesn't count as an improvement to the People Who Matter.

In fact, many so-called libertarians lament that all this broad wiretapping is ONLY necessary because we won't racially profile MORE, and there's no other way to say this, but its mighty white of them to insist upon Freedom for The People in a way that explicitly dis-includes me. But hey, we've already gone there.

But whatever. At least they are honest. Not everything is about race, but some things are, and these guys will admit it. Although you realize its not really entirely about race. Even white people who had immigration issues got caught in the Homeland Security dragnet.

I forget not everybody has pals from Eastern Europe and family from South Asia.

I forget that actually The Velvet Dictatorship was really hidden in plain sight.

I forget ... that actually ... just possibly a lot of you people didn't know about any of this until last week.

One day I'll get past WELL DAMN! I'm glad you finally got here to just plain I'm glad you're here. But not today. Not for a little while yet.
 

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June 7th, 2013


07:05 pm - [hedgehog] Watching White Boys Scream About Civil Liberties
So in 2004 and 2005, it came to my attention that young Muslim men were disappearing.

They weren't having their phone records gathered in a giant NSA database. They weren't having their emails read. They were DISAPPEARING. Many of them it seems were deported, some were merely detained, but nobody gave a shit. After all, its not like the civil liberties of PEOPLE WHO MATTERED were being curtailed, right?

I tried to report on this story and failed, because nobody would talk on the record. I had a lot of terrified and truncated and obscure conversations with people who were related to someone or who had heard something about or who knew something about this, but I was a reporter and that was all they would admit to.

And some of them were black and brown and poor. (Did you know there even WERE Mexican Muslims? I didn't before this project!) So they were used to having their civil liberties curtailed anyway. Because of the war on drugs. Remember the war on drugs? That thing where we've been spying on US citizens since the 80s?

Oh, but not the ones who MATTER, right?

So many people who supported the War on Drugs and the War on Terror did it on the assumption that trading away OTHER PEOPLE'S liberty was an acceptable price for THEIR safety. And they did it for decades. But that was the deal, right. OTHER PEOPLE's liberty. Not theirs. Theirs was sacrosanct.

And if many, not all, but SO MANY of the upset people are white, straight cisgendered upper middle class males born in the US of Judeo-Christian heritage, well draw your own conclusions baby.

But IMHO, really what the screaming people are afraid of is losing their privilege.

If you are the right sort of people, then the cops detain OTHER people (for your safety). TSA hassles OTHER people. They deport OTHER people. Hell they even drop bombs on OTHER people. The next such person who carries on about Killing US Citizens better hope I can't get into range to vomit on them. Like it was okay when we were killing NON-US citizens ... but of course that is part of it, isn't it? All of a sudden, it could be you. Your passport won't save you. Your race or economic status. Whatever you thought was saving you all this time? That fig leaf is gone. You too are in this society with everything that entails.

So, yes, I am of the eyeroll. But then I've had an FBI file since the Clinton Administration anyway.
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May 16th, 2013


04:28 pm - Of course you realize, we're also safe from free market capitalism
http://boingboing.net/2013/05/15/north-carolina-may-ban-tesla-s.html

Because what's a right wing government without a little ... no actually I have no idea the logic here. This doesn't even make sense from a right wing perspective, because its the gummint telling a business it can't sell its cars in ... oh I give up!

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04:26 pm - But at least we're safe from Sharia law
http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/05/16/2897299/nc-house-bill-forbidding-islamic.html

Because what's a right wing government worth if it can't do a little forbidding of Sharia law? 

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