Kate Schaefer

09:58 am: Sometimes I'll play a game of tag
neile tagged me, so I'm playing.

Here are your rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences here.
5. Put the meme and answer in your journal, tag five people and the madness continues.

Nearest book, to my left: Beading on Fabric: Encyclopedia of Bead Stitch Techniques, by Larkin Jean Van Horn. Book ends on page 120, the tail end of the index.

Okay, next closest book, to my right: Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress, by Anne Hollander.

"Nobody forthrightly defended the erotic and imaginative virtues of fashion itself except for male authors in France -- Balzac, a great creator of women in the first half of the centruy, was particularly eloguent about the poetic force of feminine finery; and indeed no less so about masculine elegance. So were Stendhal and Baudelaire.

"But early feminist objections in England and America were never made to fashion as a male conspiracy, only to the male restriction of female minds that confined women to such allegedly unwholesome preoccupations. Among reformers, feminine fashion itself was rather seen as feminine folly in material form, female weakness made manifest. Women, after all, were making the hats and dresses as well as wearing them."

I'll tag wild_irises, libertango, pecunium, jinasphinx (if the baby's napping), and webbob. I tell the grandchildren that I only play walk-tag, not running-tag. Online tag with words is a lot more like walk-tag than running-tag.

06:49 pm: Several random things make a post
"Gnar" is an English verb, meaning snarl, or growl. The G is silent, as in gnash or gnome or gneiss.

I have finished calculating my taxes and hope you all have done so for your own.

I highly recommend Persepolis, the film made from the graphic novels of Marjane Satrapi. I haven't read the graphic novels yet; I expect I'll like them, too. (Note to Vy: not for you right now; too much violence.)

My daffodils are about done for this year. We have a snakehead fritillary blooming in a spot where we never planted any. That is, we've planted plenty of snakehead fritillaries over the years, but the ones we've planted have vanished, and this one has appeared, far from its parents. The snakehead fritillary is a very satisfyingly silly flower.

The exhibit of Roman art from the Louvre currently at the Seattle Art Museum includes a sculture of Venus and Eros with Mosasaur. The label says it's a sea monster, but anyone who looks at that jawful of teeth can tell right away that it's a very small mosasaur. Thank you, Adrienne Mayor.

11:13 am: Norwescon
If you're at Norwescon in Sea-Tac, Washington, today, stop by the Clarion West info table and say hi. Leslie Howle, Mary Kay Kare, Michael Swanwick, Cat Rambo, Ulrika O'Brien** and I will be there in varying combinations throughout the afternoon.

Donate $2 or more to Clarion West Writers Workshop and receive a raffle egg* as a donation thank-you. Redeem your raffle egg for a fun prize. Choose your own prize from A, B, or C, depending on the letter in your egg. Every egg guaranteed to be a winner!

Prizes include some really good books, interesting art, distinguished T-shirts, and a few bad books. You decide which is which.

If Michael is at the table when you stop by, he will autograph your books for no extra charge. You may have to bribe him to keep him from signing as "Robert A. Heinlein" or "Hugo Gernsback." Congratulate him on his latest Hugo nomination, announced just yesterday.

At 3:00 this afternoon, there will be a panel called "Clarion West: Why has it worked for 25 years?" in Cascade 9, with Leslie Howle, Mary Rosenblum, Michael Swanwick, Cat Rambo, and Dave Williams, followed by Michael Swanwick's reading in the same room at 4:00.

And those of you at Minicon or Eastercon, have a great time as well.

*Raffle eggs not laid by real birds.

**Edited to add Ulrika, whom I unaccountably omitted before. Thanks!

06:28 pm: Irresponsible linkage
Eventually I may write something about what a great time I had at Potlatch. In the meantime, let me just point all my friends at this game I want to own:

http://www.phobe.com/sfi/accordion.html

Do check out the other games on the web site, every one of which is awesome in a similar yet different way. I'd love to invest in this game company, frankly, but I suspect it's going to remain privately held.

10:08 am: Remembering Sue
Today would have been my friend Sue's 14th birthday; she would have been 56. In years when her birthday didn't occur, she celebrated it anyway, starting on February 28 and going on through March 1st (or sometimes March 2nd, 3rd, or 4th). She said that having this rare birthday meant that, in practice, she got to have more birthdays than other people.

10:18 am: Help me do my homework for Potlatch
Are you coming to Potlatch? Have you read the Book of Honor, Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower? What did it make you think about?

I'm looking for short, snappy answers I can string together in a coherent way for an article in the program book. Longer, more thoughtful answers are good, too. Proper credit will be given, and you're welcome to participate even if you aren't coming to Potlatch.

I'll go first: it made me think about how much post-apocalyptic fiction, even including Parable of the Sower, is more hopeful than the definition of the genre would suggest. There's that convention of sweeping away all the mistakes of the past, allowing the survivors to build a new, better society in the ruins, avoiding said mistakes. There is a magnifient, tragic optimism that somehow human beings will be able to find a way to live without enslaving and killing each other. Parable of the Sower doesn't show a future without slavery and murder; it shows a horrific future, with appalling slavery, violence, and injustice, while still holding out hope that it doesn't have to be that way.

06:44 am: Black History Month Reading Recommendations
I'm a member of the Carl Brandon Society, which is dedicated to addressing the representation of people of color in the fantastical genres such as science fiction, fantasy and horror. I got involved with the Carl Brandon Society because it administers the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund. One of the benefits of belonging to the CBS is that I get reading recommendations I wouldn't run into otherwise. Sometimes I like the stuff I find this way; sometimes I don't.

I've only read two of the following books, and they are the two you'd expect, by the two most famous black science fiction writers to date. Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren is not just one of my favorite books; it's the book I've read more often than any other, to the point that I can no longer really read it again, since I know the words so well. It's about a group of people scrabbling for survival in an odd urban landscape after some unspecified disaster in the near future; it's about sex, social organization, the artistic process, drugs, death, religion, psychiatry, and personal adornment.

I read Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower much later in life, so it didn't have the opportunity to whack me upside the head the way Dhalgren did. It, too, is a post-apocalyptic novel, moving from a crumbling, deadly urban landscape to a beautiful, idyllic pastoral setting that's just as deadly; it's about religion, social organization, the artistic process, death, and messianic movements.

The books I'm going to read from the list this month are Mindscape, by Andrea Hairston, and The Coyote Kinds of the Space Age Bachelor Pad, by Minister Faust.

The Carl Brandon Society recommends the following books for Black History Month:

So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan
Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany
My Soul to Keep, by Tananarive Due
The Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad, by Minister Faust
Mindscape, by Andrea Hairston
Wind Follower, by Carole McDonnell
Futureland, by Walter Mosley
The Shadow Speaker, by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
Zahrah the Windseeker, by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

And the 2005 Carl Brandon Society Award winners:

• PARALLAX AWARD given to works of speculative fiction created by a person of color: 47, by Walter Mosley

• KINDRED AWARD given to any work of speculative fiction dealing with issues of race and ethnicity; nominees may be of any racial or ethnic group: Stormwitch by Susan Vaught

06:02 pm: Potlatch hotel redux
If you plan to attend Potlatch 17 and you still haven't made your hotel reservations, you have a little bit of a grace period, but it will expire very soon, on January 29. The hotel is very close to full on Friday night, with somewhat more room on Saturday and Sunday nights.

If you are unable to get a reservation at the convention rate either through the web site or by calling the hotel directly, please send email to Suzle (hotel @ potlatch-sf . org) or me (chair @ potlatch-sf . org) (un-munge the addresses, naturally).

(Potlatch 17, February 29 through March 2, 2008, Hotel Deca, 4507 Brooklyn Avenue NE, Seattle, Washington; more Potlatch info here.)

If you have questions about any other aspect of Potlatch, sling 'em my way.

Thanks!

(Cross-posted to my own LJ and to potlatchcon, so several of you will see this twice.)

09:53 am: Thank you, Michael R. Weholt
When you reach the middle of your life's journey, you don't generally find yourself in a dark wood where the straight way is lost. More often, you find yourself going to a lot of funerals, because the middle turns out to be a different place than you thought it was, and some of the people you thought would be with you all the way through are done now. They didn't intend to be done just yet, but they are.

A few years ago, Michael R. Weholt wrote How to Live with Dead People. I find it darkly amusing at all times and very helpful at the moment, when there is such a large supply of memorials available for me to attend.

10:09 pm: Creative process
I'm making a quilt for my two-year-old great-niece (I made a quilt for my great-nephew before he was a month old, but he lives in the same state as I do, so my incentive to finish it quickly was greater).

I picked out a bunch of purple fabrics with roses and butterflies and pansies and stars and abstract patterns. The combination looked too girly, so I tossed in some fish and bugs and alligators and carrots. Some of the abstract patterns looked too muddy, so I took them out. It needed something a little more lively, so I threw in some orange and yellow for contrast. The alligators looked foolish without any zeebas, so I took them out. The butterflies really weren't doing it for me, so I cut them up into tiny abstract bits; there may be some whole butterflies on the back of the quilt when I'm done, but maybe not.

At this point, the most interesting part of the quilt was the fish, so I recentered the composition on the fish, framed with orange harlequin fabric with carrots at the corners. The whole center panel of the quilt will be five fish panels forming a ladder, with randomly pieced panels on either side.

I'm happy with it. I hope the little girl likes fish.

07:00 pm: Pix
My friend Luke has posted pictures he took of Glenn and me last week. I like them.

04:43 pm: Potlatch 17 hotel news
If you plan to attend Potlatch 17 and you have not yet made your hotel reservations, please do so right away. The hotel is very close to full on Friday night, with somewhat more room on Saturday and Sunday nights.

Here are directions on making your reservation. We've been saying that you might encounter difficulty in making your reservation; let me say that although I love our hotel, I'd be surprised if you didn't encounter difficulty in making your reservation, so be prepared to be patient in getting through.

If you are unable to get a reservation at the convention rate either through the web site or by calling the hotel directly, please send email to Suzle (hotel @ potlatch-sf . org) or me (chair @ potlatch-sf . org) (yes, I've munged the addresses; I know you can un-munge them).

We want to see you at Potlatch 17, and we want you to have places to sleep. Suzle is working on an overflow hotel within walking distance, about 4 or 5 blocks away. We haven't needed an overflow hotel for a Seattle Potlatch before.

(Potlatch 17, February 29 through March 2, 2008, Hotel Deca, 4507 Brooklyn Avenue NE, Seattle, Washington; more Potlatch info here.)

04:11 pm: Active dying
I've just had word that my friend Q is now in what the hospice staff call the process of active dying.

We've said goodbye. Closer friends are with her in this vigil. I probably won't go see her again. I don't think I could be in the room with another dying person right now without crying pretty hard, and it's hard on the dying to have crying people around them. This is a practical consideration, not an emotional one: crying can be contagious, like yawning or laughing, and it could make the dying person choke.

I always send to see for whom the bell tolls. Involved though I am with mankind, it matters to me which part of it I am losing at the moment. She always did, too.

10:40 pm: Seasonal music
A little over a year ago, my friend akirlu put together a CD she called "Gaudete 'Til You Drop". It contains some large number of performances of "Gaudete" along with a bunch of other Christmas-related songs that don't sound like anything you'll ever hear on a store's sound system.

It is one of the most useful and durable seasonal gifts I've ever received. It comes in particularly handy after accidental radio exposure to something noxious like "Mambo Santa".

Thank you, Ulrika.

10:54 am: Anita Rowland, 1956-2007
My friend Anita died a little over a week ago. I miss her.

I'd known her since 1991. Over the past 16 years, we did the things friends do, first as casual acquaintances, then as friends: parties, dinner groups, movies, concerts, watching meteors fall all night long.

She liked science fiction, Regency romances, opera, dancing, sparkly hair ornaments, happy endings, and abundance in all things. She was like me in being a bit of a border collie, wanting people to get organized and do things; unlike me, because she was fairly relaxed about how quickly they got around to doing whatever it was. She couldn't drink, because alcohol sent her into fits of uncontrolled sneezing.

She was about the best grandmother I've ever seen, and I say this from the standpoint of being a pretty good grandmother myself. She and I had each married men with two daughters from previous marriages, so our relations with our grandchildren are defined by experience, by time, by love, not by blood. During her illness, I often took care of her grandson. He was always happy to see me (I'm a reasonably fun adult for most small children). He wasn't always happy to see Anita when it was time for him to go home. Time with me was time spent playing with K'nex or trains or Legos, time at the zoo, at McDonald's, at the park. Time with Anita was normal life, which had plenty of K'nex, trains, Legos, zoo, McDonald's, park, swimming pool, crayons, cartoons, Matchbox cars, songs, snacks, games; it was normal, and he could take it, and her, for granted, like air, like the earth. It is a very great measure of success when a happy child takes an adult for granted.

I'll miss her. I do miss her. There was an article about a Russian opera singer in the New York Times recently; I thought, Anita would be interested in this. Glenn ran into a group of Santas smoking and swearing and generally being badly-behaved (for Santa, anyway), and we thought about Anita dressed up as Santa, shaking jingle bells on a stick, and asking, "Naughty or nice?" with all the other Santas in the Cacophony Society's Santa Rampage, which of course made us think about the year the Cacophony Society went out caroling in the voice of Bob Dylan. Anita's Bob Dylan impression was about as bad as mine, but you could tell who she was supposed to be.

There is no way to sum up the whole of a person in writing. She was good. She was kind. She was quietly witty. She was a music major who took up the trombone when she was young, and had to give it up once it became clear that her arms weren't ever going to get as long as they needed to be for that instrument. She wasn't a saint, and she didn't ascend to heaven in a cloud of singing angels. She did feed hungry people, whether they were members of a convention where she ran the hospitality suite or homeless men at her church. I was never clear about whether she believed in anything related to church except for the music and feeding the hungry; those seemed like enough.

I miss her. I say goodbye.

09:30 pm: International Small Emergency Month
A month ago, we were observing International Small Emergency Week at my house, with crises involving the washing machine, the dryer, the downstairs toilet, and the car gearshift. All of these crises were resolved through the magic of throwing more money at them than seemed reasonable, except for the toilet, which was resolved through the magic of having hired a plumber some time back who was willing to keep fixing it until it stayed fixed, dammit, without charging more. That is, he said it was fixed months ago, and when it turned out not to be fixed after all, he came back and worked on it until it really was fixed. Our plumber is a hero of the revolution and a jewel among tradesman.

It turns out that we were mistaken about the nature of this fine international festival. It's such a popular event that it lasts at least a full month, maybe more. We will not go into the nature of the plumbing crisis that requires us to keep a drip pan under the kitchen sink. It is nothing that would not be fixed in a major kitchen remodel, and it would not even be a problem were it not for the unfortunate circumstance of our house's previous owners having bought oddly-threaded plumbing parts back in the era of Make Your House Unique With Off-Brand Stuff, some time in the fifties. We will not talk about how the car mechanic could not duplicate the gearshift problem, while we could duplicate it at will and against our will, any time of the day or night as long as it was a bad time.

No, we will go straight to the gigando flood and record-breaking rainfall afflicting all of the Pacific Northwest right now and point out that it violates the terms of International Small Emergency Month. That is, yes, it is true that the part of the flood that affects me is relatively small, only a small leak in the basement, easily controlled yesterday by applying every single towel I own to the leak in turn, flinging each towel aside after ten minutes, running the towels through the spin cycle (you will recall that I replaced the washer last month, yes?) and then through a few minutes in the dryer (you recall also that I replaced the dryer last month, no?) before reapplying the towel to the leak, which was getting bigger and faster all the time, and maybe it would become a bigger problem than towels could contain, so we moved all the stuff in the path of the leak from one side of the basement to the other. As I say, small.

And the part of the flood that affects me indirectly is only a little bit bigger, a mere inch of water all over the floors of my granddaughter's high school, closing the school from Monday morning until Wednesday. Well, maybe more than an inch, and the school will stay closed until Thursday. Um, next Monday for sure.

These are minor inconveniences compared to the landslides and closed freeways and railroads and helicopters evacuating people from the rooves of the houses, and I return to my complaint: International Small Emergency Month is supposed to involve only personal inconvenience. It is not supposed to require the intervention of the Red Cross, calling out the National Guard, or governmental declarations of disaster.

04:31 pm: Petrey Fund 25th Anniversary
Debbie Cross, Paul Wrigley, and members of Oregon Science Fiction Conventions, Inc., have been raising money to send students to the Clarion and Clarion West Writers Workshops in memory of their friend Susan C. Petrey for 25 years now. Help them celebrate this successful memorial fund!

At Orycon 29, (November 16-18, Portland Marriott Downtown Waterfront) attend panels and discussions of Clarion, Clarion West, the impact of writers workshops on people's lives, and how you can go to writers workshops. Go to the Petrey auction and let Jay Lake sell you stuff! Stop by the Petrey booth in the dealers room and buy raffle eggs! Use your Petrey coupon at Pizza Schmizza on Saturday afternoon! Come to the Petrey reception at 8 PM on Saturday evening and drink a toast to the fund, the writers, and the fundraisers.

If you can't go to Orycon but you appreciate the books and stories written by authors like former Petrey scholars Kathe Koja, Barth Anderson, Syne Mitchell, Nisi Shawl, and Heather Lindsley, please make a donation to support the Petrey fund. Donations can be made through PayPal to the email address of susanpetrey@comcast.net., or send checks to:

Susan C Petrey Scholarship Fund
PMB 455
2870 N.E. Hogan Road Suite E
Gresham OR 97030-3175

More background info at the Petrey web site.

11:01 pm: International Small Emergency Week
We're observing International Small Emergency Week at my house. The washing machine won't drain voluntarily, although it will drain if one turns the knob to just the right spot. The downstairs toilet won't flush unless one dumps a bucket of water into it. Part of the oven door fell off earlier today. Something came loose in the lint screen slot of the dryer, and now the lint screen won't go back in and the dyer is whistling ominously. The car doesn't want to shift out of park without a great deal of persuasion.

Only a week ago, all of these things worked just fine.

Glenn fixed the oven door. I've scheduled a plumber. I'll schedule the car repair and the washer and dryer repairs. We'll observe International Small Repair Week, and Domestic Let's Move On, Shall We? Week.

I am going to be very, very careful operating machinery of any size for the next few days.

11:36 pm: Comet Holmes
It's a bright full moon, and there is high haze in the sky, but Glenn was still able to locate Comet Holmes and point it out to me. Who else out there has seen it so far? It's in Perseus's thigh.

09:59 pm: Getting on with it
It's been forever since I posted, and the longer it's been, the greater that internal pressure to write something really good: something witty, brilliant, timely.

This isn't that. This is just a few words because I haven't posted here since July (really July? jeez louise).

Witty, brilliant, and timely will have to go on waiting.