mariness

I interrupt a much happier post about Tarpon Springs, Florida, and some work on two upcoming novellas, to alert you to yes, still more wrong from the New York Times, in a review of A Wrinkle in Time.

I hardly know where to begin. Let's see:

1. It's Mrs. Whatsit, not Mrs. Whastis. Right there on the blurb, even. (This might have been a typo but I am not inclined to give the New York Times much credit here.)

2. Charles Wallace, Asperger's? Seriously?

3. Having just read through pretty much every one of L'Engle's novels, I can assure you that good absolutely does not always triumph over evil in L'Engle's fiction, and indeed, her issue was attempting to reconcile her belief in a divine god of love and goodness with her realization that evil absolutely exists in the world, and that sometimes, evil wins. Her argument is not that good always triumphs, but that even in a world filled with evil and horror, we still need forgiveness and love, and we still need to fight against the darkness. As troubled as I have been by some of her moral judgments in some books, this is a message that resonates with me.

4. Girls read science fiction.

I shouldn't have to say it. It's even in the article, which admits that although the science fiction readership is dominated by men, women do read it. We even write it.

And yet here we have the New York Times trotting out, yet again, this canard that girls and women don't read science fiction. We do. We even write it. And for the record, the seminal science fiction work for me as a kid was not A Wrinkle in Time: it was Star Trek, which had a girl exploring space and talking to aliens. It was Lester Del Rey's A Runaway Robot,* the book that introduced me to robots and which at the time I thought was the best book ever written.** Those were the works that let me find A Wrinkle in Time. And robots.

Enough, New York Times. Enough.

* Which according to Wikipedia wasn't even written by Del Rey? Huh. Who knew?

** I was six. I also loved the Bobbsey Twin books and since we'd just moved to Italy, was about to start on loving Enid Blyton. Be kind.

For those I confused with my last post....I screwed up the directions. Try:

1. Go to Google Maps.

2. Click on "Get directions."

3. In A, type in "The Shire."

4. In B, type in "Mordor."

5. Click the image of the person walking, for walking directions.

That should work.

************

Just got back in, and am feeling progressively more sick, so everything else must wait until tomorrow.

Florida state agency discussing growing hydrilla, a non-native plant species, in Lake Apopka. Left out of this particular article is the fact that many communities are resentful that so much water is diverted to Lake Apopka as part of the lake restoration effort.

I'm not against all non-native species - I do, after all, have roses growing outside my window. But what I am against is the idea of using non-native species as an attempt to solve environmental issues. This almost never goes well, and you can see the results in South Florida, where the state, county governments and private landowners are having to spend millions to attempt to get rid of melaleuca and Australian pine, originally planted to help control water levels and flooding.

The problem here, I think, is that too often we assume that restoring an ecological area is about the same as cleaning a kitchen -- you pull out some chemicals and some sponges and paper towels or cloths, scrub scrub, put everything away, and voila, you're done and the kitchen is clean in a more or less one step process. Of course, if you're going to use the area again, you need to clean up all over again, something often forgotten in this "it shouldn't take this long to clean the area up."

But the larger problem is that restoration is not the same as cleaning. Everything is out of whack in Lake Apopka -- fish, plants, and most critically, the microorganisms that form the base of the food chain -- and it takes time, more time than I'd like, for all of these critters to find a balance again.

It is true that people are not, for the most part, boating on Lake Apopka -- I've seen more boats on considerably tinier lakes. And that's partly thanks to the lack of fish in the lake and the murkiness of the water - other Florida lakes in the area are filled with crystal clear water. But it's also thanks to something that isn't going to change: the basic shallowness of the lake, which means that although it's a wide lake, you can't put huge boats on it.

Naturally, the town meeting is scheduled during the only thing I have scheduled all week (no, not Downton Abbey) but I may be able to get to the tail end of it, and raise my voice for giving native plants just a little bit longer to try to grow.

It's Sunday, which must mean it's time to blog about Downton Abbey. Despite hearing several people crow about their obsession with this show last year, I missed it until this Christmas when I had a chance to catch up with the first season, and now, obsessed.

Sure, it's elitist, conservative, and incredibly nostalgic for a pre-World War I period that was not all that awesome for people not called Earl Granthams, and despite its token Socialist character happier when people Learn Their Place. Sure, one of the two main romantic storylines between Mary and Matthew is deadly dull except when Mary is helping to drag corpses around the castle, which, awesome, and sure, the entire corpse storyline was, to put it mildly, somewhat of a stretch, but the sight of people dragging a corpse through a nice luxury castle is so delightful I was willing to forgive, like, everything. Plus the resulting snobbery afterwards was fun. Sure, two of the villains are pretty stock villains, although at least the Evil Maid seems to have been given more to do this season – I'm only in the second episode, so we'll see, and I'm kinda hoping the Evil Footman Now Some Sort of Medical Orderly gets crushed by a Grand Piano because he bores me.

But against this, you have the delightful crashes between Dame Maggie Smith, playing the Dowager Countess with the precise snobbery she has absolutely down, and Penelope Wilton as her rival Isobel Crawley. I could watch an entire show just for Maggie Smith's one liners. And Bates the valet and Anna the housemaid. The actor playing Bates has this unbelievable shivery creating voice, and if this show does not give Bates and Anna a happy ending in the series finale I may have to hunt some people down. Also, costumes and a Very Cute Dog. Yes, yes, I have a weakness for these sorts of aristocratic British shows anyway, but I have a feeling that even if I didn't, Bates and Maggie Smith would be drawing me back in.

Watching this season, however, has made me aware of just why Americans were complaining last year until we finally had access to the British versions. For some reason PBS is airing episodes where bits have been obviously cut, and in the online version introducing the show with very American accents, missing that half the point of this show is the plummy British accents, and also telling us pointless things instead of just letting us get on to the show. This means, of course, that I'm just going to have to rewatch season 2 once the DVDs with the British episodes are available at the library. I feel just awful about this, I'm telling you.

1. As I announced in a couple places elsewhere, my poem Snowmelt was nominated for a Rhysling Award.

I don't often have favorites among my poems, but "Snowmelt" was one of the rare poems that entirely satisfied me, and hands down the poem I was proudest of last year. I have, you see, a slight – very slight – obsession with structured poetry, but I can only rarely make it work. "Snowmelt," which mingles a triolet, rondeau, pantoum and a sonnet in with other mirrored and structured works, takes that obsession to new levels, and I'm delighted that someone else has decided to indulge my obsession with a nice nod of recognition.

Assuming the goblins cooperate, I believe we'll have a bit more news about Goblin Fruit, where this poem initially appeared, in the next few days....although you never quite know with goblins. Tricksy creatures, they be.

2. And since it's Thursday, it must be time for another Tor.com post, this one about A Wind in the Door. I'll also note that people have already started chattering about A Severed Wasp in the comments on earlier posts, which suggests that we'll be having some interesting comments once we get to that book (not for a few more weeks.)

3. A few other good and interesting things are happening on the publishing front that I can't blog about quite yet, but, well, as they say, watch this space. Nothing good is happening on the writing front, where my work in progress can be best compared to that of a turtle who has decided that, you know, even this crawling thing is Too. Much. I've just been too tired to think clearly.

....why is the Batman theme song playing outside?

Anyway. Off to try to trick out a few more words.

I have always wanted a rose garden.

Not so much for the roses, although I love roses, but for the pure romance of the name. Rose garden. The sort of name that means fairies and dreams and magic. And because when I was very very small, we had one – a mess of roses in the tiny back yard that formed an impenetrable wall that whispered of the magic behind it, a wall watched by me and my doll Tina and our large dog* for magic or fairies or Muppets.

I never did get through those roses, even in winter when they slept.

Our later journeys were not conducive to rose gardening, although they did include visits to rose gardens throughout the world, some in great shape, some dying. Apartment living in South Florida was even worse, although I did buy the occasional bush or miniature roses just to watch them sag over and die. I had, you might say, a gift for it, and eventually decided to mostly stick to easier plants that said, yeah, yeah, so the sunlight wasn't exact or you forgot me for a couple days. I'm going to grow anyway.

When we came here, the front lawn had three rose bushes in decidedly awful shape, but one was pushing forward magnificent roses in pure defiance of the rest of its very dead state. We moved one bush (it was pretty much dying anyway) and I put coffee grounds on the others and brought in more rose bushes, including some miniature ones and hoped.

And learned that these roses can probably be best called mercurial.

One week, a bush is dying, miserable, drooping with a KILL ME NOW look; the next week, it's blooming. That bush in the very dead state when we arrived, that various people strongly suggested should be uprooted to end its misery? Is today the best and healthiest bush out there, without a single rose. Meanwhile, the most straggly bush is gleaming with the garden's single rose. Another rose, which I had given up on after it turned to a single stick, just pushed out two more branches.

And I have had to learn to get past my instincts to let plants do what they will, allowing dead branches and leaves to fall when they will. Roses are different: hurt me, they scream. Show me that you have noticed that part of me has died, and I shall respond by shooting a cane into a direction you do not want, or possibly by sending up a tiny rose, or a huge rose. Hurt me, strip me.

It's an unhappy season for the bushes just now, the dry cool period when they ache for rain and warmth, and get little of either (although this has been a warmer January than usual.) But it might rain this afternoon, a little, and light clouds are moving in, so I headed out to do a little pruning. We shall see if a rose garden can rise out of this yet.**


*Virtually everyone who has seen pictures of this dog will be disputing my description here: Ami was a basenji and not by most standards particularly large or even cracking medium size, but she was big TO ME, so I'm sticking with my story.

** It would help if I could stop rolling over the miniature roses.

Writing tic

In a recent conversation I joked that I was having problems telling the difference between "discreet" and "discrete." (Well, it wasn't entirely a joke, but I do know the difference. Most of the time. When I'm not dizzy or tired or distracted – this is just not going well, so I'll stop.)

But this reminded me of one of my little writing verbal tics: an almost pathological aversion to using the words lay/lie.

This wasn't always true – back in high school and college I knew the difference and used them without thinking too much about either word. But later, I started teaching English grammar. In my rotating English as a Second Language classes, we usually hit "lay/lie/lie" (the listening part of the TOEFL test also tests whether or not non native speakers can tell if the speaker is talking about dishonesty) right after the nightmare of the multiple meanings of "take" and the excitements of "do" and "make."

This is a bad time to hit "lay/lie," with students already wishing that "take" had never entered the English language, and generally resulted in significant sulking. It did not help that the most common phrase they typically encountered using either word was "get laid," which is not tested on the TOEFL and also offers its own grammatical confusion. As an end result we all became very fond of the word "put." "Put" is a nice easy word to spell, you don't have to change it, and you can put anything anywhere you want to without worrying about how exactly you're going to end it. We all loved "put." We also liked "recline" and "rest." Great words, and you never have to wonder if "recline" means "dishonesty." (Bonus: this also removed some of the "sit" and "set" confusion.)

But the result of years of this was to leave me twitching with the words "lie/lay," partly because when I use either word now, I feel the need to look them up, but mostly because I feel a sense of discomfort around them, a sense that these are words that cause annoyance and pain. It doesn't help that although I know it's grammatically correct, the word "lain" always looks archaic to me, calling up thoughts of the King James Bible and Shakespeare, which is rarely the tone I'm going for – I know a few people that can sort of pull off an imitation of that language in a pinch, but I can't – far too steeped in contemporary America, for all of my medieval/Renaissance reading and studies.

And I just caught myself trying to avoid using one of those words again.

This writing musing brought to you by avoiding watching the Golden Globes.

Sigh. Feeling a bit better after yesterday's wave of vertigo/fatigue, but still zonked, which does not bode well for procuring cat food today and running other errands today. On the other hand, not procuring cat food will lead to the inevitable Dance of the Kitty Paws which does not bode well for sleep. I sense doom either way.

Meanwhile, while I was out of it, my post about The Young Unicorns went up yesterday. And speaking of Tor.com, they are also running something else this week of interest to at least a couple of you: A David Bowie week.

(And their annual Reader's Choice thingy, where you can nominate your favorite novels, short fiction, and so on, if you are so inclined, and currently take a look at the way a couple of independent novelists are leveraging this opportunity to garner some increased attention for their books.)

I can't remember just when or where I first encountered Sybil, that international bestseller about a young girl grossly abused by her mother who had shattered into 16 separate personalities as a result. I do remember that I found it enthralling if not always well written, although when I finished, I had quite a few questions.

( Which resulted in one very long blog post that I should probably cut into two parts, but instead will just hide behind a cut. )