Various completely unrelated matters:

I can't remember if I've linked to this before, so here it is, possibly again, Geoffrey Chaucer Has A Blog, partly because I insist on linking to anything that correctly calls John Gower out as a wanker, partly because this is yet another marvelous example of What the Internet can bring us, and partly because this is, as far as I know, the sole attempt on the entire World Wide Web to discuss the frightening similarities between the Pearl poet and Brokeback Mountain. (Also, medievalling Paris Hilton. Also, the cheery description of an MLA conference. Also, specifically for call_me_robert. That's enough Alsos.)

“I WOLDE I KNEWE HOW OF THEE I MIGHT BE QUITTEN!”

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If those links were too much for you, wait! Wait! Look! MANDELBULB!

(In theory, this has something to do with fractals. In reality...oh, just go click and look.)

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Meanwhile, Central Florida is in a tizzy after a report that we may – we MAY – have – wait for it – ACTUAL SNOW this weekend. (By "tizzy" I mean three emails in my inbox with variations on WTF?) I don't – I can't – quite trust this report. But I do think I should try to invest in batteries for the camera, just in case.

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Finally...is it wrong to me to feel bothered that the State of the Union address might preempt Lost? Especially since I can't watch Lost live anyway? (ABC is the one broadcast channel that we absolutely cannot get.)

I mean, they have the State of the Union address every year. Since, you know, the 18th century, even! The last season of Lost comes but once!

(Er. Yes, I can be shallow. Have you not noticed this?)

The Tin Woodman of Oz

Tor.com has just posted the latest Oz post, The Tin Woodman of Oz.

I didn't discuss it that much in the post, but from a disability perspective, this is one of the most fascinating of the Oz novels (The Patchwork Girl of Oz, with its happily defiant heroine, is the other). The Tin Woodman, after all, started out with a prosthetic leg, then two prosthetic legs, then a prosthetic arm, and so on...until his entire body becomes tin. As a tin person, the Tin Woodman is automatically marked as distinct and different, but the Tin Woodman embraces this distinction, and indeed, insists that the transformation into tin is an improvement. After all, as an ordinary human woodcutter, he was just that - ordinary. As the Tin Woodman, he gets to go on adventures and rule a kingdom, surrounded by happy devoted lackeys who want nothing more than to create even more creatures of tin.

Which leads me, I suppose, to the model of the "happy disabled" - you know the trope: the disabled person who becomes a kinder and gentler person who can teach us all about what Life Really Means, or What's Really Important, and who is always cheery and faces illness/disability with a smile. (In other words, Not Me.) But I don't think the Tin Woodman fits this model. In the first place, as this book notes, and other books hint, he is hardly flawless: deeply vain about his personal appearance (he spends significant time polishing his body), fussy, and a moral absolutist whose narrow mindedness often leads him to make unfair judgements, causing pain and annoyance to other characters. (See both The Patchwork Girl of Oz and The Lost Princess of Oz.) In the second place, the Tin Woodman does not regard himself as disabled - indeed, he regards himself as superior to ordinary humans. And that in itself is a deeply subversive statement.

I'm never included in any of these things

"There seems to be a 'secret feminist cabal' that gives the impression that if you are female and want to be published in sci-fi, you must write overtly feminist tracts and diatribes or else you aren't publishable."

Why I am always left out of cabals like this? I mean, it's bad enough that I'm continually getting left off the homosexual/queer agenda, but this one really hurts. Sniffle.

(Quote appears in a comment by celebrim, January 5, 2010, 8:33 pm. I will add that Joanna Russ was another one of those writers forced on me as Someone You Absolutely Must Read In College and while she was decidedly better than, say, Djuna Barnes, I was not left with a happy impression. I am doubtless being unfair.)