From PubMed:
Clinical evaluation of postpartum vaginal mucus reflects uterine bacterial infection and the immune response in cattle. Authors: Williams EJ, Fischer DP, ….
Month: March 2009
Sally Wister’s Journal — M. T. Anderson recommends this Civil War era journal in an interview, saying it was one of the more interesting things he read doing research for Octavian Nothing. He claims that if Wister had ever turned her hand to fiction, she would have been one of the great American novelists.
The Quiet Coup — article in The Atlantic in which Simon Johnson, former economist with the International Monetary Fund, explains exactly how the IMF would be treating the United States if it were any other country.
Fear and the Availability Heuristic — post on Bruce Schneier’s blog about the non-rational basis of most human risk assessment.
360 Degree Character Reviews — John Rogers talks about some interesting exercises a writer can use to get to know his or her characters.
Join or Die — artist Justine Lai’s series of paintings of herself having sex with the presidents of the United States.
BOINC — Open source software to donate unused processor cycles to many scientific projects. I’ve donated mine to the World Community Grid.
Meanwhile, on Twitter….
glorioushubris Confession: When sick earlier this week, I impulse-bought a gold and black polyester robe embroidered with dragons to make me feel better.
glorioushubris Further confession: it totally worked. I am a medical genius.
mkazoo @glorioushubris Picture? I think such a robe should be documented for posterity.
KatWithSword @glorioushubris totally agree w/ @mkazoo Please give us photos
lnaturale @glorioushubris How could it not?
charitylarrison @glorioushubris I imagine you reading elric novels in it
kellysue @glorioushubris pix or it didn’t happen
aacooper @glorioushubris If only there were a medical version of the arXiv, you could share your discovery with mankind!
I bend to the will of the collective. My robe:
Close up of one of the dragons:
Did I mention the robe is reversible? It is totally reversible:
My immediate reaction to learning I was accepted to Clarion: grabbing books by Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link and grinning like a maniac.
This picture was taken a year ago yesterday, approximately ten minutes after I found out I was accepted to the Clarion Writers’ Workshop for 2008. That night my girlfriend and I were planning to go out to dinner to celebrate her having finished her qualifying exam. We stopped at my apartment for some reason or other, and I checked my email, and suddenly we had something new to celebrate. I was just finishing a year of Figuring Things Out that I took for myself after I graduated from Trinity, during which I tried to decide if I was going to stay in the sciences or if I was going to try seriously to pursue being a writer. I viewed my application to Clarion as something of a personal test: if I could get in to this workshop, with that history and those instructors, then maybe being a science fiction author wasn’t just an impossible fantasy. Despite having been a creative writing major at my swanky, free-thinking arts high school, five years of pouring all of my mental energy into physics and mathematics had made me lose any strong sense of myself as a writer. Being accepted to Clarion was my first step toward taking myself seriously that way again. And, in all the ways that Kathleen Howard writes about so eloquently (must-read advice for those just accepted), attending it changed my life.
Now eighteen more lives are going to be changed. The Clarion 2009 class has been selected. You can see their names and links to some blogs at the UCSD Clarion Alumni page. Huge congratulations to all of you! You are in for an amazing, exhausting, once-in-a-lifetime experience.
It’s a fascinating feeling, watching the cycle continue with a fresh group of students. Part of me feels a sense of loss–my Clarion is undeniably over now that there is a new, more recent one. But a large part of the appeal of Clarion when I first applied to it was its history. Forty years of being the proving ground for some of the best and most successful writers in SF. So another, greater part of me thrills to see the tradition continue, knowing that I am a part of that history now.
Finally: I can’t improve on Kat’s advice for the newly accepted. But I do have some thoughts for the newly not-accepted (some of whom I know read this blog). They all boil down to reasons why, disappointed as you may be, you should not be discouraged and you should apply again. Know that Clarion receives more qualified applicants than it has spaces available every year, and this year was no exception. The selection committee always has to make some very tough choices. So a rejection, especially one which says you impressed the committee, should not necessarily be seen as an indictment of your writing. You may well have been very close to getting in. Additionally, as long as attending Clarion lines up with your means and life goals you should keep applying because, honestly: if you have talent and are putting in effort, your odds of getting in are not bad. Pretend that applications were selected randomly. There are 18 spots open every year. The record number of applications in a year is 194. This year there were 91. (It is likely that economic factors depressed the number of applications somewhat. One third of this year’s accepted class is from California, as were a majority of all applicants. It looks like people for whom travel costs would be significant were less likely to apply this year.) If we use these numbers as a range, then (pretending quality of writing is not an issue) a random application has about a 10%-20% chance of being accepted. If you are serious and confident about your work, it is not unreasonable to assume that your chances of getting in are 1-in-5 or better. I can’t overstate how positive an experience Clarion was for me. Certainly worth continuing to shoot for, with odds like that.
One more note: While San Diego is my Clarion, there is actually a family of Clarion workshops. Clarion West in Seattle has accepted (almost all?) of its 2009 class as well, and congratulations to them! There is also an Australian workshop modeled after the American ones, Clarion South. Clarion South is currently struggling to meet its funding goal for its next session. The call is going out through the extended Clarion family: consider donating to Clarion South. Help keep the workshops alive, so that they will be there for future students and their wonderful tradition and history can continue to grow.
Finished the damn thing at around 5:00 in the morning. Slept, gave it another pass through, then put it in the mail.
I’m beat. I have thoughts about the class for Clarion 2009 being announced, but those will have to wait for another time. No more from me, except to say that by far the most exciting thing to happen on the internet today was the discovery of a photocopy of Alan Moore’s Big Numbers issue 3.
Manu Ginobili forcing amorous attention on Ian Mahinmi after they are singled out by the Kiss Cam during a stoppage of play:
(Were you aware that I am a fanatical supporter of the San Antonio Spurs? I’m a fanatical supporter of the San Antonio Spurs. This is my only sports obsession.)
Crohn’s patients, I have come to learn, frequently experience what are known as “flare ups”: sudden spikes in the severity of their symptoms, often requiring agressive medicinal intervention to combat. I had a flare up yesterday, and it had me–during my more lucid moments–reflecting again that “flare up” is a far less evocative phrase for the experience than I think it deserves. I would prefer something like “perpetual stomach stomp,” or, perhaps, “gutsplosion.” (How great a world would this be if students across the nation had to do PubMed database searches for gutsplosion references to write their papers?)
Anyway. I spent nearly all of yesterday in a drug induced stupor, sleeping when I could and downing pain meds and reading when I couldn’t. After about 20 hours of this things began to improve slightly, and I decided to get out my computer and see if it would be possible to get any work done. Despite the end of the month deadline, working on the story I’m writing for the Genomics Forum competition, for which I am still figuring out the characters, seemed too hard. So I opened up the file for another story I’ve been arduously revising for the past month.
Words started falling out of me like grains from a split sack of rice.
I have no explanation for this. Up until yesterday, revising this story had been like pulling teeth. But last night I could suddenly see through the haze of the story as I had written it once clearly through to the end of the story as it should be written. I think I will be able to finish the revision today.
No deep thoughts here. Other than perhaps that it is surprising how far ending on a bright note can go toward changing one’s perceptions of a miserable experience.
“If I were an earthworm….”
“If I were a dragonfly….”
Over at the Sundance Channel website, you can watch Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno videos, in which she dresses up in colorful costumes and enthusiastically and accurately demonstrates the sexual behaviors of various invertebrates. Utterly fabulous.
Ted Chiang has a story, “Exhalation,” up for a Hugo award this year. It was originally published in the anthology Eclipse 2, and now Night Shade Books has made it available for download. I just read it, and loved it. It is in structure and tone very similar to one of my very favorite short stories, “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges. In fact, the similarities are such that I wonder if Borges was a direct inspiration. Compare the first lines.
Borges: “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite, series of hexagonal galleries.”
Chiang: “It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of life.”
Additionally, both stories end with the narrator drawing comfort from imagining a universe which extends beyond what is commonly conceived of as the boundaries of the one he inhabits. Borges’s story uses combinatorial complexity as the basis of its thematic explorations, while Chiang’s uses the laws of thermodynamics. Basically, Chiang has written the physics-y version of my favorite math-y story ever, and has thus made my inner scientist very happy.
Still too focused on my short story to put any mental energy into structuring these thoughts.
- The decision to give up all technology and live in a state of grace with nature was completely unmotivated and nonsensical. It is impossible to believe that 38,000 people all agreed, after years of struggling to maintain their way of life, to abandon the products and practices of civilization. And that little scene between Lee and Bill Adama where Lee says, “It’s amazing everyone agreed to this!” and Bill says, “Never underestimate the appeal of wiping the slate clean” does nothing to address this. That is what the Turkey City Lexicon calls “You Can’t Fire Me, I Quit” writing: “An attempt to diffuse the reader’s incredulity with a pre-emptive strike, as if by anticipating the reader’s objections, the author had somehow answered them.”
- If Hera is mitochondrial Eve, this has some awfully dark implications for the survivors of the 12 colonies. Specifically, it means that every single one of them failed to have any progeny that survived and procreated. That map of the world the Adamas said they would scatter the population of the fleet across? All of those colonization attempts, except for one of them in Africa, utterly failed. They all died, and if they had any children, those children died too. Additionally, if we have any sentimental feelings for the humans already on the planet, then we should hope that one of the natives is y-chromosome Adam, because Hera being mitochondrial Eve means that the fleet arrives before the human population bottleneck. Somewhere between Hera wandering the savanna and Ron Moore in Times Square, the entire human population drops to around 2000 individuals. So unless one of Hera’s hardiest offspring (or, conceivably, Hera herself) got it on with one of the natives, then we must also conclude that the arrival of the fleet meant the eventual extinction of the indiginous humans.
- Every episode for who-can-remember-how-long has started with Kara Thrace specifically reminding the audience that we should be wondering what the hell she was. This, apparently, did not actually prefigure any intention on the part of the creators to answer that question. So they completely failed to make good on what has been, for the last season and a half, the most strongly emphasized narrative promise. This is highly unsatisfying. (Although, if you actually think through the implications of Hera being mitochondrial Eve, I suppose they did make good on that whole “harbinger of death” thing. Not that I have any faith that the writers actually realized this.)
- In what I’m certain was intended to be a touching moment of connection, Saul Tigh tells Galen Tyrol that if Tory had done to Ellen what she did to Cally, he (Saul) would have killed her (Tory), too. What Tory did to Cally was murder her, motivated by self-preservation and race loyalty. As opposed to what Saul did to Ellen on New Caprica, which was murder her, motivated by self-preservation and race loyalty. Way to be self aware about your male bonding there, Saul.
- Head Six and Head Baltar being angels, and there actually being a higher power (which may or may not be god) influencing events I personally find extremely unsatisfying. I can’t strongly argue that the narrative didn’t earn this revelation, though. There has been plenty to support this being the answer. It’s just that “They really were a couple of deus ex machina all along” isn’t very interesting.
- This show has treated in-group/out-group dynamics and dealt with issues ranging from the propriety of torture to the ethics of military occupation with such subtlety that I was tremendously disappointed by the hollow moralizing of the dancing robots ending. As far as parallelism between the show’s story and the real world goes, they could have gone with a “will we repeat the mistakes of the past?” ending in a hundred different ways that would have been better than the slapstick literalism of “robots will turn on us if we aren’t careful.”