“And so the Shortest Day came and the year died And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world Came people singing, dancing, To drive the dark away. They lighted candles in the winter trees; They hung their homes with evergreen; They burned beseeching fires all night long To keep the year alive. And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake They shouted, revelling. Through all the frosty ages you can hear them Echoing behind us – listen! All the long echoes, sing the same delight, This Shortest Day, As promise wakens in the sleeping land: They carol, feast, give thanks, And dearly love their friends, And hope for peace. And now so do we, here, now, This year and every year.”
There is a famous story told in Chassidic literature that addresses this very question. The Master teaches the student that God created everything in the world to be appreciated, since everything is here to teach us a lesson.
One clever student asks “What lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?”
The Master responds “God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all — the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs and act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that god commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.”
“This means,” the Master continued “that when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say ‘I pray that God will help you.’ Instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”
ETA source: Tales of Hasidim Vol. 2 by Mar
I started reading this and was worried it would be something attacking atheists, or bashing religion, but this makes me really, really happy.
imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”
A few years ago, I came out to my mom the morning after my senior prom. She was surprised, then quiet, then asked what my real orientation was. I said, “I have no idea, but I like this one girl.” She was a little confused, but she kissed me and said, “As long as she makes you happy.” For the next few weeks, she asked a lot of questions: when did I realize? What was my new girlfriend’s orientation? What was the word for this or that? I WAS happy, right?
Fast forward about two years. My mom sits me down and tells me that she needs my help with her next book. She’s been writing middle-grade girls’ books (like, 9-14 range) since I was eight, and she says she has an idea that she really, really wants to get right. It follows the plot of Romeo and Juliet, she says, and the main character is a twelve-year-old girl realizing she has a crush on another girl when they put on the play for English class.
Fast forward another year to now. STAR-CROSSED is about to come out, and it is absolutely amazing.
My mom has poured her heart and soul into making sure this is a positive thing for kids to read.
I’ve been reading and editing and helping with this book since its first draft and I’ve been, metaphorically and sometimes literally bouncing up and down on my heels, waiting to be able to tell people about it. It’s beyond sweet, and there’s a ton of Shakespeare and humor and goofy preteen drama and twelve-year-old girls flirting and Star Wars jokes and a glossary of Shakespearean insults in the back (yes, really), and it’s just so fun and positive and smart and I want to show it to every kid I know.
This book is for LGBT kids, written by a mom who has asked questions and done her research and tried as hard as she possibly could to make her own queer kid feel safe and loved and valid, and it REALLY shows. Mattie (the cutie on the left) and Gemma (the cutie on the right) are given space to learn about themselves, and ultimately they don’t have to figure themselves out right away or come out to everyone at once or choose a label. They’re kids. It’s okay to still be figuring things out. It’s okay.
Fun facts:
My mom said from the beginning she wanted both girls on the cover to make it clear what the book was about; then when they got the final artwork and Mattie’s hair was short, my mom wrote back and asked the artist to do the hair over to make it as obvious as possible that Mattie is a girl.
When a few people started buzzing about Mattie being the youngest bisexual protagonist they’ve seen, she went back and changed passages to confirm that Mattie likes boys and girls.
When I asked for a happier and less ambiguous ending scene, she set Mattie and Gemma up on a frigging date.
It comes out on March 14, 2017. Please join me in GETTING HYPE FOR STAR-CROSSED <3
I agree, all men should learn about women’s sexuality by reading My Immortal.
Hi friend! Foz here. Just a couple of points:
– I’ve specified good fanfiction in literally the first tweet. While this is, obviously, a value judgement wherein YMMV, My Immortal is famous for being arguably the most terrible fanfic ever written, and is therefore demonstrably not what I’m talking about. Similarly, I’ve seen other responses to this post bring up 50 Shades, which, despite its popularity in mainstream circles, is pretty much universally regarded as being not just terrible fanfic, but an excruciatingly bad and dangerously inaccurate portrayal of BDSM that romanticises abuse. So no: these are not the droids you’re looking for.
– Here’s the thing, though: you already knew that. The decision to respond to this post with a flippant reference to a fic that’s notorious precisely because of its poor quality is exactly why I used up precious Twitter characters to specify good fanfic, even though I shouldn’t have had to. Every mode of artistic expression is composed of good, bad and mediocre works, but when it comes to genres that are traditionally viewed as less worthy or literary – like fanfiction, or romance – we have a reflexive tendency to conflate the bad with the whole, such that the good is implied to be either exceptional or nonexistant. I specified that I’m talking about good fanfiction, not because I think such fics are an exalted minority, but to pre-emptively combat the assertion that they are, and then you’ve gone and made it anyway. So, thanks for that.
– But while we’re on the subject of quality, let’s make a very important distinction. Though fanfic is a largely unmediated medium, it’s not bad; it’s amateur, in the very literal, dictionary-definition sense of engaging or engaged in without payment; non-professional. While there’s a stereotype that lots of ficwriters are teenage girls – which, why is that always wielded as an insult? oh right, misogyny, carry on – a lot of us are, in fact, grown-ass adults of varying genders, some of whom also happen to write professionally in other contexts; like me, for instance. I’ve read fanfics that are unquestionably as good as, if not better than, many professionally published works I’ve read, some I’ve simply enjoyed or felt meh about, and others where I’ve mounted up on my Nopetopus and ridden off into the sunset after the first paragraph. It’s a grab bag, is what I’m saying, but if you think that’s an inherently different spectrum of enjoyment over quality than applies to any other medium, then I’d politely invite you to reconsider the matter.
– In conclusion: fanfic might not be your bag, but it has its own culture of editing, collaboration, publication, criticism and dissemination, its own conventions and subversions of same, its own extensive history and trope awareness, and, yes, its near-unique status as a medium invested in female sexual desire. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other things straight dudes can do to learn the mystical ways of What Women Want like, oh, say, talking to them, always bearing in mind that women are not a goddamn hivemind, but given that there are a frightening number of guys out there whose first or primary exposure to any type of porn is whatever degrading mainstream het they can scrouge up for free without virusing the hell out of their PCs, then yeah: I’m gonna go out on a fucking limb and suggest they maybe balance it out with some fanfic.
This might be the best summary of the power of fan fiction and its inherent lessons about women’s sexuality that I’ve ever seen.
And if you look to your left you’ll see a well written, well thought out piece “In Defence of Fanfiction”.
Side note: I think “then I’d politely invite you to reconsider the matter” is going to be my favorite online rejoinder from this day forward.
I’ve blogged before about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow. It’s a famous painting; according to the website of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna where it lives it is “perhaps the most famous depiction of winter in European art.” Bruegel painted it on a 5-foot-wide wooden panel in 1565.
I’m only a sporadic appreciator of art, but I’ve known about this painting for a while because a poster of it hangs on the wall of a ski condo I’ve been visiting since I was a teen. It was only a few years ago, though, that I noticed something cool about it in a Tumblr post that showed a detail of the painting’s ice-skating scene:
This guy:
I thought it was funny, and cool, that in the midst of painting that amazing scene Bruegel included that little bit of physical comedy, that pratfall, the guy face-down on the ice.
I’d always assumed that the version you see above, which was cropped from a moderately high-res online scan, accurately shows how he looks in the painting. I mean, he’s tiny; in the condo poster he’s just a fraction of an inch across. I figured he was just a crude stick figure in the painting, with that big round head and all.
Fast forward to today, when my partner and I were doing some last-minute Christmas shopping at Chaucer’s in Santa Barbara. It’s one of the better brick-and-mortar bookstores still around, and as sometimes happens I got sidetracked in the art section. When I spotted a big coffee-table book on Bruegel I grabbed it and flipped to the part about Hunters in the Snow.
There was a big detail of the ice-skating scene. And oh my god:
Face-Plant Guy!
He’s not a crude stick-figure at all. He’s a rounded, anatomically correct human caught in the moment before impact, his hat flying off as he tries to break his fall.
I can’t help but see it as a metaphor. I think I see so clearly. I think I can reach through the screen and grab anything I want, pull it close and examine it, make it mine, have my private in-joke with the universe.
But it’s an illusion. I’m not interacting with the actual thing. I’m interacting with my idea of the thing. And it’s a crude, distorted idea, more about my own limitations, my capacity for self-deception, than about the rich, mysterious world I drift through unaware until it smacks me in the face.
Birding, aka birdwatching, is a recreational hobby where you try to see birds. Other words you may see associated with the hobby are birdspotting, twitching, listing… there are a lot of ways to go about looking at birds! But the basic gist of all these subcategories is:
“Over the course of hundreds of years our story has been written by non-native people — anthropologists, academics, journalists — coming into our communities and telling our stories for us. Now the mission is to get away from that cycle of extractive storytelling.”
“The people chose Hillary Clinton. But it’s the electoral vote that counts, not the popular vote, so Donald Trump will be president. And no, I’m not over it.
No one should be over it. No one should pretend that Trump will be a normal president. No one should forget the bigotry and racism of his campaign, the naked appeals to white grievance, the stigmatizing of Mexicans and Muslims. No one should forget the jaw-dropping ignorance he showed about government policy both foreign and domestic. No one should forget the vile misogyny. No one should forget the mendacity, the vulgarity, the ugliness, the insanity. None of this should ever be normalized in our politics.
The big protests that have followed Trump’s election should be no surprise. You can’t spend all those months trashing our nation’s values and then expect everyone to join you in a group hug. Trump made the bed in which he now must lie.
If a normal Republican had been elected, I could say the polite and socially acceptable thing, something like “I didn’t support So-and-So, but he will be my president, too, and I wish him success.” But I cannot wish Trump success in rounding up and deporting millions of people or banning Muslims from entering the country or re-instituting torture as an instrument of U.S. policy. In these and other divisive, cruel, unwise initiatives, I wish him failure.
I do hope he succeeds in avoiding some kind of amateurish foreign policy blunder that puts American lives or vital national interests at risk. And let me be clear that I am not questioning his legitimacy as president. When the results are certified and the electoral college casts its votes, Trump will be the nation’s duly chosen leader, ridiculous though that may be.
But he has not earned our trust or hope. Rather, he has earned the demonstrations that have erupted in cities across the country. He has earned relentless scrutiny by journalists, whom he shamelessly made into scapegoats during the campaign, and he has earned the constant vigilance of the public he now must serve.
We must watch Trump, and judge him, every single inch of the way.”
Trump spent 18 fact-free months trashing America. His voters agreed, and now Trump has millions of ignorant people ready to dismantle the country.
He hired Steve Bannon as a strategist. This is all you need to know.
Part of what’s been difficult though, during my presidency, is untangling the degree to which some of these issues are because of race and some of these issues being reflective of just a coarsening of the political culture and a sharpening of the political divides. Because I do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster. And if you ask them, I’m sure they would say, ‘No, actually what you’re experiencing is not because you’re black, it’s because you’re a Democrat.’ And right around the beginning of Bill Clinton’s presidency and what corresponds with the rise of right-wing media, a lot of the old boundaries and rules of civility just broke down.
Now, one way to think about this is that issues of race and issues of political philosophy have always been entangled, and it’s hard to draw them out. Right? So, when I think about the Tea Party or conservatives who’ve opposed my agenda, I have no doubt that there are those who oppose my agenda because they have a coherent and sincere view about the role of the federal government relative to the state governments; they believe that an overreaching federal power that is taxing, regulating, redistributing is contrary to the vision of freedom that the founders intended; and they can believe those things independent of race.
Having said that, a rudimentary knowledge of American history tells you that the relationship between the federal government and the states was very much mixed up with attitudes towards slavery, attitudes towards Jim Crow, attitudes towards anti-poverty programs and who benefitted and who didn’t. And so I’m careful not to attribute any particular resistance, slight, opposition to race. But what I do believe is that if somebody didn’t have a problem with their daddy being employed by the federal government, and didn’t have a problem with the Tennessee Valley Authority electrifying certain communities, and didn’t have a problem with the interstate highway system being built, and didn’t have a problem with the G.I. Bill, and didn’t have a problem with the FHA subsidizing the suburbanization of America—and that all helped you build wealth and create a middle class, and then suddenly as soon as African Americans or Latinos are interested in availing themselves of those same mechanisms as ladders into the middle class you now have a violent opposition to them, then I think you at least have to ask yourself the question of how consistent you are and what’s different, what’s changed.
Dowitchers are stocky, long-billed sandpipers. Found in flocks that stay relatively tight together, they feed by rapid, rhythmic, vertical sewing-machine-like probing, often in water up to their bellies. Both Long-billed Dowitcher and Short-billed Dowitcher have an entirely white rump. The two species are extremely similar and best distinguished by their calls.
Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, Calif.
December 2016
I’m getting a LBDO feeling from these, but if anyone wants to make the case for SBDO (especially for that first one) I’d be interested to hear it. (Also interested to hear the birds, since that probably would clinch it.)
“This family. What can I say. What an honor to have photographed them for eight years. A couple of months ago, the Social Office came to me and said they were thinking of using a family photo for this year’s White House holiday card. So I thought of Justin Trudeau. I know you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about. Earlier this year we hosted the Canadian Prime Minister for a formal State Dinner. Malia and Sasha attended as guests. Before the dinner, I did a family photo in the White House residence. But later, when the Trudeaus arrived, the two families spent some time on the Truman Balcony with their respective delegations. At one point, the Prime Minister asked if we could do a photo of he and his wife with the Obama family. Click, click, click. Then, he said I should do a photo of just the Obamas. I could have said, ‘Sir, we already did one before you arrived.’ But instead, I clicked off a few quick frames. And lo and behold, it was this picture that Justin Trudeau asked me to take which everyone loved as the choice for the 2016 White House holiday card.” —Chief Official White House Photographer Pete Souza
