Kelley – Page 70 – Kelley Eskridge

Sit down, be quiet, behave

Since I am going to see The Dark Knight today —

(brief pause for moment of total fangirl squee)

I would love to have a secret science fiction ray gun that I can zap people with in the movie audience who are talking, texting, taking phone calls (!), and otherwise behaving badly. This ray gun would instantly tattoo on their foreheads — in neon — well…. let me tell you a story.

When I was in grammar school, the teachers’ favorite disciplinary tool for low-level offenses was assigning misbehaving students 10 sets of multiplication tables (“multies,” where a single set was “0x0=0” all the way through “9×9=81”), or 50 lines, which meant writing out an assigned sentence that many times in really good penmanship. Multies were easy — most of the kids in my class would get ahead on sets of multies when we were bored and keep them in reserve. But you could never get ahead on lines because the teachers made them up on the spot.

The one I remember most came from Mrs. Atkins, my sixth grade teacher, who was really annoyed one day and sent the entire class home to write:

I have been thoughtless, selfish and rude: therefore I must write this tedious sentence 50 times.

I would have the secret science fiction ray gun tattoo a variant of this: I have been thoughtless, selfish and rude, and need to learn that the world is not my living room.

Or, as I like to say, don’t be an asshole. An extreme response to someone disturbing a really good movie? I think not.

Oops, more of a zebra

So it turns out that the Freestyle Horse video that Iraved about the other day is actually a Nike viral marketing video.

I remember the first time I got taken by a scammer on the street for $5 because he was “out of gas.” That was in the 80’s in Chicago. He got me talking, he affiliated, he got the five bucks. I didn’t find out until weeks later that this kind of thing was starting to happen a lot. I actually got red-faced when I heard about it, because I felt so stupid. I felt like a rube.

The nice thing is, it takes more than that to make me feel stupid these days. I like this video. I think it’s way cool that someone made it. I like what it says about the power and strength and ability of young women. In other words, I like the story it tells. And I really do always want to stay open to story, even if it puts me at a disadvantage sometimes (that $5…).

Does this mean we should always accept “the validity” of other’s stories? Always be willing to embrace the story as a good thing, on its own terms? Oh my goodness, no. Every one of us should have her bullshit detector turned way, way up on the human interaction level. The guy who insists on helping you take your groceries upstairs to your apartment because he’s on his way up to see his buddy down the hall — and who calls you paranoid when you say no — that guy is maybe not a nice guy. That guy is maybe testing you. Every human has firsthand experience of the harm of being open to a story.

As a culture we teach other to be nice, defuse conflict, avoid giving offense. And then we turn around and teach each other that being credulous or gullible in any way is basically a failing and a fault, and you get what you deserve for being an idiot. Pretty mixed message — be open, be supportive and accessible, and then take the blame when those choices lead you to a bad scene. And so we make each other feel stupid for falling for anything, in order to teach each other not to fall for the wrong things.

I think it would be better to teach each other to better recognize the wrong things when they come along, you know?

Critical thinking skills can help with that. Books like The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker or Always by Nicola Griffith can help. And it would be cool if we stopped assuming that violence was an appropriate consequence for inexperience or poor judgment.

Hmm… I seem to have traveled far from Nike. Let me wander back again. I now know the greater truth of the video, which is that it’s a deliberate story someone is telling me to make me like their brand a little better. And you know, it’s a good story. I’m still open to it.

Queer Universes

Nicola and I have a new joint essay called “War Machine, Time Machine” just published in Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, edited by Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon.

Queer Universes is an academic publication from Liverpool University Press. We ourselves are not academic (smile), but we do a great job in irreverent footnotes. You’ll see.

Here’s a little excerpt of one of my parts of the essay:

I despise conscious theme, the great battering ram on the literary war machine. It subverts story. It renders characters nearly non-dimensional. It makes for some truly terrible dialogue. Good writers smile a polite ‘no’ when the theme tray is passed around, and instead allow theme to emerge from a well-told story about people who engage us because their choices, fears and hopes seem real, even if they are as strange to us as the surface of Pluto.

It’s vital for people who live outside of the dominant culture to find themselves reflected in positive ways within that culture. When those images don’t exist, we create them. It’s important and essential. But the goal should be to expand the boundaries of art, not establish new and increasingly granular rules and categories (never-het-dykes, bears, BDSM femmes, Log Cabin leathermen…) by which to label one another. I want people to write stories about strong women, people of colour, people of varied sexual orientation or physical condition, in order to make space in the cultural discussion for such people — not to set up a gay and lesbian table in the corner, as my stepbrother’s first wife did at their wedding reception so ‘Nicola and I would have people to talk to.’

— From the essay “War Machine, Time Machine” by Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge, in Queer Universes.

As much as I like myself and Nicola, I don’t think our essay alone is necessarily worth $85 (especially since we will regain the right to re-publish it on our websites early next year). But if you’re at all interested in queer theory, gender theory, and the expression of LGBTI etc. experience in speculative fiction, then there’s a lot in this book that will appeal. Please encourage your local library to order a copy — the editors would appreciate it, and so would we.

Congratulations to Wendy, Veronica and Joan, and thanks for including us.

Story people

Writers are the people who tell stories. Who do you think readers are?

Barbara Sanchez

Hi Barbara,

I think we are all story people.

I think we — writers and readers and those of us who are both — are all people who want stories. I think we respond so strongly to certain stories because in some way we are those stories; or we want to become them; or we fear becoming them. They speak to us of our own hopes, joys, risks, griefs, our compromises and our stubborness, our will and our failures of will. Or they show people just like us being heroes, larger than life, bigger and brighter, burning in ways we would like to burn if only we could.

And some of us are moved to make our own stories. I don’t know about other writers, but I write the stories that in some way I want to live, or hope to never live. I bring up stories from places of great yearning and ecstasy and fear. Sometimes those things are expressed quietly, sometimes at full volume, but even the gentle stories come from places that are full of storms.

Is it better to make one’s own stories? Nope, just a different way to live in the heart of one’s own imagination. Because whether we write our own work or read someone else’s, that’s what we’re doing — living the story, bringing it inside us and making it our particular and individual own. The act of reading is an act of creation, as surely as writing is. In the end, we are all telling the story to ourselves.

—————
You can start your own conversation now or anytime — just use the “Want to talk?” link on the sidebar.

More blah-blah: new comment management

At Jennifer’s suggestion (thanks, Jennifer), I’ve added some ways for you to more easily track comments.

If you are interested in following comments on a specific post, click on that post title. At the bottom of the post is the comments box, and at the very bottom you’ll see a checkbox that offers to update you by email whenever anyone comments on that particular post. You don’t have to leave a comment yourself to activate this update feature — there’s room for lurkers too (grin).

If you want to add the comments feed to your feedreader (such as Bloglines), you’ll find a new Comments Feed icon on the navigation bar at the top of every page of the website. It’s the little right-hand orange icon. If you don’t know what a feedreader or feed aggregator is, then you probably don’t use one. Back slowly away from this paragraph and go on to the next one.

If you want to receive a daily email update of every new comment, no matter what post, you can sign up for an email subscription using the convenient box on the sidebar under the “Recent Comments” section (“Get all comments by email”). Or use this link. This update works exactly the same way as the email subscription to posts.

I hope this will make it easier for people to stay involved in conversations or topics that interest them.

Please let me know if you have any problems or questions!

Administrative blah-blah about email subscriptions

If you subscribe to this blog by email, please be aware:

A number of people lately have been confused by the email format, and have thought that they were commenting on a post by replying to the email. And then, of course, they wonder where their comment went (and sometimes they get grumpy!). I hate confusing readers and making people grumpy by accident (I would always rather it was intentional).

So as of today, your email is coming from a slightly different address (updates@kelleyeskridge.com). This is a no-humans-here address (or an autorespond black-hole address, if you want to get technical). If you want to respond to a blog post, please do so by clicking the title link in the email update. It will take you to the post on the website, and you can make your comment there.

If you’d like to start a different conversation, please use the Talk to me now link on the blog sidebar.

If you need/want to contact me privately, use my primary email address if you have it or use contact[at]kelleyeskridge[dot]com.

If you do reply to the update email, you’ll get an automatic message back that explains all this again.

And if you’re thinking Huh, I didn’t know I could get updates by email, I want that!, then use the convenient “get new posts by email” sign-up box on either the blog sidebar or the home page.

I now return you to whatever you were doing before you stopped for this (and maybe you feel like it’s a minute of your life you can never get back, but thanks for reading).

Play like a girl

Another in the occasional Being Human series of posts.

Nicola posted this today. And I love it. I love that these young women are so brilliant at this. I would have killed for mad body skills like this as a young woman. I always admired the girls I knew who were good at sports, and this… well, it combines grace and talent and skill and a hundred split-second decisions about physics and geometry, and I just stand in awe.

And they make it look so easy. I just love their absolute sense of expertise, their genuine pleasure in making the shots, and the total lack of any body language that “apologizes” for either. And the ending is priceless, all the more so because it’s not that she didn’t make the cool shot, it’s just not the cool shot she was going for…

Anyway, go watch, and enjoy. I sure did.

Edited to add: Aha… it turns out that this is a viral marketing video from Nike. Well, here’s what I think about that.

Patricia Barber, wow

Last month we saw Patricia Barber do a supper club show here in Seattle, on the recommendation of Sly in Alaska who had previously sent us a bunch of Barber music.

Big thank you to Sly. Barber is an awesome musician and puts on a great show. If you’re lucky enough to live in Chicago, you can find her most Mondays at Green Mill Jazz Club, where for the unbelievably low cover of $7 you can get 4 hours of Barber’s lush voice and gorgeous music from a tight band (including the brilliant bassist Michael Arnopol).

Barber sips cognac on stage in between songs; she takes her shoes off; and her music sounds like all that, like warm brandy in the throat of an old friend who is telling you stories and reminding you of things you should know. The music is expert, inquiring, intimate, musing, pointed, and always personal. Seriously, she’s fabulous. Go buy her music, go see her live.

We’re no angels

There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good. — Edwin Denby

I don’t expect heaven when I die, but I’m getting a little Heaven right here in Seattle — the new location of my part-time dancing gig.

Dancers are on summer hiatus — things typically slow down in July and August, and the Hot Flash schedule is variable because of Mariners’ games (baseball in Seattle = parking hell). But the dances and the dancers will be back on a regularly scheduled basis in September.

In the meantime, I’m making noises with the management about a volunteer schedule — hey, I’ll be there dancing anyway, may as well do it on stage — but we’ll see. Either way, come dance with me on July 26 (Hawaiian shirt and bikini night!) and August 16. (Sorry, guys — Hot Flash dances are for women and transgendered people only.)

Making better managers

How true.

I haven’t mentioned recently the business idea I’m working on, but it’s still alive and on the horizon. I’ve been all about screenplay for a while, and the Humans At Work program has been on the back burner. No regrets — writing is better — but I’m determined not to let it die on the vine, either. So here’s an update for those who are interested.

Humans At Work^SM is a training program specifically designed to ground new managers in the basic skills of managing human beings. Because that’s what no one ever teaches us… and we bruise the hell out of each other learning on the job. It’s my experience that managing people well is a) the most important thing we can do in the workplace to ensure that the business succeeds in the long term, and b) not rocket science. Management (like communication, and marriage, and sex, and friendship, and pretty much every other relationship) is about behavior. It’s about skills, models, ways of being and doing, no different at its core than learning how to drive properly or understanding that you don’t shoot your neighbor just because his dog is barking (no matter how tempted you might be…).

So I’ve developed an intensive curriculum to help new managers start from a good base, so they can build experience in constructive ways rather than by damaging people around them through sheer ignorance. The curriculum is done (just needs a few tweaks). I’m building the website. And I’ve made some decisions that I think will raise a few eyebrows and possibly make some folks think I’m an idiot. Or maybe the whole thing will sink without a trace. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

I hope I can finish the site soon. It’s just fussy gruntwork at this point, and I need to buckle down and do it. But I also need to write an original screenplay, and plot out a YA novel, and get ready for more work on the current screenplay, and eat dinners and drink wine and see friends and dance and go to the movies and the park and and and… and it’s already July. It’s not stunningly original of me to say Oh wow, it’s true, time really does go by faster as you age. But oh, if only I’d known what I like to do and be, and had the skills to make it happen when I was 20, when I also had so much more energy.

But that’s not generally how life works. And you know what? If that’s the way it is, that’s cool. Knowing, being skilled, being confident, having focused passions as opposed to muddy longings — if I were given the choice between being 20 as I was, or 47 as I am, I choose now. This is better.

Hmm. Not sure how I got here from Dilbert, but there you go, sometimes the path is not straight.