cry havoc

A year (or two?) ago, there was a conversation online about the experience of growing up as an immigrant, with Mom's homefood for lunch and the reactions of (native-born, white) Americans to seeing the unfamiliar food. I cannot recall where that conversation occurred (community? someone's journal?) but if you do, pass along this link.

Is it Fair for Chefs to Cook Other Cultures’ Foods?, Francis Lam and Eddie Huang. Two immigrant sons hash out what it’s like to have your food shunned and celebrated in America

Some interesting, err, food for thought, in terms of how that childhood experience bears on the adult experience of two non-white American chefs/foodies and the question of -- when a non-American cuisine becomes 'popular' -- who has the right to cook it.

Well, maire recommended The Riddle-master of Hed and Barry Hughart's stories, and I finally tracked down copies of each. Unfortunately, I couldn't make it past three pages of the first. It just felt too much like in media res, but not in a good way. More like I was expected to care about the siblings' squabbles, and the text was clearly indicating that I was expected to read characters in a certain way, but I'd barely even met them. It actually felt a little like I was walking into a sequel, and I was supposed to already know what was going on and who-was-who. So, guess it's a pass on that one.

Bridge of Birds... reminds me so much of the translations of Chinese stories. It's a particular style, influenced by the patterns of the original language, and Hughart does manage that. With a bit of dry humor, here and there.

However, I got sidetracked by another story, and I'm still not sure where I found the recommendation. Reiko Morgan's Over The Mountain Of The Moon is a m/m romance set vaguely during the early Sengoku, maybe, in Japan. Awfully florid and oh with the romance and declarations of luuuuuurve and the protagonist-uke veering into yandere, but relatively entertaining all the same. If you can get past the flowers and hearts of the so-romance-it-hurts variety. Not a complex plot and a bit of whump, but sometimes I guess a body's in the mood.

And then a rec from Dear Author, I think, that sent me after Master of Crows, which is your usual fantasy-romance, but with cultural elements of a steppes-influenced world bordering the, hrm, maybe central eastern European sort of world. The heroine isn't helpless nor stupid, which is a plus. Not a massively complex plot, but the hero is just as much a little off-beat as the heroine, so what might've ended up annoying spunkiness in her is toned down because he's not the usual all-bastard, all-the-time.

I quit halfway through Abraham's sequel, A Betrayal in Winter, even though I really did enjoy the first in the series, A Shadow in Summer. Abraham's managed a world that's substance of China, not so much trappings. It's very subtle, but it reminds me of stories about 19th-century Shanghai: cosmopolitan merchant-crossroads, but still China beneath the veneer of things from everywhere.

The problem for me was that the first book's emotional hinge is a triangle. Normally, I don't have a problem with this, and in the first book, it wasn't actually a problem. One hero leaves for a journey, and in his absence, his girlfriend and his closest friend become, erm, close. Things roll out that way, sometimes, after all. Technically, it's still cheating, but in the book's context, I had no issue with it.

The problem was that the second book... also hung its major emotional-plot elements on a woman cheating on her supposed intended/affianced. So again, uncomfortable triangle, with everything hanging on the woman's choice to split her attentions between two men. Once, okay, but twice is a little too much of a pattern. I had no interest in finishing the book once I realized that, and certainly no interest in carrying on to find out if the third and fourth books also turn on the emotional pivot of a two-timing woman. Pass.

Tried to read Maya Snow's Sisters of the Sword, but it's a little too YA-style for me. Not in content -- it's got some brutal scenes early on where the protagonist's family is murdered right in front of her, so I wouldn't recommend it for kids under, hm, twelve -- but stylistically. It's just a very YA kind of voice. I didn't like that at that age, and I like it less, now.

Never did finish Dragon in Chains. Awful lot of lyrical poetry, but I need a little more conflict to make me turn the page. Okay, I need conflict, period. Wasn't getting any.

On order: The Signore: Shogun of the Warring States, a fictionalized history of Oda Nobunaga by Kunio Tsuji, and The Samurai and the Long-Nosed Devils by Lensey Namioka. Ambivalent over the second, since it's been so long in print (and now out of print, I think) that I can't find an excerpt anywhere. So not really sure if I'm facing yet another YA-voiced story, even if a used copy is only a buck-fifty. (What a joke: shipping is more than twice the book itself.)

In related notes, the past night or so, we've been debating what it'd be like to have a Buddhist monk, a Catholic padre, a Daoist master, a Confucian scholar, and a Shinto priest in a room together. Although by the Heian or shortly after, the Buddhist and Shinto were probably close to the same in terms of ideology... but I still think the Confucian, the padre, and the Buddhist would be arguing over whether women are evil inherently or only evil if they don't follow the moral precepts of being barefoot and pregnant, while the Shinto priest would be in the corner playing one-sided Go. CP says by mid-Qing, the Daoist would be arguing right along with the rest, but I'd rather think of early Daoism, and that kind of priest would probably also be playing Go.

Although I'd be really curious to read anything that compared how each school of thought would react to meeting a yokai/demon in the flesh. (In the spirit?) Exorcise it? Beat it into submission to the Buddha? Instruct it in moral rules of behavior? Fear it? Or invite it to tea?

I've been wondering whether I should compile the various posts (and unposted drafts) that I've done on fandom, and try looking at them as a collection of chapters about fandom and fanfiction. I think the current count is that I've been quoted now in (or at least asked for permission to be quoted in) five different grad-level dissertations.

Or maybe it's just that I may never be able to truly equate "published on the net" with "published, like, for reals". Wouldn't quoting me count as quoting from an unpublished work? How the hell do you cite someone's blog post?

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I really need to dig out my craigslist acct info and get rid of some of this stuff... so I can replace it with new stuff. Like, say, butcher-block countertops. The ones that have been out of stock for the past two months, for crying out loud. I could use different ones instead of continuing to wait, but then I'd have to deconstruct the countertop bases to make room for the extra 3/16" I'd need. Much easier to just wait for the countertops to come back into stock. Someday. Damn it.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates' series on the Civil War continues to fascinate me, interrogate my own education and long-held unquestioned cultural assumptions, and make me ponder what I learned as a child and what I just sort of absorbed even if no one ever said it. His most recent post, "The Civil War Isn't Tragic", has had me thinking today about how the war, overall, was presented in my childhood (formal, not family) education. I think the message in grade school was that it was tragic because so many people died, and so many families split north/south... but by high school and then into adult (informal) education, the tone shifted. It became more that the Civil War was tragic... because of the stupidity of people who kept it going and/or insisted on fighting in the first place.

That it was not averted by a peaceful resolution of outlawing slavery when there was the political chance on the board (as Britain did, in the 1830s) is the real tragedy, and that it dragged on for so long and cost so many lives is equally horrible. But the outcome? Not tragic at all. The aftermath and the scars? Tragic, mostly for (similar to the origins) being so badly handled, and so on.

But in the end: no, not tragic. Just stupid and horrible. And I think Coates has a significant point about the fact that we don't have a holiday to celebrate the re-unification of the Union. Why don't we?

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Okay, rain would be great. Rain that consists of only 1/4" worth of water doesn't even make the ground damp. It just kind of made everything glisten for a few minutes, before it evaporated again. This is more than a little unnerving, to know we're coming up on heat-lightning season and we're in the worst drought in fifty years.

ETA: Rain! ... and the whole "20% chance of thunderstorms" was really "a few minutes of dark sky, followed by a single drop of rain." ONE DROP. One big honking drop landing smack in the middle of my A/C repair invoice.

ONE SINGLE LOUSY FRICKING DROP OF RAIN != thunderstorm, people.

I was writing a reply recently and stumbled at a description. "Straightforward," I started to type, then paused, backed up, and pondered for a bit before coming up with "forthright". When rereading before hitting the post button, it occurred to me that I do this rather often, with the following words and phrases, and use alternates instead.

straight up => right out
straighten out => clear up, set right
go straight => go forward
setting someone straight => correcting, telling clearly
a straight answer => succinct answer
straight through => all the way through
___ straight [period of time] => ___ unbroken [time], ___ uninterrupted [time]

They're not all perfect synonyms, and sometimes I can see I've done a bit of a sidestep around my kneecap to get to my elbow, just to avoid the word. It's not like I'm trying to be PC, only that I think I took it to heart the joke a gay friend used to make, when I was in college: "never go straight, go crooked." (Though if feeling cranky, he'd say, "don't go straight, get bent.")

My sensitivity to the word and its connotations means I'm equally sensitive to reading the word in anyone else's writing. Not that I judge when I see it, only that I think, here is someone not sensitive to that, the way I am, sort of like when you're surprised that someone doesn't get hay fever like you. Neither good nor bad, just a bit of ah 'oh' observation. If someone else also avoids the word... that's harder to assess, because unless it's a really obvious one (where 'straight' would be kind of the default term, so to speak), there are different ways to say just about anything, so the absence isn't proof of anything.

But am I the only one who goes out of the way to avoid certain, specific words? And not even words that necessarily politically loaded, either -- because I also avoid 'overt' and 'sublime', whenever I can.

A bit ago I posted a link to an author's advice on Trying to Write the Southern Accent, and one of the comments reminded me of one of my favorite childhood stories... and its problematic representation of Southern Black American (and former-slave) speech. I quote, from the original:

"Didn't the fox never catch the rabbit, Uncle Remus?" asked the little boy the next evening.

"He come mighty nigh it, honey, sho's you born--Brer Fox did. One day atter Brer Rabbit fool 'im wid dat calamus root, Brer Fox went ter wuk en got 'im some tar, en mix it wid some turkentime, en fix up a contrapshun wat he call a Tar-baby, en he tuck dish yer Tar-Baby and he sot 'er in de big road, en den he lay off in de bushes fer to see what de news wuz gwineter be. En he didn't hatter wait long, nudder, kaze bimeby here come Brer Rabbit pacin' down de road--lippity-clippity, clippity-lippity--dez ez sassy ez a jay-bird. Brer Fox, he lay low. Brer Rabbit come prancin' 'long twel he spy de Tar-Baby, en den he fotch up on his behime legs like he wus 'stonished. De Tar-Baby, she sot dar, she did, en Brer Fox, he lay low.

"Mawin'!" sez Brer Rabbit, sezee--"nice wedder dis mawnin'," sezee.

Tar-Baby ain't sayin' nothing', en Brer Fox, he lay low.

"How duz yo' sym'tums seem ter segashuate?" sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.

Brer Fox, he wink his eye slow, en lay low, en de Tar-Baby, she ain't sayin' nothin'.

It's much easier to find revisions of this text than the original. One of those revisions posted online has a forward that says, "Harris retold the fables in the dialect used by the African slaves. Later retellings, such as the version of the story given here, have been in standard English, which makes the tales easier to read but takes away the charm of the original."

If you read the revised versions (behind the cut), you'll see what I mean: I don't think they realize where the so-called charm comes from. I do think it's true that the original exoticizes the slave dialect a great deal. It's so extreme, it alienates the reader, like it's letting you in on mysterious (getting near on Magical Negro territory, here) Other-stories, and your ticket to play is paid by the time you spend parsing out this unfamiliar not-English... but the exotic is not the source of the story's charm.

[That said, I should also note that while Harris may've propagated the image of the former slave as somewhere between lyrical and illiterate, he did also do a great service for later linguists, in putting so much effort into authentically and faithfully recording the actual speech. Even if he did do it via phonetic spellings, some of which are just plain baffling (I never have figured out what 'segashuate' means, but I think it might be 'suggest') -- he still managed to notate historical and actual speech patterns. Before him, most had discounted slave-speech as just Bad English, instead of understanding it as a communicative and evocative language in its own right. Some of the linguists even imply that had Harris not set the precedent, it might not've been until the WPA Historical Records Survey that anyone would've captured a contemporary speech record. In that sense, as difficult as the text is to read, to linguists and historians looking for long-standing patterns in the African-American creole, it does have value as a kind of historical record.]

( Two edited versions, a few explanations of some of the phrases/words, and childhood memories of a Georgia storyteller. )

This is being passed along/asked on behalf of taithe -- you can read what prompted these question in this thread (from the previous post). Slightly modified to be more universal for Southerners in general:

Who is defined as a Southerner? When not in the South, can you spot a Southerner right away or is it less obvious? If you live outside the South, do you feel like you don't/can't belong because of your Southern background? How closely do you think you match the stereotype of Southerner, and do you think this impacts how well you fit in -- or don't fit in -- when living outside the South? Alternate for those who've always lived/stayed in the South: can you identify when someone's a returning Southerner versus a newcomer picking up Southern habits? If so, what's the tip-off?

Formally speaking, "being Southern" has two-parts, or so I was always taught: born, and bred. Technically, I'm not a born-Southerner (thanks, DAD, the military guy!) because I was born in North Dakota. I'm completely bred-Southern, though, since we returned to the Deep South when I was six months old, and I lived in various places in the South until I was in mid-twenties. Beyond that, I have multiple generations in all directions who are born-and-bred Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, so generally... yeah, I'm pretty Southern.

( Rest of my answers behind the cut. )

If you don't mind taithe using your comments as possible jumping-off or consideration points for grad study, and want to contribute with your own stories/input for her questions, please feel free. If you'd prefer anonymity, you can go with anonymous here (I'm hoping that's okay, for taithe's purposes), or just PM taithe directly.

If your experience has differed from mine, especially do speak up. The South is hardly monolithic and I'm nowhere near an expert on All Things Southern, so do feel free to help me make sure no one gets that impression. Let's freely contradict each other, if that's what it be.

[see comments for additional response/questions from taithe]

I recall doing a beta-read for difrancis and tripping over a sub-plot that involved two childhood friends meeting again as adults... and recognizing each other instantly. That, to me, seemed preposterous. Biiiig suspension of disbelief! And bigger for Di herself, when she said she's recognized (as adults) people she knew in second grade. Just. Could. Not. Comprehend.

Oi. I have trouble recognizing coworker faces if our paths cross outside of work, and don't even ask me about faces (or names) of classmates, excepting a handful of really close friends. I've even walked right past my own sister with no recognition at all, when she chopped hair short and bleached it to white. And sure as spit, don't ever call me and think I'll recognize your voice. I've gone blank when my own father calls, for crying out loud. I'm never able to identify who's calling if I don't have caller-ID or some other hint to clue me in.

In person, I rely on things like hair color, length, and style, which means abrupt and extreme hair-style changes will throw me, especially if you're not wearing frequently-worn items like a distinctive coat or pair of shoes. I've learned to look for distinctive gestures and mannerisms, even if that means waiting patiently until someone who I think I should know -- and who acts like they know me -- says or does something that brings the face into sharper focus.

CP sometimes snarks that "all you white people look alike", but to me, pretty much... everyone does look alike. Or maybe I should say: everyone looks different, yes, but everyone looks unfamiliar. I just plain can't recall faces, and I sure as hell can't recall them if they're out of context (ie coworker not at work) or it's been more than about a year (ie old classmate).

Does anyone else do this, or have any similar kind of failure of recognition? I've always wondered if it's just me, or if it's just that everyone else fakes the lack of recognition better than I do.

Yesterday I flaked out on errands because it was 4pm already, a torrential downpour, and the start of a three-day weekend. Given this city's penchant for water-soluble driving skills, the last thing I wanted to deal with was a whole highway of the oblivions, in rain, on a friday afternoon, when everyone's getting into the holiday mood. Bleah.

So instead I went out at 10pm to get cat food, and that's when my clutch cable snapped, instead.

On the other hand, the 10pm trip was supposed to be short, because CP was going to head out with the car in time for a midnight get-together with friends -- which means if the cable was that close to snapping and it hadn't been me, it probably would've been him, instead. On the side of the highway, in a torrential downpour, at two in the morning.

All things considered, better to have the cable snap in the grocery store parking lot when you're not even out of first, yet. Unfortunately, stupid modern computerized cars means you can't even start the car unless the clutch pedal's down -- as opposed to the Porsche or the Austin-Healey, which you could start in neutral without the clutch pedal down. And that means no starting the car at all, once the cable's snapped, and that means no point in even trying to remember the specific ratios for shifting sans clutch pedal. Damnitall.

( Oh my god, it's my grandfather's car and it's parked in my driveway. )

However, I'm still not entirely sure how to explain to my little veedub that I'm no more happy than it is about that sofa skulking in the driveway.

I'm getting the impression that some of what I've figured out over the years either isn't as widespread knowledge as I thought, or maybe it's just not something most therapists/doctors explain to user-satisfaction. This ties into the issue of medication for ADD/ADHD, because one of the biggest issues about medication for that specific cognitive issue is that it's, well, pretty freaking illogical. I mean, honestly, my reaction the very first time a doctor suggested a specific medication was, and I quote: "Wait, my brain fires off in every direction at top speed, so you want to give me a stimulant? Are you people on drugs?"

So here's a really really simplified, only barely marginally scientific, explanation of one of the major theories about why stimulants work for ADD/ADHD. Keep in mind that when I say "marginally scientific," I mean that this is an extremely generalized version of something that seems to be how it (generally) works, but the brain is a damn complex organism. The how's and why's of ADD/ADHD (and related cognitive disorders) remain murky and new things are being discovered all the time, as our technology gets better and better at tracking brain processes.

In general, though, I'm told this is the basic gist of how doctors/researchers are somewhat sure (as sure as anyone can be, which is "kind of" and "maybe on days it's not raining" and "ask again tomorrow" styles of 'sure').

First, let's look at a brain that doesn't have a chemical imbalance.

The term "chemical imbalance" is actually pretty literal, if you think of your brain (and your body overall, for the most part) as containing a whole lot of checks and balances. The little receptor points and controllers and whatever else in the brain, the nerves, the cells, so on and so on, don't work in a straight line. Instead, a lot of them work by affecting something else, and making sure that "something else" is balanced properly.

( Yes, more pictures! With the caveat that I beg forgiveness from any biochemistry majors who get cranky when the proper terminology isn't observed, or anyone who gets discomfited by attempts at a generalized, non-scientific, crude explanations of what's admittedly an incredibly complex process. )

I should've said this before: this is LONG, and when I say something is LONG, you can expect it to be about six times as long as the longest long you've seen. I know I go on, but the length here is in direct proportion to the height of my temper. Just so you're warned.

RE: This Is Your Brain On Drugs . . .

NOTE: consider the above link as having a trigger-warning if you have a disability, know someone who does, or are sensitive to sudden spikes in blood pressure when in the vicinity of someone with a big megaphone busy talking out of her ass.

Ms. Lindholm's blog topic on May 20th of this year puts her in the Tom Cruise Denouncing Postpartum Depression category: someone rattling on quite definitively with little to no comprehension of the facts, in a way that essentially amounts to what you are experiencing is not only all in your head, it's a personal problem and shame on you for thinking you should, or even deserve, to seek a resolution.

First, to make this perfectly clear, the issue at hand is ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and its counterpart, ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). The two are cousin-conditions that we could generally define as "a state of excessive mental activity, sometimes accompanied by excessive physical activity (the hyperactivity element)".

ADD and ADHD are not mental "illnesses". ADD and ADHD are disabilities.

More precisely, they are cognitive disabilities, along with other cognitive disabilities such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and dyspraxia. ADD/ADHD shade into the class of physical -- because 'chemical' in the brain is still, fundamentally, a physical attribute -- disabilities, while the cognitive side is what impairs or affects thought processes like learning new skills, accessing short-term memory or transferring new information into long-term memory, capturing and comprehending incoming information, and so on.

So, to repeat: ADD/ADHD is not an 'illness'[1]. It is not something that you catch; it is not something you can cure. It is, like so many other disabilities (including learning disabilities), something you live with. You find a way to get through, and if you're really lucky, you find things that will help you deal with the disability, and the stress it causes in your life each time you ask someone around you to put up with, help cope with, or even just feel compassion for, the result of having that disability.

( But because this is an alien concept for you, Ms Lindholm, let me make it perfectly clear for you, as well as any readers following along at home. )

[ continued in part 2 ... yeah, had to break it in two. sorry. ]

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To clarify a few things that might've gotten buried:

[1] Many mental illnesses are also disabilities. I'm only focused on ADD/ADHD here, but a lot of what I say here could be extended easily to autism, bipolar, OCD, and others. What I dislike is the hidden connotations in that term: mental = "all in your head" and illness = "something curable". As though it's acceptable to dismiss the illness and/or expect one to get better! The truth is that any long-term condition, even those manageable with various tools/treatments, are (to me) not 'mental illnesses' but '[mental] disabilities'; they infringe on our ability to live as full a life as we'd have without them, and thus on a practical level are all disabilities to some degree.

[2] I am not saying that diabetes/heart-disease/ADD is a simplistic direct correlation, that because diabetes has clear-cut medication requirements, so does ADD/ADHD. Technically, the analogy fails already at 'heart disease', since that disease's medications are a cocktail to be carefully navigated to fit the particular patient, just like any medications for ADD/ADHD. But in terms of those who carry social prejudice against medication for mental/cognitive disabilities, the diabetes/heart-disease analogy does work, or I wouldn't freaking use it. Like all analogies, it breaks down when you go too deep, but for my purposes it holds up: medication is a valid tool.

As someone who, ironically, has responded to very few medications for ADD/ADHD, I will never tell you that my life is intact due to medication. In fact, I'm still here in spite of modern psychiatry, yet I continue to believe medication is a valid and crucial corner of the triangle of treatment. It may not work for every disease and every person, but it should not be discounted as an option, out-of-hand, either. The patient-and-doctor in question, ultimately, should make the decision -- not social prejudices about the mentally ill.

[3] If you are, or know, or think you may know, someone with ADD/ADHD, the best book I've found for concrete behavioral coping mechanisms -- with info for supportive family/friends, too -- is ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life by Judith Kolberg and Kathleen Nadeau. Just FYI, if you wanted more concrete info on how to help yourself, or a friend or family member.

[4] A much-shorter follow-up on what's going on in the brain (roughly, very unscientifically) when it comes to ADD/ADHD medication, cobbled out of the explanations of a whole lotta doctors & neurologists.