Patterns

We need them, whether you call them habits or daily routines or whatever. I need them. Spending as much time as I do with my head firmly in the clouds, if my schedule is disrupted I get terribly confused, even anxious. I'm like a cat -- don't disrupt things, or I'll freak.

I just don't want to spend time thinking about things like that. Having to think about them. I have other thoughts I want to be thinking that are much more important, as far as I'm concerned.

I know, I should exert a little discipline and create my own schedule and set of routines -- it shouldn't be that hard.

Well, it is.

Quagmire

That's my life right now, which is why I haven't been here much this week. New schedule, pesky practical details (for which I have no patience right now, and consequently, no motivation to deal with them), major distractions -- and the news is not something I can really get my teeth into: Obama's making some of the right moves, there are hordes of commentators out there watching every one of them through a microscope, and I have nothing to add to those discussions.

And my head is off in a different place right now. This has been coming for a while -- I think my outrage fund is pretty much tanked, at least for the time being. I'll probably be shifting the focus of this blog, as I've mentioned before. It may move more toward gay issues, maybe more toward art and culture commentary. I doubt that I will leave political commentary completely -- there's always a public idiot to skewer -- and gods know the culture warriors are still making a lot of noise (but I get tired of refuting the same "arguments" again and again), so I'm sure I'll be weighing in on some of those things.

This week the problem is time -- how much and when. Bear with me. I'm not leaving.

(I do intend to come back to the "relationships between men" commentary that I started last weekend. Let me know what you think.)

Marriage Note

Andrew Sullivan has a very good comment on how including gay couples will affect civil marriage -- it won't:

Think of the diversity of lived experience that now exists within this civil institution in America. . . . Are people really saying that a lesbian couple of several decades or a newly married couple like me and Aaron fall outside the cultural range of these experiences? Civil marriage is already so broad in its inclusion of social types and practices that including gay couples will make virtually no difference at all. And this is the genius of civil marriage: it's a unifying, not balkanizing, civic institution. To argue that including gay couples destroys the institution is absurd.

He's absolutely right, of course, and it's a stance that I've taken all along: including same-sex couples in marriage isn't going to change anything -- except a 5,000-year-old "definition" that Pat Robertson made up twenty years ago.

Sullivan links to this post by scott H. Payne that I think gets to the core of the issue (finally! I'm happy to see someone recognizing the dualistic nature of this struggle):

Of course, the struggle for marriage equality isn’t an either or affair: it is a struggle for both legal and social equality in the respect afforded same-sex couples. By my lights, Freddie gives the cultural challenges short shrift by focusing exclusively on the legal battles. Certainly I would argue that the first step in achieving some kind of all-around equality lies in securing legal equality of same-sex marriages, but I can’t imagine that anyone who has experienced discrimination based on their sexual orientation would suggest that being recognized in law will eradicate the day-to-day symptoms of inequality they encounter.

Payne's post is part of a series at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen that looks interesting. There's a couple of navigation links at the end of the post, starting with Freddie DeBoer's "Same-Sex Marriage and Nomenclature" and going on to E. D. Kain's "Western Civilization and Same-Sex Marriage". I'll try to follow up on these later.

Reviews in Brief: Welcome to the Jungle by Jim Butcher and Ardian Syaf

A little bit of something sort of new: moving from manga to graphic novels again here, with a new work by Jim Butcher that marks his entry into comics. Welcome to the Jungle is a prequel of sorts to The Dresden Files, his series on the adventures of Harry Dresden, Chicago's only wizard for hire.

It looks open and shut: a murder outside the ape house at Lincoln Park Zoo, a blood trail leading back to the gorilla's enclosure, the victim the son-in-law of an alderman: the gorilla did it. Karrin Murphy, head of CPD's Special Investigations Unit -- the "spook squad" -- wonders why the gorilla only cleaned up part of the evidence and locked itself back in its cage. Needless to say, the gorilla didn't do it -- it's much worse than that.

Ardian Syaf's graphics are pretty damned good -- I like them, which is not the usual case for me with Western comics: the frames are lean enough, and he takes enough liberties with frame-follows-frame page layouts that I never lost interest, and he manages a clear narrative flow throughout. The colors, by Digikore Studios, are clear and rich, and just as sophisticated as the drawings. Character designs are good, although everyone seems to spend a lot of time frowning.

The story seemed a bit thin, but I'm used to the novels in the series; come to think of it, there's a fair amount of description in the stories, and after all, a picture is worth. . . . So, maybe I'll just not worry about that too much.

One plus: the cover gallery at the end, with alternate covers by Chris McGrath -- I'd love to see McGrath do a series. (The cover illustrated is by McGrath, as it happens. I'll see if I can dig up a sample of Syaf's art on this one.) In fact, I'm going to be on the lookout for examples of his work: his covers are very realistic but also kind of dream-scapes. Very nice.

Del Rey did this one.

Here's Syaf's cover for the first of the series.

Friday Gay Blogging: Men With Men

This really is Friday's column -- yesterday was a bad day for writing. (Actually, it was a pretty good day for writing, just a bad day for focus.)

I'm fed up with commenting on the news, frankly, and I've found something more interesting to comment on under the heading of "gay issues." I'm feeling my way through this one, so comments and observations are very welcome. It may very well run into several installments, because it strikes me that it's a huge topic. This facet is specifically about relationships between men, and it comes from a couple of yaoi manga that I've read recently. The first is Satoru Ishihara's Kimi Shiruya -- Dost Thou Know?, which I reviewed here a couple of weeks ago, and which has a more substantial review coming up at Green Man Review on February 8. The core issue from that for this column is something I investigated a bit in an essay I wrote on the book (which may itself get published here, one day), in which I said:

This book is built on metaphors, both the central image of kendo, and others that essentially structure the various chapters. The courtship here is cast as a duel: both Katsuomi and Tsurugi are fiercely competitive young men, heavily invested in the sport, and each sees the other as his chief rival, in spite of their immediate attraction to each other.

This in itself has more than one layer. On the one hand, Ishihara has based the central metaphor, kendo, on one of the most important characteristics of relationships between men: whether you ascribe it to nature or nurture or some combination of the two, men are competitors -- for many men, perhaps most, that's a central part of their identities as men, whether we agree with it or not -- which makes a romantic involvement edgy, at best. It's that phenomenon, more than anything else, that explains Tsurugi's motivations, his resistance to "surrender," not surrender to Katsuomi, particularly -- his attraction to Katsuomi is as strong as Katsuomi's to him, that much is obvious early on -- but surrender to the idea that there must be a loser here: he, like Katsuomi, is trying to take control of the situation, not to change the outcome as such -- he doesn't want that at all -- but to hold onto his dignity. (Ishihara has stepped right out of the standard seme/uke pairing here; while that stereotypical role-playing may have some basis in Japanese gay culture -- and I don't profess to know -- the relationship developing between Katsuomi and Tsurugi is, I think, more immediately comprehensible to Westerners.)

Some observations: I tend to think that there is a strong biological component to men's aggressiveness: testosterone keeps you on the edge. Anyone who's ever had any sort of therapy involving either periodic shots of testosterone or drugs to mediate the action of testosterone knows this very well. That much, at least, is iinnate, and to a large extent it's historically been reinforced by the demands of "masculinity." I think, as gay men have become more visible in society and there are now male role models for younger gays, the old idea of "masculine" and "feminine" partners -- exemplified by the seme/uke pairings so common in yaoi -- are going by the wayside: as we learn to function in relationships in which both partners are facing the same emotional strictures and the same expectations, we learning new meanings to use to support those relationships. (I should also point out here that Kimi Shiruya is one of the very few yaoi that I can think of at this point that actually shows a relationship between men and not a heterosexual relationship transposed to two male partners -- the basis of the seme/uke pairing, and a cliche at this point in the real world. (I hope.) That's an important disctinction to keep in mind. Others that come to mind, for those interested, are Ellie Mamahara's Alley of First Love, Momoko Tenzen's Paradise on the Hill, and Isaku Natsume's Dash!, all of which are comedies, although in none of these are the participants seemingly as conscious of what they are doing as in Kimi Shiruya. They all also transpose the competition into a form of egalitarianism, at least in the emotional context -- and that, after all, is what's underneath this point of view.)

It's also instructive that the central conflict between the two characters is cast in terms of "surrender" -- something that is absolutely not allowed for men.

That works naturally into the idealism of the sport -- and I mean that in its most literal sense. The ideals of sport in general are, aside from the benefits to health of physical activity, the main reason given for teaching competitive sports in schools: teamwork, sportsmanship, dignity in defeat and magnanimity in victory. Add in the warrior's code, with its emphasis on ideals we no longer encounter on a daily basis -- honor, integrity, mercy, purity of purpose, the kind of self-respect that must be earned -- and you begin to get a very good idea of where both Katsuomi and Tsurugi are coming from. It's this idealism that sparks the relationship between Masaomi and Saya, as well: after being shamed by his older brother for leaving Saya to the mercy of the bullies among the older students, Masaomi realizes that Saya understands the honor of the swordsman -- there are things he won't do, even to defend himself -- and out of respect for that and for his own honor, he must step in.

That's one possibility for us: I think we can respect each other as men based on an ideal of masculinity that has as its basis those positive aspects of competition. And, at this stage of the game, if you don't respect each other, you don't have much of a relationship -- and there's another statement of an egalitarian basis for male/male relationships.

I can't stress enough the role that I see the Ideal playing in this work. It is, indeed, almost platonic. (And keep in mind, these are young men, and the young are still idealistic.) Underlying the surface action is a pure form of the story: on the one hand, there is no compromise on either side, the situation is yes/no, surrender/conquest. That is what Katsuomi is consciously reaching for. On the other hand, as it develops it transmutes itself: after all, no one in his right mind wants that kind of relationship with another human being if you're going to call it "love." As Masaomi observes, they're reaching for something new, something, as it turns out, "beyond gender, beyond viewpoints," beyond that win-or-lose dichotomy: as it grows, they grow into it.

I think we've made a lot of progress in this regard, but, like Tsurugi and Katsuomi, we're feeling our way forward.

In that intersection of the ideal and what stands beyond it -- the competitiveness and the ideals of the warrior and the reality of learning to love -- lies the tension that supports the story and that provides the foundation for the relationship and the characters of the two men. Katsuomi is a "stampeding boar warrior," all power and speed, direct and unstoppable. He has the courage to lay all his cards on the table (as he does in one scene, when he tells Tsurugi "I've shown you everything I've got.") and the patience to wait for as long as it takes. Tsurugi is the wind, all grace and finesse, elusive but more than able to come back with a telling strike. And he has the will to play this game his way. Katsuomi may be the irresistible force, but Tsurugi is not an immovable object: in their final, climactic battle, Katsuomi screams at him to "stop dancing around -- stand and hold your ground." It doesn't only apply to the physical contest. (Tsurugi calls him a "log-splitter" and goes for the opening Katsuomi has left.)

Looking at this passage again, and thinking about the characterizations in the book, it's apparent that Tsurugi is cast in a traditionally "feminine" role here -- at least, on the surface. The key phrase, I think, is "the will to play the game his way." That's something that I can't see as reflective of a particular gender role -- there are as many strong-willed women in the world as there are strong-willed men (hell, I was raised by one). There is also the fact, which I think I mention in the GMR review, but not specifically here, that these characteristics as stated are incomplete: Katsuomi does reveal a deep patience, while equally, Tsurugi shows a degree of stubbornness that's really almost admirable.

One thing that struck me about the portrayals in Kimi Shiruya: as the relationship develops and the boys become more comfortable with each other, they become playful. Maybe that's another aspect of that competitiveness that forms the core of the story: the last two chapters (which give their collective title to the book) are filled with scenes that demonstrate the degree to which Tsurugi and Katsuomi have become a couple in everything but the surface manifestation, and they play together, whether it's something as understated as sitting on the deck quoting children's books at each other, Katsuomi joking about how being assigned to share a room with Tsurugi is asking too much (he won't be able to restrain himself is the subtext), or Tsurugi setting up those room assignments to begin with.

Of course, there have always been male couples that fit into this framework. I think the importance of this is that we're now at a point where it is a norm, although that certainly wasn't the case. I think the real importance is, as I noted above, that here is a model not tied to heterosexual expectations.

I may come back to this -- it's gotten too big for my brain to encompass this morning -- both to comment further on the competitive aspect of male relationships and to examine some other types.

Landing on Your Feet

FGB may happen today, it may not happen until tomorrow. The gay news is pretty much wait and see right now -- as is everything else, although there are comforting signs.

And there's also the fact that my life is subject to unforeseen shifts in emphasis. Meh.

So, later. I just don't want to worry about it right this minute.

Secretary Clinton

For some reason, this got to me:



The huge sigh of relief in this country is not only outside the Beltway, obviously.

Marriage Note: Maine

Some thoughts on this article:

Opponent Bob Emrich, head of the Maine Marriage Alliance, said he wants to keep the focus on marriage. The alliance would like the Legislature to pass a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage altogether, though Emrich said Monday the group did not find a legislative sponsor by Friday's deadline. (Emphasis added)

In other words, word is getting around that supporting equality wins elections -- not even the Republicans want to touch a constitutional amendment limiting a fundamental right.

And this:

Fossel said he doesn't support changing the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples, nor would he support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

But he does think couples, whether married or not, deserve equal treatment.

"Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good," he said. "I want to see some progress here."

Fossel is set to introduce civil unions legislation. OK -- we know that civil unions are not the answer -- take a look at New Jersey.

And let's rethink that final comment: let's try "Sometimes the good is the enemy of the perfect." "Perfect" may not be attainable in all things, but does that mean we should stop trying?

This Sort of Says It All

The President's family:

Doug Mills/The New York Times
Three generations of Barack Obama’s family celebrate.

And this says more:



“Our family is new in terms of the White House, but I don’t think it’s new in terms of the country,” Maya Soetoro-Ng, the president’s younger half-sister, said last week. “I don’t think the White House has always reflected the textures and flavors of this country.”

Curiosity

He said it. He actually said it. From Hannah Rosin at Slate:

This is the word that stood out for me in Obama's list of values yesterday: "hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism." The rest have echoes in traditional and more safe political dialogue. But curiosity has a different sort of resonance. Curiosity is what led his mother on the many of what must have seemed like reckless adventures, that eventually created the motley family he has today. For a post-PC age, curiosity is a much better word than tolerance with its implications of holding your nose. Curiosity always has two shades of meaning—great interest or careful attention to detail on one side and danger on the other. From the red flag of Eve to Curious George, Western culture has often stressed the latter definition. Now Obama reclaims it as a noble character trait, which is how I've always taught it to my kids.

For me, it's the sine qua non of humanity: most of our traditional "differences" from the apes and other "lower" animals have been shown to be differences of degree, not kind -- langauge, tool-using, the like. And I guess curiosity is the same, but we have much greater potential for exploiting it.

And lack of curiosity is, most like, the one quality above all others that I have no patience with. It's the seed of willful ignorance, which I detest -- how on earth can you not want to know things?

I simply don't want to deal with people like that, because we have nothing in common.

And coming off a world-view in which curiosity is not even on the radar -- OK, I feel better.

More Good News

Hilzoy has a post with a couple of really nice items. First, from WaPo:

"In one of its first actions, the Obama administration instructed military prosecutors late Tuesday to seek a 120-day suspension of legal proceedings involving detainees at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- a clear break with the approach of the outgoing Bush administration.

And this may be even better -- from Jack Balkin:

Some of you may have noticed that Marty Lederman has not been blogging recently at Balkinization. The reason is that he has been working on the Department of Justice Transition team. As of today, the commencement of the Obama Administration, he begins work as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. (...)

The reason I say that the news about Lederman may be even better -- well, hilzoy sums it up nicely:

One other point about this appointment: at various points during the Presidential campaigns, I recall people arguing that whatever Obama might say about Bush's expansions of executive power, if he became President he would probably find those powers pretty convenient, and would want to hold onto them. In that light, it's worth noting that Marty Lederman is the co-author of a set of two articles (1, 2) that considers, in exhaustive (!) detail, the main conceptual foundation of the argument that the President has the right to set aside laws passed by Congress when conducting a war, and (basically) finds it to be baseless. The other co-author, David Barron, has also been appointed to a position in the Obama administration's Office of Legal Counsel.

In other words: the people who have been appointed to two of the most senior positions in the OLC, which (basically) tells the Executive branch what is legal and what is not, have explicitly and publicly rejected some of the Bush administration's central arguments in support of its expansive view of executive power. It's hard for me to see how they could reverse themselves on that score with a straight face, or why Obama would have appointed them if he had the slightest intention of adopting the Bush administration's views on this topic.

I'm feeling much better, thank you.

I Like This

John Quincy Adams, according to his own letters, placed his hand on a constitutional law volume rather than a Bible to indicate where his fealty lay.

I think every president should do that.

Via Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns & Money.

A Good Sign

I'm starting to feel encouraged. This bit of news was nice to wake up to:

President Obama has wasted no time handling the Bush administration's unfinished business.

White House officials tell CNN Obama Chief Staff of Staff Rahm Emanuel sent a memo Tuesday to all agencies and departments of the federal government. The memo halts further consideration of pending regulations throughout the government until a legal and policy review can be conducted by the Obama administration.

Good.

It's Not Even Blogger's Fault

Due to the confluence of burn-out, same-old-same-old, and an Internet connection gone wonky, blogging will be spotty until I get something fixed. First I have to figure out what needs to be fixed, though.

Later.

Reviews in Brief: Ayano Yamane's Ikoku Irokoi Romantan (Anime)

Ikoku Irokoi Romantan is the anime adapted from Ayano Yamane's A Foreign Love Affair. It's a two-part series and differs from the manga in a couple of respects.

The story in the anime is somewhat compressed, concerning itself solely with the first meeting of Ranmaru and Al aboard the Costa Altista on Ranmaru's wedding day, and going on to Al's rescue of Ranmaru on the road to Rome, and the rescue aboard the cruise ship when Ranmaru is abducted. Some -- perhaps most -- of the transitional scenes and background have been cut, such as Ranmaru's meeting with his eventual kidnappers on the road to Rome, and there are additional scenes at the beginning of Kaoru and Ranmaru on shipboard, including a nice scene of Al's first sight of Ranmaru which helps set up the romance.

If you're familiar with the manga and love Yamane's drawing, you're going to be a bit disappointed in the graphics on this one. It's just not as appealing as Yamane's original, especially the character renderings, which fall back into a "standard" manga portraiture. Nor are they as sensuous as the original drawings: faces, in particular, seem heavy-featured and not as expressive.

On the upside, the story's much clearer, and the ending is much neater. Ranmaru's motivations, in particular, benefit greatly by a few periods of introspection and the further development that's provided in the anime: I was never quite convinced that he was a willing participant in the manga version, especially since Al is such a masterful seme, but here it seems a lot more plausible. Characterizations of the major characters are more fully developed -- we get a lot more basis for Al's attraction to Ranmaru, Kaoru is also allowed to become a more human character -- she's not just a self-absorbed shrew -- and Ranmaru seems the be a little more on the ball, but only a little: Yamane's ukes tend to be a bit slow on the uptake. The casting is creditable, but not particularly remarkable, although Kentarou Itou as Ranmaru is quite apt.

It's a nice hour or so spent viewing. The first half is pure romantic comedy in the vein of a 1950's Doris Day/Rock Hudson romance -- even the soundtrack fits right in to that mold. The adventure in the second episode -- the kidnapping and rescue -- are for some reason not quite so gripping -- it's just a little too relaxed. The sex scenes are fairly graphic, but nowhere near as explicit as the manga.

It's a 2007 release from Prime Time.

Director: Hajime Ohtani
Storyboard: Hajime Ohtani
Original creator: Ayano Yamane
Character Design: Shuhei Tamura
Background Art: Nobuyuki Shiogama
Color design: Chiharu Tanaka

Cast:

Junichi Suwabe as Alberto Valentiano
Kentarou Itou as Ranmaru Ōmi
Ryotaro Okiayu as Ryūji Gondō
Tomoko Kawakami as Kaoru Ōmi (OVA 1)
Yuki Kaida as Kaoru Ōmi (OVA 2)
Hiromi Sugino as Ōmi's Father
Kazuyoshi Hayashi as Ōmi Member 2
Ken Narita as Al's Colleague
Naoki Kinoshita as Ōmi Member 1
Shounosuke Horikoshi as Foreigner 1
Yasuhiro as Foreigner 2

Subsidized Rape and Pillage

I don't often comment on stories like this -- under this administration, this sort of thing is just business as usual -- and they shouldn't need comment. This is just confirmation of what we knew:

Most of America's largest publicly traded corporations -- including several that are receiving billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers to finance their recovery -- have set up offshore operations that could help them avoid paying U.S. taxes on their profits, a government study released yesterday found.

American International Group, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley are among the companies that are getting bailed out by U.S. taxpayers while having subsidiaries in locations where they can avoid paying U.S. taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Of the 100 largest public companies, 83 do business in tax-haven hotspots like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands, where they can move their income into tax-free accounts.

Of course it makes good business sense -- remember, the only god is the bottom line -- but it also points up one of the major reasons I think that business is basically amoral and needs to be watched closely: this is the sort of thing that Grover Norquist and the Club for Growth favor. And if there was ever a walking talking example of the moral poverty of libertarianism, it's Grover Norquist.

Of course, there's also the fact that if you or I did this, we'd wind up in jail.

"Looking Forward"

Speaking of jail, check out this column by Paul Krugman:

Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.

There's looking forward, and there's making sure it doesn't happen again. You can't do that unless you hold accountable those who did it.

What is so hard to understand about that?

(Oh, wait -- if we try to hold the Bushies accountable, Ann Coulter might say mean things. This is different exactly how?)

Anime

I've discovered anime online. Hog heaven.

You'll be getting some Reviews in Brief -- look for them.

Friday Gay Blogging

On a Friday, no less!

Andrew Sullivan takes this as evidence that we're living in a post-gay world:



Queerty just thinks they're funny:



These are hysterical. And Sullivan is absolutely right.

Marriage note:

Well -- they're doing something right, at least. Via Pam's House Blend:

The California-based Yes! On Equality campaign launched a 2010 ballot initiative today (the "California Marriage Equality Act") with the aim of ensuring equal access to marriage for all Californians in accordance with the California State Constitution.

Despite the passage of Proposition 8 in November, 2008 – which effectively banned gay marriage in California and outlawed an estmated 18,000 same-sex marriages – a diverse and growing number of Californians have confidence and hope that marriage equality can and should be recognized.

The proposed law reads as follows: “Section 7.5 of Article I of the California Constitution shall be repealed, stricken, and removed as such: Sec. 7.5 Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California”.

This should have been done already, but it's symptomatic that they didn't think they could lose.

And it looks this time as though there's some good support work in place. Marriage Equality USA has come out with a report (via Queerty) that highlights some of the real effects of Prop 8:

"LGBTI people experience increased verbal abuse, homophobia, physical harm and other discrimination associated with or resulting from the Prop 8 campaign;

Children of same-sex couples express fear due to direct exposure to homophobia and hate and concerns that the passage of Prop 8 means they could be taken from their families and targeted for further violence;

LGBTI youth and their supporters experience increased bullying at schools as Prop 8’s passage fosters a supportive environment for homophobic acts of physical and emotional violence;

Straight allies experience the impact of homophobia firsthand and express shock and fear for their LGBTI family members and friends and the danger they may experience if they were perceived as gay or an ally;

Families are torn apart as relatives divide on Prop 8; and

Communities are destroyed from the aftermath of abusive behavior towards them during local street demonstrations, neighborhood divisions, and the impact of “knowing your neighbor” voted against your family."

The point is, don't stop -- keep shoving it right in their faces and make them deal with what they've done, because it was what they decided to do.

I know, I'm not being very conciliatory about this, but frankly, after the kind of campaigns that have been waged against us, and that continue, with all the lies, distortions, fear-mongering and other hate techniques, I'm not inclined to be nice about it (not that I ever was, particularly, but I'm a plain-spoken sort of person).

But at least I give you dessert -- this morning, from Queerty:

Words of Encouragement

Thanks to reader PietB:

Oh, I'm not going to disappear. I'm just a little tired, and my life is starting to move in other directions -- or back to some old directions.

I explained to my editor at GMR recently that my brain is doing much better at reading images right now than at reading words, which happens with me from time to time: those seem to be, with some sort of kinesthetic release added in (dance, or, believe it or not, ceramics), my default positions. They take turns taking precedence.

And I'd rather make art, when it comes right down to it.

Or at least write about it.

(Speaking of which, you might want to keep up with Booklag, where I do most of my writing about writing -- and making. And do keep an eye on Green Man Review -- I generally have something there that interested me enough to write about it.)