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Whipping Star by Frank Herbert
rating: 4 of 5 stars Superbly narrated by Scott Brick.
What I like best about Whipping Star are the conversations between McKie and the Caleban, and I like them for the same reasons that I like reading philosophy - they explore the difficulty of communicating about abstract concepts and the grounds of existence and experience.
These conversations are set in a storyline that bears a certain resemblance to a police procedural. It takes place in a universe where a variety of different "sentients" interact.
Herbert does a good job of creating actually alien aliens and exploring how they interact and manage to work together.
The sexual politics aren't so great. There is a powerful female character in the book, but she is a vain, sadistic villain. The only other character in the book who is identifed as female is the Caleban, but Brick gives her a male voice. Given how the Calebans communicate, this makes a certain amount of sense and it works for me, but it does leave only one female character, at least for the audio version.
View all my (goodreads.com) reviews.
Other stuff I've listened recently:
"Where Angels Fear to Tread," a Hugo-winning time-travel novella by Allen Steele. I enjoyed it. He expanded it into a novel called Chronospace, which I have heard is not very good.
"3:10 to Yuma," a short story by Elmore Leonard. I found it forgettable. I enjoyed the recent movie based on it. The movie expands the story considerably. Tags: booklog, feminism, sff
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(Links are to the Goodreads site.)
 Stay by Nicola Griffith
Third in a series of books featuring Aud Torvingen, who started out seeming like a sort of lesbian James Bond, but is evolving more complexity by this book. This is a well-crafted novel with two intertwined plots -- a "stay up too late to finish it" sort of novel.
 The Shadow of the Wind Bestseller's Choice Audio by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The story was engaging -- several stories within a story, in a sort of historical Gothic romance genre. Several of the male characters are well drawn.
I was disappointed by the treatment of female characters. The women in the novel are, with one partial exception, mythical beings rather than real people, who exist solely to elicit strong emotions in the male characters.
The narrator did a good job, although he fell into certain modern American speech patterns more often than I would have preferred, given that it is a historical novel set in Barcelona.
Piano music appears behind key scenes. The music itself is lovely (and apparently composed by the author). But I find it unpleasant to try to listen to music and words at the same time, so I really didn't like the musical additions and wished they'd been left out of the audiobook. Tags: booklog, feminism, reviews
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NPR, All Things Considered, November 22, 2002: Despite its possibly deadly side effects, the diet aid [Metabolife 356] has racked up $1 billion in sales and remains a popular supplement for those looking for an energy boost or trying to lose weight. November 5, 2007: http://justice.gov/usao/cas/press/cas71105-Metabolife.pdf:
In connection with the guilty plea, Ellis’ attorney told the Court that in February 1999, Ellis and his
corporation – through a retained law firm – sent a letter to the FDA stating that Metabolife had a “claims free
history.” Ellis was aware at the time, however, that this statement was false. He also knew that the FDA
would likely rely on Metabolife’s statements regarding its consumer complaint history in the FDA’s
proceedings concerning regulation of ephedra-based supplements.
In 2002, Metabolife turned over to the FDA and then to the Department of Justice reports of more
than 10,000 ephedra-related adverse events that the company had previously withheld. From Wikipedia's page on ephedra, based on Los Angeles Times article, 2003: Senators Orrin Hatch and Tom Harkin, authors of the Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act, questioned the scientific basis for the FDA's proposed labeling changes and suggested that the number of problems reported were insufficient to warrant regulatory action. At the time, Hatch's son was working for a firm hired to lobby Congress and the FDA on behalf of ephedra manufacturers. Today, the Metabolife home page has the following slogan on it: "Staying between you and your fat pants." If I were dictator I know what punishment I would give this guy. Tags: ethics, fat, feminism, politics, schadenfreude, things that piss me off
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via http://harrietbrown.blogspot.com/2007/07/take-love-your-body-pledge.htmlvia ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) serenejournal and sistercoyoteI, your name here, pledge to speak kindly about my body.
I promise not to talk about how fat my thighs or stomach or butt are, or about how I really have to lose 5 or 15 or 50 pounds. I promise not to call myself a fat pig, gross, or any other self-loathing, trash-talking phrase.
I vow to be kind to myself and my body. I will learn to be grateful for its strength and attractiveness, and be compassionate toward its failings.
I will remind myself that bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and that no matter what shape and size my body is, it’s worthy of kindness, compassion, and love. The point of this pledge is to "change the way girls and women talk to themselves and others about their bodies." I like that. I'm all for changing how body-hatred talk becomes an automatic bonding ritual among women that IMO ends up damaging our self-esteem and reinforcing a negative tendency to view our bodies as tools and vehicles to be manipulated instead of, well, us. I certain am happy to pledge that I won't "call myself a fat pig, gross, or any other self-loathing, trash-talking phrase," except in mockery of such phrases or as a way of describing an inner landscape I don't agree with and want to change. The part I won't promise is not to talk about how fat my thighs or stomach or butt are. Because promising that in the context of a promise not to talk trash about my body implies that I'm broken if I have fat thighs or stomach or butt. And I don't agree with that. My thighs and stomach and butt are fat, and there's nothing broken about any of them. Tags: feminism, pass it on
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If you're maybe noticing that you're older than you used to be, and are feeling sad/angry/confused/worried/frustrated that you haven't accomplished as much as you/other people in your present or past/annoyingly critical voices inside your head think you should have, and if you're maybe feeling something like "I'm not a real grownup like everyone else," and if you're maybe also feeling sad/angry/confused/worried/frustrated that your body isn't working the way it used to, and you're maybe thinking, "if that's true then how am I going to DO all those accomplishments that I/other people/voices in my head think I ought or want to do?", and maybe you're also wondering how are you going to dig out from under the accumulation of habit and procrastination and self-doubt to some sense of satisfaction in your life again, then post this same sentence in your journal. Friends keep saying stuff like that where I can see it, and I've been feeling it for a while now too. One said it really well in a friends-locked post: It's been hard for the last some-odd months, with my age catching up to me, not to feel that I've been a continual failure in school, work, and my personal life. ...
I've been trying so hard to hide from my friends -- most of them not very close, even if they were before -- the fact that I'm not in their league in any sense of the word. ...
Come to think of it, I don't do yard work because I'm afraid of being looked at/judged by passersby. I don't do artwork because I'm afraid of ill-judgment and meaningless or worthless praise. This has gotten as bad as it ever was in the worst years of my adolescence. Worse, because I don't have the energy or the twenty years ahead of me to think I have plenty of time yet to pull myself out of it. It was a revelation to read this, especially the part about "as bad as it ever was in the worst years of my adolescence," because that's exactly what bugs me about the similar feelings I have—"WTF? I thought I was DONE with these feelings of self-consciousness. No one told me they would come back, dammit! I thought 'mid-life crisis' just meant you went out and got your virtual red sports car and had done with it." When a whole bunch of my friends and acquaintances are having similar uncomfortable feelings, and especially when each one is having these feelings privately and feeling shame about it because it seems like no one else has them, I ask myself whether there's some kind of cultural pressure going on, and I ask myself whether maybe we would do better examining these tendencies and pressures together, so we can figure out where we stand, and which of the beliefs and tendencies to embrace, and which to say pbtpbtpbtpbt!!!! to. I wonder how that could be accomplished. Do you have those feelings? Could you use a way to talk about those feelings with other folks who struggle with them? Tags: aging, day to day, feelings, feminism, happiness, health, pass it on, queries, things that piss me off, whinge
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Big Fat Carnival #3 is up here: http://vegankid.solidaritydesign.net/2006/06/07/big-fat-carnival-3/There were some good posts (especially from body impolitic). I'm glad that there IS such a thing as a Big Fat Carnival, never mind a 3d one (and the 4th is already scheduled). I sure as hell wish I'd had access to ANY critical thought about fat and body size when I was younger. And overall there was a lot of good thought and a lot of good sharing of personal experience. However, I should not have gone in to read the posts in an emotionally vulnerable mood. I kept getting upset at subtle hatred discomfort/ambivalence about (some kinds of) fat in the posts and less subtle healthism and fat hatred/discomfort/ambivalence in some of the comments. Things I need to remember before the next time I read a roundup of such posts: - The concept of "fat acceptance" covers a lot of ground, some of which I find, well, not accepting enough. But everyone has to start somewhere.
- Discussions of fat, body size, body image, eating, and so forth, even when they are presented in a context of acceptance, are not always comfortable for me and don't always conform to my fairly extreme politics on the subject.
- Not all bloggers moderate the contents of their posts and fat acceptance posts sometimes attract fat-hating and healthist comments.
Last night, I started a post discussing the specific parts I found uncomfortable, but I deleted it because I thought it was unfair of me to focus on the negative. I'm still mulling over whether I should make a post along those lines. Tags: check it out, feminism, opinionated rants, whinge
feeling: mad that I let them get to me
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This link was originally posted by plasticsturgeon in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) fatshionista: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/Maps/poets/g_l/amylowell/bradshaw.htm"Readying Amy Lowell's Body(s)" -- An Essay by Melissa Bradshaw A quote: After a disastrous reducing experience in her early twenties, which involved sailing down the Nile subsisting on a diet of asparagus and tomatoes, Lowell resolutely avoided losing weight ever again, refusing to modify her eating habits, take diet pills (which commonly contained strychnine and arsenic), or undergo any experimental cures. When one doctor suggested operating on her thyroid to cure her "imbalance" Lowell refused because she feared it would interfere with her thinking process (Gregory 39). Such resistance to changing her body is anomalous in turn-of-the-century American culture, which Hillel Schwartz describes as saturated with marketing campaigns for slimming programs and miracle cures. Gee, it's hard to tell which century-turning he's talking about, isn't it? Bradshaw goes on to discuss how Lowell dressed during the daytime (in severe suits) and for evening events (very flamboyantly) and to claim a camp reading of Lowell’s evening-wear transforms what many have described as a "failure" into a triumph. What might appear as a reinforcement of the dominant order becomes instead a daring transgression. Here is a counternarrative to those which describe Lowell’s evening wear as misguided and unfortunate, one which grants Lowell agency and purpose in her clothing choices. This is Amy Lowell coming out as a fat woman. This is Amy Lowell acknowledging a value system that ridicules and excludes her because she is fat, and inserting herself into it loudly and dramatically. I'm kind of embarrassed that I don't know much about her and I choose to learn more because of reading something about her body and style of dress rather than via reading her poetry. Isn't that just typical? But I'm glad I've discovered her now. Here's one of her more well known poems: ( Read more... )Tags: check it out, feminism, poetry
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) alas_a_blog has posted The Big Fat Carnival First Edition, which is - well, I'll quote from the introduction: The Big Fat Carnival is a blog carnival for collecting some of the best blog posts regarding fat pride; fat acceptance; critiques of anti-fat bigotry, attitudes and research; celebration of images of fat people; practical difficulties of being fat; fat love (queer and otherwise); feminist views of fat and fat acceptance; the health at every size movement (HAES); and whatever else each edition's editor feels fits into the theme. There's so much linked there that it's overwhelming, and it's also all very good. Here's one of the ones I found especially interesting. It's from Bitch|Lab and it's entitled Oppression: It’s a process, not a product. Warning: The image at the top of the page is NWS. I feel inarticulate but I'll try to explain why I found it interesting. I've been noticing a kind of social analysis lately that I like. I don't know whether it has an official name, but I think of it as "questioning whether [some concept that has a word associated with it] should be considered a noun or a verb." I've encountered it frequently in Marilynn Wann's writings (Warning, NWS images on web page). She responds to much of the criticism leveled at fat people and much of the "obesity epidemic" hysteria/moral panic by saying "Fatness is not a behavior." The above article about oppression performs a similar analysis by arguing that we need to look at oppression as ongoing action shaped by a variety of forces. A quote: We need to ask questions such as “Why and how does it come to be that race, sex, gender, disability, fatness, ethnicity, etc. become things in our mind?” and “Why and how is raced raced? Fatness fatnessed? Gender gendered? Sex sexed? Disability disablitied?”
And by that I don’t just mean, “how are we socialized to think these things?” Rather, through what historical processes, what struggles, what political forces were things like race raced, sex sexed, gender gendered, disability disabilitied, and fatness fatnessed? Tags: feminism
feeling: procrastinatory
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