Whenever someone starts talking about "crip-drag" - the slang term that basically means "currently non-disabled actor playing a disabled character" - the conversation tends to eventually (usually sooner, rather than later) turns to this:

But but but! We shouldn't accept a less-than-stellar actor just because they're disabled. That's, like, Affirmative Action GONE MAD!!!!!! No, you just have to accept that they always, totally, without fail, and without any influence by ablism or assumptions about what stories they can tell about disabilities, the casting directors chose the best person for the job. And it's just a wild coincidence that the best person for the job is almost always someone who doesn't have a disability.
...
I think this assumption is partly based on how rarely the work of actors, writers, and creators with disabilities are highlighted or even brought to the attention of the "general" population. Inspired in part by an early comment on one of the posts by the Transcontinental Disability Choir, I want to highlight some of the artistic endeavours by people with disabilities that are available 'round the internets.

mariness

I already posted about compulsively rereading Robert B Parker and my reread of Susan Moody's Penny Wanawake series. I also did some light Travis McGee rereads.

There were several latest volumes in series, including the last but one Parker (but that pretty much counts as a reread, hem-hem); Marcia Muller, Burn Out (2008) - she really does manage to not do the running on the spot that happens with too many series protags but have McCone move and change; SJ Rozan, The Shanghai Moon (2009), which I'm not sure I was quite so impressed with as some of the earlier volumes in the series; Margaret Maron, Death's Half Acre (2008), which was perfectly acceptable, and I've pretty much given up hope of her ever returning to Sigrid Haraldsen.

Dick Francis and Felix Francis, Dead Heat (2007): acceptably readable, but was it, just occasionally, a bit info-dumpy in ways that were previously avoided?

Jesse Kellerman, The Brutal Art (2008). Hmm. Readable enough, but I thought the love-interest who was an Assistant District Attorney didn't really come over (unlike his art-world mentor-figure), and I thought the plot did a bait and switch thing of bringing in an entirely new character very late in the day, which I didn't care for when his father did it, either.

Andrew Taylor, Bleeding Heart Square (2008). I just could not get into this at all, and gave up. It just wasn't clicking for me, and while the ambience was vivid, it was also fairly grim and creepy and I needed a bit more of something or other, possibly engagement with any of the characters, to keep me in it.

Barbara Michaels, Shattered Silk (1986). This is the one in which the protag opens a vintage clothing store in Washington, but I've forgotten most of the plot details, though I enjoyed enough at the time.

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http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1266

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Chipping in" - originally published 12/21/2009 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

Was skimming through an essay in the NYRSF which was talking about the attractions of the post-apocalyptic/catastrophe scenario, and I paused and thought, 'This really is one for the boyz, innit?' (Even, or perhaps especially, boyz who are not really cut out for a Hobbesian state of nature, cf someone on my reading list who mentioned volunteers on a meal programme from some local elite boys' school who had no idea how to operate a tin-opener... No good raiding those suddenly empty supermarkets if you can't access the goods, folks!)

I have the feeling that women regard this scenario with a good deal of scepticism and caution, because it tends not to be a happy place for female characters. One of the grimmest apocalyptic novels I've read was Cicely Hamilton's Lest Ye Die (1928). Even some male catastrophe novels acknowledge this (e.g. some of John Christopher's).

Trying to think of post-apocalypses by women, which deal with the grim bit rather than the bit where some kind of civilisation has been re-established following some apocalypse/catastrophe. Not many. (Charnas's 'Holdfast' sequence perhaps counts. Octavia Butler?)

Another trope, which I alluded to in my book post yesterday, the notion of species with sentient males and non-sentient females. wild_irises asked 'are there any SF novels with nonsentient males?' and the only example I could think of was one of the alien races in the Lensman series, and it's so very long since I read those I can't be sure.

Thinking of works by women, the sentient/non-sentient thing seems to play out around the concept of the robot/android. While in Joanna Russ, The Female Man, Jael's house includes as part of the furnishings a robot man rather more sophisticated than that envisaged by Connie Francis, in most instances these narratives are about the achievement of sentience. (There's also a trope about the alien. Woah, metaphor for gender relations or what? Males - either robotic or Other...?)

There are probably a lot of instances I'm forgetting (or have never read) which contradict/support these hypotheses. Suggestions, anyone?

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http://xkcd.com/679/

Not really all that much in this category, though I think there was a certain amount of re-reading.

Phyllis Gotlieb, Birthstones (2007) - finally got round to this which has been sitting in the pile for some time. Good, but with a touch of worthiness. And a strong suspicion, that Gotlieb, like me, had read one too many (actually, one is too many) sf novels with a species with non-sentient females: and decided to work that out realistically.

Kristin Cashore, Graceling (2008) and Fire (2009), since they were being mentioned all over the place. And were pretty good, and do a lot of the right sort of things, but somehow not (or not yet) in the class of 'major new discovery'. However, will do to be going on with and will probably read her next.

Mercedes Lackey. Foundation: Book One of the Collegium Chronicles(A Valdemar Novel) (2008). Ummmm - readable but formulaic?

Sharon Shinn, Fortune and Fate (2008). Very enjoyable. Not exactly pushing the boundaries of generic tropes, but it's just done very well with engaging characters.

Madeline Howard, A Dark Sacrifice: Book Two of The Rune of Unmaking (2008). Again, not exactly pushing the generic boundaries. I thought this was going to be part 2 of a duology, but turned out to end on a cliffhanger and therefore we're in for at least a trilogy. While I was interested enough in Book One to buy this, I'm not sure I'm going to commit to the longer haul. Not particularly engaged by any of the characters.

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( Gwyneth Jones, Imagination/Space: Essays and Talks on Fiction, Feminism, Technology, and Politics )

( Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman )

( Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism )

( Lynn Sacco, Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History )

( Cornelia Otis Skinner, Our Hearts Were Young And Gay: An Unforgettable Comic Chronicle of Innocents Abroad in the 1920s )

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The poor will always be with us. It is a common refrain used to make us feel there is little we can do about the millions of Canadians who cannot afford to keep a roof over their head and food on the table.

But it's not true, says Senator Hugh Segal, who has spent the last two year studying poverty. "You can effectively eradicate poverty," he says. "It just takes solid public policy initiatives."

These are welcome words. Finally, the 3.4 million Canadians living in poverty have an advocate in Ottawa's corridors of power. Last week, a Senate subcommittee - led by Segal, a Conservative, and Art Eggleton, a Liberal - released a comprehensive anti-poverty blueprint.

The report should be required reading for politicians of all political stripes. It calls for sweeping changes to federal programs from employment insurance to child benefits. With 74 recommendations it will face some criticism for lacking focus. More significant than the individual recommendations, however, is the senators' argument that the core goal of our social programs must be the "eradication" of poverty, not simply to make living in poverty "more manageable."

The senators also concluded that, far from lifting people out of poverty, many of our existing programs are so badly designed that they hold people down.

That is why they have called on the government to publish a green paper setting out the costs and benefits of existing programs versus other options, including a guaranteed annual income. That is, a single monthly payment, based on income reported in tax returns, to replace the myriad social benefits currently available.

A basic annual income, which no Canadian adult would be allowed to drop below, was first advanced nearly 40 years ago by legendary Liberal Senator David Croll to combat the "national shame" of poverty.

Since then, our social programs have become ever more bureaucratic. The report, for example, notes that one family is supposed to deal with seven different government agencies each month.

Eliminating these various silos in favour of one-stop shopping has appeal. Critics of a guaranteed annual income argue, however, that it would be too expensive, would amount to paying people not to work, and might overlook the specific needs of the disabled or seniors.

These concerns should not stand in the way of studying the idea, as the senators are suggesting. A government policy paper would not bind anyone, but it would create a platform for informed debate. It is a debate we need to have.

E H Young, The Vicar's Daughter (1928). I am carefully rationing out my E H Youngs, I think I have one more to go, although there are a couple of early ones that are said to be a bit atypical, also hard to get hold of as never Viragoed. This one was up to the usual standard - complex familial interactions, piercing sharp insights, and a twist in the tail of the plot.

Kate O'Brien, The Last of Summer (1943). I'm also currently reading Pray for the Wanderer, written slightly earlier, which has a similar plot involving someone with Irish (specifically, 'Mellick') connections but who has been living in a more cosmopolitan milieu, coming to family whom they have either never met (The Last of Summer), or have long been away from (Pray for the Wanderer). In both cases the setting is contemporary rather than set back into the past (or abroad, as in Mary Lavelle), and, while they're good, and readable, and have many excellences, I wonder if giving a bit of distance in time and space did benefit O'Brien. Of the two, I think The Last of Summer deals with similar issues rather more successfully.

Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1975). Very well-written, rather depressing, but not as depressing as it might have been - the ending came as a surprise. I am encouraged to try more Taylor, having rather bounced off her in earlier readings.

Barbara Hambly, Homeland: A Novel (2009). I'm not sure that the words 'epistolary novel set during the American Civil War' would normally tempt me to a book, but, well, it's Hambly, and I was not disappointed. Letters between two women, one, in the North, whose husband has left to fight for the South, one in the South who had been going to study art in Philadelphia before this became impossible. Gritty, realistic, gets the voices and the hesitations and the elliptical and oblique communications. Wonderful.

Rumer Godden, The Battle of the Villa Fiorita (1963). Picked up in a secondhand bookshop - I'd read it years ago and hated it rather (it's probably right at the bottom of Goddens I'd recommend anyone to read) but thought I might give it another go. I had to give up. Too much character torture.

Josephine Elder, Lady of Letters (1949, recently reissued by Greyladies). This had its moments and its points - I mark it up for having a relationship between two women which, although not without its tensions and difficulties, is not seen as pathological and is presented as mostly nurturing and benign - but I'm not sure I like it as much as The Encircled Heart, to which it is possibly a bit of companion piece. Again, it's intriguing as much as social history - the world of girls' schools and provincial universities - as anything.

Plus a few other things I've previously posted about.

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