Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at March 30th, 2006

There are probably few things more useless than a blog post about how little you’ve been posting lately. One of them is probably an apology going into detail as to why you haven’t been posting.

I’m not completely sure why I haven’t been writing much in the last week or two, but I’m guessing that with the huge pressure building up to Summit on Racism last week, I just haven’t been motivated to do much that requires thought.

For example, my wife wasn’t home tonight. She had choir practise. I had several hours to myself. I could have worked on my novel, master’s project, business website, washed dishes, or attempted to clear our floors of our children’s toys.

Instead, I read Inside Gilligan’s Island, Sherwood Schwartz’ book about the process of bringing the show to the air and keeping it on the air.

Time well spent.

I think.

Well anyway, I now know a lot more about 1960’s television executive politics than I did yesterday. That might help me if I ever go back in time and need to start a tv series.

Posted by Jim at March 23rd, 2006

One of the places I work is GRACE, a small non-profit. Bringing churches and the community into the fight against racism is one of GRACE’s missions. GRACE does this in part through a conference called “Summit on Racism.” Every year, GRACE brings the community together to begin work on racism for another year.

Part of attracting the community’s interest means getting a speaker, someone that people will come in to hear. This year they managed to get one of the producers of Crash, a movie that just happened to win a couple Academy Awards just before Summit.

Last year the conference had about 400 people attending. This year its slightly over 600. Previous to the movie winning we’d been expecting attendence to be like last year, something that’s prompted more than one of us to say, “Looks like I have to buy more (insert just about anything here).” For example, I might insert the word “nametags.”

My role in Summit is to photograph things on the day, but (more importantly) to handle the registration process. Not too long ago “handling registration” actually meant doing data entry of all the registrations that people mailed into us. After I got more comfortable with programming and our web host provider allowed us to use php, things became a lot easier for me.

In the sense that I don’t have to do data entry, it’s easier by far. In the sense that I now field calls about problems with Paypal, it’s not exactly a cakewalk. One of the amusing things about Summit is that a lot of organizations send people to the conference. Unfortunately for us, Paypal has problems with organizational credit cards unless the organization specifically registers the card with Paypal. In short, Paypal is a pain for exactly the sort of group that we need it to be easy for. We’ve got a backup “pay by check” option for people when Paypal doesn’t work, but trying to pay twice annoys people.

Would I rather have people calling me to complain about Paypal than having to personally enter 800 names (as I did in 2001)? Yes. By far.

One thing that hasn’t changed is that the final days before Summit are filled with stress. I work at home and thus my work phone rings at my house. If, as happened this week, my wife is sick during the last couple days before Summit and attempts to rest, she will have a hard time sleeping due to the incessant ringing of phones. On Tuesday in particular, I sometimes found my cell phone and work phone ringing simultaneously with Summit related calls.

Beyond that there’s the matter of getting information about people out of the database, assigning them to small groups, printing out their nametags and making sure that the people at the front desk know who’s paid and who hasn’t. That’s an easy sentence to write, but passes over many layers of stress and lack of sleep.

So tomorrow is Summit. I’m hoping it goes decently and that I haven’t missed any major details.

Posted by Jim at March 17th, 2006

I’m interested in food. Specifically I’m interested in ethnic foods. A country’s cuisine is the product of its available resources. The types of food used in a cuisine’s dishes comes out of the environment (all around the Mediterranean Sea people eat lots of fish). The techniques used to cook the food come out of the availabilty of tools to cook with–wood, coal, metal pots, stoves, clay ovens…

As a result of personal interest then, I end up cooking a fair amount of Mediterranean foods (particularly Morrocan, Provencal, Lebanese and some Greek foods), Indian, and Thai. There’s also a certain amount of old favorites from my own childhood (roast, burritos, various soups…) and sometimes vegetarian (I’m not a vegetarian, but I don’t think meat is a necessity in every meal).

There’s also a bit of Peruvian cuisine, but that’s mostly because Kristen once bought me a Peruvian cookbook.

I sometimes wonder what the effect of growing up with this sort of menu will have on my kids’ perspective on food. I get a glimpse of this every so often. On Thursdays, the school one of my daughters goes to has hot lunch, allowing her to eat something I haven’t made.

On Wednesday night, we had beef in spinach sauce–an Indian curry. My daughter ate it enthusiastically. On Thursday at school, she had mini-corn dogs. She removed the outer covering, but ate the hot dog inside.

Spinach based sauces with strange spices are okay, I guess, but hot dogs with a covering around them are just too weird.

Posted by Jim at March 15th, 2006

As someone who’s been a long time fan of Yes and has some interest in indie rock, I was amused to note that You Ain’t No Picasso posted a link to a band’s cover of “Owner of a Lonely Heart.”

What I find kind of funny about this is that the 60’s-70’s era version of Yes covered some popular hits, modifying them in somewhat bizarre ways. In the 80’s, Yes briefly was a popular band, and, now we have a band covering them, modifying one of their hits in a somewhat bizarre way.

Posted by Jim at March 11th, 2006

Before you read the rest of this, you might want to read this comic *…

I’m not a great lover of Yanni or David Hasselhoff’s music, but I haven’t any great dislike for them personally. Thus news that both of them are under suspicion of domestic abuse is pretty strange. Funny to find these sort of charges against people who perform soft, inoffensive music. Not that I seriously expect music to offer a window into the soul of the performer, but if we were talking about people whose music was known to contain violent themes, it would seem less odd.

Oh well.

* Yeah, the comic is kind of offensive. Sorry.

Posted by Jim at March 4th, 2006

PVP is a webcomic that generally focuses on interpersonal relationships, work, role playing games, geek culture, and computer gaming. It does not generally focus on social issues.

Last week Scott Kurtz did an interesting thing in that he let us into his head as he was trying to write a black character, something that he’s apparently not entirely comfortable with.

If you read the two comics I just linked in the preceding paragraph you’ll know exactly what I mean by that. If you didn’t you might want to because what follows will assume you did, possibly ruining the humor in the process.

Anyway, I can understand why Kurtz might feel uncomfortable writing a black character. I’m writing a novel–one that includes a black character–and I’ve sometimes felt a little nervous as I do it. There are a number of reasons that a white writer might feel nervous about writing a black character.

The first and best one is simply the need to have the character feel authentic and real to to the reader. If you’re black you will have experiences and assumptions that are different from those of your average white writer. If you are a white writer and you’re realistic, you know that you can only guess as to what those experiences might be. How are you going to avoid screwing things up and making the character feel fake?

Unfortunately for the realistic writer, however, there’s more of a risk than simply having the character feel not quite right. There’s also the risk of having the character come off as a racial stereotype. Having the character feel fake is merely a technical failure. Having the character turn out to be a racial stereotype (unintentional as it might be) opens you up for public humiliation.

To me this underlines something about current moment in the US experience of race and racism. As a society, we’ve come to the point where most people agree that racism is wrong, but it’s still such a raw wound that it’s hard to talk about it publicly.

The obvious and best solution is to write a person of whatever race (or gender) as first of all a person and hope that common humanity will carry the day. I think about Michael Bishop who included a gay AIDS patient in his novel Unicorn Mountain. Michael Bishop isn’t gay, doesn’t have AIDS and doesn’t obviously have a lot in common with the character.

He made the person feel like a real human being and his gay character seemed as real to me as Samuel R. Delany’s various gay characters (Delany, incidentally, is gay). Of course, I’m not gay so I may have missed something there.

I am, however, a US citizen of Dutch descent and though that’s far from a persecuted minority, it has been interesting to read books in which people of Dutch descent appear. For example, at least in the books I read, the primary association with being Dutch is sailors and traders. Farmers and immigrants to the US barely ever appear–and when they do it seems that they turn out to be sailors.

I remember being particularly irritated by one alternate history which imagined that England never conquered New York City/New Amsterdam. It irked me that in an alternate version of the US with a strong Dutch presence I found little awareness of Dutch Reformed thought or much of a sense of Dutch history other than “sailors and traders.”

There were also structural problems with the novel, but I won’t get into that here.

Making your characters human doesn’t always quite work either and Scott Kurtz is right to be uncomfortable, but as my comments about the above book indicate, writing about white Europeans isn’t as easy as you might assume either. I’m hoping Scott sticks with the character. Even if he makes mistakes in the process, I think he’ll eventually get the character right.

Of course, if he sticks in a character who’s descended from Dutch sailors, I’ll be cranky.

Posted by Jim at March 1st, 2006

Octavia Butler is dead. Unlike Steven Barnes, I didn’t know her personally, but I did read her stuff and enjoyed it.

Who was she? She was one of the relatively few black science fiction writers–though that’s not the source of her importance. I’m not saying that race was unimportant in her writing (far from it), but rather that she was one of the better writers out there in science fiction of any race.

She seemed to specialize in cataclysms–the destruction of civilisation occurs in at least a couple series by her–but she made it entertaining. She put her characters through hell and made the reader care about them.

One of the things I liked about her books is the way they examined our own social problems from another angle and altogether without preaching. It was obvious she had a perspective, of course, but the story came first.

Run out. Buy her books.

Listen to her on NPR:
Octavia Butler remembered
Talks about race
On Science Friday with David Brin