Meedja wackiness

Or, how I would much rather not start Wednesday.

Having a (radio) interview recorded in an institution with which a particular person had a connection: except, oops, the institution has moved to entirely different premises, and even it had stayed on the same site, event took place decades ago and I suspect that place had not remained exactly as was for the duration.

And had to do recording before institution in question opened this morning.

Fortunately, was subject I can discourse on more or less in my sleep; at least, have had dreams in which I was doing just that.

On not naming and shaming

It has come to my attention that some people may have been irked by my reluctance, on the 'Strong or Stroppy' panel at Wiscon to come out and name particular books that irritated me.

There were at least two reasons for this.

Failure to remember with the kind of accuracy I should like the authors' names &/or the exact titles. Given that these were books I may have given up on partway through. Didn't want to mislead people by naming something that sounded like the book/author that pissed me off, but was actually not.

But more importantly, while I'm quite happy to name books that I think get the strong heroine right (whether as ass-kicking tough or in some other mode), I'm less confident about slagging off on books that, for me, failed. Because, operative term there, for me.

In several cases, I'm sure what happened with a particular book at a particular time was that it was just the catalyst which precipitated my annoyance with (say) trope of female cyborg working for government agency who is surprisingly incompetent. It might work for other people and I don't want to prejudice other readers against it. (This perhaps intersects with the 'Secret Decoder Ring' panel - what the reader brings to a book from previous reading experiences.)

Or indeed, I might have been reading a book at some time when I was feeling particularly picky and nitpicky.

Also, book may have rubbed painfully up against my own personal no-go tropes in other ways besides 'feistiness' in female protag.

But there's also my desire to discuss patterns and themes and tendencies rather than to trash specific books or authors (and some authors do better in other books, they may just have slipped up the once). That can be enjoyable, but is not, for me, an entirely satisfactory approach. As I understood it, the panel was about those general issues, not about 'let's bash on "feisty" heroines who constantly need rescuing'.

Though if that's what people wanted, that's okay too.

It's just not my bag, diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, etc.

Midweek linkage - gender themes

The Great Barrier Reef lovingly recreated in a giant piece of crochet? :

The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef came about by accident. Wertheim read about a discovery by a mathematician called Daina Taimina: that you could model hyperbolic space using crochet, simply by increasing the number of stitches in each row until the fabric warps. Mathematicians had previously struggled to demonstrate hyperbolic surfaces, despite the fact that they appear throughout the natural world - in lettuce leaves, for example.

Wertheim was so inspired that she picked up a crochet hook for the first time in 20 years, and encouraged her sister to do the same. It was Christine, a lecturer in feminism and popular culture at the California Institute of the Arts, who noticed how all the pieces of crochet accumulating on the sisters' coffee table looked like coral. Wertheim recalls her sister saying: "We could crochet a coral reef."

Rather cool! with pictures.

When it was first discovered more than 60 years ago, Asperger's syndrome was thought to be a male-only condition. But now that more and more girls are being diagnosed with it, why do we hear so little about them. I'm just a bit bothered by this:

[W]omen with autism often struggle at work because they lack what is often taken for granted in women - the intuitive ability to understand where people are coming from and how to manage situations. Because of subtle sex differences, we tend to "expect" more of women in the workplace in terms of smoothing things over, of saying the right thing; and whereas we would excuse a man who lacked these abilities, we are subliminally a lot less forgiving of a woman who has similar shortcomings.

because I think not conforming to that particular model of womanly angel-in-the-housery (OB 'Kill the Bitch!) doesn't have to be about autism/Asperger's.

Also on expectations of wymmyn and in particular their bodies: Why has Fern Britton's decision to have a gastric band fitted caused such a huge fuss? Kira Cochrane on how high-profile women's bodies became public property