Archive for April, 2009
Ride the wave, baby
In New York, Governor David Paterson is hoping to revive his ailing popularity by reintroducing a bill to legalise same-sex marriage in the state. NY has a law that recognises s-s marriages from other states but this new bill, if it passes, could also redress 1,350 civil discriminations against s-s partnerships.
Gov. Paterson is hoping to ride momentum from the recent Supreme Court ruling in Iowa and legislative initiatives in Vermont and Washinton DC to recognise s-s marriages.
Strunk and White ain’t right
With a gleeful chortle, I’m linking to this article by Geoffrey Pullum. Strunk & White’s Elements of Style is an iconic reference in the English literary world. Let me correct that – in modern American English writing. GF here basically lambasts S&W for being innacurate guides to grammar that has, unfortunately, been taught in American schools and used in publishing for the last half century.
As one friend said, the article is “iconoclastic, grumpy, amusing.” Another friend defended EoS as relevant in its day but grammar has changed since then, although the style sections has its merits.
I’ve never quite gotten my head wrapped round that book because I’m not a grammar freak but also because English English usage is different from American English. I’m keener on style than I am about fascist unbendable grammatical rules. That’s not to say good grammar should be ignored, just not at the expense of creative prose.
Soapie slick lesbians (pt 3)
Long running UK daily soap, Coronation Street, finally gets a lesbian storyline, its first in 20 years. It’ll be a teenage born-again Christian’s lesbian fling.
Sweetie, you don’t have to go to church just to meet women.
#Amazonfail
That’s the title reference to the hot topic on Twitter and the interwebs this week. It’s about the “glitch” on Amazon that has de-ranked over 57,000 books because of their ‘adult content’. These books also disappeared from Amazon searches.
What constitutes adult content and who makes the decision is still unexplained. A disproportionate number of books affected fall in the LGBT category, but also books which are considered literary classics which have sexual content (don’t most modern classics?). However – and this is the red flag – books that are explicitly homophobic and openly pornographic missed the cut. I’m also suspicious that Kindle books somehow escaped the cull.
So obviously, either someone made a blanket censorship decision about books based on their metadata/tags or Amazon executed a badly calculated test of a new beta search system, to put it kindly (I shan’t scream homophobia and right-wing conspiracies yet, although I do think a commercial conspiracy is the motivation).
I don’t believe that a troll cracked Amazon’s system and inserted the code because that would be just as bad for Amazon to be seen as (1) easily hacked, and (2) susceptible to fake reviews affecting rankings, and (3) ineffective in repairing the damage. At the very least, Amazon needs to issue a proper statement and not the lameass one they did yesterday, conduct a transparent internal inquiry (good luck on seeing it), and or the department of fair trade looks into it, because if this FUBAR has shown one thing is that Amazon is large enough to call the shots on the information consumers receive ala GOOGLE. Any kind of monopoly/monopsony should, as a competition issue, be investigated by authorities sooner if not later. I’m expecting the European Commission to take the first step.
Links too numerous to mention about this topic. For a recap and analysis, see DearAuthor‘s site here and here, with more to come in the next days, I’m sure.
Updated 15/4/09 from Seattle PI: It was a clerical error, apparently. In France. Still doesn’t explain why Adult books fell off the search.
Updated 21/4/09 via Claudia via AfterEllen.com – it sounds like there is a troll inside Amazon secretly going after LGBT and feminist books. Claudia believes, from a Twitter thread, that someone in Amazon was/is now deleting provocative covers linked to non-het books. The mystery deepens.
Back in 5
Am off for a few days recovering from a sinus infection, peeps. Have a good weekend – long one if you’re in Aust.
The good news, they keeps coming
A week after the Supreme Court win for same-sex marriage in Iowa, Vermont has shot ahead by voting YES to same-sex marriage (expanding the concept of s-s civil unions already recognised in the state). The majority vote in both houses of legislature overrode Gov. Jim Douglas’ veto (Boo Hiss!) against the bill last week.
The new law comes into effect on September 1 2009. Ah, that would be Spring in Australia. New beginnings.
And on the same day, Washington DC voted to be like New York, Rhode Island and New Mexico, that is by taking the chickenshit step of recognising s-s marriages legalised in other states for couples relocating in, but still not allowing s-s marriage in their own state.
It’s soo confusing to have multi-layer limited ‘rights’ in relation to same-sex couples. I mean, married or de facto is all we need to know for tax purposes, really. What’re these pseudo-partnership labels we have to accept: civil partnerships, registered partnerships, domestic partnerships, significant relationships, reciprocal beneficiary relationships, common-law marriage, adult interdependent relationships, life partnerships, stable unions, civil solidarity pacts (Wikipedia). Take a step back and we could resurrect labels such as boston marriages, romantic friendships, housemate, friend. Sound familiar?
You want labels? Here’s a rubbish load.
Residency in Wales
A one-week writing retreat at Tŷ Newydd, the National Writers’ Centre for Wales. Organised by Chroma (UK). £350 all in (not transport) with this year’s tutors, Robert Glück and Achy Obejas, for
a week of workshops, one-to-one tutorials, winding rivers, wild Welsh seas and writing writing writing.
5 – 10 Oct 2009. Limited places left.
If only I wasn’t on the other side of the world. Achy Obejas, omg!
Lit meet in London (April)
Chroma at Foyles
Particularly Poignant Poetry, Prose and Performance
On 22 April 2009, Chroma will be holding a celebratory reading at Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross. The evening will showcase the work of participants in Chroma’s DIVINE Mentoring Scheme for Emerging Writers, alongside contributors to the Flight anthology and a live musical performance from gay singer-songwriter K Anderson.
Reading at the event will be DIVINE mentees Olumide Popoola, Eamon Somers, Donna Collier, Berta Freistadt and Ben Fergusson. Chroma also welcomes two excellent young writers whose work is featured in the Flight anthology: Dean Atta and Jasmine Cooray.
Entry: £3 or £5 with wine. 7pm-9pm
Foyles bookshop, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0EB.
Book read: Landing by Emma Donoghue
I have lovely friends, yes I do. They keep me entertained and they send me pressies, yes they do. One of which is a copy of this book by Emma Donoghue.
This not a review review because I suck at writing reviews. This is a note to myself, marking the period when I read the book.
Landing is a romance faced by two women, one a small-town Canadian and the other a high-flying (literally) bi-racial urbanian Irish woman – older and did I mention, urban?, who meet on a plane over the Atlantic and somehow, by chance and a shrug, they strike up real conversations via letters and emails and what ho, fall in love. To the tune of Síle’s sharp friends, breaking up her already stale 5-year relationship and living up to her dead mum’s idealised image, Jude stubbornly defends her town, her tiny museum, her relationship with her sorta ex-husband and the townsfolk while grieving her mother’s quick demise. It’s a craft of push and give as Síle and Jude create themselves into a bearable niche in each other’s lives.
As a city-bred lesbian, I totally empathised with Síle straight away. Love the Irish wit and deprecating honesty.
As someone who has had her share of LDRs, I understood how hard it was for Jude and Síle to work it out.
Emma D is generous with witty, adult dialogue, people observations, enough description to get the lay of each important setting without triteness, great checks on Canadian and Irish lingo, and carrying the soft aches of a transatlantic relationship and the hard issues of migration throughout. There’s a little twist at the end. I love me twists.
Landing is published by Harcourt Books.
Available in print from you-know-where and also as an audio book from BBCAudioBooksAmerica.
Go Iowa!
Iowa, part of America’s heartland in the Midwest (think agriculture and industry, although not, thankfully, the bible belt), has just become the 3rd/4th US state to allow same-sex marriage. That’s right, the M word and all its attending benefits and baggage.
On April 3 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously held that the:
state statute limiting civil marriage to a union between a man and a woman violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution. The decision strikes the language from Iowa Code section 595.2 limiting civil marriage to a man and a woman. It further directs that the remaining statutory language be interpreted and applied in a manner allowing gay and lesbian people full access to the institution of civil marriage.
It was almost too easy for the Court to demolish the County’s puny reasons for the government’s stand:
The objectives asserted by the County were (1) tradition, (2) promoting the optimal environment for children, (3) promoting procreation, (4) promoting stability in opposite-sex relationships, and (5) preservation of state resources.
The last is laughable if you ask me. Anyway, the Court held these grounds were both under and over-inclusive of certain classes of peoples and were, therefore, unprovable as improving or advancing government objectives.(Read the judgment to see how easily the Court steamrolled over County’s arguments, and also to see how flimsy such arguments are. Other states, take note.)
I was wary to read about appropriate levels of court scrutiny, statutory classification and government objectives – as if this wasn’t about people’s lives! – technicalities to be surmounted before court would look at the substance of an appeal.
My favourite bit is where Cady J states:
the statute, declares, ‘Marriage is a civil contract’ and then regulates that civil contract . . . . Thus, in pursuing our task in this case, we proceed as civil judges, far removed from the theological debate of religious clerics, and focus only on the concept of civil marriage and the state licensing system that identifies a limited class of persons entitled to secular rights and benefits associated with marriage.
That’s right, people. Civilised marriage is a contract. Get with it already. The Court did not interfere with religious beliefs as they were only concerned with civil rights. Separation of the church and state and all that. Finally.
My thanks to Prof. Ruthann Robson for the tip and also her summary of the judgment.
PDF of the full decision in Varnum v Brien is here.
P/s – I am particularly pleased that the Court used the term “gay and lesbian people” throughout, with the odd “gays and lesbians” in there. I much prefer the term “gay and lesbian people” rather than the encompassing “gays” in current new usage, because I think the former is grammatically correct and the latter can be misleading (men or men and women?) Besides,why should we defer to the male term, again?
