Escaping the Trunk

Via David Forbes, I found this post by John Haffner. It’s a strictly philosophical (read: Kant gets name-checked) discussion of rights and freedoms as they pertain to immigration, a summary of a panel on the subject held at Sophia University in Japan. Japan’s stance on migration is problematic to say the least: for a variety of reasons, it has always resisted granting citizenship to foreigners. Instead, it relegates them to a labyrinthine system of visas and second-class rights. However, the population of Japan is declining as the economy dies out (Roland Kelts describes that phenomenon here) and as feminism gains a stronger foothold*, leaving a rapidly aging population with a shaky tax base to support them and only temporary workers to care for them. Naturally, this has brought up discussion of immigration as a means to solve the problem.

The first obstacle, as pointed out by philosopher Mathias Risse, is that historically the right to international migration has been largely defined as a right to leave one’s own country. According to Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to leave or return to their country, and a right to movement within their country, but there is no established right to settle outside one’s country. As such, Risse pointed out, the right to move—as it exists now—is more akin to other liberty rights, such as the right to marriage, than to claim rights, such as a right to emergency medical attention. Just as people have a right to marry, but no right to demand that any given person marry, individuals now are widely recognized to have a right to leave their own country, but no right to demand to be let in somewhere else. They must first find a partner willing to accept their claim.

It’s an interesting discussion that might be of interest to anyone who enjoys learning about Japan’s position internationally or about the migration discourse in general. If you just want the pop culture version of Japan’s internal struggle with its elderly, check this out:

That’s the trailer for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society, which deals with the issue in a predictably awesome way.

*Note: I don’t want you to think that I’m blaming feminism for lower populations, because I don’t think there’s anything blameworthy with lower populations whatsoever. Our planet is over-crowded, and in all likelihood, you could probably be doing lots more to contribute to the greater well-being of your fellow humans than simply making another one. I mention feminism here because statistically, better-educated women have fewer children, and career women have children later in life. Since educational and workplace equality are goals of feminism, ones which are being accomplished in Japan, I felt clear to bring it up.

I wrote this as an answer to John Scalzi’s latest post about the Amazon debacle, which you can learn more about here. But because John says he doesn’t want that thread to be about Amazon or Macmillan, but instead about the authors, I thought I’d post my rant here. (It is, after all, my rant, meaning it belongs on my website.)

***

Hrrm.

For all of you who are worried about “punishing” or “rewarding” Macmillan, might I suggest something?

Start your own publishing company.

No, really. Go ahead. Get a loan. Get a big, fat loan. Then get some staff. You’ll need editors for copy and acquisition, designers, binders, web developers, sysadmins, and a really patient office admin who can answer your phone for you when you inevitably collapse under the weight of the massive pile of slush that will fall on your shoulders.

See, I’d love it if you would do that, because, you see, I’m just starting out, and the more publishers I can show my work to, the better my odds of actually getting paid for what I cannot help but do anyway. So it would really help me out if you would start up a publishing house, establish a social and distribution network, build a reputation, and negotiate some wholesale and retail deals with Amazon, Apple, and Sony. Oh, they’ve never heard of you? Well isn’t that just a shame. Somebody call the waaambulance.

***

And now to buy some dashi powder and kimbap. That always makes me feel better.

As of today, I have lived in Canada for four years.

Before you ask, I’ve only been a Permanent Resident for a fraction of that time. I’m not a citizen, yet. I can’t vote here. I’m still getting used to the idea of parliamentary democracy, although I’m fascinated by the idea that there’s such a thing as a vote of non-confidence. As Jon Stewart said: “You guys can do that?!”

The person who sat at this desk four years ago to tell her friends and family that she’d landed here okay is much different from the one sitting at the desk now. I consider that a good thing. That other person was not okay — she was depleted, wrecked, hollowed-out. I had endured a moment not unlike a psychotic break, only I was painfully aware of every second of it. My first days in Canada — my first months, let’s be honest — were spent mostly in a little ball on the couch, watching broadcasts in languages I’d have to pay a premium for in the States. (Hindi movies! Chinese wu xia dramas! French cooking shows! And a lot of decorating programs in English!) At the time, I had no concept of how my life was going to change. I had no idea that three thousand miles was exactly how far I would have to travel to find exactly what I needed.

When I used to tell people I was American, they would blink twice and say: “Really? You’d never know.” Then I would tell them I was from Seattle, and they said: “Oh, so you were Canadian all along.” This year I went back to Los Angeles and saw the hospital where I was born, and the first homes my parents lived in just afterward, each situated close to the house where my mother and all her siblings grew up. “People used to stop on the street and tell you how cute you were,” my mother said. “Not much has changed,” my husband said. This year was his first visit to California. This year was the first time he saw the Pacific.

This year I also did a quintessentially Canadian thing for the first time: I went skating. I held tight to my mother-in-law’s arm as she guided me across the pond. (It was a real pond, with real water under it, and real kids playing hockey on it.) She used to be a skating instructor once upon a time, so she knew how to be patient with my constant clinging. “The others are saying you’re very brave,” she told me. “I have no idea why,” I answered, and whimpered a little as I teetered momentarily.

They have been a dense four years. Denser than university, in their own way. Not better or worse, or even more exhausting, but thicker. My temper is, if possible, even shorter. My patience is diminished. The hurt and anxiety that filled me when I first came here has been replaced by anger, and occasionally (like when my friends get arrested and beaten, for example) that anger catapults me back to that moment when I first came here — completely exhausted but equally stubborn, determined to stay here and spite everyone who’d ever told me I didn’t really have the right, or that I was doing it all wrong or that I could have made it easier on myself if I’d just been a little nicer, a little meeker, a little more patient or calculating or insert-your-value-of-choice-here. I didn’t get here because I was brave, or clever or strong. Sometimes I’m still not sure how it happened. But I know it wasn’t because I was smooth, or charming, or unafraid, or even nice. I suspect it has more to do with giving up on my pride. In that respect, it was excellent training for a career in writing.

Speaking of which: back to work.

I had a really interesting meeting today. I talked with Justin Ferrato, a student of the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab, about a project that he and his fellow Media Lab students are working on for Nuit Blanche 2010.

I don’t want to give away the content of the project, but it sounds really interesting and I’m excited to see the final result. I was asked by a Media Lab faculty member, Susan LK Gorbet, (who I know from OCAD’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation program) to talk about SF anime, something that I’ve discussed at length at other blogs. It was one of the first times I’d been asked to share my expertise anywhere outside the contexts of academia or fandom. I realized this halfway through explaining the visual metaphors at play in a specific and beloved film clip. By that point I was really enjoying myself: my meeting felt like all the fun parts of teaching (which I really miss, sometimes) wrapped up with all the best parts of panel discussions at cons (without the sleep deprivation). I always forget how much niche data I have stored until I watch someone taking notes on what I say. It’s a nice feeling, like suddenly realizing that the ground underneath you really is solid after all.

At WorldCon in Montreal, I said that the best part of workshopping is when someone tells you that your suggestion is a helpful one. I hold with that sentiment. There’s something really affirming about alleviating someone else’s creative frustrations so they can go ahead and solve the rest of the puzzle on their own. It means that their own contributions make it into the public eye that much faster, enriching the community as a whole. Being part of that process — or being asked to be part of it — is really special. I hope I get asked again, soon.

Yeah, I said it. Wu-Tang Clan vs. The Beatles. 27 glorious tracks of it, in fact, collected in Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers. So far it utterly pwns The Grey Album, but maybe I just like Wu-Tang better than I like Jay-Z. Your mileage may vary. Special thanks to Kay Thaney, she of Science Commons fame, for recommending this.

A while ago, I proposed an SF Signal MindMeld column on anime, and this is the result.

My section is by far the longest, but that’s because I spent the weekend watching anime and was feeling re-invigorated about the medium. I had lots to talk about, and I was still pinging about the subject on Monday. I felt a little embarrassed about how long-winded I was, but it’s also heartening to realize how engaged I still am about the topic. I’m glad that my enjoyment of the medium hasn’t diminished, because after writing a master’s thesis on it, I suspected it might. But no — after watching some new films this weekend, and perusing some old favourites, I felt oddly centred. My faith in live-action television has been renewed by series like Supernatural and Chuck, but for a long time I just wasn’t watching a lot of fleshy TV. (That came out wrong. Moving on.) I think that means that anime is sort of my “home” media in a way that it isn’t for a lot of people outside Japan.

On Monday, I had a meeting with my co-writer for a paper on fansubbing, and we talked about how fannish trends in the consumption of global media makes diasporans of us all. The oldest scholarship on anime fandom talks about how, when fansubs first became popular in the 80’s and 90’s, white kids entered Chinese, Japanese, and Korean corner stores for the first time. Suddenly they were living one tiny slice of immigrant life: finding your home media at the store that sells goods from home. I think that’s a small but important consequence of globalization as a whole. Globalization in general is easy to characterize as the homogenization of the planet, but the flipside is that moment when people go outside their comfort zone and then expand it to include new territory.

I post a paragraph, and you tell me which novel it’s from.

When he left the aircraft with the other passengers he had resigned himself to the notorious purgatory of the US Health, Immigration and Customs machinery. At least an hour, he thought, of overheated, drab-green rooms smelling of last year’s air and stale sweat and guilt and fear that hangs round all frontiers, fear of those closed doors marked PRIVATE that hide the careful men, the files, the teleprinters chattering urgently to Washington, to the Bureau of Narcotics, Counter Espionage, the Treasury, the FBI.

Potent stuff, man. Could be the latest book to hit Jon Stewart’s nightstand, could be a far-future SF depiction of the American border hellscape, could be pulp, could be the intro to a good cop/bad cop smut scene. One thing holds true: it’s amazingly prescient, and therefore depressing. Any guesses?

Recently, two separate posts have gotten under my skin and forced me to re-examine the book I’m trying to write. (I’m trying, I promise. Really. It’s just that everything I do looks wrong, and this is part of the reason why.)

The first is Jetse de Vries Christmas present to the genre: Should SF Die? Jetse distills his point here:

My viewpoint is that SF is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and that lack of relevance can be attributed to developments and trends already mentioned in the points above [SF is morally and ethically bankrupt; SF is monolithically angophilic; SF is commercially dead; SF has ditched science and become fantasy] and SF’s unwillingness to really engage with the here-and-now. That doesn’t mean that SF needs to die (actually, a slow marginalisation into an increasingly neglected and despised niche-cum-ghetto is probably a fate worse than death), but it does mean that SF needs to change, and that it needs to become much more inclusive of the alien (and I mean alien in ‘humans-can-be-aliens-to-each-other’ sense) and proactive, meaning it should not just shout ‘FIRE! FIRE!’ (and do almost nothing but), but both man the fire trucks *and* think of ways to prevent more fires.

Read the rest of this entry »

…Award noms, that is.

I don’t honestly expect to win any awards this year, but if you want to let the fine people at the Aurora or Hugo that you’re thinking of me, here are the stories of mine that were published in 2009:

• “Off-Track Betting”
• “The Chair”
• “βoyfriend”*

If I’ve done my job, then those stories are already sticking in your mind. But maybe you still need a refresher. It’s always interesting to me to see who likes what: Cory blogged “βoyfriend,” while Dave tells me he’s partial to OTB. Peter dared me to write “The Chair,” and he also whipped the story into shape when I was finished. All three are love stories in a way, and they range from near to far future. I had fun with each of them, although the process was a little different: OTB shifted concept a bunch of times since its inception, while “The Chair” was completed in a single night. I wrote “βoyfriend” after discussing it with Mark Tovey at WorldChanging Canada. (Mark is a great editor, who let me natter on about several different ideas before helping me decide on one.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about process lately. I’ve noticed a lot of timesucks and inefficiencies in my working habits, but at the same time I’m uncertain how to fix them. It feels like I’m writing less, but that the stories I do write are better the first time around. (I hope they are, at any rate.) If I were to discover anything about my process in 2010, I hope it’s how to do this right the first time, and do it more consistently.

* I’ve gotten an email telling me that this story isn’t technically eligible, because it was originally published in 2008. The podcast happened this year, though, and I don’t know how that counts. If you can in any way nominate Tina Connolly’s reading of this story, go for it! She totally rocked it.

Ladies and gentlemen, Amanda Palmer and Nervous Cabaret, covering “House of the Rising Sun.” (Thanks, Dave.)

This is likely my last post of the year, and of the decade. I wish I had some grand statement to make on the past ten years. I think the only thing I can say is that I feel more like myself now than I did ten years ago. Ten years ago, I was preparing to celebrate this night in somebody’s basement by drinking virgin cocktails from a plastic cup with my name scrawled on it in Sharpie. (I was sixteen.) Now I’m celebrating it with actual champagne, and the night probably won’t end with a homeowner chidingly asking if he can interrupt my making out with a boy on his washing machine. (Again: I was sixteen.)

That night, I had a novel finished. It was crap. Tonight, I have an unfinished novel which is hopefully less crap. That night, I had no real hope of entering the industry: no friends in it, no experience with it, no understanding of what I might have to contribute. I’m still working on the last one, but I like to think I’ve improved in the other areas. The friends I have now, the relationships I’m working on, are the ones I’d like to have ten years from now. Everyone says that, I know, but I feel more at home now than I did then. I have three families now. It takes a village. It takes a hemisphere. It takes three time zones and a lot of waiting. And I sometimes feel just as awkward now as I did then.

They were dense years, in between then and now. They included high school, university, and my first Master’s. This is a point of pride on the one hand, and a little worrying on the other. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever be done with school — but if I’m done with it, what will I do instead? I’ve never been out of school, really. Even the times I spent outside the academic system I was hoping to return to it. It provides a rhythm that I’m used to. I like to think I’m fairly good at it. I’m not sure what else I’m good at.

In the next ten years, that’s something I’d like to find out. I’d like to know what I’m good at. There are a small number of things I do pretty well in that others have trouble doing (public speaking, for example), but I’m still flummoxed whenever someone asks me what my actual skills are. I have this same problem with genre: when people ask me what type of science fiction I write, my mouth gapes like a koi fish and I have to really hotwire some synapses to come up with an answer. This is a fairly typical problem for people my age, and I know I’ll probably grow out of it. In all honesty, I sometimes wish I could fast-forward to forty-six, and ditch twenty-six. Generally, twenty-six is one of those ages that can be summed up by weepy songs sung by skinny boys with floppy hair.

Well, except for this one.

You bring the smokes, I’ll bring the beer.