Escaping the Trunk

A magnitude 5.5 quake hit the Ontario-Quebec border region today. You can see the epicentre here, and read another article here.

Apparently it’s being felt as far as Ohio, but what I felt was one of those mild but noticeable “Is the earth shaking or am I having an inner ear episode?” kind of quakes. (Not that I have inner ear episodes.) That said, I still headed straight for one of the doorframes and stayed there, tweeting away and chatting to my brother-in-law before he evacuated from his building.

The lucky thing? It happened after I finished today’s yoga. Otherwise: epic balance fail.

UPDATE: Although there is no weather warning for my region, a suspected tornado ripped through Midland this evening. Here, we’re experiencing high winds but not much else. So no, the “fake lake” has yet to be sucked up by a funnel cloud. But give it time.

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Just look at them.

From Toronto

I have been having fun with my new camera. I am writing a CFP. I woke up this morning, lifted weights, and washed my sundresses in bubble bath. Then I hung them out on the line and looked at my latest Tor.com post. And Peter is reading my book. Life is good.

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…I think. The time may change, but it will still be Sunday evening. Anyway, show up sometime evening-ish, and I will be there reading stories and answering questions. Here is a map.

I’ve visited InterAccess before for this event, ArtSciSalon, and it was a really interesting. We met someone who had made his own fabber, and I got to pick up the pieces and hold them. (The extruder ribs them for your pleasure. It’s great.) I took pictures with DeathRay’s phone, but forgot to download them to this drive.

Anyhow, I’ll try to think of something good to read, but if you do show up, please make sure to ask me some questions so that I’m not just sitting up there gawping like a goldfish and saying “Um…” a lot. It’s been a hellacious week at OCAD, and I’m not even sure what I’ll be able to knit together from my stretched and fraying threads of neuron. Granted, I should probably count my blessings: last Friday, I had two presentations, and this Friday, I only have one! And next week, only one more! And then I get to re-write a novel!

(You would not believe how excited I am about that last bit. Wow.)

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What you see on my hands is mehndi. I’m going away this weekend to attend an Indian wedding, and was invited by the groom’s family to a mehndi session at their home last night. What you see here is only half the finished product; the palms of my hands are so red with henna that DeathRay blinked awake this morning and started quoting Shakespeare. In retrospect I should have asked for only the tops of my hands to be worked on, because by the end of the night I could see how tired the artist was. She was very fast and very capable, but squeezing that little tube of paste must be hell on the hands. I feel a little silly for having asked for so much from her.

Mehndi is a very special thing — a freestyle explosion of colour and design that marks one as a member or guest of a specific community or event. I was really happy to be invited, because it made me feel included, and because I knew that my chance to experience it again might not happen for a while. But some of the women in attendance last night experience it regularly, either for holidays or the summer wedding season. They love it, and being there you immediately understand why: the mundane (a hand or foot) becomes immediately beautiful and precious, and the drying process requires that one do little more than sit and talk and share stories. If you’re lucky, someone might even feed you by hand, so that the paste doesn’t smudge as you pick up a spoon or a piece of bread. As one of the women said last night between baby-bird bites: “No food tastes as good as what your mother feeds you from her hands.”

I tried remembering the last time my mother fed me something by hand. I imagine it must have been back when I nine years old and practising for my First Holy Communion, and she pretended to be the priest so I’d know how to take the host. (Something PM Harper apparently still has trouble with.) She told me that when she was little, she and her siblings would practise Communion all the time with Necco wafers.

“What are Necco wafers?” I asked, the first time she told me this.

“They’re a kind of candy,” she said. “They don’t make them anymore. We also had these licktab candies, these little dots of sugar on paper. But they went away, too, once people started doing acid that way.”

“What’s acid?”

…And so it goes. Since I’m attending a family event this weekend, I’ll leave you with a quote from Amanda Palmer on families:

we decide with our creative minds who we want our family to be and we go out, hunt them down, capture them and then nourish them with all our mights. maybe this is something that artists are especially good at. we think things into reality, we don’t accept that things have to be Any Way at all.

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C. Wess Daniels has a great post wherein he explains Henry Jenkins’ definition of fandom thusly:

1. Appropriation – A person appropriates in their own life a particular text, work, and practice relating to their fan object. Often these objects are reinterpreted in their own life.
2. Participation – There is an openness for people to participate at all levels within the community. They are so inspired by it they write music, create events, etc.
3. Emotional Investment – People become really invested in this this object, topics, etc. It is something they are really into and something they want to talk about.
4. Collective Intelligence (rather than the expert paradigm) – There is room for everyone to have something to say and contribute to the collective understanding of the group. Collective intelligence doesn’t need credentials, degrees, etc., experiences and insights are beneficial to the community and conversation.
5. “Virtual” Community – These are communities that are not necessarily built around face to face meetings. Some of these people know each other and some are unknown, but more often than not these groups will have times to meet face to face. 

Mr. Daniels then suggests (inspired by his thesis advisor) that we should start judging all communities by this standard. Are the members involved? Are they passionate? Informed? Communicative?

Enter Toronto’s cycling community, who won a major victory yesterday when the city council agreed to transform Jarvis Street from a five-lane, no-bike street to a four-lane + bike lanes version. Cyclists responded to a city-sponsored ad in NOW Magazine regarding bike lanes on Jarvis by appearing at a committee meeting and voicing their support for the lanes. But during yesterday’s city council meeting on the subject, some councilors claimed that not enough of Toronto’s citizenry knew about the proposed lanes — one meeting, they said, could never inform everyone impacted by the alteration. 

And they were right. A single in-the-flesh meeting could never inform enough of the people involved.

But it doesn’t have to. Why? Because there’s this handy-dandy little thing called the internet. Which is where people meet, discuss, plan, and organize. For example, search “bike lanes” on Twitter. All the posts are still tagged with information about Toronto. This is how people acquire and disseminate information. Learning about a topic online might mobilize a population to appear in public (see also: cyclists, cosplayers, vidders), but the process rarely works in reverse (if an event is unlinkable, it ceases to exist). Fandoms have known this for years, but politicians are just now discovering it (to their chagrin).  But it poses an interesting question: what would politics look like if it worked like fandom? What if voters looked more like the collective intelligences that Jenkins talks about?

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This is my Ad Astra schedule:

• Friday, 9pm, Salon 434: Science, Fantasy, and Horror in Anime
• Saturday, 9pm, Salon 241: Move Over, Meatbrains! (a panel about robots, why they’re useful in fiction, and recent advances in robotics/AI)
• Sunday, 2pm, Ballroom Centre: Tesseracts Anthology Panel (I appeared in No. 11, and will likely be sitting next to this guy. But you’ll know me: I’ll be the only girl.

You’ll also recognize me because I’ll be disheveled, sweaty, and quite possibly exhausted. Why? Because I’m moving that very Saturday.

No, really. I just booked the truck.

It’s safe to say that I’ll be rocking the green room Saturday night in celebration, in between saying hi to people. I may also demand on-the-spot backrubs, hot towels, or the use of your spare chocolate. I’m apologising now in case I’m a little curt: I just moved (and prepared a major thesis presentation, and graded exams, taught my classes…you get the idea).

Comment here with what you’d like to discuss at any of these panels. In the meantime, I have closets to de-clutter.

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Yesterday involved a trip to the doctor, a woman singing about God to the rest of the train, and a gibberish-speaker who nestled up close to me and asked me to hold a crumpled plastic water bottle in my open fist while he reached his finger down inside and tickled it, over and over.

Clearly in need of protection, I snagged some of the infamous Watchmen condoms from a promotional installation aboveground — a faux newsstand circa 1985 with Silk Spectre posters and Cure cassettes and girls wearing an excess of yarn just handing out prophylactics. (I almost asked for the latest Black Freighter. Almost. Then I decided to be nice to Warner’s street team.)

Suitably cheered, I attended a stellar seminar on anime and contemporary Japanese society, where I was Liana K’s plus one, in her very own words. (Her date had bailed, and I hadn’t printed off the RSVP. Match made in heaven.) We whispered and giggled and still managed to take notes. It was a lot like being with a girlfriend of several years, only it was the first time we’d ever really met. My apologies to everyone in our immediate vicinity, but sometimes you just can’t hold it in. Later, I even offered her one of my condoms. She’s that nice. (Then she, Derwin Mak, and I just grabbed more from the same installation. Among Derwin’s finer pieces of advice: “Eat the cookies while you’re young.” Yes, sir, Mr. Mak, sir.)

Today I touched a tutu originally constructed in 1973. I asked about the body and transience, how the image of the dancer will last long after her art has punished her body — the very mechanism of her livelihood — for its labours. The presenter told us that all ballerinas, from 15 to 35, cry upon seeing themselves in tutus, instantly transformed into fairytale creatures, lent momentary power by centuries of myth and legend and storytelling. I love colloquia. 

Anybody who wants to talk similar labour issues in anime is welcome; I’m due for a substantive re-evaluation of a paper.

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