New Story!

The Sockdolager has released its Summer Issue, with a new story by me!

Read it here -- The Taste of Grief.

Links

The weather has broken early here -- highs only in the mid-eighties this week, and less humidity. Here's hoping it last.

Have some links!

A post of mine from seven years ago explains why Trump got elected


Related: Spencer's Fallacy

But this article about  the men who vandalized one of our mosques here made me feel better about our country today (it's also one of the best articles about Fort Smith I've ever read: very accurate!)

Related, sort of, and also interesting

On the creation of gender

Socratic knowledge

Shadow syllabus

Socialism in America

My kid draws something:

Those are characters from her comic, Fragile


Also this:

Feels like a good time to repeat this one. pic.twitter.com/DMqLnIXNDZ

— Nathan Burgoine (@NathanBurgoine) August 15, 2017

And this:

My semester

...so far

Y'all, I took an overload. This means I have 82 Comp II students.

Also 17 fiction workshop students, and 26 Global Lit students.

And I'm working on the Fault Line edits.

So basically I'll see you in December.

File This Under

...things I feel terrible for laughing about.

Other News

There is a tiny, tiny Wal-Mart on the campus of the Kid's university -- smaller than a convenience store.

The students call it the Small-Mart.

The Kid Finds Food

Classes don't start until Monday on the kid's campus, so today she's been dealing with problems and exploring.

Here's her first meal in the dining hall:

That's a grapefruit, raw carrots, tater tots and "some kind of meat," to quote the kid.  We were worried she would not be able to find food without corn syrup in the dining hall, but it looks like she can!

The Kid Departs

My kid has gone off to college -- we drove her up yesterday, helped her carry everything into her dorm room, took her to lunch, and then drove away.

It's an odd and somewhat scary feeling, I must say, to leave your child behind. But she's doing very well! She loves being there, and she's dealing with everything: meeting up with her RA, finding out where her classes will meet, buying the trash can we forgot she might need.

Here's a few views of her dorm room:

Racism in America

Here is one of my earliest memories, one I have never, ever admitted to anyone.

I was four years old. My family had just moved out of New Orleans proper -- in New Orleans, we lived in a trailer park in Gentilly, which was near the interstate overpass, and very close to the Community coffee factory. Every morning I would wake on the lower bunk of the bunkbed I shared with my older brother (my little brother had the crib) smelled roasting coffee. I still remember how wonderful that smell was.

Links for You

Tomorrow the kid goes off to college. Today we're packing and taking care of last minute details.

Have some links!

Nancy Kress on science and science fiction

Athena Andreadis on left-handness (the science and the social history)

My Review of Sisters of Tomorrow

My review of Lisa Yaszek and Patrick Sharp's Sisters of Tomorrow is live at Strange Horizons.

Why does this erasure matter? For two reasons, as Russ notes. First, when we are denied models, it’s much harder to believe that we can succeed. If it were possible for women to write science fiction, we ask as young writers, wouldn’t there be lots of science fiction written by women? Any writer needs to believe her task is possible if she is to make it through the many years of struggle. Second, if almost all women writers are erased—so that we’re left, for instance, with only a few names (Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Connie Willis), writers who seem to exist in isolation—then it’s much easier to believe that these very few women succeeded not because women can write science fiction, but because they were some sort of freak. (She wrote it, but she’s not really a woman.)

And...

...Dreher returns to the same old bullshit.

We can't hold White Nationalists responsible for their acts! It's those evil Leftists! If they didn't demand equal rights and a level playing field, why, those poor young white men wouldn't have to become Nazis!

What I'm Reading

Despite the piles of work that surround me, I am still reading obsessively. What else can I do, with our blowhard joke of a president threatening nuclear war, and the white supremacist fuckwads who support him marching in Virginia, shouting, "Jews will not replace us!"

Oddly, not a single Trump supporter has denounced this march, which devolved into the white supremacists beating counter-protesters, including members of the clergy, with flaming torches and spraying them with mace and other chemicals. Rather than mentioning this, one conservative asshat we all know and love is still screeching endlessly about the persecution of that dudebro at Google.

Update: Dreher, uncharacteristically, condemns the White Nationalist protesters, though he doesn't seem to grasp that Nazi = White Nationalist. And of course his comment stream is filled with those defending the Nazis.

But anyway! Here's what I'm reading lately:

Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington, Can You Forgive Her?

End of Summer II

I've finished all my grading and entered the grades for my Summer II classes.

Here's my schedule for what is left of the summer:

Friday, Saturday, Sunday: Work on Fault Line edits.

Monday: Start packing with the Kid, noting everything we forget to buy

Tuesday: Packing with the Kid, buy last-minute objects

Wednesday: Drive the Kid to school, help her move into dorm. Buy her books with her.

Thursday: Pre-school conference at my university.

Friday: Ditto

Saturday, Sunday, Monday August 19-21: Work on Fault Line edits. Deal with last minute prep for Fall 2017. Fret about the Kid.

Tuesday, August 22: My first day of classes.

(The picture is the Kid, age 12, at Hanukkah. I share it for nostalgia's sake.)

Well, Obviously

...there are DIFFERENT sorts of free speech* -- duh!

As a professional scientist of online, I am pleased to present a preview from my new paper "Oh You Just Care About Free Speech At Work Huh". pic.twitter.com/IiCNkUnDDD

— Oliver Keyes (@kopshtik) August 8, 2017

*For instance, there is free speech by white rich men. And then there is free speech by black upstarts who don't appreciate everything this country has done for them. When the first group speaks, we must be protected their right to say whatever like they like, at all costs, no matter what damage is done to others. When the second group speaks, we must vilify, condemn, and punish them until they shut up.

Fisking the Dreher

Andrew Johnston is doing a chapter by chapter read of Rod Dreher's pompous tome, The Benedict Option. All Johnston's posts are worth reading, but today's is especially good.

Today's youths are likely to grow up around some openly gay people and many of them have reached the same conclusions as me - queer folk are as boring as anyone else. Gay people aren't predators, they're just people. But let's not stop there - you could apply this to any of Dreher's other signs of sexual breakdown. Once you've known some women on birth control (or better still, once you've taken them yourself), you know that they aren't mindlessly fornicating animals. Once you've known some single mothers or divorcees, you know that they aren't stupid sluts. 

Links for your Sunday

Summer II is almost over here -- I'm at the stage where all my students are resubmitting their revised drafts, which means I've got heaps of reading and editing to do. Combined with working on the edits for Fault Lines (which is going well!), well, I'm busy!

But! Not too busy to rummage the internets.  Here's some links:


This won't be quite as funny unless you saw the original

It's a Streak!

A very short streak, but still.

Last night right before I started getting ready for bed, I checked my email (as I always do) and found I had sold a story to Daily Science Fiction.

Much rejoicing followed, and then (about 40 minutes later), I really did start getting ready for bed, and checked my email (it's part of the bedtime ritual) to find I had sold a second story, this one to The Sockdolager.

Two stories in one hour! It is a record for me, beating out my previous record of two stories in one year.

Go me!