I’ve been trying to avoid this meme, but I’ve been tagged yet again, so here goes

1. Since I left for college, I have lived in 5 states. I have lived in 11 “urban areas”. I have had 25 addresses. In 22 years folks. I feel permanent in my new zip code, and it’s a pretty alien feeling.
2. My feelings about buying a home define ambivalence.
3. I followed the Grateful Dead for most of a decade
4. Jerry Garcia died the day I moved from California to NY for graduate school. I learned about it just west of Rochester, when I turned on the radio to check local news for my new home. I will always feel like a part of me died that day
5. I like to fantasize about knowing how to do things. I have very little patience for actually learning how to do them. I am told this is a very Pisces trait.
6. There are three hobbies I am committed to learning and taking up: belly dancing, glass blowing, and gardening
7. I am completely fascinated with Australia. I have avoided reading and learning about Australia so I wouldn’t become a weird obsessive. Instead, I’m afraid I’ve made a bit of a fetish out of it
8. I am currently saving money to go to Australia next summer for a conference, and a two week vacation touring Queensland. And I now have given myself permission to research it obsessively.
9. I have only very recently  begun enjoying children. Other people’s children. It was a huge relief to realize that I remain quite happy about having none of my own.
10. I have 13 nieces and nephews. Two more are on their way. The eldest is 8. The eldest in Chicago is in first grade. Only 2 do not live in Chicago.
11. I get very frustrated when I do not have a vocabulary for describing my thoughts. Design and sound often fall into this trap.
12. I enjoy simple cooking. I am very afraid of multi-course ‘company’ cooking
13. I don’t bake. In my family this is considered odd. But I’ve never felt the need to bake, when mom and sis and bro and cousins are all so keen to do it. I make a wide array of tasty appetizers, though
14. I’m vegetarian. Have been since 1989.
15. I stopped eating seafood on the first leg of a family trip to Cape Cod when I was 8. I got very sick in a posh seafood resteraunt, and it was very traumatic.
16. I miss the positive peer pressure of living with folks who hold me to a higher standard than I hold myself
17. I am happy being single, but I am deeply afraid of dying alone.
18. I hate arena rock
19. Even in my dotage, I remain an idealist.
20. I am working on bringing my internal forthrightness and my external conflict-avoidance into better agreement.
21. I would rather be alone than be is a bad relationship
22. I have never seen a Rocky movie, a Bond movie, or any of the Godfather films
23. My reading materials theses days are either work-related or speculative fiction. Work, or reality escape
24. Of all the forces of the universe, I feel inertia most strongly.
25. An enigma: I love sleeping in my own bed more than almost anything. And yet, I rarely go to bed early enough to get enough sleep.

My pirate name the first is Dirty Mary Rackham

You’re the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean — not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. You have the good fortune of having a good name, since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham) is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate.    Arr!

I also managed to get pegged Ale Drinking Ivan and Dirty Wendy Whitfurrow. Dirty Wendy sounds like a bit of fun (and friendfeed would not let me take her name! silly friendfeed!):

You look good in Spandex and can tell ‘light purple’ from ‘mauve’. You can’t make up your mind, but at least you don’t sweat when you use your super strength. If you would just stop clouding your co-worker’s minds for sleazy sexual favors we’d all be relieved. You use your flying ability even if you’ve been drinking. If only you had super speed it wouldn’t take you all day to clean the house. You could have sex with the Fantastic Four and still want more. No wonder you’re so popular with the Justice League!

rules of the meme:  Go to www.musicoutfitters.com. Type the year of your high school graduation [or first year, if still in high school] into the search function. Retrieve the Top 100 songs from that year. Strike through the songs you hate(d). Underline the songs you like(d). Bold the songs you love(d). Leave blank those you don’t care about or don’t remember. Annotate at will.

I graduated in 1986, but I find this list from 1983 to be so much more defining of me. And since it’s my blog, I’ll meme it how I wanna!

1. Every Breath You Take, Police
2. Billie Jean, Michael Jackson
3. Flashdance… What A Feelin, Irene Cara
4. Down Under, Men At Work
5. Beat It, Michael Jackson
6. Total Eclipse Of The Heart, Bonnie Tyler
7. Maneater, Daryl Hall and John Oates
8. Baby Come To Me, Patti Austin and James Ingram
9. Maniac, Michael Sembello
10. Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This), Eurythmics
11. Do You Really Want To Hurt Me, Culture Club
12. You And I, Eddie Rabbitt and Crystal Gayle
13. Come On Eileen, Dexy’s Midnight Runners
14. Shame On The Moon, Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet Band
15. She Works Hard For The Money, Donna Summer
16. Never Gonna Let You Go, Sergio Mendes
17. Hungry Like The Wolf, Duran Duran
18. Let’s Dance, David Bowie
19. Twilight Zone, Golden Earring
20. I Know There’s Something Going On, Frida
21. Jeopardy, Greg Kihn Band
22. Electric Avenue, Eddy Grant
23. She Blinded Me With Science, Thomas Dolby
24. Africa, Toto
25. Little Red Corvette, Prince
26. Back On The Chain Gang, Pretenders
27. Up Where We Belong, Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes
28. Mr. Roboto, Styx
29. You Are, Lionel Richie
30. Der Kommissar, After The Fire
31. Puttin’ On The Ritz, Taco
32. Sexual Healing, Marvin Gaye
33. (Keep Feeling) Fascination, Human League
34. Time (Clock Of The Heart), Culture Club
35. The Safety Dance, Men Without Hats
36. Mickey, Toni Basil
37. You Can’t Hurry Love, Phil Collins
38. Separate Ways, Journey
39. One On One, Daryl Hall and John Oates
40. We’ve Got Tonight, Kenny Rogers and Sheena Easton
41. 1999, Prince
42. Stray Cat Strut, Stray Cats
43. Allentown, Billy Joel
44. Stand Back, Stevie Nicks
45. Tell Her About It, Billy Joel
46. Always Somethmg There To Remind Me, Naked Eyes
47. Truly, Lionel Richie
48. Dirty Laundry, Don Henley
49. The Girl Is Mine, Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney
50. Too Shy, Kajagoogoo
51. Goody Two Shoes, Adam Ant
52. Rock The Casbah, Clash
53. Our House, Madness
54. Overkill, Men At Work
55. Is There Something I Should Know, Duran Duran
56. Gloria, Laura Branigan Liked then, HATE now!
57. Affair Of The Heart, Rick Springfield
58. She’s A Beauty, Tubes This was my very first concert. Opening act? The Plimsouls. By the way, the Tubes were really *dirty* in their stage show, especially for Great America!
59. Solitaire, Laura Branigan
60. Don’t Let It End, Styx
61. How Am I Supposed To Live Without You, Laura Branigan
62. China Girl, David Bowie
63. Come Dancing, Kinks
64. Promises, Promises, Naked Eyes
65. The Other Guy, Little River Band
66. Making Love Out Of Nothing At All, Air Supply
67. Family Man, Daryl Hall and John Oates
68. Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’, Michael Jackson
69. I Won’t Hold You Back, Toto
70. All Right, Christopher Cross
71. Straight From The Heart, Bryan Adams
72. Heart To Heart, Kenny Loggins
73. My Love, Lionel Richie
74. I’m Still Standing, Elton John
75. Hot Girls In Love, Loverboy
76. It’s A Mistake, Men At Work
77. I’ll Tumble 4 Ya, Culture Club
78. All This Love, Debarge
79. Your Love Is Driving Me Crazy, Sammy Hagar
80. Heartbreaker, Dionne Warwick
81. Faithfully, Journey
82. Steppin’ Out, Joe Jackson
83. Take Me To Heart, Quarterflash
84. (She’s) Sexy + 17, Stray Cats
85. Try Again, Champaign
86. Dead Giveaway, Shalamar
87. Lawyers In Love, Jackson Browne
88. What About Me, Moving Pictures
89. Human Nature, Michael Jackson
90. Photograph, Def Leppard
91. Pass The Dutchie, Musical Youth
92. True, Spandau Ballet
93. Far From Over, Frank Stallone
94. I’ve Got A Rock ‘N’ Roll Heart, Eric Clapton
95. It Might Be You, Stephen Bishop
96. Tonight I Celebrate My Love, Peabo Bryson and Roberta Flack
97. You Got Lucky, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
98. Don’t Cry, Asia
99. Breaking Us In Two, Joe Jackson
100. Fall In Love With Me, Earth, Wind and Fire

There’s a question floating around the SF blogosphere asking for folks 10 favorite science fiction works by women since 2000. The question is inspired by a 2003 interview with Gwyneth Jones, where she listed out her answer to the same question.

I tend to read a lot more speculative fiction and fantasy than science fiction, mostly because I am drawn more to worldbuilding and mythological underpinnings than I care about the technological innovations or infrastructure of a world. But lately, my feminist science fiction reading group has been struggling for titles, and we have done a lot of revisiting of old classics in the past year. So this question caught my attention.

Here’s my list of what SF written by women I have read from the various lists. And I’d recommend all of them, they are good reads!

1. Karen Traviss, City of Pearl (I’ve read and enjoyed the whole series. It reads like fluff but wrestles with deep issues and gives your brain plenty to mull over long after the book is closed)
2. L. Timmel Duchamp, Alanya to Alanya, (I didn’t love the read, but the material has staying power, and I have decided I am compelled to read the next book. I believe there are 4 in the series)
3. Liz Williams, Ghost Sister (fascinating. Wish there were more in the same world! Great book for tech, if that’s your thing. Also a facinating take on environmentalism, religion, and colinialism)
4. Octavia Butler, Fledgling
5. Elizabeth Bear, Carnival
6. Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswomen series
7. Lyda Morehouse, Archangel Protocol (I really wish the rest of the series was still in print)
8. Julie E. Czerneda, Survival: Species Imperative
9. Louise Marley, The Child Goddess
10. Nancy Kress Beggars in Spain

And here is the compiled list of titles from the various websites linked above (minus what I have read), mostly so I can keep track of them.

• Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm
• Cyteen by CJ Cherryh
• Synners by Pat Cadigan
• Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler
• Tricia Sullivan’s Maul;
• Gwyneth Jones’
  • Life
  • Bold as Love
  • Midnight Lamp
  • White Queen
  • Castles Made of Sand
  • Rainbow Bridge
• Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army;
• Justina Robson’s Living Next-Door to the God of Love; Natural History
• Jan Morris’s Hav
• Susan Palwick’s Shelter;
• Maureen McHugh’s Nekropolis;
• Jo Walton’s Farthing;
• Kathleen Ann Goonan’s
  • In War Time
  • Light Music
• Josephine Saxton – the Queen Of The States
• Leigh Kennedy – The Journal Of Nicholas The American
• Sue Thomas – Correspondence
• Judith Moffett – Pennterra
• Michaela Roessner – Vanishing Point
• Kit Reed – @Expectations
• Andrea Hairston – Mindscape
• Lisa Goldstein’s Tourists,
• Patricia Geary’s Strange Toys
• Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark,
• Elizabeth Bear
  • Undertow
  • Hammered
  • Scardown
    
  • Worldwired

• Silver Screen is Justina Robson’s first novel;
• Nylon Angel, Code Noir and Crash Deluxe are by Marianne de Pierres;
• Time Future is by Maxine McArthur.
• Warchild by Karin Lowachee,
• Spin State by Chris Moriarty,
• Tricia Sullivan should certainly be in there
• Linda Nagata
  • The Bohr Maker
  • Vast
  • Memory
• Timmel Duchamp’s Marq’ssan Cycle -  Tsunami, Renegade, Blood in the Fruit, and Stretto.
• Empire of Bone by Liz Williams
• The Poison Master by Liz Williams
• Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson.
• Vatta Series – multiple books (Elizabeth Moon)
• Spin state and Spin Control – Chris Moriarty

I have been avoiding packing by sorting through my digital life, and spent some quality time yesterday with the Speculative Fiction folder in my Bloglines account. As a result, I have a significant starters list for next year’s reading.

I can’t remember what I have said here about my reading habits, so perhaps some background is in order. In the early 1990s I discovered feminist speculative fiction, and taught a seminar on Religion in Feminist Utopian fiction in 1997. At that time I joined on online book group devoted to feminist science fiction and fantasy (now largely dead, a victim of 2.0 technologies. Remind me some time to do a post on how blogging — I lead, I own, I direct — and listservs are not the same, and which I think foster community, and the whyfor blogging can kill a community). When I came to my current POW I was invited to join a faculty Feminist Scifi book group, and have happily been engaged there for three years (although we have come up short on new authors this past year, coincident with the demise of the online books group. I have missed the steady influx of recommended authors and books! Many fruitful blog posts there about the state of feminist scifi, and feminism in literature might spring from this statement). Which is all to say, I like a pretty specific slice of speculative fiction

It would be easy to say I only read feminist specfic (I have no strong preference for SF over fantasy — those aren’t the qualities that draw me. Both have qualities that can drive me away though!), but it’s harder to define that than it is to say it. Basically, my bottom line is that if the offends my feminism, I’m not interested. (hard to find that distinction on the book spine though!)

So, what draws me?

• Excellent world-building.
• Interesting characters.
• The absence of buxom maidens and stalwart knights.
• Boys’ quests are a total yawn (if anyone would like top pull the Aes Sedaii out of the Wheel of Time books, give me a call!).
• Boys with toys are also a yawn. Whether the toys be guns, spaceships or lances matter not.
• A world with complex religion is always a plus.
• If you are writing the Fae you have to work very hard to tell me why I should read your book.
• If the point of the book is romance, I’m not that interested. But if romance happens along the way, that’s fine with me. And I am equally engaged with reading any kind of romance — it’s the characters that matter, not their species or gender. Unless we’re talking werewolves or vampires, in which you can kill me now. Laurel Hamilton put a stake in that microgenre for me a while back.
• Some sex in my story is fine, but I can find my own porn if that’s going to be the point of the book.
• I am horrified by how much I like some books I hate — where interesting worlds and interesting characters trump horrid writing.

Favorite authors? Sherri Tepper, Guy Gavriel Kay, Octavia Butler, NIcola Griffith, Suzy McKee Charnas, Marge Piercy, Elizabeth Hand, Anne Bishop, Marie Jakober, Pat Murphy, Juliet Marillier, Jacquline Carey, Mary Doria Russell, Louise Marley, Elizabeth Bear has caught my eye, Lois Bujold…a few names  to start.

So, enough background! The books that caught my eye after about an hour scanning my months-neglected  feeds is below. Tell me what you think, what you know, what you like!

Elizabeth Bear’s The Promethean Age

• Blood & Iron
• Whiskey & Water
• Ink & Steel
• Hell & Earth

Elizabeth Bear’s Jacob’s Ladder series (proposed trilogy)

• Dust

Jeanne Duprau  Book of Ember

• The City of Ember
• The People of Sparks
• The Prophet of Yonwood
• The Diamond of Darkhold

Karen Miller The Riven Kingdom

Galen Beckett The Magicians & Mrs. Quent

Trudi Canavan–Black Magician Trilogy

• Age of the Five
• The Traitor Spy
• The Magician’s Apprentice (prequel)

Esteban Martín & Andreu Carranza.  The Gaudi Key

Justin Allen Slaves of the Shinar

Sherrilyn Kenyon Acheron

Marie Brennan, Midnight Never Come

Kim Wilkins The Veil of Gold

Gail Z. Martin

• The Summoner
• The Blood King
• Dark Haven

Jay Lake Mainspring

Dora Machado Stonewiser: The Heart of the Stone.

Dorothy Hearst Promise of the Wolves

Tananarive Due Blood Colony

Patrice Sarath Gordath Wood

Judith Moffett:

• The Ragged World
• Time, Like an Ever rolling Stream
• The Bird Shamans

David Anthony Durham Acacia – Book One: The War With the Mein

Sarah Ash Flight Into Darkness.

Jane Lindskold Thirteen Orphans

Greg Bear City at the End of Time

C.E. Murphy The Queen’s Bastard

Earlier this summer, Amanda and Jenica both blogged this meme, and I’ve been meaning to take my turn for a while. Here is my edition of Library Thing’s most unread books. Main rules are below — I’ve also asterisked the titles that are sitting on my shelves, but I haven’t ever started. (I mark books I own but haven’t read yet with “toread” on LT – how do you track those books?)

Tune in again later this week for musings about Joss Whedon and JMS and Jeremiah and Serenity and gender in men’s wild wild wests. 

This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked “unread” by LibraryThing users. The rules: bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. Pop a note in the comments if you’ve done this one (and help me keep the dream alive).

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
*Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
*Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
*Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
*Middlesex
*Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
*The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
*Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
*Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
*The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
*Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

]]> http://rudibrarian.wordpress.com/2008/08/10/librarythings-most-unread/feed/ 2 rudibrarian http://rudibrarian.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/my-manifesto/ http://rudibrarian.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/my-manifesto/#comments Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:37:03 +0000 rudibrarian http://rudibrarian.wordpress.com/?p=11 ]]>

I’m having a moment of disgust and revolution. The traitor-in-chief signed a bill into law today, designed to (excuse me while I try to stop throwing up) “protect the American people by all means possible”. The expansion of eavesdropping powers and shielding of companies who so unlawfully and willfully violated the privacy and integrity of America in no way protects the American people. It is in fact the bright clear line that tells the American people that whenever the bloodless coup actually took place, democracy has fallen and America is no longer the Land of The Free.

Which I guess means that I am taking this opportunity to declare myself an enemy of the state. Which is really only dangerous if the bastards enthroned in DC are as deeply treasonous as I think they are, in which case they have already marked me — feminist, librarian, vegetarian, academic, subscriber to Ms. and Utne Magazines, Zmag, and an ACLU (geez, throw in coop and CSA to boot!) member — as an enemy of theirs. I also support MoveOn, TomPaine, and a variety of environmental protections.

I am so disgusted by Obama, by congress, by the government, and the people who have voted for all members therein.

I therefore declare:

• I stand for an educated populace, and an affordable and excellent public education system
• I stand for Freedom — to think, to believe, to pray, to speak as I choose (or don’t)
• Freedom to travel without violation
• Freedom to not have to declare my identity and my politics to any one unless I so actively choose
• Freedom to assemble, and freedom to talk to whom I choose
• Freedom to pursue intellectual pursuits, wherever they may take me
• Freedom to read anything I want, for any reason
• Freedom to love whomever I choose
• I believe that all people have the right to expect they will not be surveilled –by their own government or anybody else– without explicit and substantiated reasoned cause
• I believe in due process, and the process of law
• I believe no person has the right or authority to own another, in either explicit or metaphorical terms
• I believe it is the primary responsibility of my government to protect the freedoms and rights enumerated above

…but instead I have the crazy days!

With a stack of ILLed work related books in front of me, all bringing various levels of nownownow with them (not to mention articles to read and books to review…), I’m feeling an urge for lazy hazy hammock breezy days to immerse myself in escapist fiction!

The urge to dive into a good novel has not been ameliorated by the fact that my campus book group has begun discussing books to select for discussion next semester, and my inbox is full of intriguing titles, like the back-in-print Egalia’s Daughters and Swastika Night, the never heard of The Hearing Trumpet, and The Euguelionne: A Triptych Novel. Long favored authors like Lois McMaster Bujold, Sheri Tepper, Sarah Zettel,and Elisabeth Vonarburg have books under consideration as well.

To top off all that temptation, I finally picked up my fiction box that Amazon failed to deliver before my vacation trip. and am thus faced with  four books enticing enough to get me to lay down some money for them (I only travel with owned paperbacks, and leave behind finished books in the airport). There’s book 2 of a Jane Lindskold series I just discovered and fell for, and a dark-ish book by a new author (C.S. Friedman’s Feast of Souls) I decided to try out. There’s the long awaited final book of Zettel’s Isvalta novels, and taunting me, harassing me, demanding I bury it in the yard or pick it up and read it? Pratchett & Gaiman’s collabaratory Good Omens

They’re just going to have to wait for dog days of August. Or rather, I’ll have to wait till then.

wish me luck!

I took a little break from work this afternoon to go to the local farmstand before the rains hit. Including a stop at the co-op, I spent all of $35 on an awful lot of amazing local and organic yumminess, suported local businesses and foodcrafters, and made a significant first step towards meeting two of my summer goals

1. eating better, healthier, more locally and
2. paying more attention to the quantity of my shopping so as to waste less

Today’s trip was in support of two recipes, and I stayed mostly on list. Well, except for the apple batard (that was supposd to be a baguette) and the 2 quarts of local organic strawberries. Because, well, they were there. And local and organic and ripe and aromatic….

The recipes I was shopping for? Zucchini Ribbons with Garlic and Lemon Pepper and Wheat Berry And Barley Salad With Smoked Mozzarella I forgot mozzarella in my local goat cheese lust, and the potatoes are for a dish to go with that. If I don’t make specific plans for fresh goat cheese, I tend to put it over hot noodles (with garlic infused EVOO…). Which is fantastic, but lacks a certain degree of healthiness.

So, a quick trip to the store to get the mozzarella and maybe some rosemary, backed up with the edamame, cereal, milk/coffee and eggs already on hand (and the raspberry sorbet), I’m going to see if this is a week’s worth of food. What do you think?

So, the bounty??

local:

apple batard
goat cheese
butter
2 qts strawberries
a small handful chard
2 large tomatoes
garlic
red onion
chives
2 zucchini
8 new yellow potatoes (adoro? I’ve never of this kind before)

not local
pistachios
avocado
lemon

This post is the sort of thing I was thinking about when I launched this blog. thoughts and wonderings from outside my professional sphere, but things I still engage intellectually. This post makes me feel very exposed, however. Please be gentle!

There was an interesting story this morning on Morning Edition, about the conflicts between churches and legally recognized same sex unions, and it has my brain whirring around.

A note before we start: I fully support same sex civil unions. I also support heterosexual civil unions. I believe that a civil union is all the government has the power to convey. Marriage is the eternal mating of souls, a magical and spiritual act, and outside the realm of government. What government can do is provide legal incentives, tax changes, ease name changing, “legitimate” offspring (which has to do with ancient inheritance laws) and make de facto certain other inheritance rights under a legal status it conveys. Legal stuff.  All that is civil union. And I think everyone who is so lucky as to find the person they love, and who loves them back, the person they want to spend the rest of their life with, their partner, everyone who is just that lucky and brave should be allowed the right for legal protections of the unit they form.

I also believe that religions should be free from legal interference into their practices and actions. They’ll change or die on their own abilities and perceptions, and social forces will play a role. But I support a thick tall wall (with a moat even!) between Church and State.

And I also support a legal system that makes sense, because if it isn’t built on sense and precedent, it can’t stand up over time. Legal decision based on anything else will crumble! If the legal bricks aren’t in place, point out where they are missing and build a stronger foundation! Anything else is just rigid quicksand! So please take the following with that in mind: this is not a critique of same sex marriage, or the rights of gay and lesbian folks. It is a critique of our legal system, and how religion is enacted in America.

Well, that was a bot of a long digression… this morning’ story included a piece about a lesbian couple who wanted to hold their NJ civil union ceremony in a Methodist owned pavilion on a bordwalk, a place where marriages are often held. They were denied, and sued. Not only did they win the suit, the church lost their tax exempt status for the pavilion and the surrounding area. Another couple sued the photographers who told them they didn’t shoot gay marriage ceremonies (because of their religious beliefs).

I don’t see these two as comparable at all! The photographers were more clearly discriminatory, although the story was cast in the light of the photographers as employers, and the discrimination flowed from there. I saw it as the couple was the employer and the photographers refused to work for them. Phrased that way, is it still discrimination? It’s unpleasant, and doesn’t make me happy, but don’t folks hold the power in deciding who they wish to work for?  And the reason this story was included in the news piece was because of the religious motivation of the photographers: they wanted to act in accordance with their religious beliefs. NPR didn’t really take that up in the telling, but it’s an interesting wrinkle. If the photographers are the employees, they are free to act on their religious beliefs in terms of who they work for, right? Aren’t we all? If the photographers are the employers, different laws hold precedence and if they refuse to take on a client due to their religious belefs, that’s another box of monkeys. NPR dropped the ball on spinning out those ramifications!

The first story, the main stoiry, engaged me for all the reasons that I pursued a PhD in religion and politics, religion in America. I think that Freedom of Religon in America has never been really enacted, and instead we have a freedom to beleive whatever we want, but we must act in ways that resemble Christianity.

For example, Islam will always be a hard sell for American businesses to work with, because of the floating calendar. Feast and fast days and other major holidays happen on fixed days in the Islamic calendar, but float on the Gregorian calendar. Businesses can’t deal with that sort of scheduling; Native Americans face similar lack of acceptance (and significant employment discrimination) because their holidays (especially the western peoples) are often called at the moment and not scheduled on any sort of calendar. We could talk about the lack of acceptance of peyote as a sacrament for the Native American Church, denials of candles and incense and access to the open air under the full or new moon for Wiccans in prison, even the difficulties faced by observant Jews who won’t work on Saturdays. Dare I bring up polygamous marriages based on scriptural precedence (I will say that government has an obligation to protect the underage, and and am not equating acceptance of religiously based polyamory with abuse of young children and forced marriage of minors). I studied New Religious Movements (aka cults) so I have lots of examples of the ways that people who practice religions that don’t behave like Christianity are discriminated against and denied rights. And I would love to see true freedom of religious behavior in this country, accepted by all.

But that also means I have to accept the same rights of practice for Christian groups. And I am frankly baffled at how a Methodist-owned chapel can lose it’s status for following the beliefs of it’s church. And it makes me very uncomfortable; it is a huge crack in the Church/State wall, a weak and tenuous wall to begin with.

This got to be very long, and I feel like I haven;t spun it all the way I want to, so I’ll sum up the high points:

• religious freedom is legally assured in America
• religious freedom is less frequently enacted in America
• I support the rights of all to civil union
• I am deeply worried about legal decisions based on what the law ought to say but perhaps doesn’t
• I worry that the wall between church and state is crumbling

Ani DiFranco is playing Disneyland.

I am without words.

well, not entirely…

News of this came across the ACRL Women’s Studies section discussion list (she’s playing downtown Disney during the ALA Annual meeting n two weeks). It came without comment, but I find it mind-boggling.

Feminism’s independent woman. A fierce denier(?) of The System. Perhaps the most independent musician to ever hit it big time. A woman, poet, singer who opened my eyes and made me question so much (including the role of happiness on fierceness in women’s creative spirit). A woman/musician/entrepreneur who rejected ever rule she ever met

Is playing DISNEYLAND???? The icon of The System. Capitalism by playing along. The epitome of selling out.

My spirit folds a little under the news.

yesterday a friend of mine convinced me to adopt two tomato plants, comparing them to a stray kitten who will die without my help. The only problem being that I am very good at keeping stray kittens alive, and not so good at keeping plants alive. Seriously, I’ve kept three plants alive in my entire life (four if you count the air plant I had in third grade). I also have a secret: I have never gardened. I used to have a spring ritual of planning a garden in my head, and once in college some roommates and I covered a patch of grass to kill it overwinter in anticipation of gardening in that spot. But I’ve never actually put trowel to dirt and gardened. Add into this the fact that my apartment is surrounded by open meadow and forest and that I am visited daily by my small brown woodland furred friend, a few families of deer, clutches of turkey and a variety of other woodsy beasties, an dgardening sounds too much like a war zone to be enjoyable.

But I took the tomatoes. We planted them in pots (and in an old popcorn gift bucket. See, it’s good I’m a packrat!) and made psuedo-greenhouses/deer protectors by wrapping the tomato cages in clear plastic, and set them on my deck. I got surprisingly attached to them, checking on them every 20 minutes or so, looking at the growing things right there on my deck! Really, to the plants themselves, not just the idea of fresh yummy brandywines in August!

And then it poured. And now I am nervous. Can potted plants, ones that were just transplanted that day, survive the kind of deluge we had last night? How delicate are they? Because I’ve realized that these are my trial balloons. If I can keep them alive and if they can survive the deer I might plant more things in the future. But if my balloon goes down on day one, I may lost impetus to trial it again next year. The gardener in my head would like incentives to grow in the world. Did the thunderstorm just steal that away, along with my brandywines?

As summer has set in and I’ve had slightly more time for leisure activities, I keep wanting to blog about things that wouldn’t really work on my professional blog. And so I decided to create Rudy’s Ramblings.

Here will be thoughts and ideas and links and other words about books, movies, food, friendship, politics, life and love. anything, really but librarianship and technology & education. Enjoy. Contribute. Participate!