Livre d'Or

This has been brewing for a while, but I'm sticking my flag in the ground:
I won't be drawn into generational conflict in the LGBTQ+ community
( rant )

In short, yes, it's uncomfortable when parts of your culture are rejected by the generation following you. But the real enemy is straight people who hold actual social power to harm Queer people, not teenagers who are sometimes clumsy and inept in their rebellion against the previous generation.

So some people have been reviving the old Three weeks for Dreamwidth fest, where people try to be a bit more active here for three weeks starting 25 April and including the anniversary of DW's official opening, May 1^st. May 1^st 2009, in fact, which arguably makes this year DW's bnei mitzvah.

ysabetwordsmith has set some prompt questions, the first being: What brings you to Three Weeks for Dreamwidth? How many times have you participated in this fest?

( meta about blogging and 3W4DW )

I posted yesterday about hosting a friend with two very young children, and the ensuing discussion reminded me about the broader issue of how adults can keep children safe without over-protecting them. ( noodling, I promise the actual links are coming up eventually )

Via marina on Twitter, rivkat's absolutely fascinating summary of a book titled Not gay: sex between straight white men. Really amazing stuff about the amount of homosexual contact involved in heterosexuality! It relates to some ideas I've come across before, heterosexuality as a constructed identity; contexts in which straight masculinity may include seeking sexual contact with other men; challenging the idea of sexual orientation.

It's also making me revisit the concept that at least some of homophobia isn't really about who one is attracted to or about what sex acts one enjoys; it's primarily about gender policing. This sense that men may want to take part in sexual acts with other men, but as long as they don't form loving relationships or have mutually consensual, respectful sex, then they're not gay. Which has the terrifying corollary that this construction of straight masculinity implies that men who behave lovingly and respectfully towards female partners are also targets for gay-bashing. Example: the Sad Puppies accusing Scalzi, who is well known to be a man married to a woman, of being gay, because he's also well known to care about not being a sexist jerk. Example: pre-adolescent and young teen boys somewhat illogically calling it "gay" when a boy expresses romantic interest a girl instead of talking trash about her.

rivkat's piece almost flips the common wisdom about orientation. It almost seems like straightness is an identity, nearly independent of attraction and sexual behaviour, whereas gayness / queerness is mostly something that emerges from choices about sex and gender expression or performance, or even a political stance. Anyway, read rivkat's post, she's saying all this stuff much more articulately than I can.

I have what is by now looking like rather an ambitious goal to post 10 pointer posts to other content by 15^th May. Anyway, here's the first: did you know that Jan Morris has a Tumblr, janmorris? (Discovered via a Making Light comment thread, I think.)

( commentary, plus Reading Wednesday )

Dreamwidth officially came into public beta on 1^st May 2009, and I started using it as my primary journalling space then. So today approximately marks the day that I've been on DW for as long as I was on LJ (I actually joined at the end of May in 2003). Twelve years of blogging, six there, six here.

( anniversary thinky-thoughts )

People are doing three_weeks_for_dw again this year, and I've slightly missed the boat as we're already a week into the three week fest. But I might try to repeat what I suggested a couple of years back and follow siderea's community building recipe. In the remaining two weeks, I can probably manage three diary entries or surveys and one long thinky post; I am not sure about ten pointers, as that will require me to post nearly every day, but I'll have a go.

In honour of the fest, nanila has created bitesizedreading, which I think is a really good idea. And another way to make sure that supposedly little, unimportant things end up here rather than just forgotten about or posted to more ephemeral places like Twitter or FB.

And oursin is posting dear little original fiction snippets which I highly recommend if you don't already follow her.

forestofglory asked to hear more about how your research is going. Goodness only knows I'll take any excuse to talk shop, but I have to be a bit cautious about what I post online regarding work that's currently in progress. So I'm going to take a slightly different tack approaching this question, and instead talk for a bit about why I'm interested in what I'm interested in.

( cancer cell biology )

I am going to have to keep the exact details fairly vague, but with that caveat I'm totally happy to answer any questions. These sorts of essays always end up being both too technical and over-simplified, especially when I just type them as the thoughts occur to me, without very much planning.

Got into a discussion with damerell about the fact that so many people have left LJ and DW and all gone to Facebook, which is just unspeakably awful. And ayngelcat chimed in with the comment that it is't Facebook that everybody's gone to, but Tumblr.

I tend to pontificate about FB fairly regularly, but hey, one more can't hurt. ( pontification within )

Is there anything DW can do to get these people back? One thing that would help would be having a usable mobile app, and another would be replacing the sack-of-crap RTE with a modern point-and-click system for posting, including pictures and embedded media without having to hand-code your own HTML. But I suspect that even if those features ever get further than a half-hearted spec, it may not be enough or too late to deal with fragmentation. Trying to be a rival to FB and Tumblr is a mug's game, that much is sure. The only hope I have for getting people back is for DW to be a place people go as well as Facebook and Tumblr (and Twitter, Pinboard, Instragram and any number of other sites that wouldn't be on topic for this post). However, to end on a positive note, these days DW is far more active and lively with ongoing conversations than LJ, and in lots of ways I like that it's small, I like that it still has the ethos of what denise calls a "Mom and Pop business". And, y'know, I've been here 4 years and I'm still very content with my online home; four years in to my time on LJ I was already casting around for some less evil / annoying alternative.

According to some, April is National Poetry Month. (Pace siderea: what nation? The Nation of Internet.) My brother is a poet, and I feel like a bad sister for not paying enough attention to poetry, not really having any opinions about it let alone engaging with the form. So I'm going to make some attempt to mark the season.

The other day I was talking to a friend from synagogue and he spontaneously recited WH "Supertramp" Davies' Leisure. It is an utterly terrible poem, it's Hallmarky and bathetic and doesn't even really scan properly. But my friend still has it by heart from his schooldays some three quarters of a century ago. I wonder if when I'm in my 80s I will be able to recite Stopping by woods on a snowy evening (which I learned for a recitation competition when I was seven) or some of the mostly Romantic poetry I learned from my father.

Talking of recitable, rythmic verse, legionseagle posted a rather good Kipling pastiche recently. It's very common to write more or less parodic versions of If, but surprisingly hard to do it well.

I've also been moved by several less formal, almost tending to the blank verse pieces recently. ursulav made a poignant post reaching out to Muslims in the wake of the Boston attacks and the inevitable wave of racism in response. And someone in the comments posted a snippet by Adrienne Rich which maybe helps, if anything can help in the face of shocking violence like that.

And in a locked discussion, a friend linked to a poem called Hair published in Stone Telling. That touched me somewhere very deep. It's not literally true of how I feel about my hair, but it's a poem, it's not a political manifesto for me to sign up to or refute. I'm not genderqueer in the way Gurney describes in that poem. But it's true that my hip-length hair is a part of who I am that is much more significant than the fact that I happen to be female, and it's also true that people make assumptions about my gender because I have very long hair. And I don't think I can claim the fierceness of that closing line: This is the flag I bring to the battles of my days., not for myself, but I am somehow heartened to know that someone out there is saying that.

highlyeccentric is one of the people who have been posting a bunch of poems, not just for April but for the whole of 2013. There's a lot of stuff that is completely new to me, some I bounce off because I don't have the degree of literacy in poetry I do in prose, and some I really like. In particular, this piece entitled The failure of language, by Jacqueline Berger (according to Wiki a contemporary American poet), really meant something to me. I want more people to see:

Everything we love fails, I didn’t tell my students,
if by fails we mean ends or changes,
if by love we mean what sustains us.
Language is what honors the vanishing.
Or is language what slows the leaving?
Or does it only deepen what we know of loss?

I am even considering copying it into my book of true things, which a dear friend gave me a long time ago when I was dealing with loss, loss of a friend and loss of a childish worldview built on a sense of fairness. Except in the 15 years since I've never quite found anything I'm certain enough of to write in the book, it's remained blank. If I wrote poetry, I'd write something about the symbolism of a friend comforting me with the gift of a blank book, and how it still comforts me that I might one day find something true enough and important enough to write down in it.

I haven't seen any signs of people doing the three_weeks_for_dw thing this year. If we were doing it, I think it would start today, cos it's usually the end of April and beginning of May, around the anniversary of open beta. So let's say hypothetically 22^nd April – 12^th May.

It's no longer really the case that DW is limited because people here aren't actively enough posting content; people who want to be here are here, other people aren't, and lots of people have drifted away from this type of journalling / community-based long-form blogging altogether and probably there's nothing DW can do to get them back. There are still basically no active communities here other than RP communities, but personal journals seem to be pretty solid, I have plenty to read, I'm meeting new interesting people and most of my posts get lively comment discussions.

This time last year, I posted about community building. Although I didn't do a formal Three Weeks thing, because I was a month from my wedding at that point, I have for the whole of the year tried to follow siderea's advice and make more frequent "pointer" posts with links to other content. I haven't managed three link posts a week, nothing like, but I have definitely noticed that pointer posts do encourage discussion, and they do encourage me to post fairly regularly even when I feel like I don't have time to make a full, polished post. I was remarking to a friend recently that I love the curate / propagate internet less than I loved the original content internet that dominated a few years ago, but if that's the milieu we're living in, it certainly does seem sensible to participate in curating and propagating to the best of my ability.

Anyway, I don't want to commit to post every day during the Three Weeks, especially not if I'm the only person who has noticed the season, that really wouldn't make for much of a meme! But I would like to increase my posting rate a bit if I can, because I think that's good in general, and the season is just an excuse. In order to achieve this, I need to resolve to be less perfectionist, so I want to make some off-the-cuff posts, not waiting until I have a honed argument with lots of detailed citations (and ending up never posting half the things that come into my head).

What I'd most appreciate would be some suggestions of topics. Please comment with titles, questions, prompts, or just general topic areas about which you'd like a few paragraphs of my random opinions. And feel free to join in with any degree of challenge to post a bit more during the coming three weeks, you're very welcome to borrow my idea or not if some other motivation for posting more suits you better.

Post queue

1. The Books of Maccabees
2. Why has everyone gone to Facebook?
   2a... or Tumblr
3. My research and supervising a PhD student
4. Anglo-Jewry, politics, the Board of Deputies
5. Baking experiments