camille_bacon_smith

Hope you are all having a wonderful holiday season.  Here is a little link to brighten your nights--or amaze you at the crazy.   It is actually even more awesomely cheesetastic than it looks in the vid.

We had our holiday party yesterday--everybody chipped in their per/person and we had tapas at Amada.  Yum!  Amada is one of my favorite restaurants in town--it is Jose Garces' first and it is still one of the highest rated in the city.  You need a reservation way in advance and you need lots of people to make tapas fun.  I'm not much of a planner, so I don't usually get in.  So having our party there meant we had both a reservation and lots of people.  But anyway, we had cheeses with a different sauce accompaniment for each to start, then garlic shrimp and tortilla--the sliced potato and egg kind, not the flat-bread kind. Salad, and then  Chorizo and Chicken and calamari and dessert.  We had a set menu rather than pick and choose, but all of my favorites were on it, so I was a happy camper.  So good! 

I thought livejournal was up and running again, but cannot get on it now.  Dreamwidth is also running slow--what is going on with the internets!?!

Philadelphia International Bicycle Race today--went to a race party at the Swanwicks', and hung out a bit waiting for the bikes to come up the Manayunk wall.  (link is to my pics on facebook.)  Then off to the Bach festival--Missa Brevis in A and in F.  Excellent.  Then dinner and home.  Falling down now but it was an awesome day.

edited for typos!

I heard yesterday that Joanna Russ had died.  Those of you who read this because of my fiction may not know that I used to be a scholar and I wrote about the community of fanwriters.   And that in the realm of scholars and science fiction feminists, Joanna Russ was the banner carrier, the one marching in front so that we could follow.  We corresponded on and off for over twenty years.  She didn't like computers, and I got out of the habit of snail mail, so we didnt' write as often as either of us would have liked (and often mentioned in our letters.)  I find that I miss her terribly.  This is my story about how I "met" Joanna Russ, who I respected more than I can say.  It starts as a disaster, but it had a happy ending! 

I had, of course, read Joanna Russ's fiction, and her feminist writing throughout the eighties--she was a tremendous influence on me.  But back in 1986,  I had an article in the New York Times--Spock Among the Women--and among the responses was one from Joanna Russ, who said that I had got it all wrong, that fandom  was really lesbians writing gay men's porn.  The Times sent me the letter for my response and I kind of exploded and told the Times they couldn't possibly publish the letter--that yes, there were lesbians in fandom, but they just participated like everybody else,  and some people wrote slash, but it was (at the time) a very small part of the literature and not what the Times had asked me to talk about.  Even more upsetting, the people in the article, who had allowed me to use their names, hadn't been writing slash, and some had sensitive jobs working with children.  They could lose their jobs if the school boards thought they were writing porn, which they weren't doing.  (Some school teachers and librarians were writing porn, of course, but they weren't in this article, and I never used their real names.)  The letters editor finally said that if we didn't publish Joanna's letter, we couldn't publish any of them.  I think he believed that the loss of all that proof of interest in my work would pressure me into giving in, but we were talking about lives, and a promise given, and a code of ethics I swore to when I entered my profession.  So no letters were published. I figured I had made myself another feud--the Marxists hated me for not doing Marx, and the folklorists hated me for doing popular culture, so there I was, the trifecta of shunned.

Then Enterprising Women came out, and I got a letter from Joanna Russ apologizing for her earlier letter.  As she got further into fandom, she grew to realize how much more diverse it was than she had at first thought.  And she really liked the book.  She went on to champion Enterprising Women, and became one of its biggest defenders.  And we got into a correspondence that continued sporadically to this day.

I was 30 when I went to college.  It was the eighties and Joanna's How to Suppress Women's Writing was probably the most significant book in those college years.  We used to sit around in the folklore archive reciting bits of it to each other--it was such a revelation, this community of women struggling to make a space for writing.  But the most important thing I ever learned from Joanna Russ was intellectual rigor with grace.  If new information causes you to change your mind you embrace it with your whole heart.  Joanna Russ did that better than anyone else I ever knew.

The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts is going on in town, and I spent this week dashing from one Paris-themed event to another--

Started with a play, Wanamaker's Pursuits.  John Wanamakers invented the department store (some say Bon Marche in Paris was the first department store, and it probably existed before Wanamakers, but I am not sure it existed as a department store before W.).  Anyway, the apocryphal grandson of John W. goes to Paris to buy designer fashions for the store and falls into Gertrude Stein's circle including Picasso from whom he commissions a painting because Gertrude Stein nags him about it, and a French high fashion designer, Paul Poiret, and the designer's wife and muse.  It is an interesting play, but I didn't think the lead actor did as good a job as I'd have liked at conveying the emotion of the words--still, worth the price of a ticket and an interesting night at the theater.

I don't, as a rule, talk about my writing process because I'm not the sort of person who swans about in the woods in a floaty white dress taking inspiration from the trees.  I don't walk on the shore for hours trying to decide on the single perfect word for an elm tree that is not, y'know, "elm tree."  This is more on the lines of mourning a piece of my process that I haven't exactly lost over time, but have repurposed in a way that brings in a paycheck but doesn't feed my craft. 

When I was  eight years old, I got into trouble a lot for taking my dolls apart.  I didn't want to destroy the dolls; I wanted to know what made the arms and legs move, how they fit together.  I wanted to put them back the way they were once I was done, but I didn't have the skill to do that part, so they stayed broken. I was the bad girl who broke all her toys. 

When I was 15, I was obsessed with Ernest Hemingway's sentences.   They were clear and sharp and vivid, and I wanted to own that skill.  So I took them apart, sentence by sentence, and fiddled them--tried to rewrite them better, to see what happened when I changed this element, or that one, to figure out how those elements fit together to make the sentence that I admired.  I never did improve a Hemingway sentence, though they, at least, did not have to stay broken.  I used that process--took apart what I wanted to emulate and manipulated the pieces to see how they worked--for a long time.  It didn't matter what the admired authors wrote about.  I wanted the structure, the language-- how they did it.

In my current day job, I do that in reverse--take arguments and sentences that are not clearly written, and turn them into a clear statement of our position, which teaches me a lot, actually, about identifying the flaws in my own work.  But between the job and the pages that have to be written right now, I have lost the luxury of breaking my toys to see how they work.

Brunch with friends at the Delicatessen on Chestnut--around 7th--this afternoon, then off to the Seaport Museum to hear Tom Purdom give a lecture on the Royal Navy's campaign against the West African slave trade in the 19th century.  (With a short digression into the East African campaign that closed the slave market in Zanzibar.)  Very good, interesting talk.  Then off to the City Tavern on Walnut for hot apple cider and conversation with Tom and about a dozen of the people who had attended the talk.  Nearly got knocked over by a 60 MPH gust of wind--sort of sat back into it and waited it out--but I made it  home.  Now listening to the wind blow and contemplating the laundry sorted and packed to take downstairs.  Maybe a nap first.