THREEDOM! (#4) M L Clark's Monthly Miscellanies
THREEDOM!
(#4)
M L Clark's Monthly Miscellanies
Preamble
As I note in this month's newsletter, a year ago I was all nerves while trying to launch a self-published project for the first time, as a way of "proving" that I was still on top of things despite major setbacks elsewhere in my life. Perfectionism is a trait that only brings out an unhealthy neuroticism and defeatism in me, though, and so I'm thankful to say that, a year later, it seems to have relaxed a touch.
I had meant to publish this newsletter yesterday, first of the month, after giving it one last read-through. I'd even let it rest a few days before launch, so I was sure that nothing could go wrong. But yesterday's schedule was pretty tight, so when a friend had an accident (watch yourself, cyclists!) and needed some things delivered early in the morning, it was obviously a no-brainer to drop what I was doing and assist instead. Less of a no-brainer was that I didn't fall into a funk over "failing" yet again. So, the newsletter is off by a day. Okay!
Whatever this year has been for you, I hope you've also found yourselves pleasantly surprised by at least some of its many transformations. The year ahead does not promise a clean recovery from our many social crises, and there will probably be some terrible new ones coming down the pipe, as well. We need to be kinder to ourselves, as much as we ever can be, so that we can face that work together.
As always, thanks for reading, if you do. I have a Patreon and a BuyMeACoffee account, if anything I've written here moves you to support the work. (Unless you already do, in which case, thank you again!) But mostly, I wish you safe and conscientious passage through the uncertainties surrounding Omicron. We're all learning and growing together in information about it, and doing the very best that we can.
M
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Three podcasts:
Brené Brown in the context of mega-slums and refugee camps (P1)
Behind the Bastards & the impoverished American dream (the Amway episodes) (P2)
99% Invisible, “Cute Little Monstrosities of Nature” (P3)
Three TV series:
CSI: Vegas and the struggle with “truth” (TV1)
Community, Season 6, Episode 4: “Queer Studies & Advanced Waxing” (TV2)
Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (TV3)
Three articles:
“Can ‘the people’ solve climate change? France decided to find out” (A1)
“The once and future mass-resignation and what it means for working people” (A2)
“David Graeber’s Possible Worlds” (A3)
Three ways of looking at social-media activism:
Activist campaigns are the means, not the end (SM1)
Case study in activisms, Part I: Personal context (SM2)
Case study in activisms, Part II: Asexuality and histories of oppression (SM3)
Three reflections on the writing year:
The superficiality of our uplift, Part I (WY1)
The superficiality of our uplift, Part II (WY2)
The problem with awards (WY3)
Three miscellaneous items
A quotation (M1)
As “easy” as apple pie (M2)
Simi’s “Woman” (2021) / Fela Kuti’s “Lady” (1972) (M3)
M1. A quotation
“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.”
―R. Buckminster Fuller, A Fuller View
P1. Brené Brown in the context of mega-slums and refugee camps
One of my new favourite games to play while listening to and reading content from Western activist spheres is imagining how any advice therein would work for someone in a very different cultural context. This isn’t done as a blanket repudiation of the original content, but as a thought experiment, to tease out what can be adapted to a wider range of human crises, and what would prove a challenge in other contexts. (And also, yes, sometimes to refuse the universalism of recommendations that fall apart outside of specific social frameworks.)
Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead and Unlocking Us podcasts are potent sites for this kind of “stretching” exercise, because much of their structure and content is shaped around people in positions of authority in their professional communities, or people who have been able to create—books, music, movements—in a way that reaches a wider audience. When Brown asks her guests to share their stories, a significant number involve access to institutions and systems hardwired for geopolitical exclusivity. And yet, Brown herself is acutely aware of her and many of her guests’ positioning, and she expressly reflects on the importance of finding ways to ensure that her research and discourse meaningfully extends the platform. As she noted earlier this year, in conversation over an anthology of essays about Black humanity,
I had really been grappling over the last couple of years with trying to figure out how to be more inclusive, how to present the work in a way that invited more people to see themselves. The last thing I ever wanted to do was put work in the world around shame, vulnerability, and courage, then make people feel like they had to do something extra to find themselves in it.
I thought I had controlled for that with my sample because I’ve always been hyper-vigilant about diversity in the people I interview and in the data sources. In fact, one of the earliest criticisms of my work was that the sample population actually over-indexed around Black women and Latinx folks. But I started to get comments, especially from Black women and men, comments like: You know, I’m having to work at this more to see myself in it more than I would have preferred, or more than I would have liked to have to do.
… The problem isn’t the research, the research resonates with a diverse group of people because it’s based on a diverse sample, but the way I present my research to the world does not always resonate, because I often use myself and my stories as examples, and I have a very privileged white experience. That was a huge aha for me.
—from “You Are Your Best Thing,” April 28, 2021 episode of Unlocking Us with Tarana J. Burke and Jason Reynolds, featuring the anthology You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience.
Brown’s books may very well be read by some of the same folks who wouldn’t recognize the cozy affluence in work like Eat, Pray, Love, but there is a stark difference in values between her texts and a lot of what constitutes the “self-improvement” genre.
I first started following her work, for instance, when she was in conversation with a woman who was quick to assume that the man in an anecdote Brown was sharing was going to be the “problem” in that tale. At the time, I was more accustomed to hearing women talk about self-help, affirmation, and empowerment in ways that deride men (a non-starter for me), so it caught me off-guard when Brown’s anecdote—about a husband trying to talk with her at a book signing, and revealing to her that the wife whose books she’d just signed would never in a million years allow him to be emotionally vulnerable, too—was actually about Brown realizing that her research into cultures of shame, vulnerability, and “daring greatly” needed to include men to better shift our systems.
So, Brown has a long track record of trying to make her work useful to as many people as possible, which is why it’s easy to mistake her “simple” terms and strategies for “simplistic.” The trouble is that the work is still very much of a context, and that context relies on many needs being met before its vocabularies, worksheets, and toolkits become optimally actionable.
Does this mean that her vocabularies for change would prove utterly irrelevant, though, to folks living in, say, extreme marginalization? Is there nothing in her research that could benefit people trying to “dare greatly” from encampments of the unhoused, from refugee camps, or from mega-slums, like those I discussed in my last newsletter?
No, it’s not as dire as all that. For one, the basic definitions of many of the key terms—shame, vulnerability, trust, kindness, courage, braving, daring, boundaries, wholeheartedness, imperfection—advanced in her books and on her podcasts don’t change much from one context to another. The risks for them, however, might be more starkly life or death.
And so, there are many factors in her reflective practice that require different implementations.
One of the most important, when I think about how Western-aspirational discourse could possibly be mapped onto the vast number of people living through displacement pressures and abject poverty, is how much privacy, and specifically space and time for self-reflection, is a difficult resource for many to acquire. Brown’s leadership-oriented podcast, Dare to Lead, makes many logical assumptions about her target audience in Western-professional spheres—because these people probably do have the power and means to, say, “circle back”: to press pause on a problem, to strategically schedule difficult conversations, to take a beat away from upsetting people, and to achieve resolutions that include the possibility of walking away.
Likewise, in the personal-growth podcast Unlocking Us, there’s a similar assumption of “time to regroup” and “safety to reflect” built into the background of the production. People who come onto her show have already been able to tell their stories as distinct, seasoned, and considered narratives: to shape them into something they can share, and market, and use to leverage future growth.
For folks desperately making do with shared spaces, limited resources, and—perhaps most critically of all—limited modelling of alternatives, the notion of having the capacity to articulate a story of self is not as easily processed. This is also informed by the fact that mega-slum and encampment life is so often intensely communal—and also, so often experienced one hard, hungry, fearful moment at a time, with no clear occasion to stop and reflect on every traumatic event that has brought them to this place at all.
(Here in Colombia, I should also note that it’s not just a mega-slum issue; plenty of my friends here grew up exposed to some slice of the collective trauma, but the idea of having a story about how those traumas affected them personally is rarely seen as something useful outside truth-and-reconciliation processes. People can certainly tell you about the traumas they lived through—and very well might, at a casual drop of the hat!—but the idea of plotting a trajectory from what happened to how that affected them is… not something most folks I’ve talked with see much value in. There’s little to no conviction that having the “right” story of self will somehow give a person any more control over what new external crisis will happen next.)
Brown is no stranger to stressors, of course; crises in her life have also brought her at times to places where pressing pause for reflection wasn’t feasible. (Ditto with most any parent of small children, and those supporting adult dependents with limited support.) Nevertheless, the framing for most of the ideas shared on these podcasts prioritizes individual attitudinal shifts.
Meanwhile, one huge self-actualizations problem for many living in the most vulnerable social set-ups is that, even if as individuals they want to engage in that work, their capacity for follow-through is far more often limited by where their immediate peers are in the process of their own self-reflection and growth. The desire to enact wholeheartedness, kindness, and bravery in one’s day-to-day life is going to be more seriously tested, that is, when you’re living alongside a number of people whose traumas and everyday needs are an ever-present ask—and sometimes also an ever-present threat to your physical integrity.
It’s not that there aren’t adjacent experiences among many guests on Brown’s shows—especially those who grew up in violent or otherwise harmful homes—but the guests are then out of those situations when they talk about them with her. The situations themselves just… had to be lived through, to some extent, and then reframed later into strengths. But what counsel is there in that sort of narrative, for people still trapped within the crisis? Put another way, what would her podcasts sound like, if Brown were talking about these issues with people still in the middle of the dehumanizing fray? If her shows went on-site to chat with the unhoused, the most heavily financially exploited, the medically vulnerable, the recently halfway-housed (whether for addiction or asylum), and the undocumented in her region?
Our Western-aspirational activisms are strongly shaped around ideas of individual awakening to change the world—and that’s not inherently a “bad” thing, especially for researchers on related themes who routinely seek to expand inclusivity in their well-sourced work. It’s just a matter of finding ways to implement changes that would allow for enough community-wide uplift that individual growth has space to matter, too.
For ever so much of our hurting world, we truly do rise together or not at all.
SM1. Activist campaigns are the means, not the end
At the heart of this month’s newsletter is a difficult concept: an acknowledgment that the performance of activism does not exist at a remove from the performance of so much else in our lives—for better and for worse. Western activism in particular is often treated as a series of compartmentalized promotional campaigns, and human behaviour is pretty consistent across all the promotional campaigns in our lives.
This needn’t be a negative, either. If anything, it’s quite empowering to understand how and why we respond the way we do—individually, and in groups. Most people are not well-informed about all the issues underlying prominent forms of activism in their communities—but they do recognize the value of endorsing what a collective has presented as the pathway to change. This often means that we bandwagon around simplistic takes that “feel” right, often because everyone else is endorsing them, too; and that, collectively, over time, we can end up supporting a whole slew of simplistic takes that are also contradictory.
No matter, though. The bigger issue we’re consistently supporting, when we perform in this way, remains the same: However inconsistent and contradictory the activist badges we might be wearing at any given time, we’re still ultimately performing our willingness to try to do better, to fight for better—if someone will only tell us what that “better” is or could be.
So why are we nervous about acknowledging that activism is often treated like a campaign, a pitch, a hustle: something with language and priorities that shift over time in lockstep with an ineffable human mechanics of contemporary concern?
Because the one way that activist campaigns differ from other campaigns in our lives is in claiming for themselves the higher and inviolate truths—truths simply told, perhaps, to attain the widest possible groundswell of popular support, but still incontestably True.
And yet, campaign activism by its very nature is an “extra.” In various ways at various times for various people, it can be joined and departed from at will. Which is… strange, isn’t it? How can something incontestably True also be so easily adopted and discarded?
It might help to consider an obvious alternative arrangement: the fact that many people automatically count as “activists,” whether or not they realize this, simply because their whole lives have been a form of activism. From their initial survival to the act of thriving against all the odds, simply existing, for many of us, is a radical act.
That’s the schism we’re not well-equipped to process. The sheer fact of “joining” an activist cause is an act of concession to the gap between the injustices in which we are complicit, and which are intrinsic to many people’s lives. Being seen as part of an activist movement is not supposed to be the goal, a thing sought after and admired for the rewards inherent in it, but rather, as a useful tool (for as long as it’s useful) to help us bridge the gap.
Two possible analogies might help here, depending on your background:
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is famous in part for arguing that our recognition of something outside ourselves is what first creates in us the idea of ourselves. Awareness of the Other creates the I. Language-formation is therefore a concession to estrangement: Here is Other. Other is not I and is not known to I (nor I to Other). I need something else, something more, to connect with Other. I’ll try Language. So it goes with campaign activism, too: we extend a bridge in the wake of our awareness of disparity, to try to attain something beyond it. To try to heal the disparity completely.
Corporations as we know them today are without end, but they were originally established as a legal means by which a project could be created and given meaningful jurisdictional protections in which to finish its work and dissolve. People would incorporate for the run-time of a given initiative, then part ways. But then folks started to realize that the power and impunity granted to a corporation, as opposed to an individual seeking material gains through personal industry, were far more lucrative. And lo, now we have a world wherein the “corporation” is its own endpoint. The same is true for many campaign-driven activisms; it’s become all too easy to conflate the shelter of a thrilling campaign with arrival at the world we want ours to become.
What alternatives exist? One of the most important is also far harder: naturally living in ways that already seek justice, restoration, healing, and growths. But where’s the acclaim in this? Where’s the excitement, the feeling of in-group tribalism that comes from lending one’s voice to the choir, or from sloganeering for the most prominent and righteously vocal cause?
Again, there is no condemnation here (at least, no more than I give myself, for my own participation in these systems): only observation. Today’s dominant modes of activist discourse are litmus tests, and they give us a wealth of insight into the shape of current power, along with the extent to which any progress has been made toward our stated ends.
Even our fear of letting go of activist rhetoric as Absolute Truth is also informative. What scares us? What threatens us? What do we know is at risk of being taken away if we back down from sweeping endorsement of simplistic, sloganeering forms of activist debate?
And how can we reduce the perceived threat, so that we can focus on getting across the bridge to a better world that activist campaigns are supposed to serve as in our lives?
TV1. CSI: Vegas and the struggle with “truth”
As I mentioned in another newsletter, I enjoy watching criminal/investigative shows as a study of how we talk about justice in one of our most accessible and wide-reaching media forms. (They’re also really good studies of basic story beats, but mostly I’m listening to how ideas of transgression, sanction for retributive action, and restoration are handled in these narratives.)
CSI: Vegas is a reboot of a series that shaped a great deal of entertainment media, but also notions of criminal justice—and not always for the better. One troubling consequence of the original CSI was something called the “CSI Effect,” in which real-world jurors tended to have higher standards for conviction in rape cases, based on lofty expectations for material evidence provided by their exposure to criminal and forensic investigation dramas—and also, on an overconfidence in their ability to assess the credibility of “expert” scientific witnesses. These jurors’ “objective” interpretations of the facts of course played right into existing biases—enhancing pre-existing reluctance to believe rape accounts, siding with victims of property crimes, and ruling against anyone that “experts” could spin as deviant with science-y jargon.
The reboot has been cleverly framed to lie adjacent to our real-world anxieties about a lack of respect for “the evidence” in a world of fake news and truthiness, and it includes some pretty on-the-nose commentary to this end from one of the long-arc villains. Mind you, I’m sympathetic to that concern! But it is unfortunately presented here with no allowance for the real-world negative impact that CSI has had on courtroom proceedings in the interim.
The conceit of the new series is simple enough: Grissom and Sara pull themselves from marine-research retirement when their old head of CSI, Hodges, is accused of having fabricated evidence—an accusation that endangers countless critical convictions, the whole team’s legacy, and the lab’s legitimacy going forward. New characters are of course introduced, and Grissom has an illness that suggests his and Sara’s return will only be for this first season, but the crux of these episodes is still a staunch reassertion of the claims that we should only ever “believe the facts” and that “the facts don’t lie”—even though there are at least two points in the first eight episodes when these prove dangerous statements to take at face-value.
One of these points relates strongly to the real-world “CSI Effect.” In an episode involving a man murdered in retaliation for an act of rape, an eventually processed rape-kit finds that the DNA found on her person did not belong to the man assumed to have raped her. And this certainly helps the team find a person who raped her! But the mere absence of DNA evidence from the original person should not have been enough for Sara to claim:
It's rare that a woman lies about being raped. But Rachel was drugged, so she got it wrong. JJ's DNA exonerated him.
Why not? Because it is also possible that the victim was raped by both people, and only one’s DNA was recovered. This is the kind of mistake, however, that informed the “CSI Effect” the first time through—the conflation of “lack of material evidence” with “innocence of a crime”—and with real-world consequences especially for people attempting to prosecute rape.
A more gaping example, though, emerges right from the outset of the series, when Sara fully accepts that Hodges would never have fabricated evidence, and Grissom calmly sides with “the facts.” This whole interaction is a perfect microcosm of the dangers of supposedly “rationalist” thought, because it is only because Sara has more than quantifiable facts fuelling her interpretation of events that she does the work necessary to find “the facts” that eventually win Grissom over to the view that Hodges is being set up. In the real world, too, context always shapes how we understand the “facts”—including how, when, and with what status-quo story we receive them. Furthermore, any truly critical thinker always needs to remember that the brain is strongly wired to favour first impressions over possible follow-up correctives. We have to work hard, to actively train ourselves, to be more receptive to secondary intel.
“Facts” certainly exist, then, but the narratives they create are the work of biological minds—and we are never further from “objective” truths about the world than when we forget to account for the ways that our affective relationships invariably shape all input for analysis.
This is a scary consideration, though, especially for self-proclaimed rationalists and empiricists. Enamoured by our intellect, we lose sight of what intellect should make clearer than ever: namely, the unpleasant reality that “reasoned” points of view are neurologically formed by biochemical patterning and immediate environmental response. Strong personal convictions should always arise from an assessment of how we’ve received the facts that shape them.
WY1. The superficiality of our uplift, Part I
This has been a wild ride of a year for me as a writer, and as a human being. In October of 2020, I was soundly knocked off my path to residency through work-visas—but there was still a chance that I could get everything back in working order in April 2021, and I clung to that possibility with every last ounce of hustle in me. It was fine! Everything was fine! I was just… “on sabbatical” for six months, until I could make my next legal bid. Back then, I still thought there was a chance I could start the press I originally wanted to, to help elevate local voices, so I decided to use some of my time “off” to throw myself into new and ambitious projects, and to learn about other aspects of the publishing industry until I was back on legal course again.
None of that worked out, of course. My dreams of stability and hopes of being able to contribute in more substantial ways were in tatters by mid-2021, and only in the last few weeks, after processing a major disappointment on the literary publishing front, have I really come to terms with all the sound and fury, signifying nothing, that so much of this process has been.
But that doesn’t mean parts of this pell-mell exploratory process weren’t instructive, and I think the biggest lesson for me in the writing world came from a publishing experiment I started last winter—ostensibly, to make myself a better future editor of other people’s work. I didn’t expect much from self-publishing (I already knew a bit about how much work and investment capital one needs to make a proper go of it), but I wanted to explore the medium to understand its pressure points before launching a press of my own. That press is now on indefinite hold, but the lessons from that experiment can and will be carried forward.
And what “lessons,” exactly? Well, as Joe Klaas once wrote (and Gloria Steinem later popularized): “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” That’s the gist of what I learned from my first foray into self-publishing, at least.
The most immediate shock for me was the extent to which the process illustrated how much Western publishing actively reinforces Western imperialism, especially with respect to the directionality of its consumer chains. Outsiders can buy items from many Western venues through externally situated financial systems, but to be an operator on most of these book-publishing websites, one needs to have a credit card from a Western bank, and a Western address attached to it. Even major banks—even the biggest bank here in Colombia!—was no match for those backend application forms.
So much for globalism and the idea of an emancipated international marketplace, huh?
Now, I say “shock,” but I think the only thing that shocked me was how blatant these biases are, plain as day on the application forms. To give you a point of comparison, I remember when I first heard about fair-trade goods—back in the 1990s, when certification practices led to an uptick in market viability for the movement—and how this originally seemed to Little Me like a wonderful initiative, simply more evidence that our world was going to get more and more globally conscious, just like so much children’s and mainstream media was promising.
But in early university, a political-science course illustrated some of the significant problems with the fair-trade system—problems that also impacted other major, widely acclaimed campaigns for social uplift. The issue had to do with the fact that, in many cases, these programs required farmers and crafts-persons who’d been operating outside of formal systems to acquire forms of documentation they’d never had before—land deeds, certificates of business ownership, bank accounts, loan papers.
People immersed in neoliberal capitalist societies might think of these as value-neutral, but they were culturally transformative: with many of these documents came the promise of legal nightmares for families and communities that had previously lived with more fluid systems of exchange and inheritance. Territorial disputes and the risk of new forms of debt, the likes of which they might never have seen before, were creating different kinds of precarity, exclusion, and hardship.
(And funnily enough, despite completely grokking the danger of switching out social systems with respect to fair-trade, I still got bamboozled years later by the promise of microloan banks—which worked initially on a small scale, but very quickly expanded and got bought out by people who saw opportunities for the same old exploitative practices on new targets. It’s very easy to let our hope for better systems keep us from a clear-eyed analysis of their failings.)
In short, then, what I was seeing with Western online publishing markets wasn’t much different from what I had seen elsewhere, in terms of the illusion of true globalism joined with the hard reality of systems centrally benefitting existing power-brokers. But it was far more blatant than in many contexts where admittance is allowed, and the difficult costs, obscured.
And, of course, many writers and editors in my industry already knew all about these stark financial-system biases, because they affect how writers are paid—or if, indeed, they can be paid, when they come from certain contexts.
As with most major issues with respect to human labour, a truly international SF&F community requires a commitment to fixing entire systems of power. Sloganeering and stumping for change, one “progressive” publication or one trending international demographic in crisis at a time, is not enough. We dreamers of better worlds have chosen genres that expressly focus on imagining alternatives. We are supposed to be—and maybe even still stand the best chance of being—the dreamers of better dreams.
So, where are they?
A1. “Can ‘the people’ solve climate change? France decided to find out”
One story I wrote this year needs a good rewriting. It was a first stab at depicting near-future hyper-regional global governance, but I think it was too heavy on “idea,” without enough of the momentum that makes for an impactful read.
And yet, when I read essays like Shannon Osaka’s “‘It gave me hope in democracy’: how French citizens are embracing people power” (Grist), I nevertheless find myself wondering why I haven’t seen many of these alternative-government possibilities play out in SF&F. In countries all around the world, unelected citizens’ assemblies have been taking a more active role in policy development and reform, with significant benefits to all involved. Politicians receive less opprobrium for decisions that they can transparently show to have been made in part “by the people,” while average citizens get to feel like they’re making a direct civic contribution and to learn about the complexities underpinning state decision-making firsthand.
What I also find fascinating about this model is the promise it’s often used to make: namely, the idea that we don’t necessarily need to “replace” traditional governance in order to provide a meaningful check-and-balance to existing systems. As more everyday people gain direct exposure to the machinations of government, it becomes that vague, fearmongering and conspiratorial rhetoric about government processes can find purchase in average lives—because now, to some extent, you or your neighbour just down the road might be government, too. There’s also plenty of research that shows simply putting people with different opinions in the same room can produce a significant depolarization in social outlook—though whether that’s a good thing, or just leads to policy decided by middle-ground fallacy, is debatable.
And yet, there are also clear stumbling blocks for citizens’ groups as they currently exist. Some are, of course, inevitable, because any government that selects citizens for this task cannot purely randomize for the role without risking highly skewed working groups, and it also has to make selections with respect to the experts it chooses to make available to help guide each group of citizens in their work. All of those choices are places wherein party politics can easily be exploited over time, but they’re also necessary concessions, at least for the time being.
The real problem, though, comes from what happens after the assembly or convention has done its work: the point when policy recommendations pass out of unelected hands and into the realm of elected decision-makers. And that’s where France’s 150-person citizens’ assembly on climate change policy illustrated a difficult but important truth: power only divests as much of itself as it chooses to. And so, when the convention submitted its 149 recommendations:
the tacit agreement Macron had made with the convention — that he would submit the recommendations to parliament or to a nationwide referendum “without filter” — began to break down. In a speech to convention members on the lawn of the Élysée Palace, the French president’s official residence, Macron announced that he was rejecting three of the 149 proposals, including a tax on corporate dividends to fund green programs and a nationwide speed limit of 68 miles per hour. A national speed limit, Macron warned, could prove too controversial; a tax on dividends might discourage investors. He called the canceled proposals his “three jokers.”
That was just the beginning. Over the next few months, members of the convention watched in frustration as government ministers discarded or watered down many of their remaining recommendations. The ban on new airports was thrown out, as was a plan to incorporate the fight against climate change into the country’s constitution. Members of the assembly were sometimes asked with little notice and no preparation to appear before government committees or lobbyists to defend their proposals.
This struggle to turn citizens’ recommendations into active reform is by no means unique to the French convention on climate policy—but neither is it an easy nut to crack. At the end of the day, after all, these are randomly selected unelected citizens, whereas the sitting members of government also embody an end-result of a democratic process. Which one should come “first”? How do we set our expectations reasonably enough, with respect to end-results, so that both groups can do their utmost to fulfill a truly civic chore?
There’s also the fact that citizens’ assemblies may very well serve to offset special interest groups, but the existence of powerful corporate lobbies and their encroachment on the ability of elected government to act in the best interests of its peoples (and, in some cases, of the planet) remains a problem too big for individual civilian action groups to resolve. Nor should they have to singlehandedly bring down money’s corrupting influence on political action! So, rather than treat these groups as a quick fix to all that ails our current democracies, we would do well to consider their inclusion—and indeed, the need for their inclusion—as an assessment tool. It’s a fact of our current political practice that shows us the state of health of the whole.
And in this case? Morale-booster though citizen-assembly experiments might be, the limits on their current ability to result in meaningful policy reform tells us that there remains a great deal of systemic upheaval-work ahead, and not much time to do it. When it comes to critical global issues like climate change, and its consequent environmental refugeeism and resource wars, we have to get our acts together now—as citizens of the world.
P2. Behind the Bastards & the impoverished American dream (The Amway episodes)
How on Earth did I miss the Behind the Bastards podcast for so long? Robert Evans, past editorial manager for Cracked.com and ongoing investigative journalist, hosts this podcast, along with It Could Happen Here, The Worst Year Ever, and an assortment of others (Always Be Podcastin’!) tackling current events and the histories behind them. But before I talk about two episodes in particular, I want to stress what makes Evans such an excellent host.
Evans is a smart cookie, which you might not immediately realize from this particular podcast, because there are plenty of shock-jocks recording podcasts on similarly sensational themes, and also plenty of sardonic male personas on radio in general. At first blush, he might easily seem of a piece with the rest (the same way, as noted in P1, that Brené Brown can be cursorily swept in with a slew of simplistic self-help writers), because Evans is certainly a dry-witted fellow who doesn’t mind goofing around with off-the-cuff inanities.
And yet, there are two points in his work—consistently, across podcasts—where it becomes immediately apparent that he remains alert and conscientious of context even at his silliest.
The first will probably resonate for fellow feminized persons, and possibly also for other historically marginalized groups. Evans is a funny man and excellent entertainer… who shuts up and makes space for everyone else on his show to speak. I cannot stress how much of a revelation it is to hear his guests and co-hosts chime in—and often with a less-funny and less-coherent take than he would have offered on the same theme—and for Evans to simply let them speak, without trying to hurry them along. His on-air persona is a wonderful example of how to be oneself to the fullest, without taking away from others, too.
The second relates to the fact that Evans’ guests often aren’t anywhere near as conscientious in their speech as he is when it comes to acceptable parameters for humour and character attack. I’ve heard plenty of female guests, for instance, joke about sanctionable violence, physical variation, and other topics that Evans then deftly course-corrects around as best he can without ruining the groove of the conversation. Again—funny fellow! Great entertainer! Goofs around with some seriously inane and at times provocative chatter! But also, acutely aware of compassionate limits, and excellent at keeping the banter within them.
So, with that in mind, if you’ve also come a little late to the game to Behind the Bastards, a podcast exploring histories of some truly awful people, along with people whose moderate individual awfulness incited truly awful world events and paradigm shifts, I highly recommend giving a two-part episode, “Amway: The Gravedigger of Democracy,” a sporting chance.
In these episodes, Evans outlines a history of Ponzi-schemes and other scam businesses, and why Amway has just barely avoided being treated under U.S. law as one of them. The reason has to do with how this organization, which powerfully interwove a by-your-own-bootstraps American dream into Evangelical prosperity gospel to bilk 99.9% of its operators out of time, money, and well-being… also massively re-shaped U.S. politics over the last sixty years.
But while the histories of conflated state, business, and religious interests make for a gripping sense of “How We Got Here,” even more potent for me was the analysis of human behaviour. Here, too, Evans’s guest falls into a common prejudice, asking aloud how a grad student in one anecdote could possibly have allowed herself to fall in love with a man addicted to the Amway cult, and Evans delicately but firmly outlines that this isn’t about people being “stupid”: it’s about some people being more vulnerable to forms of exploitation than others.
And that is a point I often try to make when I talk about human behaviour as it relates to the activisms of our day—but it’s not always one that comes across well. Just as ever so many estadounidenses (people from the U.S.) bought into the promise of Amway because it seemed to offer a pathway to another life, so too do many of us “buy into” many new vocabularies, movements, and activist pathways, whenever they seem the best way to achieve certain ends.
Now, most of those vocabularies and movements are not the monstrosity that is Amway. And yet, there’s an exceedingly important lesson to be gleaned from our species-wide vulnerability to multi-level marketing schemes in general: namely, that humans love a good promise of a better life that will come only when we commit to the work of remaking ourselves.
And yet, it’s bull-pucky. We’re currently drowning together in unjust systems that require mutual aid and mutual uplift to fully address—and so, the best form of “remaking ourselves” for the task ahead is the one where we detach ourselves from the “business” of making personal transformation the be-all and end-all of our lives, and instead orient ourselves around the desired end-points ostensibly championed by activist causes themselves.
TV2. Community, Season 6, Episode 4
Do you ever have one of those moments when you feel an urge to revisit older media for a reason, but you can’t quite put your finger on what you’re looking to remember from it?
I recently did when I revisited Community, the six-season sitcom about an eclectic group of community-college students, and a show that offered extensive meta-commentary about film and TV production around their shenanigans. At first, I thought the urge was based on the character of Britta Perry, the outspoken atheist with uselessly performative self-righteousness about global issues. (I have a soft spot for revisiting and studying characters who remind me of my worst fears for myself.)
But in Season 6, a conversation leapt out that I immediately recalled from first viewing: a kind of conversation that we almost never have space for in our discourse today, yet which was incredibly potent back in 2015, when marriage equality arrived in the US. (Well, for all but disabled folks, who still often have to weigh the risk of extreme poverty before getting hitched, thanks to some incredibly draconian benefits laws.)
This was the same year that Slate published an excellent bit of mourning for the “queer revolution” that had been lost when “winning” equality became centred on replicating existing systems—like marriage as a pathway for determining who gets to see you when you’re sick, or to benefit from your insurance plan—instead of rethinking the regulatory framework entirely.
And lo and behold, that same year on Community, we get the following exchange, when Dean Craig Pelton is offered a position on the school board, but with a catch:
Frankie: They want you to be a token homosexual?
Jeff: It's a form of progress. 30 years ago, the most power the openly gay could achieve was a center square. [Hollywood Squares reference, for you darned youngsters.]
Dean: But I'm not just gay.
Jeff: What does that mean?
Dean: If coming out is a magic show, and gayness is a rabbit out of the hat, I'm one of those never-ending handkerchiefs.
Jeff: The sad truth, Craig? Anything other than straight is plenty gay for a school board.
Frankie: The most important point is, are you prepared to make your sexuality, which is nobody's business, an aspect of your role in society? I know I'm not, so I don't.
Dean & Jeff: No? [Casting curious looks at each other because they’re so curious to know her sexuality.]
Frankie: When a person becomes symbolic they gain symbolic power, at the price of independent power.
Dean: Yep. That's an excellent point.
Jeff: It could be good for Greendale, for one of our own to be on the school board. I mean, the fact that you'd be leaving a few items off your list of your turn-ons, I mean, the goal in politics, isn't transparency, it's winning. That's why the politicians always win.
Dean: They do always win, don't they? But now I get a chance to win. I could change the system from the inside out. And all I have to do is pare down my sexuality to simple gayness—which is heavily in the mix.
Jeff: There you go.
Dean: Get ready, America! Dean Pelton is coming out as approximately two-sevenths of what he is!
—Community S06E04, “Queer Studies & Advanced Waxing”
Now, this episode is incredibly nuanced, because after Dean makes his announcement, a lot of kids in his college come up to him thanking him for coming out—so the gesture very clearly means something to them. And yet, not once does the show suggest that the value of his announcement for young adults around him should negate his reservations about what this form of activism does and does not achieve. This way of “being queer” is simply the path to power provided by the current system. That does not make it perfect.
I doubt I can fully articulate how affirming this conversation was to hear again, six years later, when label-first, neoliberally endorsed activism has become so strong that it’s easy to forget how many other approaches exist. It’s also easy to think that one form of activism is always in competition with another, such that criticizing label-first activism is automatically a call for its eradication. As this episode instead beautifully illustrates, it is 100% possible for dissent to exist, and for dissenting people to show up in support of activisms that don’t full accord with their POVs. We just need more of this nuance to come to the fore again in “real life.”
A2. “The once and future mass-resignation and what it means for working people”
Cory Doctorow is a powerhouse of informative threads on matters related to cybersecurity and authoritarianism, economic systems and egregious sociopolitical corruptions therein, big data and its myriad of (mis)applications. One of his latest also did the kind of work I most adore—historiography—by contextualizing the current Big Quit / Great Resignation in light of labour movements during the Black Plague.
In “The once and future mass-resignation and what it means for working people,” Doctorow illustrates that walking away from low-value work en masse, and being penalized with legal sanctions and state intimidation to force people back into drudgery, is by no means new to the human condition. The stories of worker mistreatment that he outlines from the U.S. today—tales of abuse before the pandemic, in its early phases, and in its current manifestation—would be cruel and demeaning in any century.
(And before someone points out that at least today’s medicines are more advanced than in the fourteenth century, what’s the point of having a cure for, say, gangrene, if one is refused medical insurance to cover its application? I’ll give you soap and toothpaste, though: definite leg-up over the medieval versions in both departments!)
The other benefit of invoking history is not just to cultivate a sense of solidarity in the struggle, but also to secure a better vision of coherent and achievable endgames. In the case of the fourteenth-century walk-offs, Doctorow writes:
The former employers of these workers slammed them as lazy and greedy, and called upon their fellow bougies to take up "unskilled" labor and scab those proles back into the workplace. When that didn't work, they passed laws that banned desperate bosses from bidding up wages. That didn't work either, so new crimes were put on the books that made it easier to slam unemployed people in notoriously cruel prisons. That failed, too, prompting cuts to the already grossly inadequate welfare system, trying to starve workers back into their jobs.
That also failed. In the end, the situation led to a mass redistribution of wealth and a period of unheralded pluralism and opportunity for workers whose families had been stuck in low-waged, dead-end work for generations.
And as Doctorow goes on to note, this situation in fourteenth-century England seems to have followed every recorded pandemic—which we should take as a real feather in our cap today, when trying to figure out how our current mess of global crises will pan out.
To be sure, nothing is guaranteed, and there are some significant differences between our global economic struggle today and the localized struggles of centuries past. (For instance, I don’t recall anything in Doctorow’s story about the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos’ of the fourteenth-century also first seeing huge increases in personal wealth while their world burned, so it’s still possible that we’ll be the combo-breaking pandemic with respect to redistribution.)
But comparative history like this offers us, if nothing else, a way out of the psychological atemporality of being caught for two years in a pandemic that has illustrated time and again the morally impoverished state of so much in our shared lives. We are not simply dabbling in the waters of “what if?”—but rather, hip deep in waters well known to humans come before.
Which of those currents of history will we lean into next?
SM2. A case study in activisms, Part I: Personal context
There were many tempests in teapots on Twitter this past month—as there are, of course, every month—but one in particular offered a perfect example of how our online activist language is in dire need of upgrade.
Context first, though, because it’s important to know who’s sharing these comments:
The labels that best suit me in the current climate are nonbinary queer/bisexual feminized person. But ’86er that I am, I grew up in an era with a lot more chatter about fluidity. My children’s entertainment was informed by ’70s and ’80s media rife with genderqueer representation; a wave of laws had recently come to favour women’s financial, workplace, and physical autonomy; globalist and environmentalist rhetoric abounded around famine, pollution, and nuclear threat; and there was far less fixation on making sure babies had pink or blue bow-bands.
Were there problems? Oh, heck yes. The war on Black lives involved horrors like the 1985 police-bombing of a Philadelphia neighbourhood, the impact of Reaganomics was making an even worse hash of the early ’80s recession, right-wing populist media was just getting off the ground with incendiary talk radio and TV, and Cold War pressures still found us deeply entrenched in resource wars devastating other nation-states.
But despite the conservative push-back against global consciousness, kids born to the ’80s were being raised on media that positively radiated excitement over the possibilities. And then the Berlin Wall came down! The Cold War was “over”! What couldn’t we accomplish next?
Near the turn of the century, high-schoolers were reporting indifference to formal orientation labels, while still being actively interested in the creation of a more just world. Heck yeah! If we survived Y2K, the 21st century was going to be the era when we’d bust through all our remaining rigid paradigms. We'd move even closer to equal dignity for all, without needing to prove ourselves to the system just to get by.
But that conservative backlash persisted, clawing back on the promise of ’80s and early ’90s media and activist movements. The early internet bubble burst, a harbinger for financial precarities to come. Gender-indifferent clothing gave way to cynical big-data campaigns predicated on maximizing purchases by dividing more products along traditional gender lines. Bush was elected in the wake of a Republican media circus around the previous presidency that set the standard for today’s still-thriving campaigns of radical, winner-takes-all conservativism. Right from the outset, Bush started gutting programs related to equity-seeking society-building, both on U.S. soil and abroad—and then, with 9/11, he gained a lot of leeway to continue in that and even more authoritarian/police-state directions.
And news and entertainment media fell in line. That was perhaps the biggest blow for most of us whippersnappers coming into early adulthood after 9/11: the realization that many outlets we had thought of as allies were also driven by corporate and chauvinist (in the traditional sense of the term) interests. Mainstream publications that purported to stand for measured analysis and defense of a better truth were suddenly supporting unconscionable wars and under-representing the massive, worldwide protests that emerged especially in response to fraudulent justifications for invasion being peddled by the U.S. to the UN. Films and TV series, in turn, heavily promoted more white heteronormative content, even for franchises that used to be more representative of full society. But we were in a culture war, after all. We needed a return to "traditional" values to defend against "terror" and vague "Islamic" threats.
Even recently disclosed New Yorker contributor stats confirm that some of our loftiest and most geopolitically isolated media outlets had more representation for different demographics in the ’90s than we’ve had in the decades since. All those gains, riding high on some amazing activist work in the ’70s and ’80s, went away post-9/11. The 21st century started on a regressive note, leaving us to reinvent the wheel.
(Although, it should be noted that 9/11 wasn’t singularly to blame. Boondock Saints also has an excellent argument for how the rise of BET, as a dedicated market for Black entertainment, might have inadvertently played a huge role in reducing the prominence of Black entertainers in mainstream TV & film, after a significant run of representation over the ’70s through ’90s. I grew up with Black representation on Ghost Writer, Today’s Special, Polka Dot Door, Sesame Street, The Magic School Bus, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Cosby Show, Family Matters, The Sinbad Show, Star Trek: DS9—and that isn’t including all the shows I couldn’t access because I didn’t have cable, or all the action and comedy films with wide-ranging casts that showed up on CityTV.
Either way, I think one of the reasons we often forget how many amazing Black creators we had on TV and in films of that period is because it’s standard belief today that “if only there were more representation, there’d be more justice!” Ergo, if there’s no justice, it must be because no one’s ever been represented in media before, right? Surely if a group is seen, they’ll be granted equity?
But no—because representation, while important, is not enough. And that’s why it cannot be our only goal. And that’s why it’s so damned important that we remember our history, and bind our activism into stories of activist movements come before.)
Suffice it to say, then, the idea of U.S. hegemony under threat, and the attendant “war on terror,” drove us into risk-averse activisms. In the LGBTQ+ community, we leaned into reductive “born this way” rhetoric instead of “none-a-ya business, all humans deserve equal rights without explanation for variation.” We fought for marriage equality—a fairly middle-class concern—over demanding that individuals have more say, full stop, over whom they have on their insurance and who can visit them in hospital.
Meanwhile, the recession hit hard. Households already squeezed by inflation-income disparities entered an even more economically conservative era. Individuals leapt less. Jobs even in once-lucrative fields like engineering dried up. And corporations still found ways to make money.
I’ll never forget the solid ten seconds of dead air, early in the recession, after a spritely pair of BBC news-anchors tried to get an economist to explain how investors and hedge-fund managers would now work to repair the system that had just tanked—only to have the economist essentially laugh in their faces, explaining that investors and hedge-fund managers would do no such thing, because they all knew how to make money even in a bear market.
I don’t think those news-anchors had truly believed in trickle-down economics, but there’s still a school of economic thought that requires credulous belief in rational, well-intentioned actors—and so, the shock of realizing that our tanking market was in the hands of people who didn’t care how many lives were ruined, or how much of shared civil society they destroyed, so long as their profit margins stayed healthy, was palpable in that interview.
As we all know, too, toxic corporate takeovers, with asset-gutting and hefty board-bonus distributions as everyday practice, continued long after the collapse. (The worst of them, perhaps, involving local newspapers, because gutting the fourth estate [the press] also accelerated the spread of disillusionment in mainstream media and the rise of fake news.)
And how did individuals respond? Like I said, we stopped leaping. We millennials delayed dating, sex, leaving home, getting married, buying homes... in large part because we just didn't have the funds necessary to take risks. We found cheaper hierarchies of value instead.
And that changed our activism in ways we didn't fully realize while they were happening—not when we were too busy inventing further regressions like gender reveal parties, and leaning hard into individual needs-testing industries as the supposed answer to failed welfare states.
(Conversely, when CEO Dan Price bumped everyone's salaries to at least 70k, babies came fast and furious among his employees, because they were affordable! Most of what we consider to be conscious cultural/biological choice is driven by socioeconomic stability, or lack thereof.)
Long story short: I remember and was shaped by a time when activist discourse was not always about slotting oneself into specific categories, and when there was still a promise of attaining equity and justice through radical re-envisioning of societal practice. I personally grew up in a conservative household and white conservative culture, too—but what I found, as I sought to resist the toxicity in both spheres, was that neoliberalism had permeated most forms of supposedly progressivist discourse, too. Corporate media, multinational for-profits, and undemocratic politicians & parties were all fostering industries of supposed activism that instead supported self-commodification as the most essential act of resistance in our lives.
Label and sort yourself, if you want to change the world!
And it’s in light of that backdrop that I want to talk (in A3) about what social-media discourse around the asexual spectrum illustrates about the state of our activisms now.
M2. As “easy” as apple pie
But first, let’s take a break from the heaviness. Well, sort of.
I’ve never been so reluctant to make and write on apple pie before, but since first intending to put a pretty standard recipe into this newsletter, I’ve been reflecting on how many cultural-context assumptions are embedded even in as innocuous a practice as baking a pie.
As I noted in the previous newsletter, Carl Sagan famously declared, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” This is charming philosophical stuff, a gentle reminder that a great deal of complexity is “baked” into our sense of reality.
But there are also many local-context considerations that get in the way of making a pie from scratch—and so, here’s a version of apple pie that walks us through them for Colombia.
M L Clark’s “Basic” Apple Pie Ingredients
for the double crust
2 ½ cups of all-purpose flour (plus extra for rolling out)
1 teaspoon of salt
1 cup (four-fifths of a 250-gram block) very cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes
4 to 8 tablespoons of ice-cold water
NOTES: Already we hit stumbling blocks, some of which I’ve incorporated into the recipe. One is obviously that we’re not weighing anything here—because food scales are not a common kitchen item in Colombia. There’s a famous ratio you might have heard with respect to pie crust dough, the 3:2:1 rule of 3-parts flour, 2-parts fat, 1-part water, but this has to do with weight, so you cannot use it for a simple eyeballing of cup measurements. That 2 ½ cups of all-purpose flour? Around 325 grams. That “four-fifths of a 250-gram block of butter”? In the ballpark of 225 grams. Close enough.
The most important thing, though, is that if you’re wondering “what, no shortening to help the crust keep its shape?”—no, there isn’t any here. (Also, if you were wondering that, you’re my people and I love you.) People don’t bake enough for many “common” baking ingredients to be found in supermarkets here—lard and shortening included—which means that my absolute favourite pie crust, from my absolute favourite pie cookbook (Magpie: Sweets and Savories from Philadelphia’s Favorite Pie Boutique—not for beginners), which has an 80/20 split of butter and shortening to keep the flavour rich while adding structure to the dough, is out of the question.
That’s fine, though, because when I first started making apple pies, I followed a recipe shared online by the sort of country grandmother who ran her kitchen with military precision and had the prize ribbons to show for it. She would not tolerate a pie crust with more than four ingredients: flour, fat, a pinch of salt, and water. Good pie crust was all in the execution of the basics, not some fancy dabbling in vinegar, sugar, milk, or what-not to keep the dough workable. YES MA’AM, I thought back then, and still think (for everyday pie) today.
for the pie filling
5-6 cups of apple, sliced (around 8 apples, medium-sized)
½ brown sugar stevia OR ¾ cup regular sugar
2 tablespoons of flour
Pinch of salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 ½ tablespoons tangy citrus (1/2 lemon in North America, 1 lime in Colombia)
the rest of the 250-gram block of butter (25 grams of butter)
1 egg OR non-dairy milk (for the wash)
NOTES: More stumbling blocks. In Canada there are many kinds of apple, so one knows darned well that you “should” be baking with a Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, or Braeburn: apple varietals that hold their structure well. In Colombia, well… Granny Smiths are available, but maybe a touch pricey, which raises the question of what kind of pie do you want?
There’s nothing “wrong” with using other kinds of apple, but you need to expect that an apple pie made with softer varietals is more likely to produce a slurry of delicious filling. Still delicious! But if you want a firmer pie filling, there’s a trick you can use with most any other apple: don’t slice in wedges. A pie made up of wedges is going to have the thinner end cook into a delicious stew while the thicker side is still firm. Instead, cut even-width pieces, around ¼ inch apiece, by slicing adjacent to the core instead of straight into it. Once two opposite sides of the apple are pared down this way, cut the rest away from the core and cut those pieces into equal, even-width slices, too.
Even then, though, many other apple varietals might crumble when you try to mix the slices with the rest of the filling. So… be gentle when mixing? Or just enjoy a gooier filling?
You’ll also notice that there’s no nutmeg. That’s not actually a Colombian-specific thing, exactly; I stopped using nutmeg when I started baking for kids years ago—too many palates did not approve. Colombians do also have a lower tolerance for sharp spices, though (this is a culture that cooks more with cumin), and to be honest, I’m only really ever hankering for nutmeg in gingerbread cookies, myself. But if you like it, add ¼ teaspoon and mix well.
Citrus is tricky, though, because yellow lemons are a rare sighting, only in posh-district stores. Limes are abundant, though, so I use them here when recipes call for that little spritz of acid.
Instructions
Blend flour and salt first, then introduce them to the very cold butter as quickly as you can. You’re looking to fully integrate the butter. You’ll still have little nodules of butter evenly dispersed at the end; it’s the lumps you want to avoid. Take your time at this step, because it determines a lot about the final product—easy to roll, or not.
Only when the flour-butter combo is fully integrated do you start to add the ice-cold water in parts. You don’t want a soggy dough, so do this one tablespoon at a time. You’re looking for a shaggy consistency, and something that holds together when a clump is squeezed in your hand. Stop mixing when this consistency has been achieved. If you over-mix, you get a tough dough that won’t roll out well.
Divide into two portions and form each portion into a rounded disc. Wrap each in its own plastic and refrigerate for no less than an hour. (Will keep for two days.)
Mix all the filling ingredients except the butter, adding the apples last to the bowl, and ensuring they’re fully coated. Refrigerate while the oven heats to 200C (375F).
Flour a surface for rolling out the dough. (If you don’t have a rolling pin, a cleaned-up wine bottle will do in a pinch.)
The dough will be hard coming out of the fridge. Flour the rolling pin while you start to work the dough discs into wider circles, 1/8th of an inch thick. Ideally, you should be able to roll it onto the rolling pin to transfer to the pie dish. This part stresses some out, though, so a good alternative is to roll out the dough on parchment paper, or to have some on hand to slide under a fragile crust and move it. You can fix the bottom layer in the pie dish if need be, and no one will be the wiser!
Assemble the apple filling in the pie dish, filling every nook and cranny. Distribute little dabs of butter all over the top.
Roll the other half of the dough on top. Trim and shape the excess depending on your design. (I like a simple crimp myself, but go wild.) Just make sure that the edges are sealed when you’re through, and nothing’s hanging over!
Beat up that egg, and brush it in a thin layer over the pie, especially the edges. (Or the non-dairy milk, depending. The only difference is in colour: the milk will leave a paler pie crust, especially if it’s unsweetened.)
Cut slits in the top of the pie (or similar pattern for venting; aim for at least four) and let it bake for 50 to 60 minutes, until the crust is golden brown. If you’re lucky, you’ll also see a bit of happy apple filling burbling through.
Resist the urge to cut in immediately. This pie serves better when allowed to rest.
NOTES:
So many little things I took for granted in Canada: the pie dish, the rolling pin, the pastry brush for the wash, the ability to turn on the oven willy-nilly. These weren’t always seasonally available or otherwise easy to acquire. But then, why would they be, in a culture that doesn’t really bake? Many folks have ovens in their homes but don’t use them because of the added electrical cost. Also, apple pie really is a basic recipe, but it can still feel like a challenge because of the precision work needed for the dough’s consistency.
And… that’s okay. Because that makes the effort special, when it’s done at all.
Lastly, funnily enough, there are many other recipes, far simpler than a pie, that I still haven’t dared to try to make by hand. Can you believe that I still haven’t explored homemade arepas, another incredibly simple recipe that’s all about how you work the dough, after almost four years in Colombia?
I probably should in the new year, though—if only to illustrate a few of the many different ways that they’re made in regions across the country. Always something new to learn! And always so much taken for granted from within our respective cultural contexts… right until new circumstances allow us to look at something “basic” in a more worldly light.
WY2. The superficiality of our uplift, Part II
I have never been a popular writer, which has its advantages.
One is the ability to observe how our industry handles its rising stars—and especially ones who become sudden sensations from relative obscurity, and often from subject-positions and geopolitical contexts with little direct past exposure to Western publishing.
I’m acquainted with quite a few people who’ve been in this situation over the last few years, and I try my best to keep showing up after the initial wave of fickle interest has faded. There are just so many… messy factors, let’s say… that go into a person’s uplift, and one of the most painful is that, even if the community thinks it’s doing a good thing by raising up someone in light of their traditionally marginalized background—swiftly latching on to a new story, that is, because it's by a person from [X] demographic—the come-down after those fifteen minutes can be crushing. And not just because the wave of popularity has ended! Also because, in the wake of that sudden surge and drop, one is often left with an unpleasant question:
“Wait, was it my story they liked, or just some vague notion of what raising me up would mean for them in relation to contemporary activist trends?”
And that is… not great for a creator’s sense of self, their confidence, and their ability to move forward in the work. Do they have to keep making every story a celebration of [X] demographic to be published and popular again? Is there a formula they’re expected to follow now, to fit into the industry?
Granted, part of this is universal to the 15-minutes-of-fame phenomenon—the sheer pressure to replicate exceptionalism!—but the part that ties into the way that our genre “does” activism is the part that most troubles me, even though I’m not entirely sure how it can be fixed.
I do have some ideas, though, thanks to the brilliant work of many marginalized groups advancing this conversation as fo late. In particular, Black writers in our genre experienced a slightly different form of this sudden uplift when SF&F (SFWA, along with individual literary agents and presses) made some sweeping commitments to greater inclusion for Black creators in the wake of the 2020 U.S. protests. All well and good in the moment, but… when the trend cycle passed, was the commitment to change still there? Or had it been but a moment’s trending blip?
The jury’s still out on this, to be quite honest, because it’s early days yet and because true equity will require far more significant changes to the way we do business (including online!).
But another writer in the industry, C. L. Clark, helmed SFWA’s blog for part of this year, and under her guidance Sabrina Vourvoulias published “So, you think your publication is working to advance equity in SFF?”—which really offers a bounty of insights on this theme, so I'll just nudge your attention that-away.
Maybe there’s hope for us yet.
TV3. Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World
If you’re not familiar with Adam Curtis’s BBC documentaries, such as The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, and HyperNormalisation, it’s important to note that there is nothing inherently “radical” about his approach to filmmaking. A studied archivist, he uses pastiches of visual and audio recording to instill a strong sense of mood around his statements about the sweep of history from the early 1900s on—but really, he's doing what all documentarians do. He’s only foregrounding the emotive purpose more.
He also relies heavily on having an authoritative voice, an Attenborough-y Britishism that lends more gravitas to his statements, in the same way that using Baskerville as a font lends one’s writing more authority. As such, it’s important to go into watching an Adam Curtis documentary mindful of the fact that it is an argument, and as such, best experienced as an audio-visual essay. Some of his documentaries have resonated more strongly with me than others—The Century of the Self being the go-to gateway piece I recommend to newbies—and, although Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021) is admirably ambitious in many ways, it easily ranks at the bottom of my list of his documentary-series output.
The ambitious notes are worth mentioning, though. Curtis attempts to unify a few world histories as differently yet simultaneously grappling with experiments in individualism, while the world as a whole also struggles with the resurgence of old empirical state structures in new and perhaps more insidious forms. To this end, he opens the series by subverting the usual historical focus on male leadership as destiny, and finds adjacent stories of women in power, or of women experiencing the impact of dangerous proximity to men in power. Curtis also gives some space to people from colonized countries, even if his main focal points are the West, Russia, and China for vast swaths of the eight-hour, six-episode series.
And yet, it’s still where the series fails for me that I find more interesting. Its opening sections are fairly loose—one might even say “meandering”—but given Curtis’s track record, I was able to temper my disappointment with some trust that he was simply laying down threads for a potent later reveal. His ultimate conclusions, though, are more than a little underwhelming: observations that don’t go deep enough to encompass the full weight of Where We Are Now after his expansive overview of Where We’ve Been in the decades come before. This was especially disappointing because I quite liked episodes four and five, and if I had to pick a standalone starter that embodies the tension for the whole series, I would definitely recommend episode four, as the clearest distillation of his exploration of how experiments in political individualism have struggled against a backdrop of old systems of power in new garb.
I did, however, find myself disagreeing with Curtis from the start, and that disagreement never abated as the series progressed. Curtis’s output has always been deterministic—driven, that is, by the notion that our actions are shaped by factors outside individual cognizance, let alone control; that each generation of human actors is caught up in tides and movements of which we are only vaguely aware. Here, though, Curtis’s arguments also felt over-determined: his sense of inevitable generational progression too heavily enforced.
It's an extremely delicate line to walk, trying to outline histories of psychological cause and effect without giving the impression that the past anticipates the present, and Curtis walks that line carefully in many of his other series. But here, his misstep seems to come from believing that individualism is something that had to emerge over a gradual period of many generations. With that assumption in mind, it’s easy to construct a progressivist narrative over different slices of 20th-century archival history, and then to stump for that awakening as having happened—painfully, with many missteps—alongside a body of uneasy “post”-imperial state and socio-technical systems that really weren’t “post” anything at all.
But anyone with other historical moorings can easily debunk the idea of a 20th-century awakening into tensions between individual want and collective destiny. Even sticking to Curtis’s theme of women of note (Jiang Qing, “Madame Mao,” features significantly in the series), one can go back to figures like Margery Kempe, a late-14th-/early-15th-century Christian “mystic” whose intimate dreams of being wedded to Christ, joined with the spectacle of spontaneous public weeping, allowed her to disrupt the normal expectations of life and leave her marriage for pilgrimage, preaching, and devotion instead. She’s considered by many to have authored, via another’s transcription, the first autobiography in the English language.
Curtis’s error here, though, is a potent one, because it’s common to many cultural discourses to mistake the passage of time with progress over time. A better way to frame his material here, I suspect, would have been to present snapshots of how the pull of individualism operated in tension with state/systemic autocracies of different eras, and to allow the viewer to reflect on what the present moment’s tensions share with those of other moments. Rather than seeing the 1920s, say, as a period that informs why individuals today struggle with common destiny and more formally imposed systemic pressures, we could simply see it as a counterpart. A fellow-traveller.
Another version of ourselves, that is—not so biologically different, and not startlingly far off—which was playing out similar ideological problems to often uncannily similar ends. What could we learn about ourselves today, if we viewed the past more like a mirror, and less like the stereotypically primitive end of an evolutionary tree?
A3. “David Graeber’s Possible Worlds”
David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) is on my “maybe” pile for upcoming reads, but early reviews of the work have already offered plenty of room for reflection about different formulations of activism, along with a question of “best use” for popular-science books in general.
Graeber died suddenly last year. He was a larger-than-life public-intellectual whose formal anthropological background was joined with an optimistic and even playful approach to anarchism, along with an active commitment to real-world participatory response. His breakout success, Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), built on his longstanding academic work on notions of value, and extended into a career of active involvement in debt-relief campaigns, Occupy Wall Street, and anti-nationalist movements (among others). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), similarly spoke to rising sentiments of futility and frustration with the current economy. He seemed to unspool a bit during pandemic—or more specifically, within the complex imposition of global authority for public safety that many have found differently difficult to manage—and was often not great with crisis or things going wrong on a personal front, but he remained fondly loved by many, and inspired wide-reaching fandoms with his work.
His and Wengrow’s recent book argues that ancient human organizational structures were far more fluid and arbitrary than our histories give them credit for, and that we’ve bought into a progressivist myth of history that suggests a too-neat-and-tidy through-line from organized hunter-gatherer societies to rigid, agrarian-based institutionalism. I don’t doubt that this tome of a text has plenty of anthropological evidence to defend its arguments around the existence of divergent and even playful arrangements of human society over time, but in reading reviews of the work, I couldn’t help but be distracted by how often literary assessment of The Dawn of Everything was shaped by the fact of his death, and the idea of this book as his legacy project.
I wasn’t really a “follower” of Graeber myself—which is not to say that I disliked or disagreed with much of his work; just that I’m always leery of fan-groups rallying around specific people who claim an interest in dismantling hierarchical power. Anarchist movements in particular have a long and storied history of still favouring celebrity and, in the process, the centrality of certain voices at cost to others. (Graeber himself might have agreed that cultish adoration isn’t great, too—but as far as I can tell, he’s also not as well-known for de-centring his activism and bringing other activists from different cultural positions up to share his outsize platform. This isn’t to say that he didn’t do these things, but they’re certainly not a central part of his legacy.)
So, instead of reading the book this month, I read up a bit more on Graeber, through Molly Fischer’s New York Intelligencer article, “David Graeber’s Possible Worlds,” because I wanted to decide how much my indifference to reading the book was based on how much mainstream media and culture had essentially commodified an outspoken anarchist, placing him into a more familiar and traditionally authoritative social role. This exercise firmed up some of my thoughts about the authority claims underpinning his work—how much easier, that is, to be a respected anarchist when also able to interact with formal institutions of power (Yale, and then, after non-renewal with Yale over his activism, the London School of Economics).
But it also posed the chewy question of “Well, what else did you expect him to do?”
Graeber was never a perfect fit for the ivory tower, on account of a different class background, but unlike, say, me, he managed to get far enough ahead in the academic game to be able to leverage class power to further his anarchist aims. And why shouldn’t he? What level of ideological purity was I expecting—no, possibly even demanding—of him? That he’d refuse the institutions entirely and go around in a hair shirt for his causes?
Up until the end, Graeber wrote about injustice and the absurdity of upholding the myth that the way our society is currently organized is worth preserving, when we could instead be enacting better arrangements of labour, value, and care. He used his far stronger institutional positioning—which absolutely gave him access to more publishing opportunities, a wider platform, and more respect right out the gate as a speaker on alternative theories—to advance causes that sought to alleviate debt and to fight the spread of capitalist exploitation.
Some of the best reviews of the book so far (which is to say, the ones that delved deepest into its arguments) have hinted that there’s still a selectionist quality to his arguments, a kind of cherry-picking and speculation around specific incidents in ancient human history to make his and Wengrow’s case—but also, that this is perfectly okay.
After all, why not see the book less as a definitive history, and more as an invitation to do what Graeber was most famous for: to play with the possibilities? To practise holding dissenting ideas in tension, and then—freed from the assumption that there is only One Way To Be—dive into the work of allowing messier arrangements in?
My error, I realized while reflecting on Graeber the Phenomenon, lay in trying to “resolve” either the man or the following into a clear sense of whether they make his final book “worth” reading or not. So, either the book will be read, or it won’t—but it’s already had an impact on how I think about power, and about how my affective relationship to even the whiff of power informs the new data I choose to take in.
And I suspect Graeber would count that as a win.
SM3. A case study in activisms, Part II: Asexuality and histories of oppression
I’ve mentioned in the past that I find myself most fascinated by places where I “snag” on contemporary activist discourse. These are the edges of my comfort zone, the precipices of my resistance to anything “different”—and I want more than anything to understand them.
One of those snags is the asexual spectrum. I didn’t list any such label in my personal context (SM2), but by the definitions presented by asexual spectrum advocacy, I’d be a “demisexual” in a heartbeat: meaning that sexual attraction arises for me from a pre-existing emotional bond. The thing is, though, that I don’t see the label as valuable for me, because I don’t agree with a baseline premise of the term: namely, that it is atypical to be selectively sexual. But just because I don’t see the label as personally useful doesn’t mean it doesn’t have use—and that’s the snag. That’s where so much of our cultural incuriosity comes into play.
New labels are highly instructive, too, because they’re one of the easiest ways to realize that we’re using different baselines when making choices about how to mobilize in the world. When people chafe at new terms, there’s usually a context of utility they’re overlooking—and yet, as with the internet’s major debate over the coloration of a certain dress, our political POVs are always shaped by different ways of perceiving the same world. It’s important to remember these wide-ranging differences, if there’s any hope of us crafting better policy.
What is really at work, then, when one group perceives itself to be stigmatized for something that to me feels status quo? What arrangements of social power and struggle does it suggest?
To be clear about my perspective on this “demi” business, I follow the argument in Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self, a documentary about the overt introduction of Freudian ideas into U.S. marketing from the 1930s on: Western commercial and online media cultures have contrived an artificially hypersexual world, fabricating exaggerated standards for beauty and elegance and attainment to which we’re supposed to be aspiring. It’s not that we’ve actually been hypersexual—at least not as a general rule; rather, we’ve been made to feel bad for not being sexually available and desirable all the time, and encouraged to buy products and services that will help us to bridge the gap.
The world outside all that artifice, to my mind, is quite different. On the normative side of things, it’s filled with couples where “bed death” has been a part of their partnerships for years, or lifelong lovers who “only had eyes for him/her,” or who have always had “low” or “mismatched” sex drives and found ways to accommodate.
On the toxic side of things, it’s also been status quo for a very long time to believe that a good woman doesn’t want or enjoy sex (See: right-wing reactions to the song “WAP” last year); she’s just doing it to appease her man. Conversely, then, a woman who likes sex is a “slut”; and also, it’s “common knowledge” that all women naturally lose an interest in sex as they age, so of course it’s to be expected that men—the only ones who apparently really “want it"—will stray.
In other words, before the current claim of hypersexuality-as-baseline, women were routinely considered functionally or inevitably asexual. This is part of what feminism fought against—fighting to “prove” that female orgasms were real, that female pleasure mattered, that wanting sex was a normal and healthy human behaviour. And it’s still being fought today—especially in many religious spheres, but not exclusively so. Plenty of angry secular men today believe that women use sex only as a power-grabbing strategy, the most manipulative long-term calculus, and they can’t seem to process that women might also… enjoy physical intimacy and/or orgasm’s release? The cultural insistence that Good Women Don’t, that good women just lie back and think of England/Murica when the obligation to perform comes upon them, remains strong.
And so, for women who fought (and continue to fight) to be seen as people whose sexual needs and interests matter, asexual spectrum activism, especially as it makes itself manifest on social media (where sloganeering is often at its fiercest), can absolutely feel like a denial of the oppressive social baseline in many of our cultures’ recent and longstanding histories.
Then to be called “-phobic” for expressing doubt that something they experienced as oppressive could itself be stigmatized? That has to be confusing—and yet, that’s definitely the social whiplash we’re currently witnessing in online debate.
And yet…
The important and thought-provoking lesson in these terms is that, for many people, what I consider to be mere marketing is also their very urgent and immediate perception of status quo—and terms that refuse a perceived status quo are useful. They help people find their place. There are clearly social needs that no other term or construct is currently serving.
So.
Many grew up believing that to have a sex drive was pathological.
Now many also believe they’re expected to desire sex indiscriminately.
Both can be true, and a struggle.
And so, I won't tell people feeling marginalized not to accuse others of “-phobia,” but I do encourage folks to consider that activism-clashes are normal, because human experiences of harm will always differ wildly, and our formal expressions of them will never be in perfect sync. Adjusting to the idea that the site of your oppression could actually be someone else's emancipation is tricky—especially since we're utter garbage at dissenting in healthy, constructive, & enlightening ways online. In-group territorialism is just so much safer, no?
But what we need to be asking ourselves—on all sides of this and other such activist-discourse equations—is whether our criticism is helping or hurting. I for one am convinced that economic collapse and mainstream marketing have driven our conflation of label-ism with transformative activism: our confusion, that is, for the “bridge” across the gap with arrival on its far side. But is the solution to attack other folks caught in the middle of these oppressive and all-consuming systems? To heap scorn on people trying to survive in a world relentlessly pushing them to self-commodify if they want even a sliver of the unjust communal pie?
Heck no. The solution is to build a world where people have more stability and personal agency, full stop. And not so that people will drop the labels that don’t match what we, personally, view as the “correct” social baseline! But as a more just end unto itself.
If your protest isn’t improving stability and agency for all, then what the heck is it good for?
We have to stop going to war over other peoples’ labels, and help build a world where label-ism isn’t the be-all and end-all of paths to socioeconomic and inter-relational peace of mind.
M3. Simi’s “Woman” / Fela Kuti’s “Lady”
A deceptively simple music video caught my attention this month, because of how well it speaks to how quick we are to assume that our activisms are or even should be universal.
Simi’s “Woman” is a song about the pressures on women in Nigeria, but you should really consider first listening to Fela Kuti’s “Lady,” a 1972 song that serves as inspiration for this half-century-on response.
“Lady” is… a sexist song with a killer rhythm. No, really, it’s a nearly 14-minute track with a great groove, fantastic walking music. But also, the sexism in its lyrics is complex, and in a way that ties in strongly to my thinking around activism this month.
As I noted in P1, Brené Brown’s podcasts make for excellent “stretching” exercises, when thinking about the extent to which Western activisms can (or should) be applied to other cultural contexts. Kuti’s “Lady” is just such another context; in it, Kuti criticizes African women for putting on airs and calling themselves “Lady”—wanting to smoke, to be equals, to sit before saluting a man, to not treat their men as their masters, and to not serve them in all ways. Pretty awful stuff, right? Especially considering that his mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was a powerful women’s rights and national-independence advocate. A force of freaking nature!
Except… Nigeria was twelve years into its hard-won independence when her son's song was recorded, and the pressures of European colonialization—cultural, as much as political—still sat like a yoke around many African nations’ necks. This song is absolutely a repudiation of forms of feminism… but the key word, “lady,” is a flat-out refusal of European encroachment on African determinism: white people, that is, telling African women how to be free.
And that’s a level of nuance that, fifty years on, we’re still struggling to come to terms with. As more work comes out of African nations and into international SF&F anthologies and magazines, we in the West are seeing more and more of what also comes up abundantly in Chinese SF&F: rigid gender roles, that is, and plenty of derogatory sentiment towards women.
But is it sufficient to slap on terms first codified in our own cultural contexts, like “cisgender” and “sexist,” and be done with it? Where’s our curiosity about the different social structures underpinning gendered experiences in other parts of the world?
This is part of the reason that I don’t use the word “cisgender” for people unless they’ve self-identified as such. I don’t like it as a blanket term for a number of reasons, including:
many people we might assume to be “cis” are instead “eggs” (that is, people still coming to realize that their gendered self is something different);
they might be hiding a known-to-them gender variance for safety;
they might actually be trans/nb and are passing so well that our own prejudiced notion of what “cis” looks like is coming out instead; OR
they might never have had a chance to explore gender variance at all.
And number four comes most potently to bear on many other cultural contexts—especially ones in which people with feminized bodies are expected to serve in certain roles from birth, and in which girls are mutilated and married off, even impregnated, long before they are given anything even remotely resembling a choice in their lives.
For Western activists to slap the verdict of “ugh, more cis stories” on this complex array of experiences forced upon people for the body parts they have is, at best, a mark of incuriosity—and at worst, a manipulative use of our activist discourse to keep ourselves centred in it.
We can and should do better.
Anyway, Simi’s reimagining also has a great beat, and an important message about how women are essentially damned if they do and damned if they don’t in contemporary Nigerian society. If a woman “no be like water” she’s going to have enemies however she performs.
So, what are we going to do about it?
P3. 99% Invisible, “Cute Little Monstrosities of Nature”
I’m always chuffed when the most unexpected media exposure fits neatly into the bigger ideas I’m chewing over in any given moment—and that was certainly true of a recent episode of 99% Invisible, a design and architecture podcast that takes its name from another quotation by Buckminster Fuller (M1), and seeks to plumb the “99% invisible” in the world around us.
“Cute Little Monstrosities of Nature” is about recent histories of dog breeding—and how even that term, “breed,” is a fairly recent term in this English/Western-centric context.
Wait, are we blaming the Victorians for something again? Why yes, yes we are—but this time, probably with more than an ounce of good cause. The podcast explores how English dog breeding arose from arbitrary standards, how dogs used to be grouped loosely by functionality, and how today’s notions of canine “functionality” are so superficial that—in an act of nothing less than extreme cognitive dissonance—we have the audacity to insist that horror movies never involve the torture of dogs while we continue to celebrate and seek out canine features that make for sickly animals.
We know better, in other words—we really do!—and yet, the pull of the trendline is strong.
And so, while listening to this podcast, I was struck by how this compulsion to covet canine categorization seems mighty similar to other fascinations with categorization in the current era. Are these issues really all of a piece with one another? Is our fixation on knowing the “breed” of our animal companions—out of a vague sense of understanding their temperament, aptitude, and best “fit” for our lives—really that different from wanting to know exactly how we and everyone around us is best labelled with respect to the sociopolitical priorities of the day? As with dog breeds, do we think that knowing everyone else’s categorical labels will shave some of the mystery and uncertainty off the slings and arrows of our shared lives?
I might have faulted Adam Curtis for leaping too much into broad declarations and assuming a sweepingly progressive bent to history in his latest documentary (TV3), but is it really so wild to suggest that a habit we’ve habituated in one sphere of our lives would also manifest in others? The exact contents of every meal we consume, how many steps we’ve taken in a given day, where we are on our annual reading lists, the “breeds” of our companions, the specific neuro-social and cultural variations that describe ourselves, our every waking thought (on social media)… There is a coherent through-line here, isn’t there? Everywhere we turn in our relentlessly monitored contemporary society, we’re mired in routines of categorization that have dazzled us with the illusory promise of transformative power.
If only we can quantify more of the highly qualitative in our personal lives, surely we’ll arrive at a better world for us all!
On the plus side, though, if these issues are all connected, and if they’re all tethered to how we’re encouraged to act in contemporary society, then they also suggest how we can begin to wean ourselves from the very worst impulses in the group. Because it’s not a fixed destiny, if it just happens to be culture. We can unlearn our reliance on label-first activism and categorical living as guarantors of any greater stability in an unjust world.
And—even better!—right now, in pandemic, it wouldn’t even take much of a leap. Just as Medellín’s shared trauma during the Difficult Years reduced most locals’ interest in narrating trauma’s individual impacts, so too has the pandemic given all of us a pretty substantial baseline expectation of shared experiences to build upon. We can certainly still talk about individual inequities created by the pandemic (and always should!), but there is also a strength, when it comes to meaningful activism, to being able to keep the conversation focussed less on self-identification and more on collaborative work for the cause.
Will we lean on that strength, though? Can we resist the insularity of certain activisms long enough to do so? Just as European dogs used to be identified more by what they were good at, what might we achieve as a species if we were more interested in what our shared experiences—from widely divergent lenses—could allow us to accomplish together?
WY3. The problem with awards
It feels salient, then, to end with the question of what I’m hoping to do about, oh, any of this. I can’t do as much as I want to; my subject-position has some pretty hard limits built into it right now. But that doesn’t mean it’s time to throw in the towel.
So. Another issue I’ve been chewing over this year, in relation to the industry in which I write, is the way that a different kind of category or label—the award—has significantly complicated our ability in SF&F to enact those better dreams that many of our fictions purport to be about.
As noted in WY1, the disparity and inequity issues in these genres—in the ways that we publish, and the ways that we uplift one another for hot seconds in the field—are to some extent tethered to similar in the world at large: fixing the world is what it will really take to fix the way our industry comports itself.
And yet, there is also something about a literary industry that expressly trades in dream-spinning that adds a layer to the failure of our activisms—because as it stands, many people think that getting in with our world is going to be the way out of their own struggles elsewhere.
And I’m no stranger to that! My writing income, modest though it has been, has been the make-or-break factor in my livelihood for most of my adult life—and even now, the only chance I have left at future stability feels highly contingent on making sums of money that the terrible gamble of publishing suggests are possible, even though they’re certainly not likely.
Nor am I anywhere near unique in my gamble. The problem shows up across the board, really: both with newer writers within the Western sphere, and among writers living in other cultural contexts. 2020’s New Zealand WorldCon muddled programming schedule left quite a few locals defeated, for instance, by what they saw as their “one chance” to get any kind of Western marketing and career success pass them by. Writers in South America, West Africa, Palestine and its diaspora—and disabled writers, too: over and over I see folks suddenly welcomed into the fold, dizzyingly uplifted for a beat and then passed over.
And for many, it all seems to come down to whether or not they can get awards. Awards are recognition. Awards are acclaim. Awards, surely, will yield a better life!
The problem is that awards in any genre tend be affirmations of already being “in” or popular—especially when the awards are not decided by a jury, but by a massive voting pool. It’s not that an award grants someone a book deal, then; it’s that a person who wins an award is also well-enough networked that they’re already very much in the running for that book deal.
But the problem with awards runs even deeper, because Western literary culture is nigh-on pathological in its fixation on prizes as arbiters of a given book’s merit, and as markers of What We Should Read Next. As such, award seasons tend to consume the rest of our discourse around new fiction, driving us into campaign-modes of signal-boosting and "liking" content without reading and meaningfully commenting. And this, too, is a heartbreaking loss—for most of us, but especially for writers who have poured difficult and important topics into their fiction, in the hope that maybe, just maybe!, if this urgent story is published, then people will read it, and understand better the depth of the problem, and be driven to act.
Where is our discourse for action inspired by the brilliant fictions we share?
That’s what I’m hoping to contribute to, in any case, by launching a YouTube channel titled “To Hell with Awards Season.” Provocative title aside, the aim isn’t to rag on awards; it’s simply to say that awards are not and should not be everything—and that, hey, here’s at least one other way for us to go about uplifting and mobilizing around the work in SF&F!
It’s been a bit tough to get this new project off the ground, mind you—nerves, mostly, the same as I had when I tested the waters of self-publishing this time last year—but by the next newsletter’s start, I should have something worth sharing from that new venture with you all.
For now, then, a simple bit of well-wishing:
May the close of this year, and the start of the next, find you and yours well-positioned to leap into new and better forms of outreach, too. Thanks so much for following along.
Quick final shout-out for UNHCR, Medecins sans frontieres, Amnesty International, and local bail funds! Wherever you choose to donate this season, whether formally or through kindness and care in your communities, thank you. These problems are bigger than us all, but they still require us to believe that individual action can help to move the dial. Be kind to yourselves, and seek justice where you can.