Taking a break.

[kiya]

A few scattered links:

An interesting post on the subject of cultural appropriation, which appears to be rattling around a chunk of my flist. (Reading comments matters.) This is something I'm needing to chew on, because the thing I'm working on at the moment is set in "the real world" for at least some of it, which means that there are real people of real cultures involved, and not all of them are mine. And I know one of my flaws as a writer is that I don't put in enough concrete detail to ground people in where they are, and that I should go in on my editing pass and make the home of the POV character much more real and grounded in its appropriate cultural background, the assumptions, the ways things work there. Because doing otherwise glosses over the real, genuine issues of cultural difference that are in the roots of the story, because it's possible to treat the things as sort of generics, and my default writing tends to, and that does the people involved a great disservice. (Link from pantryslut.)

Mindboggling high-tech gaming table war room. (Link from apollonides.)

Stunning fountain setup with Diet Coke and Mentos. Quicktime. Has sound, which is not entirely needful for the experience, but does enhance. (Originally from micheinnz, though I've seen it elsewhere since.)

Quickie book reviews:


Sexual Ecstasy and the Divine, Yasmine Galenorn

I got her Crafting the Body Divine a while back when thinking about work on tattoo dedications (which precipitated how I wound up in Kemetic circles, but anyway). I figured I'd pick up the companion book eventually, and when I spent my imaginary money I decided I was in the mood for a pagan sex manual or something.

I'm not sure I'd recommend it. Not just because it starts out with a standard neopagan revisionist history (citing Barbara Walker and Merlin Stone, even), which is not as bad as some, but still sort of aggravating. It's just ... kind of fluffy. Sex-positive and all that, but fluffy. It raises a number of issues that I think are useful for people to think about, and includes a great deal of discussion of how to go about developing a healthy sexual relationship (both with oneself and with a partner), which is a resource that I've found fairly lacking in a lot of resources (lots of mechanics, not so much on the emotional end); for that sort of thing, I think it's at least a good starting point. It also has a chapter on rape survivorship, which is a good thing.

The ritual stuff I mostly skimmed, because it's in the mode of neopagan ritual that left me feeling vaguely ridiculous when I was in my teens and thus caused me to drift out of active neopaganism for a very long time. At some point I will probably go back through it and see if I can pare it down to stuff I find useful in a practical-magic sense. She includes a number of recipes for oil blends, generally at the ends of appropriate ritual sections, which I do appreciate, as that's something I'm thinking about a fair amount lately.

There is a chapter about BDSM and other alt-sex stuff. It is not terrible, though it's not terribly useful on the WIITID front, aside from some of her discussions of why it is that she feels she needs to have a kinked relationship and what she gets out of bondage. I've come to the conclusion that I have a kink-compatibility minimum, and her negotiations of how she dealt with a similar need are a potential useful illustration. I found the section on polyamory sort of toothgrating, but she does acknowledge that she doesn't have any personal interest in the subject. This chapter also includes some discussion of gender preference, including rituals.

All in all, I was vaguely disappointed, though I'm not sure entirely what I was expecting from it. It's not a bad book; it's a light, quick read and it does touch on a lot of subjects lightly.



The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still The Least Valued, Ann Crittenden

This was recommended to me by whispercricket after I had a bit of a vent about some of the stuff that's kicking around in my head, and so I went and got it. I'm glad I did; it gives me a good bit of context for some of why I've been, historically speaking, frustrated by a lot of things, and for what the context of my own issues are with regard to my role in my household.

I'm not entirely certain how to review it. It talks about history and policy and the way things have been structured, the emergent behaviours of systems with unintended and perhaps some of them intended consequences. It talks about the definition of "work", which gets to what ailbhe wrote recently about "the most productive member of the household" being apparently equated to "who brings in the most money".

It was a rather painful read, in a lot of ways, but also something of a relief -- because I know that some of the stuff I struggle with is stuff that other people deal with, and have dealt with before me. But then again, ... nothing new under the sun, is there? "And yet I am constantly pursued and haunted by the idea that I don't do anything." (--Harriet Beecher Stowe) It makes the possibility of actually fixing the problem feel faint and distant in its way. I don't know.

A lot of my anger from this is focused on someplace I've been angry for a long time, the coporate culture uber alles cultural attitude. The modern sixteen tons: expected default overtime, working longer than one was hired for or risks of losing status or even the job entirely for insufficient productivity, family and just plain living being devoured by The Job. It's one of the reasons that I was really happy working as a secretary, and why when I've contemplated part-time employment it's always been at the minion level: I don't want a 'career', because that's always seemed to me to be the thing that eats the life. So I've never had the career/family choice, so much, but still ...

I like some of her proposed solutions. I don't like others. Such is life. It was worth reading. I'll need to talk about it with people who have read it at some point, I think, to get my thoughts straight.


And now back to dealing with Sisyphus's rock.