sharing is caring, day three

I have one of the relevant tabs open, and I'm too keyed up to head straight to bed, so...day three! Which calls for a book or fanfic. Of course I'm going to recommend both.

The fanfic is easy, though rather old (yes, I just discovered it recently, I am not widely read in fandom): the Stealing Harryverse by copperbadge. When I first read this quotation from Lev Grossman, whose novel The Magicians is being called "Harry Potter for grownups" (which of course ignores the fact that Harry Potter is for grownups), in which he goes on about sex, booze, and fantasy novels being missing from Harry Potter, I thought, "Well, Sam already wrote that fanfic!" (And if you believe the Times, Sam probably did it better.) Basically, Stealing Harry is a novel-length Sirius/Remus fic in which Sirius steals Harry back from the Dursleys at the age of eight (since he didn't go to Azkaban); Laocoon's Children is Sam's attempt to rewrite the books in parallel to canon in the same universe (though sadly he only got almost to the end of book three before being sidetracked by his own original fiction). I've linked to the tags for LC, since the tagging in the community is...irregular, and to the memories page for SH. I also have PDFs of SH and LC:1; if anyone would like one, leave a comment or PM me (though there is a duplication error in the SH PDF).

The books are easy, too. The first is The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. One: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson. It won the National Book Award, and deservedly so; it is brilliant, shattering, and approaches the mythic in its confronting the founding hypocrisies of the United States head-on. I've said before, and I will say again, that if I could make everyone in this country read just one book, it would be this one. The second volume, The Kingdom on the Waves, is equally brilliant (and if you want more of my thoughts on both books, and volume two in particular, I reviewed it here, with spoilers).

The second book is Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Caroline Weber. This gem looks at Marie Antoinette through her fashion and restores agency--and intelligence--to the doomed Queen. It's also a marvelously well-written book that refuses to condescend to fashion, and a feminist history that could serve as a model for many other scholars. I talked more about it here.

sharing is caring, day four

Website time! Another easy choice.

Yup, I'm recommending the blog Threadbared. It is written by two feminist academics and covers the politics of fashion and beauty--and anyone who thinks either of those, particularly fashion, is trivial hasn't read enough about either or about discourses of body and bodily presentation. Just to take one example, the recent posts on the Obamas have been worth their wordcount in gold, at least for this reader.

I also like the MangaBlog--it's where I get the majority of my manga news, reviews, and meta.

Sailing for the horizon

My Facebook feed is full of people saying, "Woah Patrick Swayze died!" My reaction, aside from profound sympathy for his family, is...duh. Cancer is not really a survivable disease; death rates have remained unchanged for basically the past 40 years. Every time I hear someone thoughtlessly talk about cancer per se as curable or survivable I more or less see red. If only for other people's sake, keep your ignorance (innocence?) to yourself.

To contextualize this little rant, it's been my experience that a lot of people--including some people who really ought to know better--have the impression that cancer is a preventable, survivable, even curable, disease. And while there are a lot of people who survive certain more benign cancers, usually with the benefit of early detection, it remains the plain truth that for most people who get cancer, it's what kills them. (And we can all play the "name the survivor you know (of)!" game if we like, but lucky exceptions do not rules make.) I recommend the Times series Forty Years' War for a lot of unvarnished truth on this front--the link is to the most recent article, which contains links to previous ones in the series.

It's not been a good day, month, or year for me personally on this front. Aside from Patrick Swayze, a family friend died of cancer today at the whopping age of...27. Yup, she was diagnosed with breast cancer at 24, had a double mastectomy in an attempt to retard the disease's progression, and is now dead. And of course, late last month Ted Kennedy died of advanced brain cancer. My father and I caught most of his funeral live, and we teared up at several points during the President's eulogy, as well as his sons'. At least he had the opportunity to live his life to the fullest before his death; I think that's the most anyone can really ask for--and he helped a lot of other people along the way, too.

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On a less impassioned topic, I think this article in the Times, about over-employment and under-productivity in Japan, does a good job of sketching out the nature of the economic debate going on in Japan at the moment. Certainly I'd have to agree from my own experiences that over-employment is fairly common in Japan, at least in the service sector, and while it's certainly part of what allows Japanese retail, in particular, to offer such an extravagant level of service to its customers, at times I did think that some of that labor, in a perfect world (what's the economics term for that again?) would be better allocated elsewhere. But of course thanks to Koizumi's neo-liberal reforms, which at once went too far and nowhere near far enough, "elsewhere" would most likely be a low-paying temp job with few benefits that would be the first on the chopping block in bad times. Like now.

Of course this debate is playing out in the context of an evolving two-party system; it will be interesting to see which party stakes what part of the political spectrum, and what angle on these issues, for its own.