Subj: online bulletins, partial
Date: 97-05-04 10:27:01 EDT
From: ocls@ipa.net
To: Ethesis@aol.com
Bcc:
X-Attachments (October):
Greetings, and my thanks for all the items that you have sent since August. No one has complained about the format I used ... basically, just one-thing-after-another ... I will therefore go on this way until some more rigorous format suggests itself or is suggested by you. The past month has been absolute chaos for me, with much of it spent on the road, and there's been no time to think about a more elegant way of doing this.
1. I saw an ABC "special" on August 31, 1995, that was terrifying -- just the kind of thing I predicted/extrapolated in *Native Tongue,* frankly. Did any of you see it? (Does anyone have it on tape? I'd like very much to have a copy.) John Stossel was the narrator, and from beginning to end his behavior was snide, sneering, snickering, reminding me forcibly of Bob Packwood's manner. The piece was stuffed with the worst kind of extremist right-wing symbolism, including beautiful little fetuses on-screen that had nothing to do with anything. If I had written a scene in a novel in which a video special was aired as the first step in a campaign to subjugate American women because of "scientific discoveries," I could not have done better than the script used -- except that if I had been doing it I would not have made it so *obvious.*
Much space was given once again to the experiments allegedly showing women to be more emotional, men to be more logical -- with, as usual, no reference to the fact that even the researcher for the study said that it proves nothing of the kind. I'll be taking this up in the Women & Language sections of the newsletter in future; any input from you will be very welcome. (And I'll be mentioning the study done by a top researcher on the brains of serial killers -- a sample about the same size as the one in the male/female study -- in which the researcher was delighted to have "discovered" a significant anatomical difference between the killers' brains and "normal" brains, until he checked his own brain and found that it showed the same difference.)
3. I got a letter from another woman member saying that the reason she doesn't want to work with LAadan is fear -- again, the fear of being vulnerable, the fear of having problems made so clear that she wouldn't be able to set them aside in male/female interactions. And so on. You will remember that when I wrote the thought experiment report in the earlier issue I said that I might be wrong in thinking women really don't want a language that expresses their perceptions better than existing human languages do? The evidence that I've judged it correctly keeps coming in -- along with more and more requests for information about LAadan from men. I will drop the idea of a new LAadan Network, therefore.
4. Our touch dominance network is struggling with a problem that some one of you could perhaps help us with. We need a touch mode (language from the vocabulary of touch) equivalent for the word "clear." Luke Aitken writes that the closest he can come is "feels right" or "fits"; Pat Mathews points out that although touch mode lacks "clear" it has "solid," which is not available in sight mode; I have been using "Let me try to get this message across without any flaws or glitches." But over and over, when I am writing the Touch Dominance Quarterly (in which I make a rigorous attempt to always use touch vocabulary unless it literally does not exist), I keep having to use the word "clear." As in "it's clear that...." and "What's not clear is..." and so on. Any suggestions? If there really isn't an item available,
I've got to resurrect one (in Mary Daly's fashion) from the obsolete and archaic store for English, or I've got to coin one, or someone else has to do one of those things for me. It's a serious gap and one that causes constant hassles.
5. Pat Mathews writes that "If faith is the real factor in healing, and people come to know this, then they'll lose faith in all the panaceas and nostrums, alternative or official. ... So if faith is the real factor...we have to bury that notion immediately and insist that the medical procedure, Blessing Way ceremony, trip to Lourdes, or whatever, is what's doing the trick, or faith will cease to work. Neat paradox, eh?" First, if faith is the real factor, it only has to be the faith of the healer, not the healee (see the masses of evidence on healers doing their thing with plants, with enzymes, etc.) But I suggest that what really matters is faith *plus* the ceremony in question. Like knowing the electric socket in the wall won't light your lamp unless you plug it in. More in the health care issue; your input very welcome as always.
6. My thanks to Stephen Marsh, who -- in response to my queries about people deciding war was stupid and refusing to go -- went to a great deal of trouble to send me a list of scores of wars in which the parties involved decided it was stupid and went home. I'm glad to know that that has happened, not once but apparently thousands of times; that's good news.
I am still looking, however, for a story (or real life incident) in which people --ordinarily men -- were called to go to war and refused to do it. As opposed to responding to the draft and then deciding, on the battlefield, to call it off. If there are scores of cases of *that* in history, I will be overjoyed. Steve noted that refusing to fight when called has the disadvantage of being illegal, labeled mutiny or treason or desertion, or whatever. True, but if *all* the men simply say no, it will be extremely difficult for the government to apply that law -- I think. I am as always ready to be proved wrong.
7. The L&SF Directory questionnaires have for the most part been vague about what people would like us to do online. However, Cheris Kramerae has suggested reviews of science fiction. I suspect that's because she feels the same way I do when she pays $5.95 for an sf novel, often covered with blurbs raving about how great it is, and it turns out to be unreadable -- a phenomenon that's driving most readers into used bookstores, where sales mean no royalties at all for the writer. I'd like very much to have brief reviews from you people for science fiction *in print* that is genuinely good reading. My problem is that with the exception of the occasional find (like *Foreigner* or *Grass*), the good sf that *I* come across is, most of the time, out of print. It's infuriating.
A list of "good stuff" that people can get without having to make a massive search would be valuable. Note: I haven't read it yet, but I've read a stack of glowing reviews from people whose judgment I respect, for Nicola Griffith's *Slow River.* Also, Stephanie Strickland suggests that people post "Dear Suzette" letters to me to be compiled into an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) file -- I think that's a very good idea and will be pleased to do the answering and compiling.
8. If you've read any of my Coyote Jones books (and there's no reason why you should have done so) you may remember that there was a Maklunite holiday called Gentle Tuesday, a day on which everybody deliberately took the time to be gentle and tried for at least that one day to be gentle at all times. How would you feel about finding a day where that holiday could be fit and proposing it, with the L&SF Network as its sponsor? (Note: I think I sometimes called it Gentle Thursday.... It doesn't matter. Gentle Someday.)
9. Would any of you be interested in doing some online experiments into "nonlocal phenomena," the current buzzword for what used to be called ESP or psi experiments? In which we could agree that at a time specified I would focus all my attention on a particular symbol and you would email me what you thought it was? If you want to do this -- including doing it as a way to demonstrate what utter poppycock any such research is -- it would of course have to be carefully set up and structured. This is just a very rough note, to find out if there's any interest.
10. Native Tongue is now officially out of print, and DAW has agreed to give back the rights to me. My agent is working on this, and will be looking for a new home for the book; if we can't find a publisher I'll see what I can do about self-publishing. In the meantime, I have a very few copies on hand, I can (and will) send permissions if you need to copy pages for a class, and so on. I'm sorry about this; however, DAW has gone far beyond what most publishers would have done, keeping it in print since 1984. And they feel that it just has no "commercial appeal."
11. I'm sure you all know that the conference on the impulsiveness (inability-to-defer-gratification) gene and violence -- what the media refers to as the "violence gene conference" -- has finally been held. I haven't seen reports yet.
Suzette
PS: I will see some of you at SoonerCon, in Oklahoma City, the last weekend in November. Maybe we can have an informal meeting of some kind there. And I am Guest of Honor for MiniCon, in Minneapolis, in April of 1996 -- maybe we can do the same then. Let me know your druthers.
PS2, on October 4th: Greetings again! This is my second attempt to send you the October bulletin. I don't know whether the first bounce was due to typing errors on my part, glitches on the Net, or something else, but I hope the message gets through this time.
