Wiscon Day 3: Intent, Internet, Imperialism and Indian Food

[bcholmes]

I started out the day with way too little sleep. I had been up until after 4 the night before, and I got up early to meet pokershaman for our traditional Wiscon breakfast. We gabbed about stuff going on, and about the dynamics of some of the recent Internet fails.

Coincidentally, I went from that conversation into a panel on Internet fail:

Something Is Wrong on the Internet!

What keeps you going at 4 AM when there's so much fail, and only you and your fellow Internet drama addicts stand against it like stubborn superheroes? Let's talk about why Internet drama is important to us as activists and as fans, why we engage or disengage, and what it means when ideas and personalities clash in public discussion of SF/F books, tv, fic, and culture

(See also: badgerbag's liveblog of the panel -- while she was a panelist! Seriously. My mind boggles!)

I've previously described some of the best moments from this panel. Other good bits related to the discussion of Heidipologies and the Perl versus Ruby sexism debacles and the different ways that those were handled by those communities.

Another awesome comment -- one that still has me thinking -- related to badgerbag's work editing The Wiscon Chronicles, Vol 3: Carnival of Feminist SF. She was asked about the fact that she contacted last year's Wiscon troll as well as the guy who suggested the Open Source Boob project and offered to let them provide pieces for the book (especially since a lot of material about those incidents were coming forward).

badgerbag cited a principle she picked up from Dale Spender: don't write about somebody without showing them what you're going to say. I thought that this was a good and challenging idea. I don't know how comfortable I'd be living in that worldview, but it intrigues me, and I'm interested in thinking more about it. Ultimately, she said, both parties declined to take part.

Another thing the panel brought up was all the really fun and creative ways that people that people react to Internet fail, in and amongst the drama. Things like bingo cards, and LOL macros and satires. (I love those things, too) The label, "iConversations" was thrown out here.

There was also an interesting conversation that sparkymonster and badgerbag had. sparkymonster mentioned that there wasn't a wheelchair ramp to get up to the panelist area. That was a problem. If sparky goes to complain to a hotel staff person, she's the good ally who gets to seem reasonable because (as an able-bodied person) she appears to not have a vested interest. If badgerbag makes the same complaint, it's personal: she does have a vested interest and in that case, the hotel staff person can go to "why do you have to be so angry" a lot more quickly. badgerbag also said that sometimes when an ally gets involved in an issue that way, she feels like the ally is appropriating her anger. She's angry; she wants to express her anger, and if the ally is there making all nice, it robs her of her opportunity to express her anger.

Shortly after that, sparkymonster made the comment: an important part of being an ally is sucking it up.

At another point in the panel, there was a discussion about just how low the bar is for having crucial conversations at cons. There's so much fear of drama, and it would be so easy to confront even a little bit of that potential drama effectively, but everybody backs away, terrified that it's all going to go horribly, horribly wrong. Someone used the example: why wasn't there a panel about Mammothfail at Wiscon?

Oddly, I have a note shortly after that point that reads: "It's okay to be scared." I think this note means, "be scared, but get involved anyway."

One of the audience members made this comment: every system needs exactly one asshole. Me: I think that sounds a lot more pithy than it is.

After the panel, I met up with erik for lunch.

Here's a funny thing. A while ago, I went to hacklab, and someone was asked their name. The person said, "Eric" and someone asked, "With a 'c' or with a 'k'" Pretty much immediately afterward, someone said, "I've yet to run into a single Erik with a 'k'" Me, I thought, I know an Erik with a 'k'.

A few weeks later: one of the people in that room was at Wiscon. Erik bumped in to her and chatted with her, and then bounced over to me and said: "I've just spent 20 minutes geeking with a telephony/IP telecommunications geek... who is a derby fan... who I've never met!" Wiscon brings together many different kinds of people.

Anyway, my tiredness was starting to catch up with me, and I suspect that I was a terrible lunch companion. We went to the Really Weird Pizza Place and had some slices.

And then I was off to the Green Room to prep for my panel:

Marxism and Beyond: Assembling a Class Discussion Toolkit

Talking about class at WisCon is hard. Where should we start? What can we say? Sometimes this discussion goes horribly wrong -- how can we avoid that?

I was relatively happy with how the panel went. Before the panel, people seemed to be terribly afraid of massive derailment, but I don't think that we had massive derailment. There was one difficult audience member (whom I'll call 'Neil', because that's his name) who wouldn't shut up, but *shrug*.

As I mentioned in earlier posts, I do find myself thinking about the format of Wiscon panels that are oriented around identity politics. We pretty much treated this panel as class-as-an-identity, and I did start to think that I'd really like to see a treatment of some tools for analyzing the system that's in place to look at why class (and perhaps sexism and racism) exists and who it serves. Marxism is much more about the system than about identity, and I do think that part of our conversation was a bit lacking. I concede that none of us were Marxism experts, but I think that I can hold my own in the basics.

raanve used Gatsby to talk about a number of things relating to the myth of class mobility; I liked that reference, because I've been a bit fascinated by Gatsby over the last year or so. The green light that he believed in is a metaphor that I keep thinking about. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter..."

veejane also made a comment about her disappointment that many discussions about class are just personal stories, and she put in an appeal for a more academic analysis. I confess that I'm of mixed minds about this comment. What I think most, here, is about the various academic analyses of trans issues. I spent several years devouring all kinds of pomo and queer theory analyses of transness. And, to be clear, I did get a lot out of that. But I think that a lot of the connections that one can make to an academic analysis are illusory. For my part, I find myself much more interested, now, in material grounded in lived experience. And so I'm apprehensive about her comment, although I can understand it to some extent.

My next panel was:

Racism, Classism and the Singularity

Proponents of the Singularity often describe it as a utopia -- but the history of technological adoption has repeatedly shown classist and racist patterns. In the world now we have vastly diverse patterns of computer use -- why would this suddenly change? Why should the Singularity be different? Will it be? How and why -- and is such a difference inevitable, or are there things that need to be done or put in place to assure it? And what might happen, if not? Panelists will discuss how technological adaptation follows class and race lines, and the implications of this for science fiction and future developments in technological fact.

This was an interesting panel, although I think that it went in a different direction than the panel description. Later, at dinner, one of my dinner companions complained that it was odd that Geoff Ryman was on this panel, given that he said that he didn't really believe that the singularity was likely. Me, I liked where that took us. The panel talked about what our stories of the singularity said about our existing values. And to some extent, what it said was that we want easy solutions to racism and classism in ways that don't require much energy or messiness from us. It's sort of like the Republican solution to environmental issues: Rapture!

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I'm starting to believe that Deus Ex Machina can solve a large number of problems.

Fundamentally, they argued that "Everything will be better after X" isn't a terribly useful narrative. I think it was Geoff Ryman who talked about the idea that the narrative of the singularity seemed a lot like a libertarian fantasy of meritocracy.

The last panel of the day, for me was about Authorial Intent:

Authorial Intent vs. Reader Response

Umberto Eco said once that a novel was "a machine for generating interpretations..." Once a book has been released into the cruel wold, does it matter what the author intended for people to get out of the book? If it does, does it matter more than what the readers see in the book?

(Liveblogged here).

This was another good panel. vito_excalibur moderated the panel, and raised really good (and challenging) questions. (Again: she has a really effective moderating style that I like a lot). My one letdown was that, because so much of the panel was informed by RaceFail, it was unfortunate that two panelists hadn't had much exposure to RaceFail, and there was a bit of time spent on level-setting. But that was a minor thing in an otherwise great panel.

A number of challenging points were raised. Should we take J.K. Rowling at face value when she announces that Dumbledore is gay? It doesn't appear in the text; is it part of Potterverse?

Should we accept Elizabeth Bear's statement of Authorial Intent in the stories criticized during RaceFail, or do the readers' analyses of these stories also factor into the discussion.

Ellen Kushner outlined her thesis:

My feeling, my belief as a writer and a performer, writer for actors, is that all art is a collaboration between the artist and the audience. The piece is not complete until the reader reads it -- you throw the ball, but the reader has to catch it. It turns into a third thing, not the text or the reader's experience but the two together. The first story I published, I thought was a light renaissance romance, Jane Yolen said it was so sad she cried and cried. Later I reread it and realized it was about the problems of being a middle-aged women, which at 22 I thought were hilarious. You can intend whatever you want. When it hits the reader the reader owns it and is going to make it what they want. At 22 I thought that if I got all the words in the right order, the reader would have exactly the same experience.

wild_irises commented that it's not generally helpful to tell an author not to worry about intent. The author has to intend something.

Ellen kept going back to this metaphor: To be truly great, you need to feed the harpy your own liver (a reference to Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn). Her use of the metaphor wasn't merely a reference to sacrifice. What she argued was that a writer has to put an essential part of herself out there to create a great work, and sometimes that essential part of herself reveals some ugly flaws, or things one didn't expect to reveal.

Tempest used an example involving Justine Larbalestier: Justine was in a classroom talking about Magic or Madness, and it was while she was answering questions about the fearful relationship that the protagonist, Reason has with her grandmother that Justine realized that the relationship really mirrored her own relationship with her own grandmother. She didn't realize that that was her model, but it was there in the book, and it was a pretty awkward thing to discover in front of a class of students.

And then vito_excalibur brought up a challenging example: the blogger who believed that she could see inside of Joss Whedon's soul after watching Firefly and could tell that Whedon was secretly a rapist.

Delia Sherman talked about "easy buttons" that authors can push: sick children, rape, revenge, child abuse. These buttons can usually elicit audience response, but they were "over-fingered coins" that kind of cheapen the writing, she argued. She also made the excellent point: "There is a reader response that is not an individual reader response."

There was also an interesting interaction when wild_irises mentioned that sometimes the right response from an author is: "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you, but that is what is in the book and that is what belongs in the book." Tempest responded that "I'm sorry" is a pale response compared to "I'd really like to understand how this gave offense." Afterward, wild_irises retracted her earlier statement because she preferred Tempest's response.

maize brought a really great comment to the panel. He talked about how, for example, Doctorow was big on the idea of the purpose of Little Brother being to start conversation, not to write that particular story. Should that be something for authors to aim for? The comment didn't get quite as much response as I think it was worth, sadly.

The final comment of the panel came from Delia: "Of course Dumbledore is gay: he's lonely, he's beleaguered and he dies tragically."

Then it was a really good Indian food dinner with jiawen and a number of her Minneapolis friends. The food was great, and the conversation was good. After that, it was off to dessert and speeches. And then I was bagged. I barely put in an appearance on the party floor. I was out like a light pretty early.