Don't see me how you see others

1. I am very sad to hear that Michael J. Epstein and Sophia Cacciola are moving to Los Angeles, not least because it substantially decreases my chances of hearing the complete works of Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling in person. It's also difficult to disagree with Epstein and Cacciola's assessment of the economics of being an artist in Boston:

Unfortunately, we just haven't been able to find the support necessary to create the financial infrastructure that would allow us to continue working with an upward trajectory, and as much as new arts programs are touted, we just don't envision a serious movement to make creative work viable within the context of skyrocketing costs of living in this area. Every year, more and more of our friends give up and move outside the city because they can no longer afford the rent. Boston, as a community and as an institution, fails to support startup and mid-level arts groups . . . This deficit means that the city fails to attract the types of infrastructure that result in creative workers getting paid fair wages. For our needs, that means that there are very few record labels, booking agencies, feature-film production houses, film distribution companies, etc. We personally just can't rely on crowdfunding and accumulating debt forever, and we can't work under those financial restrictions to do better than we are now. We are just killing ourselves to pull off anything serious on tiny budgets. The true cost of this failure to value creative work is that people like us are significantly burdened by staying, and we are driven to leave. We'd prefer to stay, but it's self-sabotaging to wait for sociopolitical miracles.

I am not even trying to make a living in the arts (it would be nice; I'm trying to make a living from my jobs first), but I spend a lot of time these days trying to figure out how the hell I can afford to stay in a city I consider home. The part about the rent rings dispiritingly true. The last thing this city needs is more condos.

2. I am not sure that I had known anything about the eighteenth-century enslaved chef Hercules—head cook of George Washington's household at the President's House as well as Mount Vernon, from which he later escaped to freedom and disappears from the historical record—prior to this article, so in that sense I appreciate the controversy over Ramin Ganeshram's A Birthday Cake for George Washington. The portrait is arresting.

3. I find the song itself catchy enough in an imagistic way, but I really like the video for Sun Seeker's "Georgia Dust." It gives good daylight horror. It's a witch song.

So we jumped up on the table and shouted anarchy

I would love to know what I was thinking when I left myself a half-finished note on James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977). I'd have to re-read the novel to see if it's still true, but it used to fall firmly into the category of books I love although they are possibly not any good. I was thirteen when I read it for the first time, staying with my brother's godparents and their house-spanning, university-grade library of genre fiction. It's a puzzle-book, the scientific equivalent of a police procedural. A twenty-first-century lunar exploration discovers a dead man on the moon, in a spacesuit; this would not be so unusual except that he's been dead for 50,000 years. You keep reading in anticipation of an explanation for this apparent paradox, and somewhat secondarily to find out how the protagonists will handle the knowledge once they have it, but nobody in it has any characterization past the necessities of their place in the plot. I remember always liking Christian Danchekker, the lanky, pedantic, abrasive evolutionary biologist who serves as an intellectual antagonist for the first two-thirds of the book, but he's no more three-dimensional than the rest of the cast; his particular stereotypes were just more interesting to me than well-adjusted engineering. I think I picked up several early favorite characters that way. To be honest, it still works. The right kind of character will catch my attention over anyone else in the narrative even if they're two-dimensional or onscreen for five minutes. Some years ago I realized that the paucity of women on the list of favorite characters I've been keeping for the last fifteen years has nothing to do with a constitutional inability to empathize with female characters: it's the fact that the traits that most reliably interest me in a character are traditionally assigned to men.¹ Write more widely varied and weirder female characters and I fall for them just as instantly as their male counterparts.² It's one of the reasons I am looking forward to the Ghostbusters reboot. With that many women taking center stage, at least one of them should be strange enough for me. I bet that was not what I left myself the note to talk about, but it's true. More eccentrics of all genders and I'll be happy.

1. It has also never helped that romance is not one of my main attractors and the most conventional way to include a woman in a narrative is as a love interest; the most conventional way to make a woman the protagonist is to write a love story. If there's one lady in the plot and her primary effect on it is through her affections, unless we're talking Elsa Lanchester's Bride, I'm out of luck. I display about as little interest in male characters who are romantic heroes unless they have some other notable quality. There's a related conversation here about secondary characters versus protagonists, but it belongs to another post or at least footnote.

2. I tested this hypothesis originally with Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle (1986), Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest (1978–1996 as far as I followed the series), and Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History (2000). Later evidence included The Awakening (2011), The Bletchley Circle (2012–14), Agent Carter (2015–), the fiction of Caitlín R. Kiernan and Gemma Files, and pre-Code Hollywood. Film noir, too.