Port and Books: Dow’s 2011 Late Bottled Vintage Porto
Recently, Camestros Felapton shared some beer/book pairings as part of the Blog Challenge Project. I’ve wanted to do something similar in the past for beer or tea, but given that we’re still in a pandemic of uncertain conclusion, my beer and tea access is relatively limited. Small town and all. And so I turn to another alcoholic beverage I rather enjoy and almost never talk about: port! What books go with port? Well, that depends on the port, I suppose! Today’s port is Dow’s 2011 Late Bottled Vintage Porto, which, like all ports, sounds fancier than it probably is. (I will preface all of this with the fact that I am not a fancy pants alcohol consumer or reviewer. I know maybe 3 or 4 fancy terms, but mostly I just care if something tastes good.) Here goes:
The Arts are the Glue that Holds Civilization Together
Something I have been thinking about a lot since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its profound impact on American (and global) society is the place of the arts in our everyday lives. So many of us are binge watching Netflix or other services, reading far more than we used to, downloading comics or writing our own stories, perusing fine art or setting up easels of our own, or doing all manner of creative and artsy things, both for amusement and to keep ourselves busy. I’ve been cramming in a metric ton (officially weight) of Star Trek across four decades of the franchise, blogging (as I am here), and cataloguing my books (not so artsy, but still nice). For myself, this has been part of an effort to keep me from the more destructive behaviors I might engage in (ranting on Twitter, for example) and to help me adjust to what will surely be 2 or 3 months (at least) of near total physical isolation for others. And in doing all of this and seeing all of what is happening around me, I’ve started to answer a crucial question out loud to myself: why do the arts matter yesterday, today, and tomorrow? And I think I’ve got a decent answer to that. I’d argue that the arts are the glue that holds civilization together on both the personal, national, and global scale. It’s the thing that allow us to express ourselves, to find joy and relief, to be human and explore what that even means. The arts are everything.
SF and Food: The Future Shall Be Fed
When I think about representations of food in science fiction, I’m struck by the fact that a lot of science fiction simply washes over the issue of production and distribution. Food is almost always “around” in SF literature. After all, most SF characters have to eat something from time to time (though they never poop). However, very little of the genre actually directly addresses the future economics of food, and even when it does, it’s usually a cursory glance. The one exception might be the dystopian genre, especially Soylent Green (1973). Since dystopia and starvation go hand in hand, the genre is naturally concerned with food.
Thoughts on Years of Reading (Mostly) Women
Back in 2015, roughly 92% of the works I read were by women. This was mostly intentional, as The Skiffy and Fanty Show hosted a women-centric (and non-binary friendly) theme throughout 2015. In 2016, the numbers were less skewed, with 61% of works by women. Including my teaching numbers into this list is a bit too complicated, so I won’t bother including it here. Obviously, having a more “open” year for reading meant my numbers were more fluid. But even with that fluidity in place, there’s a clear indication that my reading habits have changed. So, here’s what I’ve learned from the past few years:
The Science Fiction Canon: Function, Limits, and Problems
@renay How do we create an inclusive sf canon that also recognizes the impact publishers had on which works we influential? — Grand Moff Duke🐍🚀 (@shaunduke) December 21, 2016 I have spent a lot of my time in graduate school thinking about how to talk about literary canons and ways to disrupt them. The literature classes I teach always include works that have otherwise been excluded from the Western Canon in a deliberate attempt to draw into question how canons are formed and the limited scope they present to us as readers. It’s a tightrope game. On the one hand, survey courses have to teach students about crucial works of literature in an effort to provide some kind useful and repeatable literary knowledge base. On the other hand, simply repeating the canon is sort of like reading the headlines in a newspaper without ever looking at the article itself; sure, you’ll have a firm understanding of a literary tradition, but you’re missing out on a wide range of compelling material that could make for an even deeper reading of a field. In the realm of science fiction, that can be a bit tricky. Because science fiction is already a small bubble of a much larger literary world, text selections are often arbitrary or based on vague notions of what appears to be the “common core” of the field (we’ll come back to this in a bit). Worse, science fiction “people” too often assume they know what the canon “is” and push that perspective on others as if it has weight — which it does due to the power of cultural suggestion. I’ve heard too many stories of someone in the science fiction community telling someone else that they have to read X and Y if they want to be considered “educated” about the field; ironically, you’ll hear the same ten names repeated in these claims, suggesting such individuals have a less comprehensive knowledge of the field than they assume. There are two false assumptions in these claims: That they speak using the authority of an existing literary canon. That the purpose of a canon is to provide a reading list one must consume to be considered “knowledgeable” about a field. I’ll return to the first of these later. The second assumption is remarkably easy to debunk. Let’s use Western Canon as an example.
Gym Reads Poll #2: What should I read next?
It’s that time again. In the last poll, folks chose Karen Joy Fowler’s Sarah Canary. I’m almost done with that particular book, and I will have some thoughts about it when I complete it on Monday. Heck, there may even be a podcast about it (and The Book of the Dun Cow, which I finished about a week and a half ago).