owlectomy

It is good when conversations about body weight don't get reduced to "personal responsibility" and "TWO WHOLE CAKES" but it would also be great if people didn't get reduced to helpless victims of circumstance who can't help their ignorance and inability to eat healthy/exercise.

Yes, it's harder to eat in ways that are coded as "healthy" if you are poor. Yes, it may be harder to get exercise if you are poor. I think it would be great to work on solving those issues. But if one's possible responses to fatness are either contempt or pity, that's hardly any better than just contempt.

It's the "ignorance" part of it that gets me especially. Because any time you say that any person doesn't have enough knowledge to have the right to control their own life, you are headed to a very dangerous place.

(Started eating healthier when I moved closer to the food co-op. Still fat.)

Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can't feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is beautiful

-- Elizabeth Wein, "Rose Under Fire" (ARC, not the finished version).

Catching up on two weeks:

Finished:

The Drowning Girl, Caitlin Kiernan

I think I went in with expectations that were a little too high. The other Kiernan novel I read had an ending that dissolved into incoherency, so a long interesting buildup with a bit of a flat ending is actually pretty good. Disconcerting all the way through. I like novels that take fairy tale tropes in interesting directions and ones where reality is kind of up for grabs, so, worth my time for sure.

Rosemary and Rue, Seanan McGuire

I bought this looking for an urban fantasy that wasn't too romance-focused and wouldn't require me to think too hard, so I'll call it a win, but for me this was a little too superhero-movie -- too many death-defying set-pieces all in a row.

Midwinterblood, Marcus Sedgwick

Seven interlinked stories, covering over ten centuries, about love and sacrifice in different permutations. This is more a kind of a meditation than a novel; its power is all in the reappearing characters and motifs (apples, hares); the ending seems a little simplistic, but it's so beautifully written.

I have no idea what I'm going to read next, because the library's not getting deliveries yet, and I just look at my Kindle and sigh.

The more days pass the more I realize that I am not going to get around to writing up all the stuff I did at WisCon.

It was a bit of a low-key con for me, on account of missing all of Friday and most of Saturday and then sleeping through a big chunk of Sunday -- I think that in the future I'm going to really try to get to Madison Friday night even if I have to go straight from work to the airport, and get in super late. I didn't get to that many panels, and I wasn't that thrilled by most of the ones I did go to -- I have to remember to go to panels about things I don't know anything about, rather than things I'm already interestedin, because an hour and 15 minutes really isn't a lot of time to go into depth.

And also, other people are wrong or they talk about stuff I don't care about.

But I still had an excellent time, because it was filled with talking to people I like, and talking about books and anime and things.

I always come back from WisCon feeling like I want to write great books and I don't know how. I'll figure it out one of these days.

I want to rant because I just read someone declaring -- and I feel like this is the fifth or sixth time I've read this sentiment -- something like "If you want to talk about what talent is in writing, you have to quantify that with sales figures, or something else quantifiable, or it's just totally arbitrary."

I feel that, if you want to sell a lot of books, and so you want to look at what megabestselling authors are doing right, that's a good thing and perfectly understandable.

And I also feel that it has nothing to do whatsoever with having a genuine aesthetic response to a book.

I've told this story before, but one of the best meals I've ever had was when I got lost in the red light district of Fukuoka, and I just kept wandering and wandering through the streets of soaplands and porn bookstores until I caught a very faint smell. A food smell. I took courage and proceeded forward, following my nose, until I got to a little park where an agricultural festival was being held, and I ate a ridiculously delicious ear of buttered roasted corn. You cannot turn that into an equation about my level of hunger and the sugar content of the corn. And that is how I feel about the books I really love.

It is okay that opinions are just opinions, and that everyone has different ones, and that in the end they are a bit arbitrary (although you can always find places to point to and say, Oh, that was sloppy or Oh, that was a very clever and thoughtful way to work out that particular problem). If you could reduce it to "Book A is better than book B, which is better than book C," then you're squeezing out all the room for a particular reader to have a relationship with a particular book -- a relationship that's based in personal history and personal interests. Craft is really important, but in the end I feel like craft is not what you have in order to write an objectively great book; it's what you have so that you can build those relationships without tripping over yourself.

I've been pondering Ta-Nehisi Coates's post on the purpose of foreign language education for a few weeks now. Because its central point seems to be so true, and so "If so, where do we go from here": high school language classes are usually pretty much useless at getting people up to conversational proficiency, if that's the only contact the student has with the language (as opposed to family members, exchange programs, recreational reading/listening...)

So: there are a lot of people who took three or four years of language classes because that's what selective colleges want, and resent the classes or call themselves "bad at languages" because they didn't achieve proficiency.

I'm really interested in less conventional methods of language teaching like TPRS and other methods focused on comprehensible input far more than the traditional "four skills" sorts of classes that try to teach speaking and writing from the beginning. I think that the evidence supporting them is pretty good -- not incontrovertible, but pretty good.

It seems to me that if schools teach foreign languages because they think students should have foreign language proficiency, educational researchers should be falling over themselves to find something better than traditional high school language classes. The current status quo is such that high school language classes serve as a base for future study for the relatively small number of students who want to get to a high level of proficiency in the future, and as weed-out classes for selective colleges, but... maybe we should just admit to ourselves that most people aren't going to get to conversational proficiency.

Maybe the first thing we need to do is disabuse people of the notion that it's somehow easy to have a basic conversation. To have a conversation, you need to be able to parse a continuous stream of sound into individual phonemes (which may not even exist as distinct phonemes in your native language!) -- you need to match those phonemes up with words you may or may not know, and you might need to deconjugate a verb to match up "hubiera" with "haber" -- you need to parse the meaning of the sentence as a whole, and figure out an appropriate response -- then you need to retrieve those words from your memory and arrange them in the right order. It's not easy.

There's part of me that thinks "I studied French for four years in high school and I can't have a conversation!" should be like "I studied Physics in high school and I can't build a bridge!" or "I studied English in high school and I can't write a novel" -- Fine, sure, who expected that you could?

The other part of me acknowledges that native English speakers in the US are among the least multilingual people in the world, so clearly we're doing something wrong. And it might simply be a factor of time and exposure. The thing is, you need a lot of time and exposure. (You might be able to get a decent amount of exposure in 45 minutes a day 5 days a week depending on the method. Most high school language classes don't do it because there's so much administrative stuff -- taking attendance, classroom discipline stuff, explaining assignments -- and too much time spent on student output. I would be curious to see longitudinal assessments of 4-year programs heavily focused on comprehensible input, but I think these methods aren't widely used enough for that.)

But really, the purpose of learning foreign language should be to communicate with other people. If classes aren't achieving that then maybe we should think seriously about what's being achieved by requiring kids to study languages. Not because language study isn't important -- obviously, I think it is! -- but, you know, don't give someone ketchup if it's really important that they eat vegetables. If you can't find some way for students to achieve something meaningful, why put them through the torture of the subjunctive?

I've been thinking about this because I've been seriously studying Chinese for almost a year now. And I won't say that I've done anything to rival any of those people who will claim it's possible to be fluent in 3 months or 6 months or whatever. But I really did not expect to be at the point where I can read children's chapter books even just to get the gist of them, or pick my way through the translated Game of Thrones with a dictionary -- and I sure haven't been immersing myself totally, it's been more like 30-45 minutes a day at best. It's actually been kind of weird looking at both the progress I've made, and how far I still have to go.

No one told me that Nancy Garden wrote a book about Joan of Arc!

I have far too many books to read, but I can't possibly not read this.

I had forgotten the part in Fake where good-hearted rookie cop Ryou decides to blow up a drug kingpin's house. And succeeds, and there are basically no bad consequences. I live in Flatbush, I am not naive about the benevolence of the police, and no doubt I have watched far too much Law & Order, and to be sure this was written pre-9/11, but...

Wow, that reads a lot differently when it's about a vicious vigilante killer.

( Some discussion of rhetoric around weight loss/ dieting behavior )

Now that I think about it, Eleanor & Park is one of the only YA books I've read in which being fat is not a symptom of people with terrible emotional problems doing a lot of emotional eating. Who is not getting enough to eat, and this is recognized as part of her abusive family life, not a noble character-building thing.