Inside of a Dog, It's Too Dark to Read

I've had fanfic written of my fanfic! :D Read here - although if you aren't familiar with Girl Genius, you might not appreciate some of the internal humour and texture. I still think it's good even out of context, though.

annechen67 also wrote a drabble set chronologically later here.

I feel vaguely famous!

P.S. Yes, I missed the puppypicture update today. I was too involved in other stuff to be bothered with finding another camera cable and processing the negligible number of photos I have on hand. Yeeesss, somebody ate my camera cable....

annechen67 and I were talking Victoriana (or more like ersatz Wilhelmiana), and 'bluestocking' came up. So naturally, I had to Google for it:

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( A straightforward history )

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( Wikipedia, with some interesting references )

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( A bookstore-heir to the concept )

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( American Heritage Dictionary, via Bartleby )

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( From 'Bas Bleu' bookseller, with hotlinks of tasty quotes )

ETA: The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (ca. 1779)

I was thinking about the nature of transgressive fic for a few minutes on the way up to work -- I was wondering, is it more transgressive (or perceived as same) if the transgressor asserts or implies that her way is the 'right way' to see the characters, sometimes despite creator comments to the contrary, rather than acknowledging that's just her preference or what she's chosen to take away from the canon?

Or is it... well, delusion as opposed to conscious transgression? If not delusion, what would it be termed? Just as a really well-documented example, and not to miff anybody, consider the extreme H/H'ers. Not the reasonable ones -- the ones with the flamethrowers and nuclear bombs and 'I HATE HER!!!1!' posts.

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This is also a good place to quote an... interesting comment I picked out of a small wankiness in a manga/anime fandom. Yes, it was talking about sex, big surprise; more specifically, either a same-gender age-mismatched pairing of what I find unnatural popularity, or a same-gender incestuous pairing of even less provenance and good taste.

Here's the quote:

In an ideal situation, sex is the IDEAL AND ULTIMATE FORM OF LOVE. How, exactly, does that "cheapen" thier [sic] relationship.

OK. Either her parents were hippies or... no, that wouldn't account for it either. I will lay money on the fact that she's under 20, and likely not even out of junior high or the equivalent.

Now, does anybody want to argue the point that her having this attitude is either good, sensible, logical and/or healthy?

in_the_blue's phrasing, but we're both in on this:

OK. All of you who are supremely disinterested in exploring roleplay possibilities can skip this.

Those who aren't?

( At Dogstar, we're auditioning for... )

Come and stretch your writing muscles with us!

Will Shetterly, entirely nifty author, had already done my bit one better as he and his blogfriends discuss the alternate history of what would have happened if Bush were elected.

Mind you, there's a couple of spoilsports in the mix, but for the whole, it's team hackysack with concepts. :)

Proof of 'behind every great man there's a great woman'...

Elizabeth Holloway Marston	Virginia "Ginny" Heinlein

( Elizabeth and Ginny )

Toni Morrison



Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. She was the second of four children of George Wofford, a shipyard welder and Ramah Willis Wofford. Her parents moved to Ohio from the South to escape racism and to find better opportunities in the North. Her father was a hardworking and dignified man. While the children were growing up, he worked three jobs at the same time for almost 17 years. He took a great deal of pride in the quality of his work, so that each time he welded a perfect seam he'd also weld his name onto the side of the ship. He also made sure to be well-dressed, even during the Depression. Her mother was a church-going woman and she sang in the choir. At home, Chloe heard many songs and tales of Southern black folklore. The Woffords were proud of their heritage.

Lorain was a small industrial town populated with immigrant Europeans, Mexicans and Southern blacks who lived next to each other. Chloe attended an integrated school. In her first grade, she was the only black student in her class and the only one who could read. She was friends with many of her white schoolmates and did not encounter discrimination until she started dating. She hoped one day to become a dancer like her favorite ballerina, Maria Tallchief, and she also loved to read. Her early favorites were the Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, French author Gustave Flaubert and English novelist Jane Austen. She was an excellent student and she graduated with honors from Lorain High School in 1949.

Chloe Wofford then attended the prestigious Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in English with a minor in classics. Since many people couldn't pronounce her first name correctly, she changed it to Toni, a shortened version of her middle name. She joined a repertory company, the Howard University Players, with whom she made several tours of the South. She saw firsthand the life of the blacks there, the life her parents had escaped by moving north. Toni Wofford graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. ¹ She then attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, writing her thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf ², and received a master's degree in 1955.

After graduating, Toni was offered a job at Texas Southern University in Houston, where she taught introductory English. Unlike Howard University, where black culture was neglected or minimized, at Texas Southern they "always had Negro history week" and introduced to her the idea of black culture as a discipline rather than just personal family reminiscences. In 1957 she returned to Howard University as a member of faculty. This was a time of civil rights movement and she met several people who were later active in the struggle. She met the poet Amiri Baraka (at that time called LeRoi Jones) and Andrew Young (who later worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, and later still, became a mayor of Atlanta, Georgia). One of her students was Stokely Carmichael, who then became a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Another of her students, Claude Brown, wrote Manchild in the Promised Land which was published in 1965 and became a classic of African-American literature.

At Howard she met and fell in love with a young Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison. They married in 1958 and their first son, Harold Ford, was born in 1961. Toni continued teaching while helping take care of her family. She also joined a small writer's group as a temporary escape from an unhappy married life. She needed company of other people who appreciated literature as much as she did. Each member was required to bring a story or poem for discussion. One week, having nothing to bring, she quickly wrote a story loosely based on a girl she knew in childhood who had prayed to God for blue eyes. The story was well-received by the group and then Toni put it away thinking she was done with it. Her marriage deteriorated, and while pregnant with their second child she left her husband, left her job at the university, and took her son on a trip to Europe. Later, she divorced her husband and returned to her parents' house in Lorain with her two sons.

In the fall of 1964 Morrison obtained a job with a textbook subsidiary of Random House in Syracuse, New York as an associate editor. Her hope was to be transferred soon to New York City. While working all day, her sons were taken care of by the housekeeper and in the evening Morrison cooked dinner and played with the boys until their bedtime. When her sons were asleep, she started writing. She dusted off the story she had written for the writer's group and decided to make it into a novel. She drew on her memories from childhood and expanded them with her imagination so that the characters developed a life of their own. She found writing exciting and challenging. Other than parenting, she found everything else boring by comparison.

In 1967 she was transferred to New York and became a senior editor at Random House. While editing books by prominent black Americans like Muhammad Ali, Andrew Young and Angela Davis, she was busy sending her own novel to various publishers. The Bluest Eye was eventually published in 1970 to much critical acclaim, although it was not commercially successful. ¹ With the publication of the book, Morrison also established her new identity, which she later in 1992 rejected: "I am really Chloe Anthony Wofford. That's who I am. I have been writing under this other person's name. I write some things now as Chloe Wofford, private things. I regret having called myself Toni Morrison when I published my first novel, The Bluest Eye." ²

From 1971-1972 Morrison was the associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Purchase while she continued working at Random House. In addition, she soon started writing her second novel where she focused on a friendship between two adult black women. Sula was published in 1973. It became an alternate selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Excerpts were published in the Redbook magazine and it was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award in fiction.

From 1976-1977, she was a visiting lecturer at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. She was also writing her third novel. This time she focused on strong black male characters. Her insight into male world came from watching her sons. Song of Solomon was published in 1977. It won the National Book Critic's Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Morrison was also appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the National Council on the Arts. In 1981 she published her fourth novel, Tar Baby, where for the first time she describes interaction between black and white characters. Her picture appeared on the cover of the March 30, 1981 issue of the Newsweek magazine. ¹ This year also found her becoming a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters. ⁵

In 1983, Morrison left her position at Random House, having worked there for almost twenty years. In 1984 she was named the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the State University of New York in Albany. While living in Albany, she started writing her first play, Dreaming Emmett. It was based on the true story of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed by racist whites in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman. The play premiered January 4, 1986 at the Marketplace Theater in Albany. Morrison's next novel, Beloved, was influenced by a published story about a slave, Margaret Garner, who in 1851 escaped with her children to Ohio from her master in Kentucky. When she was about to be re-captured, she tried to kill her children rather than return them to life of slavery. Only one of her children died and Margaret was imprisoned for her deed. She refused to show remorse, saying she was "unwilling to have her children suffer as she had done." Beloved was published in 1987 and was a bestseller. In 1988 it won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.

In 1987, Toni Morrison was named the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University. She became the first black woman writer to hold a named chair at an Ivy League University. While accepting, Morrison said, "I take teaching as seriously as I do my writing." She taught creative writing and also took part in the African-American studies, American studies and women's studies programs. She also started her next novel, Jazz, about life in the 1920s. The book was published in 1992. In 1993, Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature for her body of work. She was the eighth woman and the first black woman to do so. ¹

Other major awards include: the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Pearl Buck Award (1994), the title of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters) (Paris, 1994), and 1978 Distinguished Writer Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. ³

Besides writing, Morrison has been recently working on rebuilding her house on the Hudson she lost to a fire in 1993. She was devastated to lose a home full of memories from the years past and has expressed how much she misses the little but irreplaceable things, such as old photographs of her sons and her. She thought long and hard about selling the house before she realized how difficult it would be to write books without the melody of the flowing water of the Hudson serving as a soundtrack to the early mornings she spent writing as the sun rose. ⁴

Novels
     The Bluest Eye, 1970
     Sula, 1973
     Song of Solomon, 1977
     Tar Baby, 1981
     Beloved, 1987
     Jazz, 1992
     Paradise, 1998
     Love, 2003

Plays
     Dreaming Emmet (performed 1986, but unpublished) <sup>5


1</sup> http://www.distinguishedwomen.com/biographies/morrison.html
² http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tmorris.htm
³ http://www.oprah.com/obc/pastbooks/toni_morrison/obc_20000427_aboutauthor.jhtml;jsessionid=C4UBDNAZAHQGTLARAYGB3KQ
⁴ http://empirezine.com/spotlight/toni-morrison/toni-morrison.htm
⁵ http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1993/

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martinhesselius, I found a poem after all. It was on the website of someone... hmmm... in the same head space I'm in.

( ...by W.H. Auden )

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Gwynne says I'm obsessed. What do you expect from the fannish-style obsessive-compulsive? I mean, really.

So as a result I've added The Raven-Haired Goddess(tm) Aeryn Sun to www.SFF.net/people/Corgi/
Shareout/Ama-tars/ama-tars2.htm. Women of worldly power and suchlike to follow, when I have the time.

The Wonderful Pirate moey has added Canti Five of Canis Mutatem, then corrected one of them (ooops). Thank you again, Lisa Kadlec, who is enjoying my story!!! *BEAM*

An SF riff:

Which Heinlein Book Should You Have Been A Character In?
brought to you by Quizilla
( No 'Glory Road'? :(  )
Interesting. I took it a second time with completely different answers, and still got Cat. I need to re-read that book....

Which Agent Smith are you?
By Madeline Elster
( I have GOT to find time to see the movie...! )

What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
( Hm, Neo and Smith at the same time. Eeenteresting. )

Which Doctor Who are you?
this quiz was made by Auntie Krizu(:>)
( Heh. Typical American )