High tech

For someone who learned to type on a Royal manual standard typewriter that weighed about as much as I did at the time, computers are a wonderful thing.

To be sure, I can't quite get over the feeling that a computer is *work*. Spending my evenings downloading music files, or "surfing the Net" (a phrase that is now years old and so might as well date from ancient Greece), holds little appeal. The usefulness of computers for the business of writing, though, is undeniable. Researching anything is much easier with the Internet than it ever was before. There is no excuse for not knowing an editor's name when the publisher has a Web site.

And, of course, there's the unprecedented and amazing possibility that someone I've never heard of--or have, and admire--or someone who wouldn't write me a letter if you tied a pen to his or her hand--will see a blurb or a post and e-mail: Hey, how interesting, what else have you got?

Reading: Mark

Ash Wednesday

"Surely, if there is sin, it must be that--to throw life away as if it were nothing."
--Tomorrow's Promise

Statistic

Here is the real statistic to watch:

According to a March 2006 poll by the Pew Research Center, 51 percent of Americans oppose same-sex marriage, down from 63 percent in February 2004.

Fifty-one percent is a bare majority. Canada was there in the last 10 years.

Twelve percentage point drop in two years is amazing.

Reading: Tyrannic Love, or The Royal Martyr by John Dryden

Left Behind

I haven't read more than a few pages of the LaHaye/Jenkins series (just shelved many, many copies at a public library). And it is probably my literary (as opposed to theological) bias, but I don't find the popularity of this series quite as alarming as many commentators, particularly in Britain, seem to. It looks to me like a parallel to the phenomenal success of other "Christian/inspirational" genre publishing, such as romances.

Genres like thrillers and romances are enormously popular as entertainment, but there is a large market of folks who are uncomfortable with certain conventions, like the context of sex in a traditional romance. So they buy these other series. I think readers buy these apocalyptic books because they want to read thrillers, but regular thrillers make them uncomfortable, so they substitute Satan and God for the bad/good guys in, say, Tom Clancy.

Certainly, if large numbers of individuals actually want to provoke Armageddon in the Middle East then that is alarming, but even most of those "true believers" are not active participants in the destruction. After all, like non-Zionist Jews before 1948, they hold that this is all in the hands of G-d and we have nothing to say about it at all.

I don't think that most readers are buying fiction because they want to enact it in their actual lives. They buy it because they are bored.

Reading: Paradise Lost by John Milton
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

Fear and dread

Our text for today is a verse from Isaiah. I say it over to myself frequently, especially in recent days and weeks:

"Do not call conspiracy all that this people call conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the LORD your God, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread."

I never used to understand the idea of "God-fearing." It seemed that fear was something very different from trust, and weren't we supposed to trust rather than fear God? But now, plagued by years of adult anxieties, I have a somewhat different idea.

We all have fear and dread; the question is, is it worth it? Do we direct it towards something like nuclear war (how twentieth century of me), which we cannot control and which may never happen? What a waste of worry that would be. (Thanks to my seventh-grade language arts teacher for pointing this out.)

One of the points of having a God is that "he" is big enough to be worth our fear and trust. Yes, of course I hear Richard Dawkins saying this is a delusion. I respect Dawkins, but as an evangelical preacher--which, for atheism, he is--not a practicing scientist. He hasn't done original research in years.

The point of this delusion, if that is what it is, is that it is insulated from time. The fear and dread are not linked to today's conspiracy theories or the woes of this particular generation. There is far more at stake in this universe of grace than that.

Reading:
Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle
Sidney Godolphin

In other words

It was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in America last week. Reading (let alone listening to) MLK's sermons, sometimes called "speeches," is a reminder that others often say it better than I do. So, from the sublime to the ridiculous, here are a few others' words:

(MLK on his opposition to the war in Vietnam) "This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men…?"

Lillian Hellman in her memoir, Scoundrel Time: "The traceries from what you were to what you became are always too raw and too simple."

Reading: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

"In my experience, the world's happiest man is a young professor building bookcases"

Finally, I suggest going to Opinionated Lesbian and scrolling down to February 28, 2005 11:03 AM
Shallow book reviewers

Why'd you come to Canada?

I am asked this question probably more often than any other, once people realize that I'm American. (Clarification: Although I now have Canadian as well as U.S. citizenship, I have a hard time thinking of myself or my writing as anything other than American. It's just where I'm coming from.)

The people who ask this are themselves Canadian, and I wonder if Americans would ask a version of this question. I can't imagine, back in the U.S., asking an immigrant "Why'd you come to America?" In the first place, it seems rude to me, but beyond that, Americans tend to assume that everyone would live in the USA if they could. While this is not true of lots of people, there's a kind of American confidence that takes for granted what a great country the U.S. is. And, while there are also huge problems there, I do miss that confidence.

To answer the question I go one of two ways, depending on how much I want to go into it with the particular person asking:

(Short answer) Because my partner lives here.
(Long answer) I would still live in the U.S. if Penelope (the "partner" referred to above) had an unrestricted right to live there with me (and if she wanted to). Unfortunately, one of the problems with the U.S. is that federal law (which governs immigration) does not recognize any relationship whatsoever existing between two women, although we have shared our lives for more than fourteen years. For the first half of those years, we did not share a home, or indeed even a country. She is British, and Britain is where we met. In those days, Britain was almost as unwilling to recognize a same-sex relationship as the U.S. still is. Other people have found other solutions, but ours was to find a country where 1) at least one of us could immigrate in her own right, and 2) the other, if necessary, could be recognized as the first one's partner so that we could end up in the same country together.

The country that met those criteria, at that time (2000), was Canada. We do not know if our relationship was taken into account when we immigrated, or if we simply both qualified.

I get very, very tired of people born in Canada, invariably white like me, making comments about "immigrants" when they clearly haven't the first idea what it takes to get into this country. I feel that I have more in common with others who have come to Canada in search of a better life than I do with these people. Just because we look alike and our first language is English, they spout this xenophobia. It reminds me of the things people say about gays when they aren't aware the person they're speaking to is gay.

Because people rarely know these things unless they've dealt with them personally, here are a few important facts:
1) Immigrating even to a relatively welcoming country like Canada is a long, hard, expensive process. Laws change all the time and then you have to start over. In fact, under current regulations, with the education and experience I had in 2000, I would probably not be allowed in myself.
2) Some of the United States, and some cities, have started to recognize same-sex relationships and even marriages. Unfortunately, this does not help anyone whose partner is not American. Immigration law is federal and the federal government is not particularly keen on either gays or immigrants right now.
3) A good organization working to change these laws is Immigration Equality.

Reading: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel