I had completely forgotten I did this interview for them. Opens into Youtube. Just ten minutes.

First published in 1976, The Female Man remains a rulebreaking, groundbreaking book. Through modern eyes sometimes problematic, the book is discussed and analysed by Farah Mendlesohn. An indepth discussion of gender, storytelling, anger, and complex narratology.

Presented at Conversation, Eastercon 2023.

I have spent the weekend at the online Eastercon. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about it’s a convention that has run for over 70 years. It is run by teams, it’s a participant convention not a ticketed festival. It’s a community. It has traditions.

I don’t usually write convention reports (although I love reading them) but this year I have had Thoughts.

As this report really doesn’t belong here, you can now find it at Ansible. If you need a Word file or another format, please email me.

—

And to make the obvious response: we all screw up. It’s how you understand your screw ups that matters

I’ve moderated a panel last night on Working Class Heroes. Guests were Ali Baker Brooks (UEL), Stewart Hotson, Ken MacLeod, and Charles Stross. We roamed over the issues of what is the working class, is there just one, what are the things that shape working class experience. Below are some of the books we mentioned that covered living as working class people, struggling against capitalism, achieving and coping with moving out of the working class, and the issues of intersectionality

This is the reading list from the Working Class Heroes panel: Ali Baker Brooks, Stewart Hotson, Ken MacLeod, Charlie Stross.

·       Courttia Newland, A River Called Time

·       Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black

·       Eleen Lee, Liquid Crystal Nightingale

·       Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter

·       Simon Morden, Gallowglass

·       Temi Oh, Do you Dream of Terra Two

·       Homer Hickam Jr. Rocket Boys

·       1632, Eric Flint.SM Stirling

·       Nalo Hopkinson, New Moons Arms

·       Philip Reeve, Railhead

·       Elizabeth Hand, Waking the Moon

·       Helen Wecker, The Golem and the Djinni,

·       Nathan Lowell, The Quarter Share books,

·       Liz Wiliams Precious Dragon (fantasy) and

·       Nine Layers of Sky (SFF)

·       Kari Sperring The Grass King’s Concubineb

·       Tricia Sullivan, Maul

·       Oisin McGann, Small Minded Giants (YA)

·       BB Alston, Amari and the Night Brothers -upper end of middle grade and lower YA

·       ➢ Also see blogon unions in SF; http://hugoclub.blogspot.com/…/witches-of-world-unite.html

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein has received nominations for the Locus Award, the BSFA Award, and tonight, the Hugo Award.

Awards are idiosyncratic things. We really shouldn’t read too much into them.

But I am enormously honoured that so many of you in the UK (BSFA award) and across the world (Hugos) thought that my book was worth nominating.

Thank you.

Dear Mr. Whiteside
Once upon a time I was an avid fan of Greggs. As a school kid I used to regard your sausage rolls as just the best, the iced fingers a high treat, and the strawberry tarts a Friday wonder.
I even worked for you briefly in 1993 before I got my first academic job, in a small store on an estate at the edge of York. I used to eat sausage rolls and Russian slices in the breaks.  A deputy Vice Chancellor who was one of the best managers I’ve ever had was one of your factory managers when she was younger.
I have huge affection for Greggs.
But the last time I tasted a Greggs’ sausage roll was 1997.
Which is why I am asking–begging in fact–when you’ve nailed the vegan thing (which I heartily approve of) please please turn your attention to producing a gluten free pastry range, because anything Greggs produces will knock all competitors out of the park.
Yours

Farah Mendlesohn

Dear Farah
Thank you for your message. That is a long time to go without a sausage roll.
We recognise the growing demand for gluten free and have introduced some choice in sweet bakery and soups for example. So far a good tasting gluten free pastry product has eluded us but we will keep on trying.
Regards
Roger

by Fjm

Yesterday I talked to people about the struggle to hear when I’m teaching a group of students and someone, in all innocence, said “at least it isn’t an 18th century lecture hall”.

Folks, if we still used 18th century lecture halls I would have been able to function a lot longer. 18th century lecture halls were designed for the unaided voice, and for a population that expected to lose hearing with age and didn’t have hearing aids. 40% of us lose some hearing after the age of 40 after all. When I stand at the front of one of those curved, steep tiered lecture theatres, all those audience voices are directed at me, I am the focus of the sound.

Modern classrooms are all sorts of shapes and they each raise issues. Here are just three (there are others).

The classroom full of tables for group work: suddenly a third of the class have their backs to me, a third are side on, and the only way I can hear is if I walk right up to someone.

The rooms where the microphone is at the very front of the room and there is a huge empty space in the centre, into which the teacher walks to talk. Which means the students with hearing impairments can’t hear a thing because while the teacher is conforming to current pedagogy and moving around, the technology is still there, fixed on the podium.

The classroom with sound baffles so that students can focus on the sound from the front of the class (ie the lecturer): that was fascinating, it was only the day I went to the back to listen to a guest that I realised the classroom was deliberately designed to make the lecturer voice central and to dampen student voices. I could hear every word the speaker at the front said.

I only ever found one book on classroom acoustic design (I’ve just tried to find it and can’t) and of twelve essays every single one assumed it was the student who might have a hearing impairment. But 40% of us will lose some hearing as we age, making it far more likely to be the teacher,

 

 

 

We talk a lot about #OwnVoices in fiction, but less so I think in academia, where we are all supposed to be neutral. In both race, sexuality, indigenous and disability studies, however, the mantra “Nothing about us, without us!” is beginning to have an effect.

A few months ago I spotted this title. I felt actively sick when I saw it, but I spoke to my friend Kenneth Kidd, and he put me in touch with The Lion & the Unicorn, and when my review is available I’ll link to it here. 

Full disclosure: I began to get sick around the age of 6 (“tummy troubles”), was having serious fainting attacks by the age of 8 (three days in isolation also introduced me to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe so some good came out of it) and by 12 had a diagnosis from the coldest, most dismissive doctor I’ve ever met. The year I turned 14 was a disaster: occasionally I get asked about my rather spotty education and poor school record, to which the answer is “migraine”, but until recently I had to hide that under more generic answers as people never really “got” what I meant. I’d like to think that’s less true now, but Honeyman’s book suggests not.

This book impressed me as an academic, for its interdisciplinarity and for its research, but it also gave me the feeling of being recognised. Like all academic books it’s expensive, but there is a much cheaper e-book available And Update! the pb is coming out this month!

Farah

Interview with Susan E. Honeyman

Why did you decide to write this book?

I got tired of waiting for someone else to write it.  I had casually read about migraine all my life with hopes of finding anything that might help, but I got frustrated by the seeming limitation of works to the self-help genre.  Then, when I first read a testimony of child migraine I felt less alone. And interviewing others was amazing in that respect.

 Experiencing migraine as a kid presents a unique constellation of problems, especially confusion about why it is happening. I hope that in the future more ethnographies with a larger sample size will come out. In fact I am starting a new book series (Cultures of Childhood) and hope to be able to facilitate more ethnographic studies of child cultures (of pain, of institutionalization, medicalized identities, alternative education… oh the possibilities!). One thing I didn’t find through my interviews but wanted to is more folkloric evidence of superstitions and obsessive-compulsive beliefs we invent in attempting to control pain. Migraine gives you a lot of time when bedridden alone with pain and your thoughts.

 Another reason I convinced myself to write the book was the naïve hope that it would be therapeutic for me. It wasn’t. Not at all. As I mentioned before, sometimes I wrote with a plastic bowl nestled between my arms kept in place by my body and the keyboard. The writing usually made me nauseated, and learning about Jeffrey Lawson was actually retraumatizing for me. It pierced right through my resolve to not know what interventions had saved my life at birth, and what happened in the 24-hours before my parents could even see me. Let me just put it this way: when I had my first MRI and discovered, with great embarrassment, that I was extremely claustrophobic, my mother matter-of-factly attributed my fight AND flight reaction to my “difficult birth.” I didn’t believe her until I read about Jeffrey Lawson. Now I know exactly what she meant and don’t want to know any more.

 What makes you most angry about the current situation?

The ease with which adults suspect children of lying…I was still so frustrated about this issue that I wrote more about how this disproven prejudice affects gravely ill children in my most recent book, Perils of Protection. Even my neurologist asked, when I told him about my book on migraine, “but how do you know the kids aren’t faking it?”  It is terribly offensive. Children know when they are being called liars, and they know what an insult that is. But it also blocks kids from having any say, contributing to their own healing and coping through self-report. In short, it makes them less safe.

What do you want people to take away from this book?

I want families, schools, and medical personnel to stop denying that children can and do experience dysfunctional pain. Child migraine and chronic pain are more common than often thought, but, like any invisible impairment, they can be ignored or worse. Though we can’t possibly understand a stranger’s pain without report, we can become more aware of the ideologies we live by.

No one is immune to compensatory defense mechanisms. For example, someone dies and we ask how old they were (this is to soothe our own fears: “oh, he was older than me”); someone gets lung cancer and we want to know if they smoked, not consciously blaming the ill but certainly trying to contain that illness in a reality outside of our own. We can be more aware of our compensatory defenses and break such reasoning with empathy instead.  And if you catch yourself knitting your brows in preparation for a pity party, just don’t.

Do you think migraine pain in children can cause PTSD and is there grounds for offering support along these lines?

 This is one of the issues that most surprised me in interviews (which I later confirmed by consulting studies): many migraineurs told me that the anxiety of having an attack was almost as debilitating as the attacks. Only one interview subject spoke of flashbacks to the brain injury he’d sustained two decades before, after which the migraines began.

Personally I had never experienced much anxiety surrounding the attacks, but I realize that one of my bad habits (poor concentration, selective memory) has actually helped me in this department. I have a massive capacity for denial. Even after four decades of migraine I’ll catch myself saying things like “hmmm, 8 days without a headache, I think (whatever new supplement I’m trying) is working!” or “11 painfree days—that’s a record. Migraine season* must be over.” Of course saying such things doesn’t make them true, but they do keep me hopeful and feeling proactive.

 *Of course there is no such thing, though I read somewhere that dropping barometric pressure in autumn can affect them, and certainly migraineurs can tend to have attacks in response to similar weather. January is always my worst month and October the best!

Final Question:

You describe What Katy Did, by Susan M. Coolidge, as teaching docility as a way of managing pain. But that book probably saved my mental health as the only thing I read that reflected my experience (I also managed to hurt my back in much the same way when I was a teen). I’m wondering if there is a book you encountered as a child that did the same for you? Ie acknowledged you and gave you a paradigm or model for coping?

For this a have a pretty dull response: honestly, I didn’t read for pleasure as a kid because I was a remedial reader with processing problems, perhaps from my encephalitis as a kid. Reading was such hard work that it gave me more headaches. I didn’t read for pleasure or bibliotherapy until my 30s when I finished my Ph.d. I still am a remarkably slow reader. But there are all sorts of alternative ways we can collaborate in ability. My partner usually starts reading off subtitles unprompted when we are watching a movie and they scroll too fast—so I can switch to audio, follow the movie, and not keep pausing. It works pretty well!

Thank you very much Susan.

 

 

 

Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to be taught by me will have heard me say,

“Don’t write beautifully, write precisely….”

Nowhere is this more relevant than in the use of conjunctive adverbs/connectives/cause and effect signal words (whatever you or Michael Gove wants to call them). There is lots of advice on how to use them. Have a page.

At some stage in our education we are taught that thus, however, therefore, despite, etc. are incredibly powerful words to make us seem clever.

Unfortunately, relatively few people seem to learn before starting a PhD either what they actually mean  or when, or even whether, to use them. The result is that they are sprinkled like confetti, randomly.

My friend Gabrielle Lyons puts it this way: “They are taught that connectors makes their work look more coherent. Sadly, they haven’t learned that connectors help to express logic: they don’t produce it.”

The worst mistake is using words that imply causality where no causality is evidenced, but the second worst mistake is often just using them in the first place, too often they are redundancies. When you are line editing, go through and strike out any that do not move the meaning on.

A short table of conjunctive adverbs (and one annoying phrase) and their meanings or uses.

accordingly	as a result
also	in addition; too.
besides	apart from.
consequently	as a result (there must be causality involved)
conversely	introducing a statement or idea which reverses one that has just been made or referred to
despite	without being affected by; in spite of.
equally	in the same manner or to the same extent, or, in addition and having the same importance (used to introduce a further comment)
finally	used to introduce a final point or reason.
furthermore	in addition
hence	as a consequence; for this reason
henceforth	from this or that time on
however	used to introduce a statement that contrasts with or seems to contradict something that has been said previously.
In fact	Just don’t use this one: if it’s a fact you don’t need to reinforce it. If it isn’t a fact it doesn’t become one for making the claim.
indeed	used to emphasize a statement or response confirming something already suggested
likewise	in the same way; also.
meanwhile	in the intervening period of time, or, at the same time
moreover	as a further matter; besides (an intensification, adding detail)
nevertheless	in spite of that; notwithstanding; all the same
nonetheless	in spite of that;
on the other hand	alternatively (which is also a less coloquial form)
otherwise	in other respects; apart from that.
significantly	in a sufficiently great or important way as to be worthy of attention
similarly	used to indicate a similarity between two facts or events
subsequently	after a particular thing has happened; afterwards (unlike consequently, it does not imply causality)
therefore	for that reason; consequently (there must be causality)
thus	as a result or consequence of this; therefore (there must be causality)

 

 

 

 

One of the people with whom I’ve done a lot of work over the years on supporting inclusion at events, is Alison Baker of the University of East London. Alison teaches Education and has a diagnosis of dyspraxia. This is a piece she wrote about her experiences and needs.

Neurodiversity in academia and fan spaces: building in inclusion