graculus

Nearly at the end of term, thank heavens.

First off, the student teacher did not come back. I'm hoping it's been suggested to her that perhaps teaching is not really her thing and she ought to consider something else, but I have no idea if that's the case or not. I'm currently in the middle of organising and managing exams, not to mention encouraging folks to sign up for classes in September (with 4 of my students joining one of my classes already, which means I'm 25% full on that class with people where I already know what they can and can't do, which makes my life much easier).

I've also managed to snag a few more hours from September of what was going spare, though I didn't want to take on too much and also wanted to keep a day off in the week if I could - in order to manage both of those aims, I've agreed to teach a Saturday morning class, but at a higher level than I've taught before so that's going to be interesting. It's very grammar-heavy at that level, which is no issue for me, except making sure that I know how to explain the rules (which I've discovered is quite a different thing from knowing if something is right or not when I read it). Teaching on a Saturday means that I will now have Thursdays off completely and also no teaching commitments on Mondays before I head off late afternoon to college for a few hours each week.

I realised a few weeks back that if I didn't get a wiggle on, I wasn't going to actually have a holiday this year (since going to Nine Worlds doesn't really count, even if I sneak off to a museum or two instead of going to panels now I'm going to be in central London) so I've been organising to go to Mull for 10 days before the schools all break up. I'm also going to be camping, though camping when you have a car is a little less Spartan since you don't have to carry everything with you wherever you go. I've booked a couple of trips when I'm there, but tried not to organise myself too much just in case - my main plan is books, coffee and beer, and wandering about. It's prime otter territory, apparently, but that's what they said about Skye too and I never saw any otters there!

I also recently took a refresher navigation course, since I live very close to the Peak District National Park but haven't really explored it properly. I'd done map and compass navigation many years ago but had forgotten most of it, so I went off the other Saturday and spent the day re-learning how to do stuff and also would like to get back and do more later on in the year - the same guy does navigation in poor visibility training, which could be very useful in the coming dystopia. ;)

You may notice I have not, to this point, mentioned the referendum. I'm really not sure what there is to say about it, other than that one side was vigorously campaigning on what's turned out (to the surprise of nobody on this side of the situation) to be a tissue of lies and half-truths at best. It's also validated the views of a small bunch of horrible people who now think that the majority agrees with them about 'foreigners' and people who are British but not White, making them feel bolder about being arseholes in public. The folks who 'won' clearly didn't expect to, because they had no plans on what should happen next, so we're stuck in a bit of a limbo at the moment while political power games carry on and everyone on both sides of the House try and jockey for position.

It's all a bit pathetic but also quite worrying because nobody really knows what's going to happen - the referendum was, after all, advisory (another thing that seems to have been glossed over by and to the folks who want to leave the EU) so could be ignored by government if they want to do so, though that would probably require significantly more backbone than most politicians possess when faced with unpopularity. Whether or not I'll have folks to teach in the longer term is another matter, but for now nothing has immediately changed, so we'll have to see just how deep we're all in the shitter.

It's been an interesting couple of years to be a fan of SFF, that's for sure. The latest kerfuffle is over the subject of an award, given by the World Fantasy Con every year, which currently is in the shape of what I can only describe as a caricature of the fizzog of said HP Lovecraft. I'm not going to post a pic here, because it's pretty awful, but if anyone's desperately curious to see it, you can find a pic of it and the man himself here.

Basically, for the past few years there's been something of a campaign to get this award statue replaced by something a) less awful and b) not representing someone who was a massive racist, even by the standards of his own avowedly-awful period. Naturally, this has seen some pushback - mostly by white men, it has to be said, which will come as no surprise to anyone, I'm sure - because of Lovecraft's influence on the genre. Except that, racist arseholery aside, I'd argue that if there was a competition to say which dead white guy has had the most influence on the Fantasy genre, Tolkien would be a shoo-in.

Anyway, good news, the award is going to change from this year so we're waiting to see just what replaces it. In the meanwhile, we get to retread the argument about whether you should separate the behaviour and atittudes of the creator of something (whether we're talking books, movies or whatever) from the thing they've created. This becomes more complex, naturally, when you're thinking about past times as the 'but everyone was [insert prejudice of choice here] back then!'.

I think, as I've got older and thought more about people other than myself (I hope!) then I can empathise with a zero tolerance approach even though I might not maintain it myself. There are certainly creators of modern media who I think are unmitigated arseholes and I choose not to engage with anything they are involved with - if anyone's interested, my list includes but is not limited to Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Steven Moffat, Orson Scott Card and various less well-known folks within the SFF genre who I have seen be arseholes online. I have zero tolerance for people who are either plagiarists or who have been caught being arseholes to anyone who criticises their work (Anne Rice is the first person who leaps to mind, but there are others). There are also folks in fandom who I have seen be arseholes online so I now won't read anything of theirs, even if they happen to be in fandoms I would otherwise read.

As for historical stuff, that's a little more difficult - apparently, even for his time Lovecraft was considered massively racist, which is saying something. It's an easy out to say 'oh, everyone thought like that' because that's never been true of any time period, since if it was true nothing would ever change because nobody would ever think it needed to. There have and will always be outliers, good and bad, with most folks being somewhere lumped in the middle of whatever opinion is current. Still, we choose what we value and what we give head-space, and I choose to be more selective than that, since there's plenty more out there that isn't produced by arseholes.

Five online things:

Some old, some new...

1. Welcome to Night Vale - do I really need to explain what this is?

2. Musketeer Space - currently reading this after briefly meeting the author at WorldCon and hearing about the fact she's writing what it says on the tin, the Musketeers as space opera.

3. Tea and Jeopardy - another post-WorldCon addition, this time a podcast, hosted by writer Emma Newman with various guests.

4. Shousetsu BangBang - a regular source of excellent gay and lesbian original fic, highly recommend.

5. Amuse Your Bouche - one of a number of cookery blogs I follow, this one vegetarian.

For my fellow Brits: Campaign asking the UK government for a posthumous apology to Alan Turing.