Others

I just discovered that there are two projects independently trying to send high-speed rail from Las Vegas to the LA metro area. This sounds like a good thing at first, but I'm very worried about it.

It sounds like Desert Xpress has managed to advance quite far in just a few years perhaps even including some initial construction. It has the advantage of being far cheaper (about $4 billion instead of $20-30 billion) and being based on already-existing technology rather than relying on further development of maglev technology.

But it's got some big problems too, most notably the fact that its western terminus would be 40 miles from Riverside, putting it at the far outside edge of the LA metro area. I worry that this might make it basically unusable. I guess it could be workable if it was basically treated as an airport, with a huge parking area - it would just be an airport that serves only Las Vegas and gets you there slightly slower, but without the security hassle. Hopefully travel would be cheaper than plane too.

The California-Nevada Interstate Maglev on the other hand has planned stops at the new Las Vegas airport (planned for construction by 2019 to increase capacity once McCarran is full) and two tine desert cities, as well as Ontario and Anaheim, bringing it well into the LA metro area. Of course, this is why it's so much more expensive, having to get right-of-way through dense urban areas.

It's unfortunate that different government groups seem to be giving money to both projects. I don't know how much productive cooperation there can be between the two plans. Perhaps the best plan is a cheap version like the Desert Xpress with a possibility of extending service from Victorville into the California High-Speed Rail corridor.

Quite a few things have inspired this post. The first was reading two truly atrocious books over the weekend. To be fair, the first one, Graceling by Kristin Cashore, simply had what in films are called continuity errors. The main character in the book is a very talented fighter called Katsa. The first chapter spent a lot of time setting up the fact that none of her assailants ever expected her to be a girl, so they always imagined that a talented male fighter was attacking them. The next chapter had Katsa being renowned all over for being the odd, frightening talented girl fighter. FAIL!

The other book was even more of a mess. It was The Language of Stones by Robert Carter, and fuses Arthurian myth with an alt-historical Wars of the Roses. It sounded wonderful, but was an incoherent mess of every Arthurian and fantasy trope (from magical stones and ley-lines to 'Mark my words well, young Jedi' platitudinous portentousness; from bashing of a greatly modified version of medieval Christianity to random usage of Irish as the 'true language'). To make matters worse, it rips off The Dark is Rising in a truly shameless manner (come on, it's no coincidence that your super-special hero is called Will, was born on May Day and is brought away from his sheltered existence by Merlin just before a significant birthday).

After reading these two books, I thought their authors could've benefited from a post like this!

Anyway, the other inspiration for this post was the fact that many people I know are doing NaNo, so I thought a few writing tips couldn't hurt.

First up is one of my favourite bloggers, The Intern. She has some of the best writing advice I've ever read:
'-Open novel to a random page
-Read a couple paragraphs, or at most, a couple pages
-Can you tell what the conflict is, or what the character is yearning for? Can you explain, in just a few words, what these paragraphs are doing and why? [...]
If you stab your own manuscript with that toothpick and need to read an entire chapter before being able to identify some kind of internal or external conflict, you might have a problem. If you can't identify what's going in any particular spot in less than twenty words, chances are the conflict or tension is too vague (or there isn't any).'

It's so obvious, and yet it's not something that you'd obviously think about as a new writer.

Justine Larbalestier and her husband Scott Westerfeld (find him at westerfeld_blog) are posting helpful writing tips on alternate days.

These next links are not necessarily NaNo-related, but they contain valuable information for writers of genre fiction in particular.

I really love Abigail Nussbaum's blog. Although I don't always agree with her, she's probably one of my favourite commentators on all things SF/F. Her latest post, on The Magicians by Lev Grossman, is definitely worth a read.

Finally, John Scalzi has had enough of sci-fi geeks whining about lack of mainstream acceptance. He's as eloquent as usual.

I've been rediscovering Steeleye Span recently. I've listened to them since I was a child, and always adored their take on traditional folk songs. As you know, I'm a lyrics freak, so any style of music that emphasises storytelling is going to appeal to me, but I'd forgotten how awesome the songs were. My current obsessions are the less well-known (at least to me) songs:
'Following Me' (I can't find the lyrics online at all, but they're great)
'Lady Diamond'
'The Fox'
And, in particular, the awesome 'The False Knight on the Road', which is a great example of riddling and rhyming as a battle with seriously scary consequences. (The 'False Knight', is, of course, the Devil.)

I love finding out obscure stuff about the origins of the songs, so I was pleased to find this fabulous site that unravels the complex meaning of 'Cam Ye O'er Frae France' in all its subversive, Jacobite glory.

Well, I hope this post was full of writing and wordy goodness. Good luck, NaNo people!

Interesting article in the NYTimes, about the first American to win the New York Marathon in 27 years. Apparently people complain that it isn't a "real" American win, because he immigrated to the US from Eritrea when he was 12.

Apparently the most recent American winner (in 1982) wasn't American-born either - he immigrated from Cuba when he was 2. He didn't get the same sort of complaints though. He suggests (or maybe the author of the article?) that it may have something to do with being Hispanic rather than black, but I think it's more complicated than that. Part of it is surely also the point that although Keflezighi is "black" in some sense, he's East African, while most African-Americans are of West African descent. (Obama is too, though I have no idea if the groups Obama is related to are connected to the groups Keflezighi is from. I'm pretty sure the most widely-spoken languages in Kenya are Bantu (at least, Swahili has a lot of Bantu origins), which would connect them to southern and western Africa, while the languages of Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea tend to be more closely related to Hebrew and Arabic. But I have no idea what that means about ethnic, cultural, racial, or whatever connections.) Thus, although the article mentions that Patrick Ewing didn't face this sort of criticism when he was on the US Olympic basketball team (he's originally from Jamaica), part of it is that Ewing has the ancestry that an American black person is "supposed" to have (presumably being a descendant of slaves in a British colony), while Keflezighi doesn't.

Additionally, the winners of the New York Marathon in recent years have tended to be from East Africa. (In the recent winners list I see that in the past 12 years, the winner has been from Kenya 7 times, Ethiopia once, and from other place (Brazil, South Africa, and Morocco) four other times.) So somehow he also fits the stereotype of "foreign marathon runner". I suspect that if he had immigrated from India or Korea when he was 12, rather than Eritrea, he would have counted as "American enough". On the other hand, if the competition he won had been some annual computer programming or engineering competition, and he was the first American to win in 27 years, I'm sure he would have counted just fine, but would have endured these criticisms if he had been born in India or Korea.

At any rate, it's certainly unfair to say that someone is "not American enough" to count as an American marathon winner, when he's lived in the US for 22 years. But it's more than just garden-variety racism at work here - it's a whole collection of intersecting stereotypes about what an American looks like (even though people admit an American might not be white, there are still limits) and what it takes to be "an American marathoner" as opposed to "an American computer programmer" or something else.

While I was talking on Skype with my mother on Sunday, we had a minor disagreement about something we've argued about in the past. After a day of reflection, I can see why we argued: she misunderstood something which I had said.

( We've been spending most our lives living in an introverts' paradise )

Last night I went out to the pub with a bunch of ASNaCs. We had all been at a talk given by one of the postdocs in the department. There were so many of us that we didn't fit at one table. Somehow it worked out that I was in the first group, which was all Germanicists, while the second group, which included the speech-giving postdoc and my supervisor, was all Celticists.

All of a sudden, one of my Germanicist friends noticed this odd segregation - and the fact that I was the sole Celticist hanging out with the Germanicists. After some consultation, they decided that I was one of the kidnapped Irish people mentioned in the Icelandic sagas (not being a Germanicist, I have no idea of the name of this kidnapped Irish person), a Celtic exile.

This amused us greatly.

I love the ASNaCs.

When I was a high school student, I was incredibly busy, to put it mildly.

( It's frightening how much I did in one normal week )