mmanurere

"Being a feminist is much more central to my identity than being a man."

It's still true (of course!) -- but it's also an expression of male privilege. The "man vs. feminist" dynamic just doesn't have anything like the moral convolutions of "woman vs. feminist" -- in no small part because "man" is a position of privilege in a whole range of really noxious ways. Every state of privilege (male, white, middle-class, etc.) carries with it a corresponding moral obligation to subvert that state of privilege. Only "subvert" isn't quite enough -- I'm just not sure what a better term would be. In any case, a principled failure to formally embrace one's own position of privilege is rather undermined when one expects cookies for it.

And it's even worse when one gives oneself cookies for what should be a minimum baseline for "not totally failing," not any particular accomplishment. So, yeah. Something I need to pay more attention to in the future if I want to engage in less fail.

So far, I've presented two talks on literary theory as related to Harry Potter fandom -- one at Lumos '06 in Las Vegas (regarding liberal vs. radical political self-conceptions in popular media, comparing the HP novels to V for Vendetta), one at Azkatraz '09 in San Francisco (regarding interactions between the body and the self in HP slash fanfiction, drawing on cyborg theory).

Now, to continue the "every three years" pattern, my paper proposal has been accepted for Ascendio 2012 (put on by the same people as the other cons/symposia) in Florida. Now, I've been disappointed in the past with the number of people showing up at my presentations/lectures (10-20 the first time, 7 the second; partially I blame being scheduled at the same time as the other slash-related quasi-academic presentation), so I decided to try to put more asses in seats by offering a deliberately provocative title which will show up on schedules and programs.

I'm calling my paper/lecture this time around "There's No Such Thing as Canon".

I still have to work out some of the details (like whether I can afford to go to Florida this July and whether I can overcome my distaste for Slavoj Žižek long enough to quote the worthwhile and relevant bits of his work in what is, after all, supposed to be a paper on "practical literary theory for HP fans"), but I'm hoping to draw in a lot of indignant fans and convince them to move in a fanarchist direction.

Also -- I'm going to have to manually crosspost this between LJ and DW. Does anyone know a program to help with that process in the future? I used to have such a program a computer or two ago...

As part of my project to work my way through Samuel R. Delany's "Modular Calculus" stories, I'm now about halfway through the novel (vs. the metafictional epilogue) part of Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia.

I'll be able to talk about it in more depth later (and yeah, I'm going to be working some thesis action on Delany), but I think I might be starting to understand heterosexual men better than I had before. That's not actually right, though -- I think I'm understanding how to make sense of heterosexual men in a particular set of ways that I hadn't before. Of course, given how involved this novel is with how language and representation relate to desire, it'll take quite a bit more reading and discussion to really come up with a better way to phrase that. In any case, there are things about heterosexual-male-ness that I think could only be passed from one gay man to another. I know there are things about race and class that I'm only partially comprehending here, too, as someone much whiter and less man-identified than Delany...

So, here's a description of a puzzle:

You have 16 square "tiles", each with a different combination of red and blue "sides". Since the same side is always up (no rotating the tiles), the 16 tiles represent all 16 possible combinations of "sides". Now, these 16 tiles are to be placed in a 4x4 square, such that touching sides must be of the same color and all exposed sides around the outside of the square must be blue.

From one set of relative placements of the all-blue and all-red tiles (all-blue in a corner, all-red diagonally adjacent; rotations and reflections cover all variations on this), I've come up with 56 solutions. It took awhile to completely exhaust the possibilities, though, with much note-taking and backtracking, so I don't especially want to just brute-force the other six relative placements of all-red and all-blue. Unfortunately, I don't really have the right math to take a more analytic approach.

One weird pattern I noticed -- in making the "tiles" (er, pieces of paper), instead of making the whole side a color I just had basically a dot at the center of each side, with all sides of the same color in a given tile connected (so all-red has a red + taking up the whole square, the tile with a single blue side at the top has a red T-shape, the one with red on the sides and blue on the top and bottom a -, etc.). Each solution has a different "pattern" of the red "channels" this way (and you could actually put the tiles together based just on this pattern if you have it written down), but all 56 solutions I have so far have exactly two "loops" in the red channels. Going to poke around a bit and see if this might have something to do with solutions to this puzzle corresponding to 4x4 normal magic squares.

The crêpe batter and crème pâtissière are chilling in the refrigerator. Later tonight I'll make the crêpes.

Tomorrow morning, I make ganache, spread it (along with raspberry preserves and the crème pâtissière) in between the however-many-layers-of-crêpe-I-can-manage, chill the whole stack, then make another batch of ganache to cover the whole thing.

I've never done a mille-crêpe before, but I couldn't resist adding chocolate (and rasperry, in honor of the so-rich-it's-almost-inedible ganache-and-raspberry-filled "truffle cake" my family gets from the local cake place for most of our gatherings). Maybe another time I'll do the more "normal" (pastry cream only) version.