Humoring the Other

I've complained before about the current trend in TV of Immigrant as Butt of Jokes--that I'm all for more racial diversity on TV, but we're not doing it the right way. I finally found The Right Way.

Michael Tuesdays & Thursdays was a brilliant Canadian sitcom, but it didn't find its audience and lasted one season. I just watched it in November and died, it was so good. (It's online at the CBC, but only in Canada.) It's about a guy with an anxiety disorder, and his relationship with his therapist. At work our anxiety dude has an asshole coworker. He's East Indian. But the reason he's funny is that you recognize him as The Office Asshat. Yes he has an accent, so when he comes and says "I've got the chit chats!" it's probably funnier; but it'd be funny without too.

Their boss is also East Indian, and in a wheelchair. He's a funny character. But funny because he's interesting--soft spoken, gentlemanly, whirring around the office in his electric wheelchair. He's filmed in a funny way.

The East Indianness of these two characters isn't ignored, they aren't whitewashed. But while they're more interesting because of it, they aren't funny because of it.

Here's another great example. You only need to watch 30 seconds to get the joke.

What's funny here isn't Peele's "flaming" performance, it's the juxtaposition between Peele's excitement about getting married, and Key's terror. Homosexuality is key to the joke, but anyone can relate to why it's funny. 

I'm not saying humor that makes fun of people isn't ever funny. Some of the best humor in the world is insult humor. But when you're combining that with jokes about "the other" then you'd better be damned clever and damned funny. That takes Dave Chappelle brains, not Jeff Dunham. Most of the time immigrant/gay humor goes for the easy (read "lame") laugh.

More on this tomorrow.
 

Historical Romance: it's a white zone

I talked yesterday about historical romances, and touched on the fact that most of them these days take place in Regency England.

Like anyone raised on Georgette Heyer, I love the Regency. It's an interesting time tucked in between a more morally loose Georgian period, and the super strict Victorian. There's room for eccentrics and dissipated heroes and flirtatious chicks, but there are still rules which limit the characters and give authors a lot of material for conflict.

But there are some problems with this, the main one being: There can be no people of color in these stories. You can attempt homosexuality in this context, like Anna Cowan did; you can put in a Jewish person, like Trollope's The Way We Live Now (not Regency, but close); but there aren't many opportunities for a black hero, or an Indian one, etc. In modern London there are a lot of East Indians and Afro-Anglos, etc. But in the Regency, they're mostly absent.

If you have an historical romance set in the United States in the 1700s, 1800s, there are more opportunities. MM Kaye wrote a great cross-racial romance set in India (The Far Pavillions, omg so romantic the scene in the cave!); and Paul Scott created a heartbreaking romance in 1940s India, in The Jewel in the Crown. But the romance genre has sort of turned away from all these possibilites. Even when a romance takes place in Egypt, as so many do (it's the big Orientalist Fantasy in romance novels, I don't know why) the romance is between white people. The last Loretta Chase I attempted (takes place in Albania) was so stupid in its portrayal of characters of color, I couldn't read it.

Mary Kowal has recreated the Regency with magic, but I don't know if because of this she's managed to find a way to integrate diversity. Wrede and Stevermer didn't.

Well. I suspect ebook publishing is what's going to unleash some much needed diversity and fresh ideas and more radical ideas in Romance Land. Frankly the entire romance genre is incredibly white. Embarrassingly so.
   

The Rise of the Sexless Regency? maybe

I wonder if we're going to see the re-emergence of Regency romance novels sans sex.

Post Austen/Heyer there were Regency category romances, and they emulated A/H. So no sex. But they died in the 90s just as the historical Regency romance took off. Amanda Quick* started writing these longer, steamy-riffic Regencies, and these days that's all you can find. Authors like Loretta Chase still write the light, witty sort of stuff, but there has to be lotsa sex. (She used to write category Regency, so I guess she made the transition.)

I don't dislike the sex books, but they have a completely different tone than the Heyer type books. Completely outrageous things happen in these books. They're modern people in a Regency setting, with modern morals, and a modern way of talking. I might enjoy the characters, but I don't feel transported to a different universe. For example I'm reading a romance about an 18 year old who pretends to be a guy's mistress at a weekend orgy. In Heyer's Regency (and I'm pretty sure real life), never, never in a million years would a well brought up young man bring a similarly brought up young woman to an orgy. It's insane. But her character is super cute, so it's fine. I'm enjoying the book.

But sex relieves romantic tension. "No kissing til the last chapter" tends to recreate what it's like to be falling for someone and not knowing if they like you back. O the torture of it all! If you're going to have sex with someone, well, clearly there's some interest there. In order to keep the tension going, the stakes have to be raised in other ways. Heyer has some books where The Kiss happens halfway through, cause there's a mystery to carry the novel the rest of the way. In modern novels, things usually go nuttier than that. Spies and supa-adventures and massive misunderstandings and break downs and family drama.

I don't dislike the current Regency historicals, I just want to see more variety. That's why I enjoyed Jude Morgan's Indiscretion so much. Finally someone writing in the old Austen-Heyer tradition. Right now Goodreads is taking votes for the best books of 2012, and in amongst the usual suspects of erotica, semi-erotica, and paranormal was Edenbrooke.

I'd never heard of it, but it's just a Regency novel without the sex. It is published by Blue Mountain who are owned by a Mormon publishing group, so I assume this isn't where the next great gay romance is going to come from--but I gather it also is not a Christian Romance ("inspirational romance" as it's called). But Edenbrooke was published under a new line that will be dedicated to "clean" romances.

I don't care for this "clean" terminology, cause I don't think sex is morally dirty; but I do hope that the popularity of this book means we'll be seeing this sub-genre of romance re-emerge.

____
There were bodice rippers before Quick, but I think the popularity of her style led to historicals being overwhelmingly set in the Regency, as opposed to the United States, pirate ships, etc.
   

Funnies

From Things That Happen in Movies But Never Happen in Real Life

(check out the rest of them)

Just in case you like crying

http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/pictures-that-will-restore-your-faith-in-humanity

has a list of stuff like this:

Music to not write to

Here's Serena Ryder covering Jordin Sparks' pop hit "No Air."


Ryder's a Canadian. She's a bit hit and miss for me--here are some of my hits.

"Little Bit of Red" (it's a toe tapper!)


Cover of one of my fave Leonard Cohen songs: "Sisters of Mercy"
The sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on


And a jaunty Christmas song!

She can be rebuilt!

This is what my dad sent me yesterday, after talking about my necrotic imagination. He suggested that in my rebooting process the Writerly program still hasn't booted up properly, but will eventually.

Stop running

Alright, I'm done. My brain/soul/heart are all bitching and complaining that I'm making them do something they emphatically don't want to do, and they're running out of ways to let me know. (Their latest desperate move has been to make my characters unbearably boring. I've never written a story before where I was bored by every single last one of my characters. So this move got my attention.)

Yes writing is work, but it's not supposed to be "Worst Jobs in History" kind of work.

I'm going to listen to my body and stop. When it wants to write again, it'll let me know. Maybe we'll go back to quietly puttering away on our novella. Maybe we'll just read books. Maybe we'll just watch TV. I don't know. Tonight I'm gonna get some cheesies and catch up on Hart of Dixie.

One of my friends has a lot of health problems and often has to stop and completely REST or else she'll just get worse. And I'm always nagging her that it's okay to take those rest periods and not feel guilty that other things aren't getting done. Her body needs the rest. Not "wants" but needs.

I'm going to take my own advice.

The day that you stopped running
Was the day that you arrived

My future career as a writing caster

Is it possible to lose your imagination? I've decided it's possible to just, one day, stop being a writer. The writer part of me has actually dropped dead. I am no longer a writer. I can't write.

It's possible there's an expiration date. I wrote my first non-school book when I was 9, so that's 30 years now. That's a good run. Maybe it's like being an athlete--you get 30 years and then it's time to take your trophies and become a sports caster.
   

November

Here's what November in Nanaimo looks like:

Okay, admittedly it also looks like this: 

My dad likes to say: "You know what my favorite Fall color in Nanaimo is? Green!"

I'm such a little fella

My brother sent me this video from our childhood. It's a series we both vaguely remembered... basically just that it was a shrunken head and the theme song went "Chico Chico the raaainmaka..."

I didn't remember that the head itself sung the theme! He's so cute! And how awesome the theme is!

Chico chico the rainmaker, Chico chico the rainmaker, Chico chico the rainmaker, Chicopacobacawana make the rain! Chico I'm such a little fella, When I'm around you better get your umbrella, As I start to sway and my eyes go flash, The heavens open wide with a mighty crash!


   
These are the kinds of things that get me through the hard times. Chico Chico the raaaainmaka...
 

missed it

Oops! Posted a Dixie song twice yesterday, instead of this Lucinda Williams song:

If we lived in a world without tears

How would heartbeats know when to stop?

What the discerning 300 lbs biker is listening to these days

Watching Hart of Dixie and Nashville has me in a country mood these days. Well, pop and rock country, anyway.

I bought my first Lucinda Williams album cause I was standing in line to buy something, saw an album by this woman I didn't know, and the review sticker compared her to a female Keith Richards. I had to buy it. The top comment on one of these videos is "I am the 300 pound biker up front at her concerts bawling my eyes out."

If we lived in a world without tears

How would heartbeats know when to stop?

RobinElla


Alison Krauss & Union Station


Keith Urban


Dixie Chicks

Let the lists begin!

I usually write my "best of the year" lists in December or January. But I'm rarely talking about stuff that came out that year, so... the date doesn't really matter. I should really be doing this in October or November for people to put on their Christmas wish lists! ;-)

(Plus, what better way to procrastinate from Nano?) So count on seeing my fave books, movies and music from the past year. And I think I'll need a new category: "I bought it at a thrift store!" :-)

I'll give it some thinks. In the meantime, here's what I read in 2012 (I think if you click on the first pic it will open a window where you can scroll through them, and they'll appear larger.)

Hi-larious

If it's true that I have a team of spirits that follows me around all day influencing me, then there's an 80 year old in there somewhere. Reading PG Wodehouse and Rumpole, and watching Nelson Eddy & Jeanette MacDonald movies.

When I was in my teens my mother was in law school, and in the summer I'd visit and we'd live what she coined the "nouveau pauvre" lifestyle. Eating Boston broils, expensive ice cream, and renting movies every night.

Her video store had a collection of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald movies. Not being 98 years old, I'd never heard of them before and I fell in lurv. All this running around serenading people = hi-larious. People complain that Eddy couldn't act his way out of a paper operetta, but I thought he was = hi-larious.

My favorite movie was New Moon, but Rose Marie contains their most famous song: When I'm calling yoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu...  It's a song that our Mountie, Nelson, teaches Jeanette. At the end of the movie he's leading away her fugitive brother, whom she's been harboring, and she tries to call him back by singing the song to him. "Will you answer toooooooooooooooooooo?"

My mother would sit on the other end of the couch reading her mystery novels, and occasionally taking in the Goings On. When this scene played she was shocked -- shocked! -- that it was actually touching. (Even through Eddy's hi-larious acting. *Spins around on horse!*)

Outings with Yoda

Yoda and I at the Hawksley Workman Concert

Getting his picture with Diana Krall

He always has a lovely, placid expression. Like he's pleased with life, and easy to please.

Last time I posted a picture of myself my face was behind the camera and Ms. Brownlow "complained." So here I am striking A Post in my concert attire. 

Full of 'tude, in my Prince necklace.

Random acts of humor

How about a light day today? This was from some website list of 50 People We Wish We Knew.

(Hall and Oates)

This one's my fave.

 

Punishment by Shame (the school bus lady)

Everyone loves to see justice done

On somebody else

(Bruce Cockburn)

There was a story in the news about a woman who drove over the sidewalk so she could get around a school bus. As part of her sentence she had to stand outside and hold a sign about it. I've often wondered about punishments like this--they seem like a good idea, or at the very least harmless.

But Brene Brown is out for shame punishment. In her book (I Thought It Was Just Me) she addresses a similar case of a man who abused his wife and had to stand on the court steps to read out an apology. Brown challenges us to think past what satisfies us as a punishment, and think about what really works.

It's key here to remember there's a difference between shame and guilt. Guilt can be healthy because it's our own perception that we've fallen short of our own values. Shame comes when we've fallen short of someone else's values, and it results in us feeling isolated. Punishment by shaming puts the criminal on the outs of society, rather than reintegrating them.

To address this "public shame as conviction" thing Brown quotes Dr Harriet Lerner: "For people to look squarely at their harmful actions and to become genuinely accountable they must have a platform of self-worth to stand on. ...Only from there can they apologize."

Lerner gives the example of Ron, who doesn't want to join a group for men who beat their wives, but will join one for men who have trouble controlling their tempers. She calls this a healthy act of resistance: "If Ron's identity as a person is equated with his violent acts, he won't accept responsibility or access genuine feelings of sorrow and remorse, because to do so would threaten him with feelings of worthlessness. ...How can we apologize for something that we are, rather than something we did." (pp65-66)

When I saw it put this way, I immediately knew this punishment by shame thing was wrong. Do I want anyone, even an abuser, to ever feel worthless? No, absolutely not. And as someone who believes in God and the inherent value of all life, I can't.

In Canada we wear felt poppies on our laps until Remembrance Day, and the sale of those poppies goes to veterans. Poppy donation boxes are often in stores, and this year to lower theft they handed out guidelines to stores on how to keep the boxes. As a result far less theft occurred. Now look at this CBC poll:

Even though we KNOW FOR A FACT that the best deterrent is to communicate with retailers, people believe sin shaming. Mind, Brown would see our response as normal--cause we tend to shame others when we ourselves are in a state of fear or anger. ;-)