So… I’ve fallen in love with a particular tea (it was a gift). Insofar as I can tell (remember I can’t read Japanese, and it’s a direct import), the brand is Harada, and it’s their Yabukita blend of green tea–you can see the box here. It’s got a light, refreshing taste, and it quenches thirst quite effectively. So far, so good. Trouble is… I haven’t been able to find this particular tea here.
I’m therefore hunting for a substitute.

Am I right in thinking a good grade of Sencha tea from Japan would taste about the same, or am I completely off-base? I haven’t been very impressed with the one variety of Sencha that I bought, but it was definitely the cheap kind (google tells me that Yabukita is a particular category of sencha, but I haven’t been able to find Yabukita either).

-Jim C. Hines blogs on sexual harrassment here, here and here

-Broad Universe publishes stats on diversity in genre

-The World SF blog Tuesday fiction is “City of Silence” by Ma Boyong (translated by Ken Liu): part 1, part 2. Incidentally, the blog is also looking for fiction they could showcase–preferably set outside the US/UK, or by authors from outside the US/UK (note that this overlaps with, but is not *quite* the same thing as fiction by US/UK PoCs). No payment, unfortunately–everyone’s a volunteer and the website runs on a shoestring, but you’d be contributing to a worthy cause; and they take reprints and stories that have been hard-pressed to find a home elsewhere.

Aka, the nativity scene and the Christmas tree. I never feel this is official until the actual Christmas tree is put up, even though we’ve been in the Advent for a while.

(pictures behind the cut, including my rather unorthodox nativity scene…)
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(well, OK, not so recent. Catching up on my summer of sloth)
–A Tangle of Magicks/Renegade Magick by Stephanie Burgis: the sequel to A Most Improper Magick/Kat, Incorrigible, which finds teenage witch Kat Stephenson in Bath, trying to shepherd her sister into marital happiness, prevent her older brother from gambling the family fortunes away–all the while struggling with her Guardian powers, and a dastardly plot to use the power of the Roman Baths for nefarious ends. Kat’s voice is as delightful as always, and this is a very nice, punchy mix of comedy of errors and adventure book. Very much looking forward to book 3!

-David Gemmell: hum, a lot of books? Finished the Drenai books, and found one I hadn’t read (the very last one, Swords of Night and Day). The earlier ones are still those that carry the most punch for me; I suspect partly because of nostalgia. Also read Lion of Macedon/Dark Prince, which is basically Greek legends on crack (I exaggerate a bit, since Gemmell obviously documented himself well and has always had a fondness for Antiquity settings in his books; but not by much. The entire many-worlds experience, and the Source vs Spirit of Chaos thing are very entertaining, but I very much doubt that they have anything of “authentic” Ancient Greece about them. Still, what I very much enjoyed about them is their scope: the books take place over decades, and it’s refreshing to see alliances form and break as time passes. It also allows the author space to show the characters grow and age, which isn’t often found in genre fiction–especially in epic fantasy–and this gives a gravitas to the books which prevents them from tipping into outright silliness. Not by much, admittedly).

My Vietnamese progresses; I can now get *some* words recognised by my mother when I say them (don’t laugh. The potential for screwing up words in this language is oh-so-boundless). And this weekend is going to be busy busy, as I’ll be at Rencontres de L’Imaginaire in Sèvres with the H, hopefully signing a number of books greater than zero…

Also, this: awesome xkcd comic. I want to go back in time and build one of those in high school.

-Charles Tan on Awareness and Bias
-Strange Horizons interviews Sergei Lukyanenko (via the joint efforts of Nicholas Seeley, Shari Perkins, and Natalia Antonova). Awesome stuff about Russian SF, Russian tropes, and Russia vs. the US.
-Jeremy L.C. Jones interviews me for Clarkesworld. Best interview title *ever*.
-Jacob of Drying Ink interviews me
-Over at The Night Bazaar, I blog on “Playing to Your Strengths, Playing to Your Weaknesses” (with many thanks to Courtney Schafer for the invitation!).

Another need-to-get-it-off-my-chest-post. Feel free to skip if you dislike rants; it’s only very mildly constructive.

I’ve lost track of how many people have quoted this study to me as being a fun and telling way to characterise gendered languages. For those of you not familiar with it, it’s a study by a Stanford professor which says that people “gender” nouns: that if a table is feminine you will give it feminine characteristics like elegance, beauty; and a masculine bridge will get described as sturdy and strong, which are masculine traits.

OK.

As someone who speaks two gendered languages (one of them as a native), one non-gendered language, and is starting to make inroads into a second non-gendered language… NPR is giving you a false idea of how gender in gendered languages work (I have no idea what the original actual research is; this being the NPR report version, which I suspect distorts the truth). And I’m not denying that language shapes thought, or that genders are completely neutral in gendered languages: for instance, most animal names are male, and I have a devil of a time thinking of a goat as other than female (it’s “la chèvre” in French, which is feminine).

But I do have several issues with that taking that article at face value, and particularly in generalising those results to every single word. The first one is that this concept of “gender characteristics” sounds very much like something that a long-standing Anglophone speaker would come up with: a lot of Anglophones I’ve met have been fascinated by the idea of giving gender to nouns, but in a very odd way. No, I don’t think of a table as female. I think of it as gramatically feminine, which is a different beast. There is a difference–yes, they’re not totally dissociated concepts, but there is one.
Also–I’ve had a chance to interact with US mainstream culture for a while, and it’s struck me that it puts a lot of accent on gender separation and gender proper roles, which is again, fairly compatible with this kind of ideas. We’ve also been discussing this elsewhere with J. Cheney and Chris Kastensmidt, but there’s a whole “anthropomorphising” complex at work in English: Anglophones (or at least USians, I don’t know about UK people) are actually more likely to anthropomorphise their vehicles, computers and cars–giving them names and genders; and referring to them by those names. By contrast, French (and, it looks like, Portuguese) will look at you very oddly if you keep referring to your nice masculine computer. The French language is grammatically gendered, sure; but to all intents and purposes, gender is a dead attribute when it comes to most everyday things.

The other issue I have is with the notion of “gender characteristics”–I’m sorry, but though there are common points between the way cultures view male vs. female, there are also a heck of a lot of differences. People’s perception of “idealised” gender characteristics strongly depends on the culture/language. Very simple example: in France (or in most of the West), a manly man is someone who is strong, and generally good at sports. This is emphatically not the case in traditional Chinese or Vietnamese culture, where a manly man is slender and thin, educated, has beautiful long nails, and can compose beautiful poetry. [1] Puts another spin on the “lone hero”, doesn’t it?

You don’t even have to move that far: where I live in France, it’s usually considered very feminine to be always touching and kissing (on the cheeks) and hugging. Go to Spain and watch a couple of guys from that perspective, and they’ll still seem like a bunch of sissies, because Southern Europe cultures are very tactile.

And another thing… some of the most intensely gender-separated cultures (China and Vietnam, sorry, using what I know, and my repertoire isn’t large, but it will suffice for this) have non-gendered languages, where only the pronouns are gendered. So the gender of people is not the gender of words, and vice-versa.

The study doesn’t mention who they picked as tests subjects, either, but considering that it took place in the US, it’s making me wonder if the German and Italian speakers were pure native speakers with no second language, or if everyone had been immersed in US language and US culture for a while (I strongly suspect the latter). Whatever the case, it certainly looks like the aforementioned speakers got their “perceived genders” classified according to an American perception of gender. So, hum… sceptical, to say the least?

So, please, please, pretty please… do not tell me about the feminine table or the masculine computer? Gendered languages don’t work the way NPR would have you think.

[1]A fun one is that long hair is usually considered a feminine and weak attribute today, at least in my social circles in France; but in Ancient China, wearing hair long wasn’t a particularly big deal–in fact, when the Vietnamese and Chinese first met, the Chinese thought the Vietnamese were Barbarians, because the men dared to cut their hair)

“Trời sinh voi, trời sinh cỏ.”
Literally (I think, the translation is mine, and I’m not at “can understand effortlessly” stage): “Heaven made the elephant, [and] Heaven made grass”. I think it’s “God will provide”, but I could be wrong (translating a proverb word for word not giving me much about its actual meaning).

And a less-lovely one: “Trọng nam khinh nữ”, which means “hold men in high esteem, despise women”. No prizes for the interpretation, it’s pure Confucian (though Vietnam itself was always more equalitarian than China, and fairer to women–used to be a matriarchy before the Chinese arrived, and some of it stayed).

On the plus side, see how my vocabulary is growing? 😀

I might not have written half a novel in November, but I did total 50k words of original first drafts and non-fiction (blog posts for guest blogs).

Can I collapse now?

For most of my adolescence, Terri Windling’s and Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror defined short fiction; and I waited every year to borrow the new volume from the library. I remember the sense of real magic from its pages, and the joy of getting lost among Terri’s selections of authors (Ellen’s side was more horror, and I don’t react as well to that as I o to fantasy). But you don’t need me to tell you that–you probably have your own reminisciences of how important Terri Windling is and has been to the field. Well, now she’s in deep legal and financial trouble, and there is an awesome fundraiser with cool places to help her out.

See here for a list of what’s on offer.

A little tired. Probably writing two stories in a week, and revising a third, didn’t help. (the revision not being done yet, but I’m working on it). Also had to update my PR file as part of a submission package (the PR file is where I put the nice things people have said about me. Haven’t touched it in a year).

Reading-wise, almost finished with the Drenai books (just got the last Skilgannon/Druss book left). Then onto the rest of Gemmell. Took a brief break from Gemmell to read Anthony Horowitz’s House of Silk, the new Sherlock Holmes novel. Enjoyable, if not ground-breaking. The voice of Watson is bang to rights, but of the two linked intrigues one is too easy to guess (the one with the street urchins–sorry, I have a nasty mind), and the other one ends up coming out of left field, and feeling a bit forced as a result (a side effect, I suspect, of too many reveals piled up). And I really wish people would stop thinking a Sherlock Holmes novel needs to have Moriarty, Mycroft, and Lestrade in it to be successful. I’m personally holding out for more Mrs. Hudson, because what the world needs is more women around Sherlock Holmes…

Tomorrow, big cooking experiment: my first recipe transcribed from Vietnamese (from here, more specifically)! Will report when I’m done 🙂