tychoish, now without a net

I don’t have a good new post for tychoish today, it’s been eventful, and I seem to have about half a spare brain cell.

I did however manage to get posts up for a couple of guest blogging things:

• A post on Zimmermania, with a finished picture of a sweater that I worked on a while back (I’m behind on sweater posting, it’s true)…

• A post on the Feminist Science Fiction Blog about “the singularity” and possible theoretical interactions with feminist ideas. It’s sort of rambling, but a good start.

I’ll be back plenty soon enough, you just wait and see.

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tagged: interwebs • knitting • the queer

Judy wrote a post today about identity and how we change ourselves to fit what we’re doing at any particular moment. I’ve been thinking about something reasonably similar for a few days and I’ve meant to write about it more extensively and clearly here. So I’m going to now. At the moment my interest is pretty specifically focused on how the act of naming serves to concretize identity and meaning, basically “what’s in a name,” to be overly trite.

By giving something a name, we make it seem comprehensible as something unique, and there’s an expectation that people can understand what something is going to be based on the name. If I give you the title of this blog (and your familiar with the site) you’re probably going to know what the posts are going to be like–and mostly you’d be right. Just as, if I told you that a site is a “blog” you know (or think you know) something about it’s organization and layout.

I think the theorists would say that “naming is performative,” but I think the invocation of J.L. Austen is totally unnecessary, and probably pretty confusing in the long run. Basically this means that the act of attaching a name to something is as a result of its utterance, meaningful. At the same time, a little sign-posting doesn’t seem uncalled for.

On some level, that’s what the term “queer” is about (trying to establish a different way of thinking about sexual and gendered difference) and because of this and because of the importance of performativity to “queer” that I consider naming to be a queer issue.

So why am I writing this, you wonder? In part because I feel like this blog needs a new name, and in part because I’m considering my pen name more thoroughly as I embark more seriously upon a knitting career.

First, the blog: The current name “the life and opinions of tycho garen,” is a bit stale, and I think provokes a style of blogging that’s more like a journal, a style that I’ve been fully complicit in enacting. And while I do take pleasure in the allusion to Lawrence Stern’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, I’m not sure that my karma needs that kind of spiritual connection at the moment. I’d also like to push this site back in the direction of the blog over the journal.

I used names for TealArt (r.i.p.) that were reminiscent of newspaper titles (e.g. “The Times of TealArt”), but I think I need something different. This blog/site will still be called tychoish, but I think some better title is much needed and I’m looking for suggestions.

Maybe I should see if I could cycle through a list of titles (for up at the top), there are a number that I think might work well. Maybe what I’m looking for is more of a tag line. Things that have been floating through my mind:

• innovative bordering on the avante garde (from torchwood, Ianto’s reference to Jack’s sexual prowess.)
• awkward, but endearingly colloquial (An actual comment a prof. wrote on a paper, a long running joke, and I used it on TealArt for a long time. perhaps too journal-ish)
• tychoish from the past future (I like phrases that mash up “future” and “past” because they create a sense of history.)
• work and live as if– (the less famous first half of the Alisdar Gray quote that ends “–you live in the early days of a better nation,” which Ken MacLeod has already used for a blog title)

That’s all I have for right now, suggestions are welcome.

Now on to the more serious part: the name.

To which I guess I don’t have a lot to say, except that I’m not sure. Here’s some pro/con analysis, but I hope you give suggestions.

Pros to using pen name tycho garen:

• The name is entirely my own. I chose it, I have shaped it myself, without connection or reliance on other people. There is no “garen family” tradition, nothing. Just me.
• It’s what this blog has always and will continue to be authored under (even if TealArt was originally authored by my given name). There’s a marketing advantage here.
• Pseudonyms paradoxically draw attention to the identity and role of the author, in a way that is rather cool.
• It’s more difficult to mispronounce than my given last name. The silent H is a bit of a blip, but I have an 8 letter last name that’s typographically complex (-nm- letter pair,) and an english spelling anomaly (-ei- sequence.)
• “garen,” is a loose homage to my maternal grandfather (his first name began with G, and in the tradition of jewish naming, that and intention are enough), which feels nice.
• I feel more comfortable being a non-capitalizer with a pseudonym
• It allows me to isolate my professional (academic or otherwise) production from everything else, and offer some differentiation for the purpose of google.

Cons to using pen name tycho garen:

• I think it would be difficult to change later if I had second thoughts.
• Might be more difficult to use it to do business.
• In this vein it might cause confusion, which is bad from a marketing perspective.
• Many people know me by the given name, as they should, particularly in the context of knitting (knitting camp, various other things.)
• It is hard to mix it up, to do some things with one name and some things with other names.
• I debate weather it’s the same or different as writing under a modified version of their given names: JMS goes by Joe but is credited J. Michael Strazinsky, J. C. “Chris” Hutchins and so forth.
• tycho is less (potentially) ambiguously gendered than “Sam,” and significantly less common, though Sam is a pretty uncommon for men in my generation.

I’m thinking I’m going to go with it for the publishing (to the fam, I don’t want to change my name or anything, just a pen name, to be clear), but I don’t know. I suspect I’ll get it sorted out.

Any feedback you can offer with regards to either the name of the blog or the pen name debacle, I’d love to hear from you a lot.

Cheers,
tycho

(ps. Onward and Upward!)

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tagged: the queer • writing

I have amazing friends. Many of you read this ‘blog. Sorry if I’m ripping you off, but comedy, is well, good to find. Thank you all for saying memorable things, and sorry if I’ve changed your words too much.

N: I am tired and cranky and don’t want to think about gender anymore today. pause Or math.

G: Men, on average, have more upper body strength… It’s helpful in settling primitive disputes, well primitively.

(P is a friend who plays frisbee with great dedication. The following stems from a description of something from a frisbee game.)

T: What?

P: See, I lay out, they lay out in front of, next to, behind, under, or over me.

T: Ok.

P: Then, we collide, and one of us comes up with it or the defense

T: If you say so.

P: Right, and then we help each other out, groan

pause

P: I mean up, help each other up.

pause

T: That was the best freudian slip I’ve seen in a while.

P Laughs.

T: I thought you liked frisbee because it was homoerotic, but I didn’t know that you knew that.

Thanks folks!

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tagged: comedy • the queer

R: So, I had a date, it was nice.

T: Oh? Good for you! What’s his story?

R: He’s a classmate. And he’s cute!

T: Cute?

R (picture link; has two guys on it): The one on the right.

T: Um. Ours or theirs.

R: Ours, dumbshit. That’s the only system that makes sense.

T: I know, right? But the other guy is cuter, so I just wanted to make sure.

R: Whatever, asshole.

pause

T (looks at picture, again): Oh, that’s right you used to have a crush on me–

R: heh. shutup.

T: –which means, we have totally different standards for cute.

R: you’re welcome.

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tagged: the queer

I’m sure I’ve ranted about this r/evolution debate in the past, but this post about Bruce Sterling’s new novella in F&SF fired up my feelings on the subject, so here it goes.

First off, let me establish that I’m going to use the term evolution in an explicitly non-technical sense. I’m often annoyed that any sort of gradual change or adapatation is refered to as “evolution,” when in a technical sense, this isn’t even a good analogy to what’s happening. But that’s a different rant, for now I’m going submit to the dominant lexicon.

Secondly, I haven’t read Sterling’s novella, and this isn’t a reaction as much to Sterling as it is to Cory Doctorow’s gloss of the Novella. Just to be clear.

From the blog post:

“Sterling says of this story, “I’ve been in an eight-year struggle to write ‘a kind of science fiction that could only be written in the 21st century.’ With the possible exception of my forthcoming novel, this story is my best result from that effort.” I think he’s right — about the story, anyway; I haven’t seen the novel yet.”

This seems to be a false premise. At least to me. The 21st century is an arbitrary unit, and while I think we do live in a very different world today than we did eight or ten years ago, that is always the case. Interestingly boingboing, gets a lot of milage out of looking back at forward looking bits of “culture” from the turn of the century, and the 20s-40s. These cultural artifacts seem as antiquated to us as “the kind of science fiction that could only be written in the 21st century,” will surely look in the next dozen years.

Which isn’t to say it’s the wrong thing to write, or bad, just that if you look at it the right way, “writing SF that could only be written in today’s world,” is exactly what every SF writer is (or should) always already (be) trying to write. And if you’ve been in eight year struggle to do this, maybe there some other issue that we should talk about. But then authors of cyberpunk are all about arguing that the present marks an revolutionary advancement from whatever went before.

Doctorow goes on to say:

“This is a genuinely 21st century piece of sf. It uses the slightly stilted, comic dialog form of great sf to unravel the social and technological implications of automated search, copying, governance and communications, with an enormous amount of compassion and heart. Sterling’s way of thinking about technology has often struck me as kind of stern, but years of living in Serbia appear to have given him a bit of a melancholy Slavic outlook that creeps into the story in a hundred little ways that tell you how much affection he really has for our poor tired human race.”"

I fear that this mode of writing utterly current SF is really based on some sort of ill gotten notion that if we write about the present we’ll be seen as being “more real,” than if we write about space ships and lasers. Which is all kinds of silly, and this sort of critical trend is dangerous, because it doesn’t promote a diversity of opinion and approach. This is sort of a reenactment of the downfall of cyberpunk all over again. Or maybe more correctly given that it’s being propagated–at least primarily–by Sterling and Gibson (and Doctorow, though he wasn’t publishing during the “high cyberpunk period”), part of the protracted decent of that movement.

Don’t get me wrong, I rather enjoy the concept of cyberpunk, and some of the post-cyberpunk imaginations in much the way that I enjoy space opera: as a platform for story telling that isn’t necessarily true to what’s going to happen, but enjoyable and full of possibility nonetheless. At the same time I think the argument that cyberpunk is more real, and in touch with everyone’s lived realities, because it is gritty, and dark, and current is absurd.

And I think this goes back to the r/evolutionary argument: do we understand history as a slow progression, or a series of distinct epochs?

The question is open of course, but I tend to believe that revolutions, of the intellectual/cultural/historical scope that cyberpunk seems to be responding to, don’t really happen. Other kinds of revolution? Maybe, and if/when they do, they’re never has temporally clear cut as anyone would like them to be.

Sorry guys…

tycho out.

Onward and Upward!

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tagged: academia • science fiction • the queer

I write a lot on this site about what I’m doing in the world, and less about who I am, in some sort of larger sense. Or something.

So much so that despite writing about “queer things” with some regularity on the blog, I don’t much talk about queer stuff in a concrete sort of way. For instance, I don’t talk about being gay at all in my “about page.” Weird. At one point it was incredibly important to write those things.

I’ve thought from time to time that I make a better “professional queer” than I do a “real queer,” even if thats a fraught distinction, It’s kind of true. At some point I’m going to have to figure out how to figure this out. For the moment, I’m going to postpone that transcendental realization.

Anyway. About “boyfriends” and I suppose girlfriends as well, though I don’t want to universalize or project. I have a friend and blog reader (hi!) who is very interested and invested in having a boyfriend, and all that accompanies that, while I can totally understand the way that, particularly for queers, being attached confirms identity experience, this isn’t a project that I’ve ever been very interested in. “These things happen, particularly when you’re not looking for them,” I’ve often said. And I’ve generally found that to be true, though not absolute.

In real life, I generally refer to TheBoy by his name or in an ironic nod to the 70s and 80s culture as my “friend” (given that I don’t talk about friends in my cohort very often, it’s not incredibly odd). I’ve often wondered how this kind of positioning affects the closet/not-closeted dynamic, and often conclude that I really don’t care. I enjoy the freedom and possibility that being vague allows (the boy has a potentially gender-neutral name in the diminutive/common form, indeed as do I,) though there are clear problems with this.

I’m not sure how to build this transition, so I’m not going to try. The other piece of this puzzle in my mind is that I don’t “crush” particularly well, which has lead me to declare (somewhat falsely) that I don’t really have a “type.” I can’t remember having a crush for more than a few days without them finding out (usually by virtue of me telling them about it.) TheBoy is an exception to this, but I was in high school for g-d sakes. It’s actually kind of funny, because I don’t think of myself as being particularly forthright about such things, but there’s data to challenge that. Weird.

Anyway, there are going to be socks in a few days. And neurosis aside, warm feet are always a good thing.

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tagged: journal • the queer