The panel on "Rethinking Disabling Metaphor," on the ways that casual use of terms like "lame" or "crazy" as all-purpose dismissals of people and ideas can both be painful to some people who hear them, and create or reinforce prejudices, was good. The moderators had to remind a few people of the focus of _this_ panel, that similar uses of, say, "that's gay," were beyond the scope of what they were trying to do in 75 minutes. But some good ideas were shared; one useful thing the moderators did was point out that you can't just tell people not to use idioms or metaphors, you need to provide and use different ones. So they collected a few from other categories: for example, that an idea is half-baked or doesn't hold water.
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elisem summed a lot of this up as "before you insult someone, think of the collateral damage."
The panel I moderated, on Tyrannosaurs and F-14s, went pretty well, I think, despite one person in the front row who kept jumping in without waiting to be called, to the point that I cut him off in turn, saying "we've heard from you a lot, $name. Anyone else?" (I have already forgotten his name, not having noted it in time to save for "people I do not want to be on panels with.") One of my panelists noted afterward that the audience kept laughing, which was a good sign. We threw in lots of "I liked this even though it was bad," and Cabell suggested that one reason we were all coming up with movies and TV shows rather than books is that there are several people involved in creating those, and more ways that some parts of it can be good: the script stinks, but the cinematography is gorgeous or one of the actors really appeals to you. Someone in the audience added that a movie, for him, is a two-hour time investment, and a novel is eight or ten, so he's going to have higher standards before sticking with a novel. Also, stuff that you hit at the right time: for different people, Lost in Space, and Highlander. So does context: part of what Cabell had enjoyed about Highlander was watching it with her roommate annd mocking it together. That's less likely/common with written fiction.
After that, I went to the Haiku Earring party, leterik serve me herb tea, had some nice round brownies, and eventually picked out a pair of earrings that I figured I could write something from, though I didn't want to keep them. So:
Patchwork Magic
Magic holds the world
together, after children
tear summer's thread.
I'm not 100% happy with it, but will probably just let it sit. (I took a photo with my cell phone before putting the earrings back; once home, I may see about getting that from there to Flickr.)
And so to bed, and a decent night's sleep this time.
[Lunch withoursin, dinner with Matt, Janet, their daughter, and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pennski and her husband Chris. I've been in and out of Michelangelo's for tea often enough, close enough together, to have gotten into smiles and "hello again" with at least one of the counter staff.]
ETA: Elise has posted photos of the earrings; I'm fairly sure these are the ones I was working with.
elisem summed a lot of this up as "before you insult someone, think of the collateral damage."The panel I moderated, on Tyrannosaurs and F-14s, went pretty well, I think, despite one person in the front row who kept jumping in without waiting to be called, to the point that I cut him off in turn, saying "we've heard from you a lot, $name. Anyone else?" (I have already forgotten his name, not having noted it in time to save for "people I do not want to be on panels with.") One of my panelists noted afterward that the audience kept laughing, which was a good sign. We threw in lots of "I liked this even though it was bad," and Cabell suggested that one reason we were all coming up with movies and TV shows rather than books is that there are several people involved in creating those, and more ways that some parts of it can be good: the script stinks, but the cinematography is gorgeous or one of the actors really appeals to you. Someone in the audience added that a movie, for him, is a two-hour time investment, and a novel is eight or ten, so he's going to have higher standards before sticking with a novel. Also, stuff that you hit at the right time: for different people, Lost in Space, and Highlander. So does context: part of what Cabell had enjoyed about Highlander was watching it with her roommate annd mocking it together. That's less likely/common with written fiction.
After that, I went to the Haiku Earring party, let
erik serve me herb tea, had some nice round brownies, and eventually picked out a pair of earrings that I figured I could write something from, though I didn't want to keep them. So:Patchwork Magic
Magic holds the world
together, after children
tear summer's thread.
I'm not 100% happy with it, but will probably just let it sit. (I took a photo with my cell phone before putting the earrings back; once home, I may see about getting that from there to Flickr.)
And so to bed, and a decent night's sleep this time.
[Lunch with
oursin, dinner with Matt, Janet, their daughter, and pennski and her husband Chris. I've been in and out of Michelangelo's for tea often enough, close enough together, to have gotten into smiles and "hello again" with at least one of the counter staff.]ETA: Elise has posted photos of the earrings; I'm fairly sure these are the ones I was working with.
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Patchwork Magic
Magic holds the world
together, after children
tear summer's thread.
I like this, for reasons that go way beyond the poem itself, or the earrings (which of course I haven't seen.) I was at Spy Pond yesterday, with the girls, on the second really hot day of the year. Some friendly fishermen were amused by K's enthusiastic interest, and let her try a few casts. They were so patient and generous with her, untangling the line over and over, that I thought there was a bit of magic involved.
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I like it too. I have some guesses about where
And you can see at least a photograph of them as soon as I finish organizing the snapshots of all the haiku earrings and then learn how to upload thumbnail links to LJ. Thanks to a kind friend who came up to my room and was a second photographer, we got shots of every single haiku earring this year before the party.
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I especially hope lots of people will rethink the currently/recently-popular "[xxx]:fail" application of this. (In general terms, that is, as it quickly falls into a kind of begging-the-question or "disagreeing with me is Wrong" attitude that -- though perfectly human -- doesn't go over well with most Fans.)
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Neither does getting called out on their privilege, which I find to be a more troubling problem.
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Part of the trick, I think, is to avoid overuse: tagging one person's mistake with X:Fail is probably a bad idea. Just about everyone will do the wrong thing sometimes, and "hey, you messed up this time" is different from "look, this person has been consistently wrong on this topic for years." (Among other axes.) Among other things, if it's used too much, it will become useless when there is a large-scale issue.
[Please ignore the previous version of this comment, I had looked at your comment but not what you were replying to; more imperfect software.]
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Actually, I think the original was probably "When you are insulting someone, consider the collateral damage."
I said it in response to an exchange between some audience members and panelists which was (in part) about using phrasing about people and using phrasing about things people were doing. I had said earlier that one way to simultaneously avoid using slurs and be more precise was to talk specifically about the action with which one disagreed, rather than just calling the person names. A number of other people expanded on this or had made similar points earlier. One person said then that she actually intended to insult somebody, rather than talk about their actions. There was a big laugh, and then I said, "Well, when you are insulting someone, [pay attention to/consider the/avoid] collateral damage."
It's the whole metaphor thing: using something from one context to comment upon another. I've been thinking about it a lot lately. It's one of the foundations of empathy, and it's also a really easy way to go wrong, and it's something a lot of us do, and it's powerful, and sometimes it's a really lazy way to do things which leads to big trouble and sometimes it's a brilliant short route to understanding.
Tools are like that. Metaphors are tools.
(I was a bit exasperated when we kept drifting into "but are these words OK to say at all?" territory, because that wasn't what we were there to talk about, and I was also profoundly startled that we apparently had to define "metaphor." After the convention I was wondering whether we needed wall posters with parts of speech on them. Then again, wall posters with all sorts of info might be useful, but that way
madnesschaos-in-interior-decorating [and possible hotel grumpiness, unless folks are careful with implementation details regarding tape] lies.)From:
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I don't actually remember which one I said, but those were the ones I was choosing from.
...but that way
madnesschaos-in-interior-decorating [and possible hotel grumpiness, unless folks are careful with implementation details regarding tape] lies.And this is an example of exactly what we talked about, and what we intended to talk about. Though we didn't get time to talk about the issues vis-a-vis quotations, especially often-used ones. I wish we had.
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Got it: tear summer's fabric. Or maybe "the cloth of summer." But I'm still not sure "children" is right.
OK. What we have right now is:
Magic holds the world
together, after children
tear summer's fabric.
For some reason, I'm more willing to go short a syllable in a haiku than run over, so "tear the cloth of summer" doesn't make me happy.
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Well, OK, I'll still open with one:
I note that you are using a seasonal reference; are you also open to or interested in playing with the pivot at the end of one of the lines (the cut, some people call it, I think) that is found in more traditional haiku along with the seasonal reference?
If so (and here's where I depart into example-and-suggestion, so please promise me that you'll ignore anything that's not useful, OK?), maybe fitting the "magic holds the world together" concept on a single line could provide a nice pivot. Something that works like:
or
or even moving it around:
* or binds, or mends, or joins, or....
I really like what you've got in this one that plays with the patchwork imagery, by the way.
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