Half Changed World

Jenny Davidson at Light Reading recommended Farthing by Jo Walton, so I picked it up at the library.  It’s a classic English country manor mystery, with the twist that it’s set in an England where the Hess mission was successful and England has made peace with Nazi Germany.  It’s a clever twist that pumps fresh air into a somewhat stale genre, and Walton does a nice job with it.  Nothing spectacular, but a good read.  The politics (warning of how fragile democracy can be) are a bit heavy handed, but certainly timely.

Davidson explicitly links Farthing with some other recent, more literary alternate histories — The Plot Against America and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.  Of the three, I think Plot is probably the best, not as clever as YPU, but better executed.  But the comparison set me thinking about alternate histories, and wondering about a) why alternate histories are often considered a subgenre of science fiction and b) why so many of them take WWII as the point of divergence.  So that’s really what I want to write about.

I think the main reason that alternate histories are often considered sci-fi is that the authors who write them are often primarily associated with sci-fi, with Philip K. Dick as an early example and Harry Harrison as a more recent example.  My personal judgment is that if an alternate history story involves time travel or movement between parallel universes, it qualifies as sci-fi, but otherwise it’s probably not.

In looking up links for this post, I ran across the wonderful listing of alternate histories, ordered by the data of their convergence, at UChronia.net.  This list, which includes essays and newspaper articles as well as fiction, suggests the divergence points are more evenly spread out than my subjective impressions would have led me to conclude, but I still think that most of the memorable alternate histories I’ve read diverge either at World War II or at the Civil War.  Those are times when the course of history clearly changed — and mostly for the good.  As a rule, writers are far more interested in divergences where things could have gone horribly awry than in divergences where things could have gone right for a change.  In alternate histories, even when good things happen — Lincoln survives the assassinated attempt — they turn out to have horrible consequences. 

I don’t think it’s because writers are inherently cynical, but it’s hard to turn things going right into a story.  Let’s say those chads didn’t hang, and Gore was elected in 2000.  I think 9/11 would still have happened.  I could write a story in which the US didn’t invade Iraq and Hussein was still in power but we captured Bin Ladin somewhere in Afghanistan and the government had a reasonable response to Katrina, but unless there’s some ironic twist somewhere, this may be good propaganda, but not much of a story.

When I wrote about the Motherhood Manifesto movie last fall, I mentioned that my colleagues had a good discussion about whether it was a mistake to limit the call to action to mothers.  So I wanted to mention that Moms Rising now has a "Families Rising" section which includes a bunch of thoughtful dad-bloggers.

If you are in the DC area, and haven’t seen the movie yet, there will be a screening of it this weekend:

Saturday, July 21, 2007, 10 am – 12 pm

The
True Reformer Building
1200 U Street NW,
Washington, DC

Child care and snacks will be
provided
Please
RSVP to Liz at 202-293-5380 x110

Sponsored by Councilmember
Mendelson with the Center for Economic and
Policy Research, DC ACORN, the DC Employment Justice Center, DC Jobs with
Justice, Empower DC, Jubilee Jobs,
Inc., the National
Association of Mothers’ Centers, MothersOughtToHaveEqualRights, the National
Partnership for Women & Families, and the National Women’s Law Center.

I’ve got family visiting over the weekend, so won’t be able to make it, but it should be a good event.  The discussion afterwards will focus on the DC paid sick and safe days act.

The "Liz" to whom RSVPs are addressed is not me, and I’m not one of the organizers, but I do claim a smidgeon of credit for pushing the folks putting the event together to figure out a way to provide child care.  They said "kids welcome" from the beginning, but I knew my kids wouldn’t have the patience to sit through the movie, and I suspect most others wouldn’t either.  Which means that at least some of the moms would probably have wound up either leaving early or taking their kids out into the hallway and missing half the movie.  Far better to line up some people who have agreed in advance to do the child care, whether as paid or volunteers.

[David at Scrivenings had a couple of really good posts earlier about a discussion on Twisty’s blog about kids in public spaces, where some commenters started with the statement that when kids are around, there is often an assumption that all women will take responsibility for watching them, and then wandered off into nasty statements about how awful kids are.  In brief, my take on the back and forth:

• it is a feminist position to say that mothers should not be individually responsible for arranging child care in order to participate in public life;
• it is also a feminist position to say that random women (whether parents themselves or not) should not be assumed to be available to provide child care simply because they are women and/or mothers;
• it is not a feminist position to say that women (or men) who dislike being around children should be a entitled to child-free spaces (or spaces where children are seen but not heard).  They’re allowed to prefer such spaces, and there may be enough places to go around that they can even get their preferences met in some of them, but they don’t get to claim any particular feminist cred in support of their preferences.]

Via Kameron at Brutal Woman, I found this presentation on how much of what we think we know about "the third world" is wrong.  Specifically, it points out how much Asia and, to a lesser degree, South America have converged with Europe and Northern America with respect to factors like infant mortality and life expectancy, leaving Africa behind.  But the use of graphics is the attention getter.

So, I was quite pleased to discover that the data tool, gapminder, that Rosling uses is now available for anyone to play with.  You can pick from a bunch of pre-loaded data sets, and the site promises that there will eventually be the ability to add your own data.  Data geek heaven.

On a somewhat related note, does anyone know if there’s a way to condition the color of a bar in an Excel bar graph on the value of a boolean value of another data series?  I wound up doing it by hand for the presentation I was working on today, but there ought to be a way to it automatically?

The Washington Post today had a front-page story on a recent poll that found that 60 percent of working mothers said that part-time work would be the ideal situation for them.  This is an increase of 12 percent since 1997.

It’s hard to know what to make of this finding since, as the newspaper article points out, only about 1/4 of working mothers work part-time, and that hasn’t increased in the past decade. The question asked was "considering everything, what would be the ideal situation for you, working full-time, working-part time, or not working at all outside the home?"  It’s hard to know how people interpreted that — if people thought about a hypothetical part-time job that paid as much (per hour) as a full-time job, with benefits and interesting work, or if they thought the part-time jobs that are actually out there.  Who wouldn’t want the "have your cake and eat it too" version of part-time work?*

I know I’ve said that at some point I’d like to cut back to part-time (probably 3/5 or 4/5 time) work.  I’d like to spend more time with the boys, and I’d like to have more time to do all the other things (reading, blogging, cooking, hanging out on the lake) that I never have enough time to do.  And I could even do it at my job without it being a major career-limiting move — Rachel Schumacher, who is quoted in the article about her part-time job, works for my organization.

So why don’t I?  Money is the most obvious reason.  I took a paycut when I took this job, and while we’re doing ok, it would be hard to cut our budget by another 20 percent.  T could presumably get a job that would fill the gap, but it would be tricky to align our hours.  This will likely be more manageable when the boys are both in school, and I suspect that we’re headed in that direction (although it will in part depend on how much the market value of T’s professional skills have degraded with his time out of the workforce).

But I also suspect that I’m driven enough that I’d have trouble cutting back on my work commitments.  Take next week for an example.  T has someplace else he needs to be for 2 days– we’ve known about this for months, and I’ve planned to take them off from work to hang out with the boys.  But Monday I learned about a meeting on an issue area that I’ve been trying to get into for the past year. And of course it’s scheduled for one of the days that I’m supposed to be off.  My boss literally didn’t say a word, but I knew I should be there.  So I scrambled, and have lined up some childcare for that morning.  I have a feeling that I’d wind up working at least some of the time as often as not on my days off.

* Well, fathers apparently.  Only 12 percent of fathers said that part-time work would be the ideal situation for them.  But, interestingly, 16 percent said that not working outside the home at all would be the ideal situation for them.  That’s lower than the figure for mothers (29 percent), but I think it’s fascinating that fathers were more likely to chose "not working" than "part-time work" and mothers were more likely to choose "part-time work" than "not working."  Does that mean that there’s more interest among men in "reverse traditional families" than in "equally shared parenting"?  Or that more dads still think that staying home is a permanent vacation?

Via Laura at 11d, I read this thread on cities vs. suburbs at Matthew Yglesias’ blog.  One comment jumped out at me:

"What’s with this "suburbia is cheaper" claim? Where I live, suburbia is
more expensive (which is why low income people live in cities and older
suburbs)."

I’m not sure overall which is cheaper.  It’s certainly true that far-out suburbs are cheaper than close-in suburbs (at least in the DC area, I think elsewhere too.)   That’s why Prince William county just passed a harsh anti-illegal immigrant measure — lots of immigrants have moved there, because a bunch of people can share a house for a lot less than renting small apartments close in.  And there’s lots of evidence that everything from food to bank fees to insurance costs more for residents of poor inner city neighborhoods.

So why don’t more poor people move to the suburbs?  The US Department of Housing and Urban Development did an experiment called Moving to Opportunity where people who lived in public housing were divided into 3 groups, one that was offered Section 8 housing vouchers that could be used anywhere they chose, one that was offered special vouchers that could only be used in low-poverty neighborhoods, and one that was not offered vouchers, but continued to live in public housing.  This was a voluntary program, so everyone in it had said that they wanted to move.  One of the interesting findings is that the majority of the people who used the unrestricted vouchers moved into neighborhoods that were still high poverty — not as high as the public housing they came from, but still more than 20 percent.

Under the voucher program, what you pay is based on your income, not the rent, and you can rent any house up to what HUD calls the "fair market rent" for the metro area.  So why did the voucher recipients stay in high poverty neighborhoods?  If the researchers asked this, I haven’t found the report that says it.  But I can take some guesses: Because those are the neighborhoods that they knew, where their friends and family lived, where they knew how to navigate the transportation system and which grocery store had the best deals.  Because landlords discriminated against them — or because they were afraid that they might.  Because they didn’t have cars, and the upfront cost of buying a car is obvious, while the added costs of buying food in inner-city neighborhoods is hidden.

All this is mostly a long way of saying that I’m not sure that the fact that poor people live in inner cities proves that they’re cheaper than suburbs.

So, Yglesias argues that the suburbs are only so cheap because the roads and other infrastructure are so heavily subsidized.  Lisa Margonelli says that it’s a myth that people will drive less if gas prices get high enough.  She argues that high gas prices have hit the poor the most.  I think this is probably right — if people’s driving
is responsive to gas prices, it’s clearly only in the very long run, as
people choose where to work and live.  Somewhat less plausibly, Richard Brodsky claims that Bloomberg’s proposed congestion pricing plan for driving in Manhattan would be regressive, hurting poor and middle-income drivers the most.  I’m pretty dubious about the idea that many poor New Yorkers own cars.

But outside of New York, I think the evidence is overwhelming that helping low-income families own cars is a highly cost-effective anti-poverty strategy.  (We’ve actually just donated our old car to Vehicles for Change, an organization that does this.)  It opens up a world of job opportunities, lets people shop at lower-cost stores, go to church and doctor’s offices and more.  In an ideal world, you could do all these things by public transportation, but in most of the US you can’t. 

So, how do we help the environment without penalizing low-income families?  I still think that some version of Pay at the Pump auto insurance would be a good thing.  It would convert a big part of the fixed cost of owning a car into a variable cost of driving it, so would both make car ownership more affordable for the poor, and discourage driving at the margin.  School reform isn’t usually thought of as part of an environmental agenda, but if you could improve urban schools to the point that they seemed like a reasonable alternative for families who have options, more of them would choose to live in cities.

I seem to be on a fiction-reading kick lately, and I think that’s bad for my book reviews, because there’s not a thesis for me to explain and argue with.  Sorry.

I finished two books this week, and they couldn’t be more different.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessel got a lot of buzz last year when it came out.  It’s the other book that my brother and sister-in-law gave me for Hanukah last year, along with The Places Inbetween.  As you can tell by the fact that I’m just finishing it now, it wasn’t exactly a page turner, at least for the first 300 or so pages.  I kept picking it up, reading a bit, and putting it down.  I’m not sure I’d have finished it if it hadn’t been a gift.

I’m generally a sucker for stories about intellectually precocious teenage girls.  (See Arkady Darell)  But I never really believed in Blue, or cared about her.  You know from the beginning of the book that Hannah is going to die and Blue is going to live (and go to Harvard),
so the question isn’t what is going to happen, but how, and why.  And I found the endless literary references (both real and made up) more annoying than anything else.  Lots of people have compared this book to The Secret History (because both involve elitist cliques and things going horribly awry), but it reminded me most of Infinite Jest.  At least Special Topics had an exciting 100 or so pages at the end to reward you for the long slog.

The other book I read is Alice McDermott’s After This, which is a series of vignettes about moments in the life of an Irish Catholic family in New York in the 60s and 70s.  The trick here is that McDermott repeatedly breaks the narrative flow to tell you what is going to happen to these people 10 or 20 years down the road.  It gives the whole book an Our Town-ish feel, where ordinary moments are bathed in a golden light by virtue of hindsight. 

Here’s a bit I liked:

"Annie had cried herself to sleep every night that her mother was gone, in full misery the first night, in anticipation, on all subsequent nights, of her brothers’ sweet solicitation as they climbed onto the cot with her and said kindly in the dark, without teasing, that their mother would be home soon, with a new sister for her to play with, and she shouldn’t cry."

Someone posted to some of my local email lists this Forbes article on best and worst school districts for the money.  Our old district, Alexandria, VA, ranked last on their list.  John Porter, who got promoted out of being HS principal into an administrative position (one of my pet peeves about the district) is quoted blaming the poor graduation rates on the large number of foreign-born students.

I’m somewhat skeptical about the methodology of the article (I don’t get why they only looked at the districts where most school funding comes from property taxes, and they admit that the graduation rate statistics are inconsistently reported).  It would be interesting to look at the demographics of the top ranked districts, which I suspect are generally quite affluent.  And Forbes almost certainly has an ax to grind.

But as we’ve discussed here before, I do think that Alexandria is probably not getting performance consistent with the spending levels.  Montgomery County certainly serves plenty of immigrants, and is ranked #5 on the Forbes list.

America
by Allen Ginsberg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.

I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb

I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I’m sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

There must be some other way to settle this argument.

Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.

Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?

I’m trying to come to the point.

I refuse to give up my obsession.

America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.

America the plum blossoms are falling.

I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for

   murder.

America I feel sentimental about the
Wobblies.

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I’m not sorry.

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.

When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.

My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.

You should have seen me reading Marx.

My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.

I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over

   from Russia.

I’m addressing you.

Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?

I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.

I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

It’s always telling me about responsibility.  Businessmen are serious.  Movie

   producers are serious.  Everybody’s serious but me.

It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.

I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.

I’d better consider my national resources.

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals

   an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and

   twentyfivethousand mental institutions.

I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in

   my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his

   automobiles more so they’re all different sexes

America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe

America free Tom Mooney

America save the Spanish Loyalists

America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die

America I am the Scottsboro boys.

America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they

   sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the

   speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the

   workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party

   was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother

   Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain.  Everybody must have

   been a spy.

America you don’t really want to go to war.

America it’s them bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.  And them Russians.

The Russia wants to eat us alive.  The Russia’s power mad.  She wants to take

   our cars from out our garages.

Her wants to grab Chicago.  Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest.  her wants our

   auto plants in Siberia.  Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.

That no good.  Ugh.  Him makes Indians learn read.  Him need big black niggers.

   Hah.  Her make us all work sixteen hours a day.  Help.

America this is quite serious.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.

America is this correct?

I’d better get right down to the job.

It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts

   factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/america.html

This seems like an appropriate poem for the Fourth of July in the mood I’m in right now.

You can also listen to a recording of Ginsberg reading an early version of this poem.  (Check out the rest of the site as well — it’s got both modern and historical readings, including some for children.)

When I was in high school, I had a chance to hear Ginsberg reading his poetry.  He read this one very differently than he does on this recording — softly, and as if he thought the whole thing was a bit of a joke.  And of course, we were sitting there listening very seriously.  Here he reads it with lots of energy, and the crowd cracks up with almost every line.

So do you think Bush will sign the Second Chance Act if Congress sends it to him?  God knows.  Worrying about consistency has never been his strong pont.

I’m just sickened that Bush is letting Libby off the hook. It’s not even that I’m so horrified that Libby won’t be going to jail.  If the judge had suspended his sentence pending appeal or something, I would have rolled my eyes, but would have basically forgotten about it the next week.  It’s the evidence that there’s no limit to Bush’s hubris, not from the rule of law, not from public opinion. 

It makes me feel like a dupe, like I was a sucker for ever arguing that we shouldn’t be demonizing the politicians whom we disagree with.

And it scares me, because this Administration has another year and a half to run its course, and at this point I truly believe that they are is capable of anything.  If those British sailors who were captured had been Americans, I think the sailors would be dead and we’d have used nukes on Iran by now.

N is at a stage where he desperately wants to be a big boy, or even an adult.  There are so many things that he’s old enough to understand that they’d be fun, but just isn’t big enough to do (cross the street by himself, swim to the deep end, pour himself a glass of milk).  And it’s made worse by having an older brother who can do many of these things.  And who doesn’t hesitate to point out that he’ll always be older. "And when you’re MY age, I’ll be NINE!!"  N has decided that he’s not little any more, he’s "medium."  And maybe next week he’ll be big.

I found myself humming Circle Game last night — "Words like, when you’re older, must appease him/ And promises of someday make his dreams."  Because I know it seems to him like it’s taking forever for him to grow up, but to me it seems like he was a baby in my arms just yesterday.

The song reminded me that we should try capturing fireflies in a jar to make a lantern.  I found a jar and punched holes in the lids.  I explained to the boys that we had to be very gentle with the fireflies, and that when it was bedtime we’d let them go.  (We’re not as brutal as Christopher, but we’re not as tenderhearted as Lyra.)   And I put some ivy in the jar so they’d have something to sit on.

And then we waited.  And waited.  And eventually the fireflies came out, and we caught some and popped them in the jar.  But the darn things wouldn’t light up.  We tried shaking the jar, and we tried leaving it alone, and we tried bringing them into the dark.  And they wouldn’t light up, except for the one that escaped from the jar and flew around D’s room.  Finally, we gave up and let them go, and then they lit up.  I have no idea what we were doing wrong.