You know you’ve been working with digital imagery for too long when you look up at the moon and think “I can see some banding around that. It’s over-compressed.” Then you realise, no this is life, not a JPEG.
And this from the “Wow, that’s really not what I read at first” department.
So this afternoon, in-between sorting out some Strategic Coach projects, I picked up supplies for the bookbinding class and outlined what I’m going to teach (their heads will be ‘sploding from the information). And my staples were delivered — though an hour and a half after they were supposed to be. I hate waiting for delivery stuff. It starts with “Should I get in the shower?” and peaks at “#%$!! I want to get out of the house and do some work!”
Anyway, the staples fit in my enormous magical stapler, and with this new method I bound the first ten chapters of Finitude in, seriously, less than five minutes. It’s amazingly fast, much more durable, and even cleaner-looking than the other method. (The other two novels, though, are just too fat to bind this way.) This is more or less the same method used by the guy in this YouTube video.
So I’ve decided that on Sunday a) I’m going to teach three different types of binding, and b) for the reading session I’m going to read the first section of the first chapter of my new book. This is what authors are supposed to do, isn’t it?, read a sneak-peek from their newest thing while pimping the book you can buy now.
Then this evening I went to the opening of The Edinburgh Independent Radical Book Fair, where I heard a pair of women from the Middle East talk about their experiences of the place as women. I know, it sounds heavy and dreary, but it was wonderful. One of them, Haifa Zangana, is from Iraq. She is the first person I’ve seen in life since the occupation who’s from there, and there’s something chilling about it, imagining this person subjected to that, but she’s just this smart, lit-up woman. She was ‘in conversation with’, or basically interviewing onstage, writer Nawal El Saadawi. Saadawi was like a grandmother from a Latin American magical realist novel, except she’s from Egypt. She just glowed, and spoke with joy, passion, and conviction. Yet she’s been persecuted, banned, and threatened for years because of her writings.
The only part where she lost me was when she drifted (in response to a question from an audience member) from female genital mutilation to circumcision. Now, sure, I agree that it’s a strange thing to do, and I laughed very loud, turning heads, when she mentioned the bit in the Old Testament in which God promises Abraham a patch of land in exchange for his children being circumcised; “I don’t get the connection,” Saadawi said.
Anyway, she was a doctor, she never performed them, always thought it bizarre. Fair enough. And I daresay it is a weird practice that’s not justifiable in a modern world. (She took issue with it as a defense against AIDS in Africa, which I don’t know about. I’ve read about epithelial cells and blah blah blah, but I don’t know enough about the science and it’s not my area.)
Where the discussion loses me is when people — especially people without a penis — start talking about how horribly mangled and psychologically wounded the circumcised are, as well as being completely sexually dysfunctional because they can’t possibly feel anything with a member that’s so ruined as to be insensate (I exaggerate — but not by much).
You know what? I’m fine. My wang and I get along fine. In fact, it works so well it’s a constant source of distraction. It’s amazing I’ve accomplished anything in this life.
The only psychologically-damaging thing is having strangers talk with revulsion about some part of your anatomy. It’s something that, as a homophile, I’m very careful not to do about women. Too many gay men say things like “Eeeew, minge!” Really, it’s totally out of my experience, and how hateful to talk about my sister humans that way. No, I don’t want to have sex with them, but that’s about me. How horrible to characterise some part of another’s body that way. What’s especially weird is when it comes from people who are supposedly humanitarian and politically, empathetically switched-on. Say whatever you want about the future of this medical practice, but keep my willy out of it!
Anyway, it was just two bad minutes or so out of an otherwise brilliant talk. It’s just a topic that, ahem, arises from time to time over here (not so much in Canada, where just about my whole generation is “cut”), and it always seems to be the un-cut or penisless who are most adamant about it.
Is it bad form, just before you’re about to make a public appearance, to spend 4/5 of a blog post talking about your “junk”?
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