Below are the most recent 9 friends' journal entries.

Friday, July 4th, 2008
ozarque	2:13p	Personal note; ranting and raving... Here's how I have spent most of today and most of the two days that came before today [with occasional time-outs for the thunderstorms]... There was, as part of the Huge Emergency-Rush Project, this enormous document to be revised. Hundreds of pages of it. I had it on my disk, with filenames that all started with the word "FINAL." I also had it in the form it had when it appeared in the world in print. And I had a long list of things that were supposed to be added to it and done to it, including translating it into a different register of the English language. This wasn't especially appealing, as tasks go, but it struck me as doable. All I thought I had to do was take the text on the screen and revise it according to that list, translating as I went along. And then I discovered that although all my filenames had started with "FINAL," the client hadn't agreed with me. Between the time I turned all those files in and the time they turned up on paper, the client had decided that my work wasn't final after all and had taken it upon itself to do a major rewrite. And it hadn't occurred to the client to let me know that this had happened. Which meant that -- before I could even start the revising I was supposed to do -- I would first have to go through those cottonpicking files, all hundreds of pages of them, line by line and word by word, and make my version match the client's version. The only work I've ever had to do that was remotely as tedious as this has been was the summer that I was hired to type the entire list of names and addresses, on little waxy cards, of all the cosmetologists in the entire state of Missouri, in alphabetical order. And I think this is probably worse, because I was fifteen then and I'm almost seventy-two now; I was stronger when I was fifteen. It has taken me three days now, and I'm about a third of the way through; there are therefore six more days of this ahead of me. My mind... At the risk of being melodramatic, I think my mind has just abandoned me and gone away someplace where there's lots of dark chocolate to eat and lots of hearty Guinness to drink and no typing to do. If I had any idea how to get to where my mind has gone, I'd join it. I do hope it comes back, but I wouldn't blame it if it didn't. In the meantime, I have the most monumental case of intractable blogger's block... (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
ozarque	7:42a	Personal note; thank you... Thanks to all of you who have commented about the art gallery website and about the prints; your feedback is very helpful, and much appreciated. George has asked me to tell you that the software for constructing the site gives him only limited control over its details -- which means that there are a number of your excellent suggestions that he's not able to put into practice because the software won't let him. He's very grateful all the same, and will see what he can do. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
ozarque	8:32a	Personal note again; many-ring circus... The month of July is going to be horrendous here, Gentle Readers. It may give rise to rumors that fit into that "personal blogging is decreasing" tale; I'd like to head those off in advance by explaining what's going on. First, there's the Huge Emergency-Rush Project. The good news is that the deadline has been extended to roughly January 1, 2009; the bad news is that I now have to start putting in roughly four hours a day on it for the rest of this year. There'll be days when that doesn't happen -- like the blessed weekend I'll be spending in Tulsa at the Conestoga science fiction convention, and there'll be days when it's eight hours instead of four, and there'll be everything in between. But four hours a day is the target. Moving on, there's the second edition of The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense. I'm waiting for the printout to arrive from my editor -- the printout that will have all the requested changes/additions/deletions indicated on it -- so that I can do the necessary revisions. Since this one has an August 1st deadline and it's now July 1st, this is starting to get very scary. However, I have no power whatsoever in this situation, and I am trying not to think about it. [This is one of those situations for which being math-challenged is actually a blessing.] When the printout arrives, the Huge Emergency-Rush Project will have to be abandoned for a few days while I whip the final draft (an e-file) of the book into shape, complete with the dreaded "Acknowledgments" section and the book's index. If Providence smiles on me, the printout won't arrive when the HERP is in crisis, but it will arrive while there are still enough days left in July to get the work done. And then there's getting everything ready for Conestoga. Especially the Art Show part, which involves filling out a batch of papers. Especially the part that involves packing suitcases and getting the dog ready for the kennel and shutting down the house and the gardens. I may run in circles; I promise not to scream and shout. While I am at Conestoga, I plan not to allow thoughts of the HERP and the GAVSD II to so much as cross my mind. I plan to enjoy myself, and I look forward to seeing some of you there. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
ozarque	7:17a	Personal note; announcement... I wanted to let you know that my husband has set up an online gallery selling limited edition prints of my drawings, at http://www.bysuzettehadenelgin.com. Any comments you might have about the site -- or about the prints -- would be welcome. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 30th, 2008
ozarque	8:08a	Recommended link; blogging... Recommended: "Is Personal Blogging Fast-Fading?", by Rob Peters, at http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/89439/... (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 27th, 2008
ozarque	9:33a	Poem... Conversation The woodcarver says: "There's a deer inside this hickory chunk, and all I do is whittle away everything that isn't that deer." The sculptor says: "There's an angel inside this slab of marble, and all I do is turn that angel loose." Talking to another human being is like that. There's a meaning inside that language-tangle; it's in there somewhere. All you have to do is whittle away everything that isn't that meaning. All you have to do is turn that meaning loose. (20 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
ozarque	7:47a	Personal note; schedule... Back on June 4th I posted a what-I'm-up-to-at-the-moment report that included this item: "3. Huge Emergency-Rush Project This one is typical. It has an early September deadline on it, the work involved would -- in a rational universe -- take at least six months to do, and we are still fiddling about while the proposal wends its way through committees and boards and similar truck. I have suggested that I should be instructed to go ahead and start work on the parts that will unquestionably have to be included, and have been told sternly not to do that. "Wait," they're telling me. I may wait, and then again I may not." Well, given the sternness of the admonishments to wait, I waited. And it was just as well, since -- as is also typical of projects like this -- the specs for the project have been changing day by day, and if I hadn't waited I would have done some work that would by now have turned out not even to be included in the evolved project. Yesterday, however, we finally reached critical mass with this thing. And today I have to construct two very complicated and lengthy documents, each of which ought to take maybe two or three days .... but I have to get both of them out today. That's going to keep me from posting, and it's going to keep me from responding to your comments. It doesn't mean that I wouldn't prefer to be posting and responding, instead of constructing those two documents. I wanted you to know. ================== Nonfiction online: "How Verbal Self-Defense Works" at http://people.howstuffworks.com/vsd.htm ; "Why Are Old Women Older Than Old Men And How Can We Fix That?" at http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/articlesElginOld.html ; Religious Language Newsletter archive at http://www.forlovingkindness.org ; Fiction online: "We Have Always Spoken Panglish" at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Story-Panglish.html ; "What The EPA Don't Know Won't Hurt Them" at http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/epa.htm ; "Weather Bulletin" at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Weather.html ; "A Quorum Of Grandmothers" at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/QuorumOfGrandmothers.html ; The Communipaths at http://www.jackiepowers.com/SuzetteHadenElgin/TheCommunipaths.html . More stuff at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/SiteMap.html ; LiveJournal blog index at http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=ozarque . (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
ozarque	10:23a	Linguistics; questions about hostile language... On May 24th, in the context of a discussion about why I use the term "hostile language" instead of the more standard term "verbal abuse," recovered_dream posted this comment: "... I get a lot of people saying I am being abused, when what I see instead is that there are some bad communication skills and really awful examples that have become ingrained. This has brought me to wonder: Is it verbal abuse when the person attacking intends harm, or when the person under attack perceives harm/intent to harm, or both? Also, when dealing with adults, how does one go about making abusive patterns known so that they CAN be changed (or at least so the offending party can be aware that the behavior is not acceptable)?" Those are very good questions, and have much to do with empathy; I've been thinking about them for a while. I'm grateful to recovered_dream for posing them, and I'd like to try, briefly, to answer them here. With three things specified in advance: (a) that my answers are just my opinions, not items I'm claiming as "scientific facts"; (b) that I'm prepared for a negative reaction to what I'm about to say, and will live through it; and (c) that what I'm about to say holds only for language interactions between people who are both native speakers of the same language and who are both neurotypicals. Question 1. "Is it verbal abuse when the person attacking intends harm, or when the person under attack perceives harm/intent to harm, or both?" The attacker's intentions are irrelevant to the question of whether an utterance is verbal abuse or not. The only meaning an utterance has in real-world spoken language is the meaning the listener understands it to have; that's the meaning that the listener will respond to and act upon. If the attacker intended to do harm, and the targeted person didn't understand the utterance that way, the utterance has failed as an attack. When the target's understanding of the utterance is that it was intended to do harm and is hostile, that's the relevant real-world meaning. In both cases, the target may have misunderstood, but it's the target's perception that matters. If your perception of the words someone speaks to you is that they cause you pain, then that is the meaning they have for you, and they are verbal abuse. If you don't trust your own judgment, and you worry about whether it's "neurotic" for you to be hurt by those words, you are adding another layer of pain to the pain you already feel. Plus, you are decreasing the odds that you'll be able to find your way to an honest discussion that would make it possible to clarify the situation and perhaps settle it. You should feel free to trust your judgment. Question 2. "Also, when dealing with adults, how does one go about making abusive patterns known so that they CAN be changed (or at least so the offending party can be aware that the behavior is not acceptable)?" The best way I know to do this is to use the three-part message pattern. As in... "When someone says [X], people are likely to perceive it as hostile language [or "as verbal abuse," if you prefer that term] because [Y]." (69 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
ozarque	9:01a	BookNote; The 2008 Rhysling Anthology... Yesterday, my snailmail included a copy of The 2008 Rhysling Anthology: The Best SF, Fantasy & Horror Poetry of 2007, edited by Drew Morse and published by the Science Fiction Poetry Association in cooperation with Prime Books; ISBN 978-0-8095-7349-3. [A photograph of the cover, a link to the Table of Contents, and a link for ordering copies are at http://www.sfpoetry.com/rhysling.html .] I remember when the Rhysling Anthology was an 8 1/2 x 11 Xerox thing stapled in the upper lefthand corner, "produced" by me. Things have changed, and the annual anthologies are now beautifully-produced handsome trade paperbacks. They still serve the same useful purpose, however; they let the entire membership of the SFPA read every one of the poems nominated for the year before they cast their votes for the Rhysling Awards. You can't get any more peer-reviewed than that. This year's poems are an impressive collection, and I was pleased to find quite a few that focus on language, linguistics, or both. There's Mikal Trimm's breathtaking "The Envoy," on pp. 58-60, which includes this stanza: "when lights shine how to make you hatenot fearnot fightnot is hardly so hardly to goodspeak my sorry my sorry is all so much from my sorry" There's Alice Oswald's spectacular "Dunt: a poem for a nearly dried up river," on pp. 129-131, about a Roman Waternymph who is the last known speaker of her native language and is trying "to summon a river out of limestone." Like this... "Little distant sound of dry grass. Try again." And like this... "Little whispering fidgeting of a shutaway congregation wondering who to pray to. Little patter of eyes closing. Try again." There are poems by Deborah P. Kolodji and Sonya Taafe and Leah Bobet and Theodora Goss and JoSelle Vanderhooft and Bruce Boston ... and many more. [Including, to my surprise, Margaret Atwood.] Recommended. For sure. (8 Comments |Comment on this)