It Might Be Done For, It Might Be Not

The blog that is. It appears whatever program bugs I was struggling with before have now been addressed. Although, I'm at a point where I feel I need to give the blog itself some kind of focus. My previous blogs have always been, more or less, semi-philosophical public diaries. But lately, it seems, I've lost my taste for it.

I don't know. I think I spend so much time writing either for school purposes or on the books (plural now! And still, no home for the first... Merf, as Merlin would say.) that rambling about things off the top of my head doesn't come as naturally as it used to.

I was thinking of starting another blog, where I would comb the news for odd stories, post a link or portion of the article and then comment. And then I found that little add-on gadget that automatically links your blog to a streaming list of odd-news stories and couldn't decide if that made my writing idea too redundant.

So I'm back to I Don't Know. Maybe I'll write about the things I've read lately. I'm currently two-thirds of the way through Lovers and Other Monsters. It's a love-themed, fantasy/sci-fi anthology with a great assortment of authors: Poe, Lovecraft, Bradbury, Wells, Asimov, just to name a few. But I've noticed something about this collection that irritates me. The majority of the stories are so... well, sexist. With a small number of exceptions, every female character--regardless of the author--is either a sexpot, a bimbo or a shrew. A lot of times, all three. And of the females that do show a smidgen of intelligence or decency, they are all frail to a fault.

Even in Edith Wharton's story, The Lady's Maid's Bell, the titular Lady just drops dead, and for what? Because her husband did not love her? Because her delicate nerves couldn't take the shock of a bell ring? I could just be being overly critical, but it bothers me that I have yet to read one story with a satisfyingly multi-dimensional female character. I wonder what it has more to do with: the age of the stories, or the fact that the anthology was selected by a man.

Not to say there aren't a few gems to be had from it. I loved Theodore Sturgeon's "The Deadly Ratio" and Parke Godwin's "A Matter of Taste", but seriously, Frederick Pohl's "The Fiend" read like someone's rape fantasy. Ick, ick, ick.

Other than Lovers, though, I haven't read much else recently. I've got Moonheart by De Lint and a couple books by Michael and Kathleen Gear sitting on my coffee table, waiting to be read, but my appetite for books has become as finicky as my appetite for writing. I've been waiting for something really interesting to catch my eye, but I'm always open to suggestions.