Well, it's been a fairly godawful day around here in terms of transportational devices. This morning on the way to work Emil hit a deer - or rather, a deer hit him. Happily, all that happened was that the front fender got bunged up (well, and the side panels, too, but the point is, it was a glancing blow). Considering that it's not uncommon for a collision with a deer to total a car - or a person - we're figuring he got off lucky. Emil said that when he inspected the car he noticed fur in the hubcap . . . yeccch! I told him he should've stopped and put the deer on the roof rack; at least we'd have venison to eat all winter, since the car repairs will leave us short of cash . . .

And then at lunchtime, he wasn't wearing his seatbelt and got stopped and ticketed for that. (Wouldn't you imagine that a man who got a whiff of mortality at the hands of a deer in the morning would wear his seatbelt at least for the rest of the day? I would . . . ) Anyhow, we're not sure how much the ticket is going to be, but however much, it'll be too much.

Oh, and speaking of tickets, Emma got a parking ticket yesterday.

Then tonight, Charles got rear-ended while he was sitting at a traffic light. No details yet; his phone died immediately after he notified us, but apparently the car was towed off somewhere (I'm sure he'll have no idea where), so Emil figures it's probably totalled. So we'll have that to deal with this weekend as well . . . and Emil and Charlie will have to deal with getting Grandpa's old car roadworthy. This'll be interesting . . . I'm worried about this one because it looks like an outlay of money both coming and going . . . and no doubt the car will break as soon as it's fixed, since it's got that Grandpa Bauman mojo going for it.

Feck. I'm glad I ride a bike.

In other news, the other day my nephew Ben posted a blog entry about James Tiptree, Jr., about whom I knew nothing before I read his blog entry. For others who may not know, James Tiptree, Jr., who wrote science fiction novels and stories, is the nom de plume of Alice B. Sheldon. Ben's entry concerned the varying degrees of wrongheadedness of gender essentialism - of thinking that it's possible to know whether a particular author must be male (or female) because of some quality in their writing. As Ben tells it, in the 70s many people (including Joanna Russ) were convinced that Tiptree had to be a man, because a woman could just never write the things s/he was writing . . .

I was curious enough to poke around the links he posted, and I found a story called The Women Men Don't See. Funny thing was, after I read it I thought to myself (somewhat self-consciously, I'll admit, since gender essentailism is indeed silly, I know), "Holy crap! People used to think that was written by a man??? A man could never write that!" Here's my favorite passage, redolent with 70s sensibilities. The main female character tells the narrator and protagonist,

"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."

We're far enough from the 70s for the story to ring faintly quaintly . . . and we're far enough to see that, damn, she's right. The misogyny (and the racism) captured in that story are very much coming back into vogue . . .

So then I started thinking about the politics of representation. What someone says matters a whole lot, to be sure - but equally, who the someone doing the saying is matters, too. If you think this story was written by a man, you read it differently than if you think it was written by a woman. And it started to seem brilliant to me that Sheldon had encoded this little gem of feminist truth in the guise of both a male author and narrator. It's almost like she sent a secret message out only to those who could hear, in much the way women writers in the 19th century encoded health information and various kinds of other "unspeakable" information in their novels. I felt like I was getting a gift, like I was in on the joke.

So now I have to go find more Tiptree . . .