Month: December 2016

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Mourning Our Icons

I don’t know why the death of Carrie Fisher has hit me so hard. Maybe it’s that in the last two years, she seemed so much larger than life: unruly, unabashed, and unapologetic, an icon I was looking forward to see puncture the hypocrisies of Hollywood and how the world treats women for the next twenty years.

Her outspokenness about mental illness, her gifts as a writer and a public figure, and her utter willingness to give the world the finger – when it deserved it or just because she felt like it – were an inspiration.

And she gave us Leia Organa. She made that role what it is: Senator, Princess, Rebel, General. Her red pen is on the script of The Empire Strikes Back.

I don’t think I can express what it meant to me, to see Carrie Fisher as General Leia. Oh, I came to Star Wars through the novels, and later met Leia staring down her torturers on the screen: the woman who sees her entire world die and still doesn’t break. Who carries the men around her when they falter and digs deep and finds the strength to keep going.

General. Forty years on, brother vanished, son a traitor to everything she worked for, lover running from responsibility, and still the backbone of a movement. Still fighting: choosing again and again to stand for what she believes in, in a galaxy where doing that has already cost her everything. And yet still able to be generous, still choosing to welcome Rey, to hold out hope and an open hand.

General Leia is not all that Carrie Fisher was – she might be the least part of a complex comic genius. But the woman Carrie Fisher and the character Leia Organa are each in their own way inspirational figures, and the character is what she is because of the woman behind her.

To Carrie Fisher: drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra.

May her memory endure forever.

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What A Year

Well, people. It’s been a year.

Not a particularly good one for me, even leaving international politics aside. (Although it’s fairly impossible to leave international politics aside right now, between the rump nationalism of Brexit and the regressive fascism-in-prospect of Trumplandia: looking either east or west from Ireland, the immediate view seems gloomy.) You may have noticed a certain lack of my blogging presence on these here tubes. I got a job, you see.

Ordinarily, that’d be good news. Unfortunately, it turns out that the job and I were fairly well unsuited to each other: I’m apparently not made for the kind of government work I found myself doing. In early October, I had my worst bout of suicidal ideation in about ten years. Combined with improbable amounts of fatigue, exhaustion, and continuing anxiety – I tried, I swear, so many prescription drugs. It took two months, but I recovered enough to return to work – long enough to give my notice.

So that was last week.

The events of the past while have made clear to me just how very little time there is to waste. I want to do work I’m good at and that I (at least for the most part) enjoy – and I want to advocate for the causes I believe in, which I could not do in the civil service job, which as a condition of employment forbade anything that could be construed as partisan political activity. So! You’ll probably be hearing a little bit more from me on Irish politics, the importance of green energy, climate change mitigation, #repealthe8th, social housing, ending Direct Provision, welcoming refugees, combating racism, building better public transport, and so on, as I harangue my local TDs (that’s the equivalent of an MP, but in Irish) and try to figure out where I can throw my weight in with political activism locally.

In the next while, I should be reactivating (under somewhat different terms) my Patreon page, writing more reviews for Locus and Tor.com, figuring out whether I have a theme for 2017 for the Sleeps With Monsters column, and looking at the practicalities of setting up a freelance biz in editorial consulting/proofreading. (I have mad skillz… but not necessarily in self-promotion.)

That is, I think, all the news that’s fit to print.