About "Eve"

Here's a guest post, from the southern hemisphere, which I should have posted yesterday, on the last day of March (and Women's History Month):


Let's do tell all about Eve 
by Anna Tambour

"Have we been so conditioned that we are no longer responsive to obviously flawed arguments?"
Deb Moyle, "The mother of all fiction", Sydney Morning Herald, March 28, 2011
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-mother-of-all-fiction-20110327-1cbxs.html

Since Australian public schools teach the basics so well that children remember their history ("Eve ate the apple") and science, in all its physics, action and reaction (that apple-eating of Eve is "the reason that women have pain in childbirth"), I hope our schools are also carrying these lessons through about natural history, for elephant mothers also have pain in childbirth – and not only that, but they love fruit and live in (probably sinful) matriarchies. Deb Moyle's revelations about what children are learning were published three days ago in the Herald's "Heckler", an orphan of a column – not supported by a "Herald investigation" or an editorial, even in this, Women's History Month. Instead, "Why aren't women getting angry?" Moyle asked in this 450-word commentless rantspace allocated to people's whinges, however trivial.

I've fomented for years about state-sponsored religion-pushing, only to see proselytising that if it weren't hiding behind "God" would be deemed dangerous ignorant regressive bigotry, multiply as the cane toad.  http://medlarcomfits.blogspot.com/2010/04/australias-funniest-science-prize.html

So if we can't beat them, and if we taxpayers are paying to have these myths told to our kids as fact, we might as well be consistent and tell the whole story. Teach all about Eve, and Adam. While Adam was sitting on his bum, Eve ventured forth. Without Eve, "man" would never have progressed. She should be celebrated as the first human with the curiosity of a scientist, the first explorer into "what if?" instead of "just obey".  If Eve is a historical figure who changed history, like Napoleon, then teach her as she was: an early model for Mary Kingsley, a woman who, like Eve, came from a sheltered existence, and like Eve, made up her own mind (for that talk about the snake influencing is just hearsay. You tell me when you hear a snake talk and I'll tell you when I find a man with one less rib.)

Although Mary Kingsley had the abused life of the born-to-be-an-unpaid-servant, caring for a pinchbeck but highly self-prized and demanding father and brother--her escape, when it came, was spectacular. Always dressed like a perfect lady, she explored and treasure-hunted artefacts and stories for museums and her own delight, travelling rough in places where Western men dropped like poisoned flies and missionaries were, in her estimation, a constant pestilence. She boated, canoed and trekked with native guides but was herself, the leader of all her expeditions. Her accounts of her travels in West Africa show a cannibal-friendly woman who has not only great stamina, but courage, unconventionality, and a sense of humour that hints of a great love of life and untapped potential in this Victorian virgin by choice.

But back to the basics. I'd like to push for every child learning about Eve, to be taught who Eve was: the first human interested in knowledge--if we have to have the creation story taught as if it had been camcorded. I'd prefer kids finding out about the Venus of Willendorf, who was probably Eve's great-great-great-great gran--and Ms VoW's  ancestors, those many still to be recognised as pivotal to our history, living in the first garden of all, the primordial sludge that came before humans were a twinkle in the universe's history.

And by all means, let's have every child learn about religion, and by that I mean the history of all the goddesses (Ishtar and all the little Ishtaresses, yes!!!) and the gods, myths and prejudices associated with them and the power-structures they provided reason for, as well as the inevitable genocides and wars spawned on their behalf.

See also:
The glory of unintelligibility
http://medlarcomfits.blogspot.com/2006/04/glory-of-unintelligibility.html

Remnants of WFC 2009

I'm back home in Seattle now, faintly amazed that I spent time lying in the grass in San Jose, staring up at the deep azure sky, my skin caressed by soft, amiable air. This past weekend at the World Fantasy Convention, though I mostly wore my publisher/editor's hat, I enjoyed a wide range of conversations, professional, social, and personal. Many of these could be described as flash conversations-- brief, one-on-one vivid bursts that occurred in passing. Several were serial conversations that came in installments-- interrupted, only to be resumed half an hour or a day And a few were extended, almost leisurely. In short? It was a fabulously talk-driven weekend.

It was a special pleasure to meet Anna Tambour in the flesh for the first time. Though Anna originally hailed from the US, since 1976 she's lived in faraway lands in the Southern Hemisphere. Combine that with my sense of her work as frequently venturing into distant and unusual regions of the imagination, and you'll understand why it never crossed my mind that we might actually someday meet outside of cyberspace, face to face, eye to eye, breathing the very same air. And so I was astonished when, less than a week ago, I spotted her name on the WFC membership list. Did a part of me not believe it? That would explain why I was still astonished when I found a woman seated behind Anna Tambour's name tent during the mass autograph session, all warm, glowing flesh. And when I introduced myself to her, I confirmed that yes, this woman was indeed Anna Tambour incarnate, I was astonished all over again as we hugged over the table and promised to meet one another for a long breakfast early the next morning. I am not an early-morning person (as many people know well), but our meeting was unalloyed joy (even down to Anna's disbelief that the child's-size portion she ordered at Peggy Sue's diner was meant to feed only one child). I think she said she'd last been in the US in the 1990s-- and that everything had changed so much since then that it felt like another country. That sounded about right to me. Isn't it the case that for the last century there have been vast differences from decade to decade, especially in urban environments?

Although I had lots of wonderful conversation, I missed a panel--"Why Steampunk Now?" with Deborah Biancotti (M), Ann VanderMeer, Liz Gorinsky, Michael Swanwick, and Nisi Shawl-- that I dearly wished I'd made it to when I heard people in the bar talking about Nisi's brilliance discoursing on steampunk. I've found a mention of another conversation about the panel here, but not an actual first-hand description of it. I'll just note that the people talking about it in the bar said that Nisi had given more than one writer the idea of writing Ogun steampunk. I also recall hearing the expression "cotton-gin punk," though without elaboration. I'd really like to hear more about this. It'd be wonderful if someone's actually taken notes on the panel and decides to post them...

ETA There's an LJ report on the steampunk panel here, by thistle in grey.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2007, Pt. 6: Anna Tambour and Susanna J. Sturgis

The first of these next two pieces isn't exactly a list, though it certainly does speak to reading pleasure...

Anna Tambour:

Dear Timmi,

I have been thinking every day about this issue, and have had many things that I almost said, feeling uncomfortable about all of them. This was what I wanted to say, and I realised that it depended upon not saying. Though there is a mixed metaphor there that should perhaps be fixed. So how is this?

". . . and to .........., literary genius, who steered me firmly away from romantic fiction"

These words in the Acknowledgements of the book I'm reading now are both the rightest and wrongest words in any book I can remember reading, in 2007 or any other year. The name of the book is ........ (it matters as much as the name of the "literary genius," which is nothing at all for the purposes of my few words). The book as written IS romantic fiction of the highest order, for it isn't some artificial-sugar-laden thing confected for others who are supposed to like that sort of thing. It is pure as the sap exuded from a cut tree. It is high romance, because the story came from the writer's heart, and it tells about what she most loves. Technically, the words don't flow like they would if she were a real writer. The words taste rough and true, which makes the book only more romantic.

Susanna J. Sturgis:

Words and Music 2007

I spent most of last winter in Russia—nineteenth-century Russia, both the period of the Napoleonic Wars and (indirectly) the middle of that century. I'm a copyeditor by trade and my assignment was the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, which was published earlier this fall. A demanding job, yes, but intimidating? Not at all. While my editorial mind paid close attention to matters of usage and consistency, my readerly mind was exhilarated by the interwoven stories and my writerly mind was impressed as hell.

At WisCon 30, I was fascinated by the various discussions that either explored or touched on the "generation gap" in contemporary feminism, and in recent years I've been variously exasperated, infuriated, and ultimately puzzled by the notions that many men of all ages in the U.S. left-of-center have about feminism. In part the misconception is willful: it's the prerogative of the privileged—any privileged—to distort, simplify, and misinterpret anything that, if fully understood, might threaten their view of themselves and their world. But something was still eluding my every attempt to see it clearly. My quest eventually led me to Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, in which Deborah Siegel, Ph.D., seeks to explain the Second Wave to the Third and the Third Wave to the Second, all the while developing a wide-screen picture that encompasses all of us. Siegel's interpretation of the Second Wave was familiar, and fair, but it also seemed pale, wavery—the ghostly image of something I had known firsthand in brighter colors.

At last I got it. Siegel relies heavily on texts, both Second Wave and Third, to sketch her pictures of feminism—and nonfiction texts at that, by writers whose access to mainstream print was way above average. So much of feminism as I knew it was rooted in doing—organizing women's centers and bookstores and health-care collectives and music festivals, etc., etc.—and what we learned in the process. Sisterhood, Interrupted barely glimpsed this, and it didn't tell me much of what I most wanted to know about Third Wave feminists either: what they were doing. Feminism confirmed me in my nearly lifelong conviction that words were important, but it also taught me that words couldn't tell the whole story. With feminism, as with Christianity, Islam, red-state Republicanism, the 12-step program, and probably every other mass movement, the "real thing" exists in the living as well as in the texts. The discrepancies between the text and the practice often take the outsider—especially the outsider who comes with debunking on her/his mind—by surprise.

Ever since I read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, I've wondered "what if"—what if one of the people she worked alongside by some miracle mustered the skills, the energy, and the access to mainstream publishing to get her story into widely read print? In my wondering I've read, or at least skimmed, books and articles along the lines of What's the Matter with Kansas? and Don't Think of an Elephant and moved on, still not dissatisfied. This past summer I finally found my man, Joe Bageant, in an essay online, and this fall I finally got hold of his book, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. Bageant grew up working class redneck in Winchester, Virginia, went on the road, turned into a wild-eyed socialist journalist type, and then thirty years later went back home to live. Deer Hunting with Jesus is raucous, infuriating, livid, heartbreaking—easy to read but once you let it under your skin it's hard to get rid of.

Under my skin in a different—but maybe not so?—way is something that isn't even "text" at all—or maybe it is? In 2006 rock master Bruce Springsteen toured Europe and the U.S. with the Seeger Sessions Band, performing songs sung by, written by, and/or in the tradition of folk master Pete Seeger. For the last several months I've been working, driving, dancing, and singing to The Seeger Sessions: We Shall Overcome, the two-CD set recorded live at the first stop of the U.S. tour. Once in a while I shut up, sit down, and just think about how many generations some of these songs—like "John Henry" and "Erie Canal" and "Jacob's Ladder"—have survived, and how many ways you can dance to "Old Dan Tucker," and how seamlessly Springsteen's new verses fit into Blind Alfred Reed's "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?," and how Bill and Sis Cunningham's "My Oklahoma Home" and Seeger's "Bring Them Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam)" don't need any updating at all.

Emma Goldman had it right: Don't trust any revolution you can't dance to. Singing is good too.