Karen Joy Fowler's The Science of Herself

Have you read Karen Joy Fowler's The Science of Herself, a new volume in PM Press's Outspoken Authors series? The publication date is 2013, but I only recently read it. This series, if you don't know of it, includes, among other slim volumes the size of Conversation Pieces, Nalo Hopkinson's Report from Planet Midnight and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Wild Girls. The Science of Herself contains a brand new story, "The Science of Herself," two reprinted stories (the searing "The Pelican Bar" and "The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man"), "More Exuberant Than Is Strictly Tasteful," a characteristically snappy interview conducted by Terry Bisson, and "The Motherhood Statement," an essay combining fire and irony.

By the time I finished reading the second page of "The Science of Herself," which opens the volume, I'd fallen hard for it. The seaside village of Lyme Regis in the first decades of the nineteenth century? How could any voracious reader not think first of Anne Elliot watching Captain Wentworth as he fails to catch Louisa Musgrove when she willfully throws herself off the stairs, in Jane Austen's last novel, Persuasion? Fowler takes Anne Elliot's visit to Lyme Regis as her point of departure, leading to imagining Austen herself walking that beach and not seeing (yes, yes , not seeing) a young girl who was often to be found on that beach. "Strangely dressed, lower class, odd in affect, and desperately poor, she was not really the kind of girl who wanders into an Austen novel." (2) But then Fowler quickly goes on to note that Austen's visit to Lyme Regis had actually been made to see this girl's father, Richard Anning, a cabinetmaker. The connection between the unnoticed young girl and Jane Austen, though virtually invisible to the casual eye, is actual.

Anning, besides being a cabinetmaker, was also a fossil hunter; more interestingly, his daughter Mary proved to be not only a more redoubtable fossil hunter than he, the person who recovered the first complete ichthysaurus ever to be found, but also a sharp paleontologist whose contributions to the field were only belatedly awarded public acknowledgment when the British Royal Society named her on their list of the ten British women who have most influenced the history of science. "The Science of Herself" tells a story about Mary Anning's life that "wouldn't have made sense [in Austen's novel] with her bits of gothic history, her lightning, her science, her creatures. She wouldn't make sense in any story until the story changed." (25)

 I've long been interested in the problem-- one that Fowler has been mining for some time-- of stories that don't fit "the story" that is the template for how stories are told. It's a problem faced by writers wishing to write stories that don't fit the limits or language or assumptions of the current conventions, and a problem for readers longing for such stories and virtually unable to find them anywhere (and so often resort to ingenious methods for reading what is there slant). That template is, fortunately, always shifting. "The Science of Herself" is as much an exploration of how the stories that could be told about Mary during her lifetime were constrained and limited--how her life overflowed those constraints. The form Fowler uses to tell the story is what? It's prose, certainly. But is it fiction or nonfiction?

I'm particularly interested in the question of the form Fowler uses to tell Mary Anning's story because I've been sporadically working on a story about Emilie, the Marquise du Chatelet, for years now, struggling against the form it seems determined to take. The only form in which I seem able to cast the story of Emilie bears no resemblance to the forms in which stories about historical women are usually told. And I've been fighting that form because it resembles the form taken by "The Science of Herself," aware as I am that many readers would reject it as not really fiction (much less science fiction). I don't want to write an essay about Emilie. I want to imagine and explore aspects of her life as a woman of science in the same way in which I imagine and explore aspects of the lives of the characters I invent. In this sense, "The Science of Herself" is not an essay. Or is it? I'm thrilled that Fowler put this story out there, defying the demands that the writer choose one or the other. I think it will embolden me to finish the story. And I will say, for myself, that I'm increasingly uncertain about whether any clear distinctions can be drawn in every case between fiction and nonfiction. Obviously, some fictions are clearly, unequivocally fictional. But as someone trained in history, I've long been aware that because history is composed of narratives, it must always partake of the uncertainties (and distortions) of representation and won't ever be certain. Though based on "facts," imagination is the glue that makes those facts meaningful. In the end, we come down to story, and what stories can be told under this or that set of circumstances.

"The Science of Herself" plus "The Pelican Bar" alone would make this a bold book for a volume so slim, but "The Motherhood Statement" pushes it into the red zone. The book's second entry, "The Motherhood Statement," takes as its point of departure "The Motherhood Statement" in the Turkey City Lexicon (which Fowler describes as "a primer for science fiction workshops." "Motherhood" in this statement, like "apple pie," exemplifies "conventional social and humanistic pieties." Fowler, as anyone familiar with her work knows, is all about challenging comfortable conventions and "pieties."In principle, she's in agreement with the statement. But.

It's the specifics that give me pause. Apple pie, okay, fine, whatever. But motherhood? Nothing, absolutely nothing, appears to me more contested in our political and social and private lives than motherhood. Any woman who has ever had children can tell you it is no picnic of affirmation. Any woman who has not had children can tell you that that, too, is a controversial place to be. Neither is much admired. (28)

Fowler reminds us of something most science fiction (particularly that written by men) has not, until very recently, taken note of: "Motherhood is a concept that changes from culture to culture and over time. Sometimes it's set in opposition to mothering--motherhood, in this schematic, is the sacred duty of women, an artificial construct which underlies the whole system of patriarchy."(28)

Of course tarring "motherhood" with the brush of conventional social pieties has been a longstanding woman-bashing tradition for fiction written by US men in the twentieth century. It was a part of a concerted (highly successful) program for ejecting fiction by women from the upper echelons of literature in the US.* Fowler doesn't go into that, though, but focuses more closely on attitudes toward women vis-a-vis childraising, before paying tribute to the explorations made by feminist sf in the 1970s and then concluding with attending to the ferocious, on-going twenty-first-century attack on women's reproductive rights and how the free exercise of such rights has become a story many people and venues approach (if at all) with timidity at best and repulsion and censorship at worst. "I can remember no other time in which the attacks on women's freedom have been so widespread, so sustained, and so successful," Fowler writes. "Or half so scary... An argument that begins by positing women valuable only as mothers will end by suggesting that, even as mothers, women are not valuable at all." (32-33)  

Fowler ends the essay by returning to "The Motherhood Statement": "The easy assumption that motherhood constitutes some easy assumption is neither accurate nor serving us well. " (34)

She has a lot of good lines in her interview, but I'll offer you one here: "I believe that the learning in workshops happens to the critiquer not the critiqued." (72) Now go read this sharp little book yourself, if you haven't already.
_______________
*See, for instance, Paul Lauter, "Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon: A Case Study from the Twenties" (Feminist Studies 9,3 Fall 1983).

Building Feminist Worlds reading list

The CSWS has posted a list of materials discussed on the Building Feminist Worlds panel I mentioned in my last post. You can find it at http://csws.uoregon.edu/wp-content/docs/events/40th/40th_anniversary_recommended_scifi_list. In addition to fiction, the list includes plays, films, and links to podcasts.

Recognizing Gabe

Alberto Yanez, who was my student at Clarion West last summer, has just been published by Strange Horizons. Recognizing Gabe: un cuento de hadas is a Trans coming of age story with enormous heart. Alberto wrote it for my week at Clarion, and I just loved it and urged him to send it out as soon as possible. Strange Horizons was at the top of the list I gave him for likely venues. I'm tickled pink to see that it was, in fact, a perfect fit.

I recommend the story highly.

Recommended Reading: Vandana Singh's The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet

Vandana Singh's The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories, which I recently had the pleasure of reading, will appeal to a lot of Aqueduct's core readers. (Big surprise, hunh?)

The collection offers ten stories, each with its own finely grained world. When in the last story, "The Room on the Roof," I came across pov character Urmilla's conclusion "that the world she lived in was not a separate, self-contained thing, but actually an intersection of many worlds. There was the world of the beetle, the world of her mother pounding spices in the kitchen downstairs, the chess world, where her brother battled the evil enemy king, and who knows how many hidden worlds outside her awareness"(181), I found myself thinking that her observation distills a sort of subtext of the collection as a whole. Of course more world than one is evoked in each story, but one of the things Singh does well is give us a sensual taste of the particularities of the daily in her characters' lives.

I'd read several of the stories before and found them well worth a second read. I do have favorite stories in the book, though: the inexplicably powerful "Hunger," the poignant "The Room on the Roof," and "The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet." The latter is a classic feminist sf story that imparted a sense of wonder even as it made me giggle with its sly, not-to-be-denied humor. The story is told from the point of view of the middle-aged Ramnath Mishra, who grows increasingly frantic to restrain Kamala, his wife, who is in the process of becoming a planet, from disrobing in public (and private). Here's a sample:

He caught her just as she was about to run out into the driveway in nothing but a petticoat and blouse, in full view of street vendors, cricket-playing children and respectable elderly gentlemen. He wrestled her into the bedroom and tried to slap some sense into her, but she continued to struggle and weep. At last, frustrated, he pulled half a dozen saris out from the big steel cupboard and flung them on the bed.

"Kamala," he said desperately, "even planets have atmospheres. See here, this gray sari, it looks like a swirl of clouds. How about it?" She calmed down at once. She began to put on the gray sari although the fabric, georgette, was unsuitable for summer.

"At last you believe me, Ramnath," she said. Her voice seemed to have changed. It was deeper, more powerful. He looked at her, aghast. She had addressed him by his name! That was all very well for the new generation of young adults, but respectable, traditional women never addressed their husbands by their names. He decided not to do anything about it for now. At least she was clothed. (45)

You can buy The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories here.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2008, Part Two: Carolyn Ives Gilman

Carolyn Ives Gilman:

The Enchanted Frontier



Sometimes, insights come from the juxtapositions that happen when you read books in the context of a crowded life.

I must have been one of the last five people on earth to read Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I’d put it off because the book was such a doorstop. But last spring a friend gave me a loaner copy just as I was leaving on a research trip, so I took it along. I no longer had an excuse not to read it.

I should explain that my day job as a museum curator takes me around North America and Europe tracking down dispersed collections of books, manuscripts, maps, artworks, curios, antiquities, and downright bizarre and enigmatic stuff. I get paid to talk my way into the closets where museums keep the things they’re a little embarrassed by, like the shrunken heads and witches in bottles. For the last two years, I’ve been scouring the world for material relating to the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys between about 1750 and 1800, in order to produce an exhibition and book on the American Revolution on the Frontier. This was an era when the American Midwest was a contested zone, a place that would have seemed very alien to all of us who live in it today. It was inhabited by a complex blend of peoples—multilingual, multiethnic, multinational. Native Americans, French habitants, British soldiers, American settlers, African slaves, all struggled to define and control one another and the land where they wanted to live.

On this particular trip, I was investigating something fairly normal: the manuscript collection of an eccentric 19th-century scholar named Lyman Draper. He was obsessed with the subject I am working on, and devoted his life to acquiring every relevant scrap of paper he could lay his hands on. He was willing to go beyond the ends of the earth for a good interview; when he ran out of manuscripts to collect, he employed a medium to raise the spirits of the historical figures he studied.

So there I was, spending the day immersed in the collection of an obsessive dead scholar, then going to my hotel room at night to read a novel that actually made obsessive scholars sound interesting. This was an extraordinary feat in itself. But even more extraordinary to me was the way that Clarke managed to bring to life a set of European folk traditions about the supernatural. She managed to put me in a world where other-than-human beings present a real and present danger, where cozy normality is a mere lacquer over a perilous mystery that obeys rules we can only distantly sense.

And suddenly I understood the minds of the American frontiersmen I was reading about.

This is not so far-fetched a leap as it might seem. To begin with, I think Clarke’s book is based on some serious research into traditional beliefs about the nonhuman world. Whether she has invented or distorted details for fictional purposes is not important, because she has remained true to the overall picture. By that I mean the sense that magical power emanates from the land itself; that a vast hidden reality exists beneath the everyday world; that the worlds intersect at particular geographical points; that animals act as messengers or conduits between the worlds.

Moreover, the other world is inhabited by beings we cannot understand. They are simultaneously childlike and immensely powerful. They meticulously obey rules we cannot fathom, and trap us when we violate them. They can be physically beautiful and even grand. In negotiation they are deceptive, and in war treacherous. They are cowardly, but also formidable enemies. They are ruthless and have no regard for human life. They are lazy and feckless, incapable of becoming productive members of society, but glory in wealth and finery when they can get it. They love to cast spells over human beings and carry them off to their own realm, where the captives live in an entranced state, forgetting their homes and families.

This last paragraph, written to describe fairies as portrayed by Clarke, matches point by point Euro-American beliefs about American Indians in the late 18th century.

The existence of American Indians seriously staggered European intellectuals, and in the 18th century debate raged over how to account for them. Were they different in nature from Europeans (the French philosophes’ view), or were they simply at a different stage of cultural development (the argument of Scottish intellectuals)? Did they constitute a separate sub-species (as Carolus Linnaeus believed), or did they have the capacity to become “civilized” (as Thomas Jefferson argued)? On this debate hung questions about human origins and social evolution—questions with urgency for an impending colonial age.

So intellectuals wrote a lot about their reactions to Indians, but we know much less about the reactions of ordinary people who based their beliefs about the world on tradition and tale, not theory. Most of the people who actually came into contact with Indians on the frontier at this time were of Celtic extraction, often straight from Highland crofts or rural Ireland. They brought to America their clannish allegiances, their martial traditions, their fondness for ecstatic religion—and their folk traditions. They had certain expectations about the way other-worldly beings behaved and acted. When they were pushed or moved onto the frontier, they found themselves sharing space with incomprehensible and unpredictable beings. It only stands to reason that their pre-formed expectations about the Other were projected onto the Indians.

*

When we enter the world of the frontier through the gateway of Celtic traditional belief, and try to see what the settlers saw, America looks like a very different place.

People moving west before the Revolution had to cross a line that separated the predictable world of Europe from the wilderness. It was called the Proclamation Line, after the Proclamation of 1763, in which George III had forbidden settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains in order to preserve the West as “a Desert for the Indians to hunt and to inhabit.” Once beyond the line, settlers were beyond protection.

When people entered the West, what they encountered first was the forest. Not the little patches of woodland we have set aside to cherish in a paved-over world—this forest was endless, impenetrable, unmapped. It stretched uninterrupted from the foothills of the Appalachians to the rumored shores of the Mississippi 800 miles away—a forest four times larger than all of Britain and Ireland combined. To newcomers, it seemed primeval, unchanged since the dawn of time, mile upon endless mile of dank moss and tangled vine under the uninterrupted shadow of ancient trees. “Who can tell how far it extends?” wrote one American in 1782. “For no European foot has as yet travelled half the extent of this mighty continent!”

Things grew to immense sizes in the West. American chestnuts (a species now almost extinct) had trunks that rose fifty feet before branching, and a surveyor in 1774 measured a sycamore thirty-seven feet in circumference. Boatmen hauled hundred-pound catfish from the river. There were flocks of neon-colored Carolina parakeets flashing through the trees (yes, even in Ohio). Watching from the overhead branches were the huge tawny cats most people called panthers. Rumor told of “the ivory-bill wood-cock” whose beak was pure ivory—“a circumstance very singular in the plumy tribe.” More amazing to them than to us were the buffaloes that ranged as far east as the border of West Virginia. One astonished traveler described them as a sort of mythic beast assembled chimera-like from the parts of other animals: the body of a cow, the eye of a goat, the grunt of a hog.

But these living behemoths were dwarfed by the mysterious bones found at a salt spring just past the Kentucky River. Here, wrote one eyewitness,

very large bones are found, far surpassing the size of any species of animals now in America. The head appears to have been about three feet long, the ribs seven, and the thigh bones about four; one of which is reposited in the library in Philadelphia, and said to weigh seventy-eight pounds….These bones have equally excited the amazement of the ignorant, and attracted the attention of the philosopher….Whence is it that the whole species has disappeared from America?…These are difficulties sufficient to stagger credulity itself….Can then so great a link have perished from the chain of nature?
The mystery posed by the great bones was coupled with another one, even more troubling to accepted wisdom. As soon as they started to cross the mountains, Americans came upon evidence that this land had been inhabited by an advanced civilization at some ancient time in history. The discovery of a mysterious race of builders and engineers, unmentioned in the Bible or any history, posed such a dilemma that American intellectuals quickly entered into a state of denial about their existence, an attitude that persists today. But the ancient landmarks must have evoked a different response from Celtic immigrants—one of familiarity. Here were huge barrows marking the graves of neolithic chieftains. When broken open, they revealed coffins assembled from stone slabs, holding gigantic skeletons arrayed in shell beads and copper weapons. Hauntingly beautiful sculptures had been left as grave goods.

Undiscovered species, extinct monsters, a fallen civilization—who could doubt that the West was a land of mystery and magic? But we would be wrong to imagine that 18th-century Americans reacted to it with the same confidence and curiosity we would. Our positive view of wilderness was thoroughly alien to them. To them, the silent forest was an ominous realm. We think of external dangers, but to them the greatest threat was an internal one. For they believed that living in such a forest would change them. First would come a type of disorientation they called “bewilderment.” Then, by a slow and subtle process, the wilderness would rob them of the morals and manners of the civilized world. They would forget European ways and degenerate, step by inevitable step, into savages.

This belief was based on a legitimate scientific theory of the day; but then as now, science became distorted and exaggerated when it entered the popular culture. The theorists held that the differences in culture and lifestyle being discovered all around the globe were not racial—or as we would say, genetic—but the result of adaptation to different environments. Ordinary Americans heard this and reasoned: if character was formed by environment, would not a European transplanted to a new environment take on a different character? Would not a person who went to live in the forests that produced the Indians become like the Indians?

In fact, that was exactly what they believed. Pseudo-scientific “proofs” showed that the character traits of savagery were produced by the darkness and damp of the forest, by sleeping on the moist ground, or by eating wild game. Indian maize was disdained as a starvation food for this reason. Journalist Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur described what happened to people who went to live in forests: “Their actions are regulated by the wildness of the neighbourhood…. The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsocial…. Their wives and children live in sloth and inactivity;…they grow up a mongrel breed, half civilized, half savage.” Hunting was “a licentious idle life” that would “pervert good dispositions” and lead to “rapacity and injustice.”

The most terrifying proof of the susceptibility of civilization was the phenomenon of captivity. Gallons of ink were expended on this subject in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the captivity narrative became one of the first indigenous genres of American popular literature. Scores of these homespun tales gorged the market, filling roughly the same slot as horror does today. The central mystery that confronted Americans was, why did so many people captured by Indians adapt so quickly to their new lives, forget their own cultures, families, languages, and religions, and blend seamlessly into Indian society?

It was a well documented phenomenon. In 1764, at the end of Pontiac’s War, Col. Henry Bouquet “liberated” hundreds of European captives in Ohio, only to have a large proportion of them decline to be rescued. When the redcoats forced them to march back east, sure that they would soon recover their senses, dozens escaped to return to their Indian villages. Those who stayed behind eventually became known as “white Indians,” feared and vilified for combining the enterprize and discipline of Englishmen with the treachery and ruthlessness of Indians. One of them, Simon Girty, achieved such a legendary reputation fighting for the Indians that Stephen Vincent Benet made him a prominent member of the Devil’s jury in The Devil and Daniel Webster. Nineteenth-century engravings portrayed him as a shriveled, twisted creature with a maddened expression.

Today we notice with suspicion that women, African Americans, and other marginalized groups were particularly likely to “succumb” to Indian life. Girty himself was an abused child. But these are our explanations, not theirs. At the time, it was such a baffling phenomenon that they struggled to account for it as a universal human tendency to degenerate into a savage state from a hard-won pinnacle of civilization. Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1753,

when an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.

The settlers on the frontier had a less detached attitude than Franklin. They believed that the Indians were exercizing a mysterious power over their captives. Significantly, they did not call it captivity; they called it “captivation.” They regarded it with terror and mistrust. The most famous frontiersman of all, Daniel Boone, succumbed to captivation during a six-month sojourn as Sheltowee, adoptive son of the Shawnee chief Blackfish, in 1777-78. When he returned to Boonesborough, the town he had founded, the residents put him on trial for collaboration with the enemy. He was tainted with suspicion ever after, because he had shown the moral weakness of failing to resist.

All of this is far more understandable when one minds the beliefs underlying the settlers’ reactions. They had long experience with captivity, after all; fairies had been ensnaring Britons for centuries, almost always with tragic results. With Tam Lin echoing in their minds, is it any wonder that they reacted to Indian captivity the way they did?

*

All of this leaves an interesting dilemma for historians like me. If we acknowledge the role mythology played in the surviving first-hand accounts of Native Americans, how are we ever going to learn the truth about the people themselves? What I want to know is, what were the Indians really like?

People like the wily but nearly illiterate George Croghan, who lived with the Shawnee and Delaware for years and achieved enormous power representing the Crown at their tribal councils, swore they had cultural and character traits that we find eerily similar to the traditions of the Sidhe he had doubtless learned growing up in Ireland. Should we discount his testimony, or could there have been some reality underlying his claim?

The truly interesting question here is the chicken or the egg. That is, did Celtic frontiersmen see only what they expected to see, so that their perceptions (and the historical record they produced) were irretrievably tainted with an overlay of myth? If so, then we will never know what the Indians were actually like in the 1770s. Since they left no written record of their own, no plausible evidence survives. I, who study American Indian history, might as well be studying fairies.

Or could it be the other way around— that Europeans’ earliest experiences of non-European peoples actually gave rise to stories about the nature of supernatural beings, perhaps overlaid on earlier and less detailed traditions? Could the folk tales reflect a literary means of coping with real-world experiences of the Other?

Or could the tales reflect something universal about the reality of human nature when it is unrestrained by society and custom? I’m not sure I even want to go there, since it smells of determinism, but in the interest of objectivity we have to ask the question.

The fact is, these were and are still dangerous ideas. This made the reading of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell an uncomfortable and double-visiony thing for me. It was impossible for me not to think of the fairies as the indigenous, colonized peoples of the British Isles, and I actually suspect this was Clarke’s intent. At the same time, she does make you really long to smack those fairies down, or exile them to fairy reservations. Maybe this is the cleverest thing the book does—it makes you realize that, presented with a different balance of power, even you and I, enlightened liberals though we are, might react much as our ancestors did to Indians.

Carolyn Ives Gilman is the author of Halfway Human, a novel, a great deal of short fiction, and a body of work of 18th- and 19th-century American history, particularly Native and frontier history. She has published two volumes in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces Series, Candle in a Bottle: A Novella and Aliens of the Heart: Short Fiction.

The Carl Brandon Society's Recommendations for Black History Month

The Carl Brandon Society has put together a list of recommended readings of speculative fiction books by black authors in honor of Black History month. Claire Light explains:

The idea is for you to read these books this month, forward this list around to your friends, take this list into your local bookstores and ask them to display these books this month, post the list on your blogs and websites, etc. I hope you’ll all strongly consider at least picking up one of these books and falling into it. It’s a wonderful list, and your February will be improved!

Here's the list:

• So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
• Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
• My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due
• The Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad by Minister Faust
• Mindscape by Andrea Hairston
• Wind Follower by Carole McDonnell
• Futureland by Walter Mosley
• The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
• Zahrah the Windseeker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

And the 2005 CARL BRANDON SOCIETY AWARD Winners:

• PARALLAX AWARD given to works of speculative fiction created by a person of color:

47 by Walter Mosley

• KINDRED AWARD given to any work of speculative fiction dealing with issues of race and ethnicity; nominees may be of any racial or ethnic group:

Stormwitch by Susan Vaught

Julie Phillips on Boys' Liberation & Other Stuff

Last month this blog featured a couple dozen posts on what various Aqueductians had enjoyed reading, viewing, and listening to in 2007. Julie Phillips had intended to send me a contribution but ran out of time. I assured her I'd be happy to accept it late, and now, here it is.

She writes in an email to me:

I was going to send you an intro to my piece about The Dangerous Book for Boys, wasn’t I? I was looking at the people who’ve already weighed in on your blog. People are so good, they do their assignments right, they come up with useful stuff…

So I feel like I should add a couple of proper recommendations. One book that I really enjoyed last fall is the new Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods, which is already out in the UK and is coming out in the US in April. Its science fiction elements are not always all that strong or original (though I liked the robot sex), but it’s very angry and very funny, always a good combination.

And do you have books that have been sitting on your shelves, surrounded by a halo of respect and affection, for so long that you can’t remember what it was that you loved about them? I took down and reread an old Seal Press book, Tove Ditlevsen’s Early Spring, the other day, and now I remember what I loved about it. It’s by a poet who grew up in the slums of Copenhagen during the Depression, enduring miserable poverty and equally miserable parents, and what I enjoy and admire is the clarity with which she’s able to look back at herself and her surroundings. She writes with a funny kind of dispassionate understanding, with anger (and of course humor) boiling just under it. It’s the best book I know about a writer’s childhood.

It’s short, and you can order it on Amazon for 25 cents. Have you ever read it? You would like it.

Anyway, about my piece on The Dangerous Book for Boys, the only intro it really needs is that it’s partly a review of the Dutch/Flemish edition, and I wrote it for a local audience, so I found myself making all kinds of Dutch references, especially to the Dutch ambivalence about history. The Dutch feel uncomfortable teaching their own history. They associate it with national pride (which they don’t like: it reminds them too much of Nazi Germany). And they don’t like to look at the negative parts of their own colonial past. Now that they’re confronted with a large immigrant group, they don’t know what to do. Should immigrants be expected to care about Dutch history? If they don’t learn it, can they integrate into Dutch culture?

The essay is also about superheroes, pink toys, and why girls want to be librarians. In retrospect I think I made too much of an effort to respect this whole “boys will be boys” business, which I would like to think is, as one male friend of mine put it, just a “reactionary last gasp.” But I am a woman and don’t like to look less than understanding. It’s here

What has really put me off the boys’ liberation movement is a book called “Manliness,” in which “natural” male qualities are shown “naturally” to lead to sexism and George W. Bush. I wrote about that too, here.

Actually, the very best thing I’ve read lately is Martha C. Nussbaum’s review of “Manliness” in The New Republic. It’s online here. She takes the book and its author apart with a serene authority that’s a pleasure to see.

+++++++++++++

Be sure to check out Julie' essays. They're well worth the read. (And now I'm going off to check out the Nussbaum piece, which I haven't yet read myself.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2007, Pt. 11: Eileen Gunn and L. Timmel Duchamp

Here's Eileen's piece:

[photo of Eileen Gunn by Leslie Howle]

Here are some words, not really reviews, about some of the books that I enjoyed in 2007.

True North | Nord Vrai, by Jody Aliesan. Blue Begonia Press, 2006.
Jody Aliesan is a remarkable poet who can convey both exquisite happiness and bone-deep pain, sometimes in the same poem. I've been reading her work since 1980, and it has grown deeper and more complex, as one would expect. And yet even her recent work has stayed very close to the voice and the deep self of her early work. She is an activist in the feminist, anti-war, and social-justice communities, and her poetry reflects those concerns: she writes about what she feels most strongly.

True North is a memoir, a collage of texts from Aliesan's entire life, seamlessly stitched together with a direct but softspoken narrative. In it, Aliesan describes and reflects on her relationship with her mother, a narcissistic woman who was a pathological liar. I found it a truly gripping read. As always with Aliesan's work, I was shaken by its honesty and directness, and I marveled at her ability to distill her anger at the cruelty and violence she has experienced.

I expected that in True North Aliesan would, as she does with her poetry, lead me through the dark but not leave me there, but, even so, I was surprised at the peaceful clarity of the light that shone forth at the end of this book. I strongly recommend it to you, as I recommend her books of poetry.

Other books by Jody Aliesan: here


The Hearts of Horses, by Molly Gloss. Houghton Mifflin, 2007.Do not be put off -- or seduced, for that matter -- by the syrupy cover and title of this new novel from Molly Gloss. This is not a syrupy book, it is not a romance, and it does not sentimentalize either horses or humans. It deals with the classic Faulknerian theme: the human heart in conflict with itself, as embodied in Gloss?s own particular interest, the emotional lives of strong, solitary women.

Once past the marketing misdirection, you'll find another compelling Molly Gloss novel, an emotionally complex tale of a young woman who understands horses and is learning to understand people. This is sort of a post-coming-of-age novel, taking place in the life of Martha Lessen after she has struck out from her family's ranch in eastern Oregon to find work at a distance, on her own. The work she knows is breaking horses to saddle, which the narrator says is a job sometimes performed at that time, in 1917, by itinerant women broncobusters. Martha rides into town in classic western style, a stranger on a horse looking for work. She is wearing a pair of outlandish rodeo chaps that draw a few skeptical stares, and has a copy of Black Beauty in her saddlebags. She gentles horses, as the other women do, by observing their behavior, respecting their differences, and making it worth their while to do what she says.

The narrative voice, which is close-in and personal, but not Martha, captivated me from the beginning. It first seems to be someone reminiscing about the past, but then quickly moves into novelistic exposition. We see things mostly from Martha's point of view, but occasionally we see Martha from someone else?s viewpoint and find out things that Martha doesn't know and never will, and it becomes clear that the narrator is that most delicate of beings, an omniscient voice that moves, when it wants, from one character to another. Gloss explains in the Acknowledgements section that the beginning of the book is taken almost verbatim from the reminiscences of a rancher's daughter in Cowgirls: Women of the American West, an oral history by Teresa Jordan.

The narrator's voice is just the beginning of the voices that emerge from this remarkable book. The various ranch women and men who struggled to make a living in a stark, dry land are for the most part not articulate, or even very talkative, but their deep, rich voices call out from a time when the American past was turning into the present, and the future arrived in bits and pieces.

As for the dust jacket: it is best viewed from Martha's point of view. Marketers are herd animals: they understand things differently from writers, but, with patience and understanding, most marketers can be taught to respect the writer's space. Perhaps the marketing department at Houghton Mifflin simply needs a bit of gentle correction.

Spook Country, by William Gibson. Penguin-Putnam, 2007. Gibson wrote Spook Country in 2005-2006, and he produced a richly imaginative work that felt very strange to read in 2006, which is when it is set. In 2007, however, I've seen traceurs glide swiftly over obstacles in front of Nordstrom, and I've so absorbed the idea of invisible artworks populating the landscape that I often wish I had the special glasses needed to view them. I'm not sure how much that is the result of Gibson always being one step ahead of the zeitgeist, and how much is the Heisenbergian effect of reality bending itself to Gibson's vision.

Spook Country is a benign thriller, exciting on a chapter-by-chapter basis, and yet it does not violate the reader's trust. It is chock-a-block full of Gibsonian felicities, and richly rewards the casual Google.

A View from the Chuo Line by Donald Ritchie. Printed Matter Press, 2004. I bought this slim collection in September, on my last night in Tokyo, at midnight in an all-night bookstore, and read it on the plane going home.

The stories in it are very short, very precise, often from a woman's point of view, or a child's. They are structured around the characters' small, internal epiphanies rather than plots, and, although they are set in present-day Japan and deal with present-day issues, they read like tiny slices of life from a film by Yasujirō Ozu: the essence of Fifties Japan thrust into the 21st Century. They are written from within a particular character's point of view, and they do not in any way meet the reader's eye.

They might even be called character studies rather than stories. I don?t know why I like them, but I do, as I liked Richie's peculiar memoir The Inland Sea, part travelogue, part. The voices and concerns of the characters remind me of Mai, the protagonist of Geoff Ryman's Air, which I also read this year.



L. Timmel Duchamp:

Aqueduct keeps me so busy that I often feel as though I never get to read anything but manuscripts and books I’ve been asked to review. But a look through the book in which I keep track of my reading shows that though my list of books read runs a good deal shorter than in past years, I did in fact do some reading for pleasure in 2007.

I have a special love for collections of short fiction, and for me these are a surer bet than the best magazines and most celebrated anthologies. If a writer consistently produces interesting short fiction, their work shows to greatest advantage in collections, since collections allow the reader to grasp themes and catch resonances that otherwise escape their notice. Early in 2007 I read Australian Kaaron Warren’s The Grinding House for review for NYRSF. I’d never seen Warren’s work before and was pleased to make its acquaintance. Though her prose style is superficially plain, her narratives are fresh and unusual. My review can now be found on my website. Other collections I especially enjoyed were Margo Lanagan’s Red Spikes (more unusual stories from Down Under!), Tamar Yellin’s Kafka in Bronteland, Alisdair Gray’s The Ends of Our Tethers, and Diane Williams’s Excitability.

I also love novellas, especially those that are published as standalone books (which is probably why I like to publish them). At Potlatch this year I purchased a standalone PS novella by Geoff Ryman, titled VAO, from my favorite Portland booksellers, Wrigley-Cross. This gentle, ingenious satire is set in a $100,000 a year retirement home where cyber-chicanery is standard operating procedure for residents and caretakers alike. What can I say? Ryman’s good!

My very favorite new stories of the year (besides either those to be found in the collections above or those I acquired and edited for Aqueduct) were Theodora Goss’s “Singing of Mount Abora” (in Logorrhea) and Vandana Singh’s “Hunger” (Interfictions).

I read several anthologies and enjoyed several (though not all) stories in each. Special mention goes to Lucy Sussex and Judith Raphael Buckrich’s She’s Fantastical, which is twelve years old now but was difficult for me to get hold of, and re:skin, ed. Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth, a gorgeous hardcover published by the MIT Press earlier this year that hasn’t been reviewed anywhere. It has both stories and essays (including a new story by me), and is, in short, a fitting sequel to the celebrated reload: rethinking women + cyberculture.

I enjoyed about a dozen novels immensely:

Samuel R. Delany’s literary novel Dark Reflections is poignant and elegant. (Steven Shaviro has posted an excellent review on his blog.)

Carol Emswhiller’s The Secret City offers a fresh take on the First Contact experience. (I’ve posted my review of it on my website.)

Tricia Sullivan’s paired novels, Double Vision and Sound Mind, which I reviewed for Strange Horizons, satisfied me immensely; Sound Mind is probably too long, but for the reader who likes to think, they’re great fun. (See my review at Strange Horizons.)

I’d been saving Angela Carter’s last novel, Wise Children (the only one of her novels that I hadn’t yet read at least once), and this year suddenly realized that doing so was pointless. So, after all these years, I finally, dove into it. I found it an energetic romp with an underlying sadness, a novel more akin to Nights at the Circus (which is, I think, my favorite Carter novel) than to her earlier work.

Among the year’s rereads, I had the pleasure of rereading Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed a couple of times this year (for an essay I wrote this summer); as often happens with rereads, I found it fascinating to compare my 2007 reading with my 1980 reading.

For sheer escapism I medicated myself with mysteries as needed. Of these I can two stand out in my memory: Peter Dickinson’s King and Joker (set in an alternate history) and Håken Nesser’s Borkman’s Point.

At the experimental-lit end of the spectrum, three novels particularly moved me. Michelle Tea’s The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America reminded me of Violette Leduc, probably because the narrative revels in a gritty, raw frankness about money and class and desire and insecurity. Stacey Levine’s Frances Johnson and Dra— are not so easily described. Well, Dra—, maybe, is somewhat describable, blurring realism into dream imagery and driven by dream logic in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, a female-inflected variety of Kafka on laughing gas. One of the strangest moments of reading Dra— came when I realized that the title character’s name ends with an em-dash and not an underline (as I initially took it, assuming that the character’s name began with the letters D-R-A, as obviously it does not).

Although I was a bit wary going into Elizabeth Knox’s Black Oxen because the last novel by her I’d read (Billie’s Kiss) devolves from a fabulous beginning into a mess of shifting tropes that finally obliterate the narrative with their incoherence, I ended up loving it. Black Oxen demands a good deal of trust on the reader’s part—trust that the author knows what she’s doing and that everything in the novel is there for a reason—and then richly rewards that trust. It’s a science fiction novel that is so focused on the lives of its characters and the politics of narrative that I suspect some sf fans might disdain to call it science fiction. I loved the texture of the narrative, I loved its layered density, I loved its generosity with characters whose choices and affections and even crimes can’t be neatly compartmentalized and explained away.

One novel this year filled me with absolute, inordinate glee. Rebecca Ore’s Time’s Child doesn’t compare with Outlaw School or Gaia’s Toys, but it was such fun to read that I silently burbled with mirth all the way through (when I wasn’t outright cackling). I loved Ore’s future Philadelphia and what her motley crew transported by time-machine from the past were up to there, just adored the way the guy from OUR time was helpless to thwart them. And how perfectly apt that the idea of everyone thriving and working cooperatively to create a decent place to live just drove him up the wall, reflecting the depressing pathology of 21st-century US mores and values. There are aspects of my intellectual formation that account for my glee, of course. The book’s central character, Benedetta, a 15th-century Italian woman who as a camp follower works with artillery, helps to maintain and operate a cannon. Among other things, she and her young son hang out in Leonardo da Vinci’s studio and even help him test one of his inventions. When she’s brought forward into 24th-century Philadelphia (along with other people on the verge of death whom academics who have the use of a time-machine have snatched from other places and times), she cannily sees through the lies they tell her and decides she wants to go through the physically risky process of adapting to life outside the quarantined rooms in which a variety of historical refugees are being kept. Ore, you see, refuses to kowtow to the modernist dogma that people born into modern societies are necessarily smarter and better able to adapt to The New than people born into pre-modern societies. A friend of mine who’s a medievalist scholar constantly rants and raves about the idiotic assumptions people make about individuals living in the high middle ages, as though simply being born later makes one smarter. In this novel, a man born in 21st-century Philadelphia is unable to cope with 24th-century Philadelphia because he’s so ideologically brainwashed that he can’t believe that his rigid neoliberalist view of human nature isn’t the True one and so imagines that he can effortlessly sabotage a communal social, economic, and political organization that Benedetta, hailing from the 15th century, finds familiar and sensible. Nisi Shawl and I had a grand argument over the book with the person Nisi mentions having hated the book so much he demanded his money back; without question, he hated the very qualities of the book that I loved. It occurred to me later that Benedetta’s adaptability might not have bugged him so much if Ore had brought Leonardo da Vinci forward instead of Benedetta. Everyone cuts slack for geniuses (who are always male, of course). And the book sets out to be playful rather than Realist. In any case, I daresay most feminists and many leftists would enjoy Time’s Child.

Quickly, interesting nonfiction that I read or started reading in 2007: Linda M.G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom; Naomi Klein, Shock Therapy; Jeffrey J. Williams, ed Critics at Work; Laura Kipnis, Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics. And of course I reread Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing (which I reviewed for Strange Horizons).

I’ll conclude with mentioning three films that made a deep impression on me.

Pan’s Labyrinth delivered a vivid, frighteningly visceral reminder that fascism is totalitarian—that it takes over not only the political sphere but everything else, including the imagination.

Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad, a film about the teacher’s strike in Oaxaca that inadvertently turned into a revolution, gave me much to think about. Its focus is necessarily on documenting the takeover of (and subsequent ejection from) public space by the peoples of Oaxaca, but it offers an intriguing subtext about the anarchistic, democratic agency traditional to some indigenous peoples and briefly shows a scene in which a thousand people reach consensus on a critical political decision.

And this month I saw I’m Not There, a splendid (if overly long) film about Bob Dylan which divides his character into distinct personas (one of which is played with total plausibility by Cate Blanchett). It’s a playful and evocative film, full of lots of in-jokes and resonant images. And it constantly reminded me of bits of my life during the 1960s and 1970s. The scene in which the Dylan character and his wife Claire are sitting in an outdoor café with another couple startled me, for it was absolutely typical of the arguments that would arise in such settings, where the men argued with the women about women’s inferiority. I’d forgotten, you see. I’d forgotten what it was like to be faced with the male, stone-faced conviction that women are illogical, women can’t write good poetry, women can’t compose music, women can’t write great novels, women can’t do science, women are emotional, and so on and so forth. Just that one scene encapsulated the reality of that loud, constant pressure on women to accept that they are inferior and just get over it. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many arguments like that one I participated in back then. Each time it felt as though I were struggling for my life, struggling just to breathe, while the men used their greater vocal power to interrupt and drown us out, always laughing at our silliness for even caring. Hmm. Though some of the forgotten once-familiar scenery of the movie evoked nostalgia, obviously I have no hankering to return to those days…