Archaeology of the Sissy (ASA 2011)

American Studies Association, 20 October 2011. Harry Thomas's talk on a panel entitled "Violent Transformations: Imagining the Gendered Body."

Harry Thomas began his talk, “Amplifying the Paradox: Effeminacy in the Age of AIDS,” with a discussion of how the sissy has been alternately a figure of fascination and horror in our culture. The creation of the Boy Scouts was motivated by sissiphobia, as was the 2008 Lawrence King murder; on the other hand, Liberace was the most successful entertainer of the 1960s, and he’s had many effeminate superstar successors. Now, the term for hybrid bodies that both horrify and fascinate is, of course, “the grotesque.” And the paper will address both the threatening grotesque and the fascinating grotesque.

The sissy as threatening grotesque is featured in Randy Shilts’s nonfiction novel And the Band Played On, in the form of one Gatean Dugas, the alleged “AIDS Patient Zero” who, we are told, deliberately went about spreading HIV in various cities in the Seventies and early Eighties, about whom Shilts makes monstrous claims that invoke misogynist stereotypes. While Douglas Crimp and others have debunked the Dugas myth and discredited the very idea of an AIDS Patient Zero, celebration of Shilts persists. Shilts’s portrait of Dugas incorporates class and gender stereotypes, depicting a bitchy swell from the lower orders (even sissy memoirs are upward-mobility tales) with vindictive/emulative urges toward his betters and a monstrous vanity. In Shilts’s melodrama, Dugas is the victim of bullying whose suffering leads to a need for recognition. Shilts must continually emphasize Dugas’s effeminacy, lest his promiscuity look like a studly virtue. Although Shilts’s book is anti-homophobic, it tends toward the femmephobic and sex-negative. The confrontation outside the American Boy store between Dugas and a butch gay man who tells him to leave and stop infecting people suggests that healthy, all-American masculine gay men can restore the community.

Now, the polarities are reversed in Angels in America: the tough pro-American macho gay is Roy Cohn (and to some extent Joe, who is conspicuously absent from the community — “the liberal Edenic America” — that forms at the end of the play). Kushner’s femmes, far from being villainous, have special and sometimes superhuman abilities. Belize says of Roy Cohn, “A queen can forgive her vanquished foe” and is given the moral triumph of persuading Louis to say Kaddish for the villain: his compassion stands out in the Reagan-era U.S. And of course, Prior’s heroism takes place on an even grander scale. Kushner’s queens are heroes and prophets, the bandagers of wounds and the redeemers of the American Dream. Belize says to Roy Cohn, “I’m your negation.” So effeminate men in Angels in America are not fully-realized characters either. Must effeminate men be superhuman in order to be sympathetic? Thomas ended his talk with an illustrative quote from Sarah Schulman’s Rat Bohemia:

I read in Herve Guilbert's book that Foucault died, not knowing exactly what had hit him. His lover found his handcuffs and whips and couches full of leftover manuscripts on such trifles as the history of socialism. Charles Ludlum was the most profound loss. America doesn't even know what she's missing . . . But what do we do with all the mediocrities who never created anything worth remembering and never would have even if they had lived to be eighty-five? It drives me crazy how quickly the great ones get canonized. Blah-blah-blah is such a terrible loss. Does that mean that the death of one mediocre slob is not as terrible? Do fags have to be geniuses to justify living?

I was struck by how Thomas’s description of Dugas’s character resembled Tom Ripley and how Shilts’s invention of Dugas resembled the fictional character of “Michel Foucault” that James Miller presented in The Passion of Michel Foucault, and how both recalled earlier fantasies of effeminate purveyors of infection, such as Jews. Also I noted that Belize is a bit too much of a Magical Negro. In the Q&A, I asked for a genealogy of American sissiphobia — did it start around Teddy Roosevelt? Thomas was sympathetic to Michael Kimmel’s claim that we have to go back at least to Andrew Jackson’s reinvention of elite American Manhood. But the age of TR and the Boy Scouts was certainly a high water mark for these kinds of anxieties.

When less is more

Freud got some things right. As, for instance, here, when he's talking about Shakespeare's artful characterization (of Richard in Richard III):

It is, however, a subtle economy of art in the poet that he does not permit his hero to give open and complete expression to all his secret motives. By this means he obliges us to supplement them; he engages our intellectual activity, diverts it from critical reflection and keeps us firmly identified with his hero. A bungled in his place would give conscious expression to all that he wishes to reveal to us, and would then find himself confronted by our cool untrammeled intelligence, which would preclude any deepening of the illusion.

Fiona Lehn's The Last Letter

Aqueduct Press is pleased to announce the release of The Last Letter, a novella by Fiona Lehn, the latest volume in our Conversation Pieces series.  It's a fascinating tale. On Island SG7, one voracious parasite endangers a protected forest and a small community. But the biologist hired to bring the place into balance is already compromised—by a too-narrow view of her duties, and—increasingly—by a love she cannot ignore.

This is the love letter of Peta Sutton, who struggles to perceive the full complexities of her place in a foreign ecosystem and an extramarital relationship. As the island roils and the parasites seem to drag people's worst fears into being, Peta struggles to forge a peace at the heart of fears that threaten to consume everything.

Here's a taste:

Nearly 25 years ago, in the northwestern region of the New World, on Island SG7, in the month of May, I spoke with you for the first time. I had called a general meeting. Such meetings usually drew 200 people or less and so were held in the pub, where they comfortably adopted the tone of a family squabble. My meeting, however, took place in the school gymnasium at the northern tip of the island, to accommodate the nearly 2500 island inhabitants who attended. They sat in the bleachers that lined the sides of the room. You stood alone against the far wall by the exit and said nothing, watching the proceedings as if observation were your business. In the middle of the gym floor, I clung to the sides of the podium with sweaty palms, trying to emanate an authoritative calm.

“Thank you all for coming,” I said. “This community obviously cares about its forest system.”

“You're damned right we do!” A man's voice shot out from the crowd and echoed about the gym, followed by righteous voices of agreement.

“I've spent the past week in the forest, as you know,” I said, “and I want to share with you what I've learned.”

“We already know—the worms are taking over the entire island!”

More shouts of assent.

“If you would please refrain from commenting until I've finished,” I said, “We'll have time for everyone to share their views.” The crowd quietened. “The web worms and their webs are unsightly,” I said, “but they have done and will do no permanent damage to the forest. This Spring, the web worms will continue to develop through six phases, called instars—during which they will grow and molt, or, shed their skins—until late June when they coccoon. I will destroy any cocoons near ground level and trap moths in early July. In the months that follow, I will destroy all accessible egg masses. This process will significantly reduce the web worm population and give the forest a chance to renew itself. That is the first step to restoring balance to the island's forest system. As well, I will develop a long-term eco-balancing strategy. Until the forest regains balance, it may look strange to you, but I need you to be patient and let me do my job.”

The islanders, a mix of superstitious island-borns and educated, retired imports from the mainland cities, were accustomed to autonomy and immediacy. They wanted predators shipped in, they wanted bug bombs and pesticides. I reminded them that their overuse of pesticides over the past decade was one of the things that had gotten them into this mess in the first place, killing off beneficial insects and losing their web worm predators in the process.

“Then spray the worms,” someone shouted. “If the other organisms or creatures are gone, then we have nothing to lose anymore. Spray everything!”

“Spray them with what?” I said. “After completing my preliminary tests, I can tell you that the web worms have developed a resistance to insecticides, viruses, and funghi. Even the parasites they host have no significant effect upon them. You have bred some very resilient web worms here. So we must control them another way. But this will take more than a season, so again I ask for your patience—”

“We've waited long enough already. Those worms have devoured half the forest.”

“What will they eat when they run out of trees?”

“Us?”

“Our homes?”

***

Fiona Lehn is a new voice in feminist science fiction, and it's my pleasure to do what I can to make her better known in our field. Her only publication to date is a novella in The Writers of the Future series. Fiona grew up in Stockton California and took a BA in Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz but now lives as a Canadian citizen in Vancouver, British Columbia. Besides writing fiction, Fiona is also a musician. From 1993 to 2006, she co-produced several CDs of her original songs and performed across the U.S. Of particular interest for this blog's habituees is that from 2007 to 2011, she served on the editorial collective of Room, Canada's oldest feminist literary magazine.

You can purchase The Last Letter here.

Reading for a Friday

Today is Ursula Le Le Guin's birthday. Happy birthday, Ursula!

---It's therefore fitting that today's first link is to a description by Ryan Britt of a panel discussion, at the Center for Fiction, on the influence Ursula K. Le Guin has had on the sf/f field. The panel was moderated by David Hartwell and included N.k. Jemison, Michael Swanwick, Ellen Kushner, and John Wray. I was particularly interested to read...

In terms of her influence on the panel’s writing specifically, N.K Jemisin noted that Le Guin made a big impact on rediscovering her love of short stories. Jemisin cited “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” as a major revelation as the story caused so much “pain, because it’s intended to be a painful story.” Jemisin previously felt she didn’t need nor understand the medium of short fiction, but after some prodding from peers and reading the short fiction of Le Guin, she thinks totally differently.

...because it reminded me of how important Le Guin's short ficton was for me in the 1980s and how for a long while I firmly believed her short fiction superior to her novels. Eventually I decided, perhaps because the generally shared assumption that novels matter more than short fiction began to insidiously erode my conviction that the best short fiction is as powerful and affecting as the best novels, that perhaps I might be wrong. (Not that I'm not used to being alone in my critical judgments...)

---This is a bit old in internet terms, but in case you missed it: Vandana Singh's most recent column for Strange Horizons continues with the second part of her series on "Science, Emotions, and Culture."

Spread/Art Culture has a photo essay by Kisa Lala, "Visions of a Treeless World," that ranges from the Vikings' slash and burn razing of forests to Easter Island to current day Manhattan, offering striking art work along the way.

--In her essay The Balm of Sisterly Consolation: Thoughts on Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of Udolpho, Abigail Nussbaum wrestles with Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of Udolpho and finds the young Jane Austen reacting against the labeling problem women writers face now as well as then. Nussbaum notes:

It's a question that crops up again and again, whenever art by, for, or about women is discussed. You see it whenever chick-lit--the term, the publishing category, and the question of who gets classed into it--is discussed, and especially when an author of literary fiction--usually a female one--comments disparagingly on it. These discussions, if they acknowledge that chick-lit is rooted in some deeply problematic assumptions (and that it is equally problematic that women writing about the domestic, such as Austen herself, are assumed to be writing chick-lit, or at least less worthy work than male writers who write about it), will usually fail to admit that the perception of chick-lit as frivolous and shallow is rooted in misogyny, and vice versa. During the discussion of the dwindling ranks of women writing SF, there were several surprisingly negative responses from female bloggers, which were partially explained by their argument that women haven't been driven out of SF but have left it for fantasy and paranormal romance, and that the prioritization of SF is just the flipside of the tendency to discount these genres. But all is not well even within those fields: witness, on the one hand, Stina Leicht complaining about the expectation that a female fantasy writer must be writing paranormal romance, and on the other hand, M.K. Hobson's creation of a moniker for a female-oriented subset of steampunk which she dubs "bustlepunk." And then there's the fact that what is meant by literature for women is often literature for white, middle class, heterosexual, cisnormal women, as discussed in the comments to Kyra Smith's review of a romance novel at Ferretbrain.

---Over at the Nation, Ari Berman weighs in with How the Austerity Class Rules Washington:

In September the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a bipartisan deficit-hawk group based at the New America Foundation, held a high-profile symposium urging the Congressional “supercommittee” to “go big” and approve a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan over the next decade, which is well beyond its $1.2 trillion mandate. The hearing began with an alarming video of top policy-makers describing the national debt as “the most serious threat that this country has ever had” (Alan Simpson) and “a threat to the whole idea of self-government” (Mitch Daniels). If the debt continues to rise, predicted former New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, there would be “strikes, riots, who knows what?” A looming fiscal crisis was portrayed as being just around the corner.

The event spotlighted a central paradox in American politics over the past two years: how, in the midst of a massive unemployment crisis—when it’s painfully obvious that not enough jobs are being created and the public overwhelmingly wants policy-makers to focus on creating them—did the deficit emerge as the most pressing issue in the country? And why, when the global evidence clearly indicates that austerity measures will raise unemployment and hinder, not accelerate, growth, do advocates of austerity retain such distinction today?

An explanation can be found in the prominence of an influential and aggressive austerity class—an allegedly centrist coalition of politicians, wonks and pundits who are considered indisputably wise custodians of US economic policy. These “very serious people,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wryly dubs them, have achieved what University of California, Berkeley, economist Brad DeLong calls “intellectual hegemony over the course of the debate in Washington, from 2009 until today.”

Berman names some names and takes notes of the deep pockets backing "these very serious people."

---A New Scientist article by Andy Coghln and Debora MacKenzie reports that

An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The image the article provides of interlocking ownerships is awesome. 1318 corporations make up the "core," but a "super-entity" of 147 owned 40% of the total wealth in the network.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Fascinating stuff. The study is to be published in PloS One.

What I read last summer, part 3

This is the third in the series. (Sorry it's taking me so long to get all of these out...) The first can be found here, and the second here.

One of my most enjoyable reads of the summer was Karen Lord's Redemption in Indigo. The story spins off from a Senegalese folk tale abot a foolish, gluttonous husband that the book begins with, casting the gluttonous husband's estranged wife Paam (who is a fabulous cook) as its "heroine" (the term the narrator uses to characterize her), in a conflict with Chance, a djobmi ("one of the undying ones"), whose power over probability (mostly referred to as "chaos") has been taken from him and given to Paam. Chance's "shadow" in the world wears an indigo skin, and the redemption in the title refers to Chance's redemption, not Paam's (for Paam is an exemplary human being). Since the narration takes the style of a folk tale, and the narrator adopts the role of storyteller, there are many generalizations about human nature, as well as lessons. Which works fine, though the narrator's recurring defensiveness is a bit irksome. I found this particular mixture of science with fantasy fresh and delightful. The style as a whole is gentle and good-humored, the writing lovely.

Fresh; gentle; entertaining. Recommended without reservation

I've read a lot of work by Jane Gardam, and I was pleased to see Europa bringing out one of her novels, since its editions are so handsome. Oddly enough, though, I didn't enjoy Old Filth as much as I've enjoyed her other books (several of which are collections of short fiction). "Old Filth" refers to Sir Edward Feathers (a name that kept making flash on Angela Carter's wonderful character named "Feathers"). In a set-piece dialogue, one of Old Filth's colleagues remarks about him: "Great advocate, judge and-- bit of a wit. Said to have invented FILTH--Failed In London Try Hong Kong. He tried Hong Kong. Modest, nice chap."

This is not Gardam's usual protagonist, and I suppose that's why this novel, of all her novels, has reaped loud critical accolades (and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize). It's also the reason, I suspect, that I was mostly bored by it. The book is a sympathetic portrait of a wealthy, privileged man whose childhood was traumatic and literally unspeakable (until, in advanced old age, he finds it necessary to make a confession of it to a priest). The narrative is discontinuous and jumps back and forth in time-- but never connects any of the dots, and never shows the most important moments of the protagonist's life. The mature Filth is pretty much oblivious to other people, except when he's annoyed by their presence or absence-- and by his dependence on them. He never bothers to learn the name of his devoted housekeeper, whom he calls "Mrs. Er..." (and whom the reader discovers, near the end of the book, has never been married and has been working for him for decades). The younger Filth (like the older one) is a prig and snob. Still, Gardam does get in quite a few good bits, which, along with her nicely economical style, kept me reading.

Recommended for people who enjoy British raj lit fic.

Pathological liars aren't exactly rare on the ground. I suspect that more people than not have had close encounters with at least one. And close encounters with such people usually leave a very bad taste in the mouth, if not a kind of soul-sickness. That's probably the reason they've been depicted so often in fiction. (Jane Austen depicted them brilliantly.) Curiously, in her book Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, Sissela Bok characterizes the pathological liar as "quite harmless." That absolutely flummoxes me. I mean, she's a philosopher. I have then to wonder whether she's ever actually encountered one. I suppose this is her reasoning for calling them harmless: "There is an undoubted psychological easing of standards of truthfulness toward those believed to be liars. It is simply a fact, for instance, that one behaves differently toward a trusted associate and toward a devious, aggressive salesman." (134) Bok finds pathological liars so negligible, in fact, that she only brings them into her conversation to ask whether one is justified in lying to a pathological liar. I presume this is because she considers them both "harmless" and irrelevant to a discussion of morality, except insofar as how a moral agent behaves toward them: the point being that pathological liars cannot meaningfully be considered moral agents. (Similarly, children only figure in her book as "deceived persons.")

I unfortunately had the bad luck to have known a pathological liar over a long period of time because he married my mother, who, though usually very smart about people, took literally years to see through him (by which time he'd run through a lot of cash that she had toiled long and hard hour to earn). Basically, he continually told people anecdotes about himself that charmed his current interlocutors, or impressed them, or-- and this is the weirdest part-- intersected in (literally) incredile ways with their own past, long before they'd met him-- thus establishing a kind of fated connection with them. These stories changed every time he told them. But beccause he always believed them while telling them, he never noticed. That's the thing: although he was a big manipulator, the element of conscious calculation was missing. And that was just as well, because he was below average intelligence. At the time I met him, I had a memory like a steel trap. So just a couple of weeks after meeting him, I began to register the constant shifting and altering of details, and the contradictions between stories. (Which was probably why I was the first person in the family to fall out of the spell he had woven over all of us.) Once I tumbled to the falseness of the stories, I began to register other falsenesses-- ones less cunningly concealed and more obvious. I also began to realize that he lied almost constantly, even about trivial, insignificant things without any possible benefit to him. It was as though he had no continuous consciousness, no social or even personal memory at all. In short, I discovered there was no there there-- only a shallow, selfish, attention-hungry core that would do anything to keep people from seeing anything real about himself. (That this caused problems in my relationship with my mother is an understatement. I can't tell you what a relief it was when, after a ridiculous amount of time, other family members fell out of the spell.)

Austen's Mr. Wickham is probably one of the most famous liars in literary history. She doesn't have him lying about everything*, but she does get it right about his believing, absolutely, every lie he tells at the moment he tells it. Which is to say, he doesn't think of himself as duping the people he's lying to. That's a key aspect of pathological liars-- when called on a lie, they'll never admit that it's a lie; if really pushed, they'll insist that you've misremembered exactly what they said, and then come out with an altered version designed to accommodate the contradictions you've raised. I always wondered, when watching that television show about the experts on detecting lying whether "tells" or even changes in voice would ever manifest themselves in pathological liars, since their baseline is lying, and since they really do believe what they're saying. Deliberate, calculating liars work it all out in advance. People who aren't used to telling the truth are always ad-libbing, always living life as improvisational actors. Pathological liars tend to operate in a passive-aggressive mode. (Confrontation is just not their thing.) Conscious habitual liars, though, enjoy confrontation and operate most of the time in an aggressive mode. Lying, for them, is an act of aggression. (I'm not talking, of course, about the many lies most people tell to spare others' feelings. I'm talking about lies that make fools of the deceived [in the liar's estimation, that is] told mainly to prove to the liar how smart they are compared to other people, who "stupidly" (in the liar's estimation) fall for their bullshit more often than not.)

I mentioned that Austen's Wickham doesn't lie about everything (though, as is later revealed, he lies about a lot of things). That could be either because there are pathological liars who don't lie about everything (which would be a clever adaptation, since it would help them keep their interlocutors under the spell for much longer), or because Austen didn't want to spoil her plot, in which Elizabeth needs to be able to fling his "persecution" of Wickham into Darcy's face when he makes his arrogant proposal to her.

All of which is preface to my reaction to reading Justine Larbalestier's YA novel, Liar. It's purportedly narrated by a teenager, who is purportedly female and purportedly black-- and avows herself, from the beginning, to be a liar. This narrator (whom I'll refer to as "she," because that's how she identifies herself to the reader, without ever shifting from that identification) lies frequently-- but knowingly, with calculation. Which means, of course, that she isn't a pathological liar and has no problem keeping truth separate from lie in her own mind. Since she's the narrator, being a deliberate rather than a pathological liar makes her a lot less interesting, because it means that not only do her lies cast no spell on her interlocutors, but she also doesn't believe her own lies. If she did believe her own lies, merely in speaking we'd catch her lying, and there'd be something for the reader to parse. But in fact she changes the stories she tells simply to pull the rug out from under her interlocutor(s) (whom we never learn anything about)-- and, of course, the readers of the novel, who are situated in the place of that mentioned but never specified audience. Every time the narrator does that-- oops, sorry, here's another big lie I've been telling you, the narrator says-- it's like a bitch-slap flicked at the reader. (Remember: lies, for such people, are acts of aggression.) Such people, rather than casting spells, simply alienate people, because no one, even their original families, are able to believe a word they say and far from being charmed by their lies simply turn off after a point. (Either that, or they react to aggressive lies in the way they react to other acts of aggression: fight or flight.) Their friends are always short-term (unless the "friendship" is cynical and the "friends" not interested in having a personal relationship) because the problem with a habitual liar (whether pathological or conscious) is that there's no "there" there.

Habitual liars can of course be written about in fiction when they're described from the outside. But what does it mean to have a narrator who spends the entire narrative telling-- and then retracting-- one lie after another, and no other narrative voice for reference?

What it meant, for me, was after a point no longer being able to hear the voice of this fictional character speaking as "I" or to engage imaginatively with anything at all this voice claimed had happened: after too many retractions of too many lies, all I was aware of was of the author's presence in the narrative, of her fingers inside the narrator-puppet's head, moving it's mouth to simulate its speaking. I kept thinking: Oh, this is the author ventriloquizing the voice of a teenaged girl, using that voice to jerk the reader around. (Repeated conscious lies are acts of aggression.) Not that it was the lies, exactly, that first made me hyper-aware of the author's presence in the story. That happened in the first half of the book, before I gave up on believing in the narrator's existence, as I waited and waited and waited for the narrator to announce that the story was a variant of a particular trope (of a sub-sub-genre), which the narrator had been heavily implying it was from the first few pages of the novel. (Nudge nudge, wink wink.) (This is an otherwise ancient, worn trope that has been interestingly explored by several feminist writers over the last 20 years.) As I waited, I asked myself the author's purpose in playing nudge nudge wink wink for so many long pages. The first reason I came up with was that we were supposed to understand that the book was not written for genre readers-- which would in turn keep reviewers from talking about the book in an explicit way so as not to spoil it for those inexperienced readers who had never read anything in the sub-genre the narrator eventually invoked. At the same time, I knew this coyness was supposed to play into the theme of the narrator's lying-- which it wouldn't have had to do had the narrative been written in close third. But I also suspected it was a ploy to keep the book from being pigeonholed as genre, to make the book's potential audience wider. (This latter was merely the result of my annoyance at such coyness.) After laboriously (so many lies, and I've just never enjoyed lies, you know?) reading the book through to the end, though, I knew that I was meant to understand that the invocation of the trope might be a lie, too. (Well, duh!) And also, that in some sense, it didn't really matter whether the invocation was a lie or the truth, since the consequences were the same.

But here we run into the key problem characterizing the reading experience of this book: viz., that it's impossible to say what the consequences or even the acts that had consequences ever were, because nothing the narrator says has enough heft to grant even hypothetical reality to it, even if the narrator does remain consistent on a handful of things (i.e., gender, race, and age). Just because she didn't retract those few things-- her gender, for instance, or that she's a great runner, or that a teenaged boy was killed before the narration begins-- doesn't mean we have any reason to actually believe they're true. When anything can be true, nothing can be believed. It's a little like those "oh it was all a dream" stories, only in this one, the narrator claims to be writing the narrative for some specific mysterious person or persons she claims she wants to tell the truth to (meaning: manipulate). That might be true-- but then again, once I stopped hearing the fictional narrator's voice, even if it is true, it became, at that point, really "academic," as they say. That's because nothing in the narrative is verifiable. Certainly not the characters, or the events described, recanted, or reinterpreted. Perhaps, had we ever been allowed a glimpse of the supposed interlocutor, there might have been more than the author's voice left at the end. But that would, of course, have required the author's providing a frame for the narrative, which would have taken us outside the first-person pov. But because there is no frame, not even at the end, I can only conclude that that draining away of thereness and eventual flattening and disappearance of the characters is the whole point of the novel: delivering up the bitter lesson that novels are only words put on a piece of paper by the author. And that it doesn't matter how one interprets those words. Because they're all just lies, lies, lies, and although readers can tolerate a degree of unreliability in a narrator, they still must be able to believe some things without question. A rather cynical lesson, and a bit harsh for young readers. I myself prefer to be under a spell when I read the "lies" in a novel. It's that spell that allows me to build a world and embody a set of characters in my mind, to feel intensely, to analyze and worry over, in the way I might do about people I care for. Which is to say, for fiction, I prefer pathological to calculated lies. I'd rather not see the author's conscious manipulations, rather not see the author's hands moving the characters around like paper dolls or puppets-- unless those manipulations are actually part of the story (as in metafiction, they often are) and don't necessarily destroy the illusion of reality that stories so often offer. That's a personal choice. Many readers may enjoy this departure from the usual.

The disintegration of the story, for lack of believable anchors for constructing any kind of narrative at all (other than the reader's narrative: that you can't trust anything this narrator says), raises the question of whether Liar is actually anything that could be called a story at all. I think I'd have to answer that it is a story-- if only a meta-story-- because I, as a reader, ended up reminded that fiction is a game of pretend, and that if the author chooses to play a (second-level) game with that game, the story ceases to be about the fictional narrative and becomes all about the limits of the reader's ability to create a story from the text (which is what readers typically do with the tests of fiction). Here's a classic discussion of what a story is, from James Baldwin's The Devil Finds Work:

A story is impelled by the necessity to reveal: the aim of the story is revelation, which means that a story can have nothing --at least deliberately-- to hide. This also means that a story resolves nothing. The resolution of a story must occur in us, with what we make of the questions with which the story leaves us. A plot, on the other hand, must come to a resolution, prove a point: a plot must answer all the questions which it pretends to pose. In the Heat of the Night, for example, turns on a plot, a plot designed to camouflage exceedingly bitter questions; it can be said, for The Defiant Ones, that it attempts to tell a story. The Book of Job is a story, the proof being that the details of Job's affliction never, for an instant, obscure Job from our view. This story has no resolution. We end where we began: everything Job lost has been returned to him. And, yet, we are not quite where we began. We do not know what that voice out of the whirlwind will thunder next time --and we know that there will certainly be a next time. Job is not the same, nor are we: Job's story has changed Job forever, and illuminated us. By contrast, the elaborate anecdote of Joseph and his brothers turns on a plot, the key to which is that coat of many colors. That coat is meant to blind us to the fact that the anecdote of Joseph and his brothers, so far from being a record of brotherly love and forgiveness, is an absolutely deadly study of frustrated fratricide and frustrated (thought elaborately disguised) revenge.

I did see another way of reading Liar: as a failed attempt of showing us an habitual, conscious liar-- and a damaged personality-- in action. But that's something that can be done only from the outside-- maybe not entirely from the outside, but with occasional departures from the liar's "I." (A pathological liar would be another matter altogether.) Frankly, though, I'd rather understand the novel as a cynical metafictional lesson rather than as a failed attempt to anatomize a character who flattened and receded from view, retracted lie by retracted lie. As a reader, I desperately want to read the most successful book I can make out of a text, even if I've totally misunderstood the author's intention.

Recommended for readers with a reasonable tolerance for metafictional experiments.

I've liked some of Michael Blumlein's work, but The Roberts was a chore to get through. I picked it up in the Dealers Room at Potlatch, with relatively high expectations because it is published by Tachyon. (I hadn't realized it was originally published in F&SF, or might have given it closer scrutiny before purchasing it.) It's a merger of the story of Pygmalion (though not Shaw's) with the story of Narcissus. All about a "genius," Robert, who after a spectacular failure and the loss of an eye, no longer finds women beautiful, and so creates, as his muse, Grace, who is not only beautiful, but also made to want only Robert's happiness, Robert's love, and to not be hurt when Robert, busy with More Important Affairs (the result of his genius) ignores her for weeks or even months on end. (The other women he'd loved had all been hurt and left him because he forgot, while he was thrashing about in the throes of genius, that they existed.) But Robert then goes a step further-- and creates a second Robert ("Robert's Robert") to keep Grace company at home while he's busy out in the world. And Grace, at the same time, creates another Robert, too (Robert No. 3). Genius Robert is (inevitably) devastated with jealousy when he learns that Robert's Robert is having sex with Grace. But not to worry. All ends happily ever after.

At one time this story would have filled me with rage. Now I just find it pathetically fatuous (with a bit of an ick factor, since all the created humans have adult bodies with "infant" minds). Oh, and incidentally, it totally fails the Bechdel Test.

Not recommended.

Witnesses, well-to-do or otherwise

This morning, when I read this passage in Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern---

While a dozen civil wars were raging, [17th-century chemist Robert] Boyle chose a method of argument--that of opinion-- that was held in contempt by the oldest scholastic tradition. Boyle and his colleagues abandoned the certainties of apodeictic reasoning in favour of a doxa. This doxa was not the raving imagination of the credulous masses, but a new mechanism for winning the support of one's peers. Instead of seeking to ground his work in logic, mathematics or rhetoric, Boyle relied on a parajudicial metaphor: credible, trustworthy, well-to-do witnesses gathered at the scene of the action can attest to the existence of a fact, the matter of fact, even if they do not know its true nature. So he invented the empirical style that we still use today. (18)

---I thought of the Guardian article I read yesterday, Rick Perry Officials Spark Revolt after Doctoring Environment Report, noting how all the scientists who had contributed to the report removed their names in the face of the Texas governor's censorship of the science he is determined to suppress.

By academic standards, the protest amounts to the beginnings of a rebellion: every single scientist associated with the 200-page report has demanded their names be struck from the document. "None of us can be party to scientific censorship so we would all have our names removed," said Jim Lester, a co-author of the report and vice-president of the Houston Advanced Research Center.

"To me it is simply a question of maintaining scientific credibility. This is simply antithetical to what a scientist does," Lester said. "We can't be censored." Scientists see Texas as at high risk because of climate change, from the increased exposure to hurricanes and extreme weather on its long coastline to this summer's season of wildfires and drought.

However, Perry, in his run for the Republican nomination, has elevated denial of science, from climate change to evolution, to an art form. He opposes any regulation of industry, and has repeatedly challenged the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Texas is the only state to refuse to sign on to the federal government's new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. "I like to tell people we live in a state of denial in the state of Texas," said John Anderson, an oceanography at Rice University, and author of the chapter targeted by the government censors.

That state of denial percolated down to the leadership of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The agency chief, who was appointed by Perry, is known to doubt the science of climate change. "The current chair of the commission, Bryan Shaw, commonly talks about how human-induced climate change is a hoax," said Anderson.

When I read the article yesterday, I thought about how Texas's government censorship of science is perfectly in line with the state's Stalinist approach to rewriting the history that is taught in its public schools. But today I'm thinking also that Perry's tactics exemplify the nature of the struggle underway. Although people who call themselves "fundamentalist" Christians claim the Bible as their source of authority, they in fact (as any scholar of the Bible could tell you) ignore that authority when it suits their purposes (as well as favor mistranslations and similar distortions of it) and prefer instead to seize control of the doxa (mostly by brute, well-capitalized, propagandizing force). I wonder what Boyle might have said about this development (other than to characterize the lunatic Republicans as having adopted the "raving imagination of the credulous masses").

ETA: As with the Bible, so with the US Constitution. Always, they ignore and distort what doesn't suit their interests.

That Fabulous Murdoch Touch

You knew, of course, that Murdoch owns not just Fox News but the Wall Street Journal as well, right? So perhaps you won't be surprised by a story in the Guardian by Nick Davies, Wall Street Journal circulation scam claims senior Murdoch executive, which reports that the corruption of Rupert Murdoch's extends to the Wall Street Journal. Apart from other things, Murdoch's executives have been engaging in a scam to boost the WSJ's circulation figures, selling papers in bulk to sponsors for less than 5 cents a copy-- and then distributing those copies to students attending the sponsors' seminars. But when the sponsors grew unhappy with that arrangement, among other things (including tampering with the content of the newspaper) they actually started providing the money for those bulk purchases of the WSJ to one of the sponsors that  was supposed to be doing the purchasing. (If that isn't baroque... selling on the cheap to boost circulation numbers, then also providing the money for buying on the cheap...?)

One of Rupert Murdoch's most senior European executives has resigned following Guardian inquiries about a circulation scam at News Corporation's flagship newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.

The Guardian found evidence that the Journal had been channelling money through European companies in order to secretly buy thousands of copies of its own paper at a knock-down rate, misleading readers and advertisers about the Journal's true circulation.

The bizarre scheme included a formal, written contract in which the Journal persuaded one company to co-operate by agreeing to publish articles that promoted its activities, a move which led some staff to accuse the paper's management of violating journalistic ethics and jeopardising its treasured reputation for editorial quality.

Internal emails and documents suggest the scam was promoted by Andrew Langhoff, the European managing director of the Journal's parent company, Dow Jones and Co, which was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in July 2007. Langhoff resigned on Tuesday.

The highly controversial activities were organised in London and focused on the Journal's European edition, which circulates in the EU, Russia, and Africa. Senior executives in New York, including Murdoch's right-hand man, Les Hinton, were alerted to the problems last year by an internal whistleblower and apparently chose to take no action. The whistleblower was then made redundant.

The circulation scam is probably legal-- though European companies advertising in the WSJ might not be so happy to hear that almost half of the paper's European circulation was in effect bogus:

The scheme was controversial. The sponsoring companies were not reading the papers they were paying for; they were never even seeing them; and they were buying at highly reduced rates. The students to whom they were distributed may or may not have read them; none of the students paid for the papers they were being offered. But the Audit Bureau of Circulation ruled that the scheme was legitimate and by 2010, it was responsible for 41% of the European edition's daily sales – 31,000 copies out of a total of 75,000.

What took the scheme over the top, though, was the next step of the arrangement with one of these sponsors, Executive Learning Partnership:

In early 2010 the scheme began to run into trouble when the biggest single sponsor, a Dutch company called Executive Learning Partnership, ELP, threatened to back out. ELP alone were responsible for 16% of the Journal's European circulation, sponsoring 12,000 copies a day for which they were paying only 1¢ per copy. For the 259 publishing days in a year, they were sponsoring 3.1m copies at a cost to them of €31,080 (£27,200). They complained that the publicity they were receiving was not enough return on their investment.

On 9 April 2010, Andrew Langhoff emailed ELP to table a new deal, explaining that "our clear goal is to add a new component to our partnership" and offering to "provide a well-branded showcase for ELP's valuable services". On 30 April, ELP agreed to continue to sponsor 12,000 copies at the same rate. But that deal included a new eight-page addendum, which the Guardian has seen.

The addendum included a collection of side deals: the Journal would give ELP free advertising and, in exchange, the ELP would produce "leadership videos" for them; they would jointly organise more seminars and workshops on themes connected to ELP's work; but, crucially, Langhoff agreed that the Journal would publish "a minimum of three special reports" that would be based on surveys of the European market which ELP would run with the Journal's help.

It is this agreement that is now being cited as the reason for Langhoff's resignation on Tuesday. It led to the Journal publishing a full-page feature on 14 October 2010 that reported a survey conducted by ELP about the use of social media in business, quoting ELP's chief executive at length. The story carried no warning for readers that it was the result of a deal between the Journal and ELP, nor that ELP were sponsoring 16% of the paper's European circulation. Similarly, there were no warnings attached to a second story, published on 14 March 2011, which consisted of an interview with one of ELP's senior partners, Ann de Jaeger, about the role of women in company boardrooms.

As the Guardian reports, employees of the WSJ started to get unhappy with this arrangement. (Hence the whistle-blower, who in turn caused a panic among the executives involved.)

It sounds as though all of these shenanigans are legal. But are they ethical? I wonder whether it's even possible for any publication owned by Murdoch to meet basic ethical standards for journalism. Everyone knows that Fox News has lower journalistic standards than, say, the National Enquirer. But what about the Wall Street Journal? I have to wonder.

The Second Issue of the CSZ now available for free download

The second issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone is now available for download, free, here.

Here's the table of contents:

Vol. 1 No. 2—April 2011

Feature Essay

Hyperbolic Futures: Speculative Finance and Speculative Fiction, by Steven Shaviro

Poem

She Lives, by Shweta Narayan

Grandmother Magma

Vonda N. McIntyre’s Dreamsnake, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Reviews

Akata Witch, by Nnedi Okorafor, reviewed by Uzuri Amini  

Birdbrain, by Johanna Sinisalo, reviewed by Carrie Devall  

The Broken Kingdoms, by N. K. Jemisin, reviewed by Ama Patterson  

Destination: Future, edited by Z. S. Adani and Eric T. Reynolds, reviewed by Karen Burnham  

Under the Poppy, by Kathe Koja, reviewed by Rachel Swirsky  

Of Blood and Honey (Fey and the Fallen), by Stina Leicht, reviewed by Paige Clifton-Steele  

The Universe of Things, by Gwyneth Jones, reviewed by Nisi Shawl  

Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft, reviewed by Liz Henry

Featured Artist

Susan Simensky Bietila

 

Fresh Outrages in the War on Women in the US

Topkea, Kansas, has repealed its domestic violence law-- supposedly to save money-- and to keep Shawnee Country from passing the buck for prosecuting domestic battery. Which means, of course, that they're flashing the green light to batterers in that city: telling them that in Topeka, domestic battery is no longer against the law. Here's a snippet from the McClatchy Newspapers report by Joe Lambe:

Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, said that around the country, prosecutors are being forced to prioritize certain types of cases, but these decisions are rarely discussed in public.

“Usually no one comes out and says that starting today I’m not going to prosecute that crime, which sends a message of failure and tells the community you’re free to commit that crime,” he said.

Joyce Grover, executive director of the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual & Domestic Violence, said the situation in Topeka demonstrates that its politicians need to give domestic violence a higher priority.

“For the city and county to say this is about economics seems disingenuous to me,” she said.

Seems disingenuous to me, too.

Sarah Seltzer reports for AlterNet that Congress is debating Let Women Die legislation:

Today's installment of the War on Women is brought to you by Congressman Joe Pitts, whose HR 358 is finally being debated in the House this week. The bill is an extreme and sweeping anti-abortion measure that would decimate insurance coverage for abortion and gamble with women's lives. It's so drastic that it's been nicknamed the "let women die" act.

At Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan explains why this title is totally apt (emphases mine):

The bill has been lovingly nicknamed the "Let Women Die" act, as it would allow hospitals that receive federal funds but are opposed to abortions turn a woman seeking an abortion away in all circumstances, even if an abortion would save her life. It also proposes to outlaw any federal funds from going to health plans that cover any abortion services. Finally, it would make it impossible to block federal funds from going to health organizations that don't support abortion rights, hence the hospitals' freedom to "Protect Life" by refusing to perform a procedure that might save a woman's life. HR 358 was penned Joe Pitts, a Pennsylvania Republican and a vocal member of the House's Pro-Life Caucus. For those of you keeping score at home, Joe Pitts does not have a uterus.    Read more

The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Vol. 1, No. 4

The fourth issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone is out and available here. This is our first special issue, on Women and Science, and is 28 pages (instead of the usual 24). I'd have liked to have announced it on Ada Lovelace Day, but that just didn't work out. 

 

Essays

Gender, Science, and Narrative Inversion by Ann Hibner Koblitz

Women in Science and Science Fiction: A Mutual Relationship? by Helen Merrick

Bad Science: The Flawed Research into Gender Differences in the Brain by Nancy Jane Moore

Where the Juice Is: An Interview with Julie Czerneda by Nisi Shawl

Grandmother Magma

Symbiotic Planet by Lynn Margulis reviewed by Andrea Hairston

Reviews

Tesseracts Fifteen edited by Julie Czerneda & Susan MacGregor reviewed by Nic Clarke

Frankenstein's Monster by Susan Heyboer O'Keefe reviewed by Siobhan Carroll

The Highest Frontier by Joan Slonczewski reviewed by Karen Burnham

Revolution World by Katy Stauber reviewed by Tom Foster

Featured Artist

Jennifer Mondfrans

The image above is Jennifer Mondfrans' "Henrietta models a distant galaxy," a portrait of astronomer Henrietta Swann Leavitt (1868-1961). In her career at Harvard College Observatory, she discovered more than 2,400 variable stars. She saw a direct correlation between the time it took a star to go from bright to dim and the star's actual brightness. Knowing this relationship helped other astronomers, such as Edwin Hubble, make their own groundbreaking discoveries.

The Art of the Ironic Dedication

On reading George Schuyler's dedication to Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, AD 1933-1940 , I found myself wondering just how rare (or common) ironic dedications are:

This book is dedicated to all Caucasians in the great republic who can trace their ancestry back ten generations and confidently assert that there are no Black leaves, twigs, limbs or branches on their family trees.

Can anyone point me to similarly ironic dedications? I'm intrigued, and am wishing I'd discovered this arrow in the writer's quiver long before now.

Living in the future means thinking like an sf writer, pt. 4

As sf writer has already been there, of course (Philip K. Dick), only he posited psychics rather than software as the technological provider. Declan McCullagh, in Homeland Security Moves Forward with Pre-Crime "Detection," writes

An internal U.S. Department of Homeland Security document indicates that a controversial program designed to predict whether a person will commit a crime is already being tested on some members of the public voluntarily, CNET has learned.

If this sounds a bit like the Tom Cruise movie called "Minority Report," or the CBS drama "Person of Interest," it is. But where "Minority Report" author Philip K. Dick enlisted psychics to predict crimes, DHS is betting on algorithms: it's building a "prototype screening facility" that it hopes will use factors such as ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate to "detect cues indicative of mal-intent."

McCullagh notes that "DHS calls its "pre-crime" system Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST." DHS is apparently thinking that once they finish testing it they'll be using it for airport screening, at border crossings, at sporting events and conventions.

(Link thanks to Liz Henry)

Sounds to me like profiling to the nth degree, no? But that's what technology sans civil rights and liberties will inevitably get you in a place like the US. Seems appropriate, their calling it "FAST," given that we seem to be stuck in a train on a really fast, greased track run by a gaggle of engineers who thinks brakes are a security threat (and are, anyway, for losers and sissies).

Quote of the day

The people on Wall Street broke this country, and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. This happened more than three years ago, and there still has been no basic accountability, and there has been no real effort to fix it.-- Elizabeth Warren

And the War Goes On...

Besides being Ada Lovelace Day, yesterday was also the tenth anniversary of the US's invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. This is a war that has done terrible damage to Afghanistan, has cost unimaginable sums of US taxpayer dollars to undertake, and which most people in the US do not approve of. Afghan human rights activist, author, and former Member of Parliament Malalai Joya, who has been on the side of democracy and therefore against the US, the Taliban, and the warlords (whose allegiances are always short-term and corrupt), released this video for the occasion:

Odds & Ends

1. Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Remember, honor, and celebrate!

2. Declaring women's rights vital for world peace, the Nobel Committee awarded its annual Peace Prize on Friday to three indomitable campaigners against war and oppression -- a Yemeni and two Liberians, including that country's president. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa's first freely elected female head of state, shared the $1.5 million with compatriot Leymah Gbowee, who led a "sex strike" among her efforts against Liberia's civil war, and Arab activist Tawakul Karman, who hailed the award as a victory for democracy in Yemen. "We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society," Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland told reporters. [Read more of Reuters' report here.]

3. Liz Henry is here in Seattle for the weekend, and somehow, this afternoon, as we talked and talked and talked, I found myself opening a Facebook account today. You can visit me there at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003011847651.

4.I find the story about how when a bus driver ordered a woman with a crying baby off her bus, every single passenger left the bus in solidarity with her in protest, fascinating:

It's the story of two dozen passengers, more or less, a baby in a bad mood, and a bus that motored through its own terrible little Twilight Zone on the 16 miles from Beaverton to Forest Grove in the Portland suburbs.

The trip ended only when the bus came to a halt, the mother, Magdalena Rabadan, and baby were ordered off, passengers protested in her defense, the driver suggested they could leave, too, if they didn't like it, and everybody did.

I was especially taken by the added complication of the baby's mother not knowing much English. It made me wish I'd invented such a story for my own fiction. I'm sure that few readers would've found it "plausible," unless I'd also invented two dozen individual explanations for all those people inconveniencing themselves.

Nisi and Cat on Steampunk

It's Steampunk Week over at Tor.com, meaning posts galore on that currently hot topic. I see that a couple of Aqueductistas have contributed. Cat Rambo has posted Suffragette Steampunk, which begins

Steampunk often features historical figures: the poets, explorers, and scientists of the Victorian period. But few books reference one of the most important political movements of the time: the women’s suffrage struggle. That’s a shame, since the movement had its share of charismatic, unusual characters who rarely surface in speculative fiction.

While Nisi Shawl weighs in with The Steampunk That Dare Not Speak Its Name, which begins

People have always had sex. Even in the Victorian era, a time synonymous these days with prudery and abstinence, sexual acts were committed.

In one of the period’s most infamous cases, popular author Oscar Wilde was tried and jailed for the “gross indecency” of making love with other men. Yet Wilde wasn’t alone in his support of “Uranian” (same-sex) relationships. Poet Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s lover and originator of the phrase “the love that dare not speak its name” (echoed in this post’s title), was also a proponent of the well-known Uranian movement. Since steampunk so often draws on Victoriana, we should find Uranian interests represented in a fair number of steampunk stories, right? Plus, the overtness of sexual markers such as corsets in steampunk, and the tendency of the genre’s authors to imagine modern attitudes into their versions of the past, should make queer steampunk common enough that multiple examples are easy to find. Right? Right?

What doesn't get said

There's an AP article by Phillip Rawls on some negative effects on Alabama's economy that's been unleashed by Alabama's harsh new immigration law. What interests me in the article are the things Rawls doesn't say. He writes, for instance:

Intended to force illegal workers out of jobs, it is also driving away many construction workers, roofers and field hands in the country legally who do backbreaking jobs that Americans generally won't.

The vacancies have created a void that will surely deal a blow to the state's economy and could slow the rebuilding of Tuscaloosa and other tornado-damaged cities.

Employers believe they can carry on because of the dismal economy, but when things do turn around, they worry there won't be anyone around to hire. Many legal Hispanic workers are fleeing the state because their family and friends don't have the proper papers and they fear they will be jailed.

Rick Pate, the owner of a commercial landscaping company in Montgomery, lost two of his most experienced workers, who were in the country legally. He spent thousands of dollars training them to install irrigation systems at places like the Hyundai plant.

"They just feel like there is a negative atmosphere for them here. They don't feel welcome. I don't begrudge them. I'd feel nervous, too," Pate said.

Presumably we are supposed to understand (though Rawls never says it explicitly) that most Hispanics in Alabama are now living in serious (and reasonable) fear of imminent harassment--which is to say, of being locked up "indefinitely." This isn't hysteria, which is one way the article could be glossed, since people who are detained on "suspicion of being in the country illegally" (that's all it takes to be arrested, you see) are supposed to be released when "documentation" is produced. But anyone with any exposure to the US's detention policies of immigrants will know that merely having documentation won't necessarily achieve their release. (A lawyer would help, of course. But how many immigrants working minimum-wage or sub-minimum wage jobs will have access to lawyers?) That Rawls never even hints at the nightmarish realities of US immigration (and even general prison) policies and its exemption from adhering to due process allows the ordinary complacent reader to judge people "legally" living in the US who still fear detention as irrational and ignorant (when of course their fear is a sign of just how closely in touch with reality they are).

But of course that's not all that's implied but not stated in this article. Then there's this:

Legislators said the law would help legal residents suffering from nearly 10 percent unemployment.

One of the bill's authors, Republican Sen. Scott Beason, said he expected short-term problems, but he has received "thank you" calls from two people who replaced illegal immigrants who fled their jobs. Beason predicts that trickle will become a rush.

"We have the best law in the country and I stand by what we've done," Beason said.

Some farmers disagreed.

On Chandler Mountain in north Alabama, tomato farmer Lana Boatwright said only eight of the 48 Hispanic workers she needed for harvest showed up after the law took effect. Those who did were frightened.

"My husband and I take them to the grocery store at night and shop for them because they are afraid they will be arrested," she said.

Farmer Chad Smith said his family farm stands to lose up to $150,000 because there are not enough workers to pick tomatoes spoiling in the fields.

"We will be lucky to be in business next year," he said.

What is unstated here is that the reason farmers stand to lose big is that they probably pay poverty-level wages for body-breaking work, without benefits, and probably under sweat-shop working conditions. When people loudly claim that it's the backbreaking nature of the work that "Americans" are unwilling to perform, what they really mean is that most US citizens tend to avoid working at poverty wages if it's at all possible, more especially when it's the kind of work likely to inflict pain and even long-term damage on their bodies. (Agricultural workers have the highest rates of incurring long-term damage, because most farmers use pesticides.)

The reason I've assumed that anti-immigrant sentiment is almost 100% due to racism is because everyone knows (though they don't like to admit it to themselves or anyone else) that the food we eat would be a lot more expensive without immigrant-- particularly undocumented immigrant-- labor. In this clash between racism and the wish for cheap fruits and vegetables (and clothing, too, since some of the few clothing manufacturers that actually make their product in the US employ contractors who run sweatshops), the resulting cognitive dissonance usually resolves itself by erasing consciousness of the connection between lower prices and immigrant labor, just as when employers talk about being bereft of workers, they're talking about workers who are willing to work for substandard wages.

I guess the politicians are hoping that more US citizens will be willing to work for the same pay as undocumented workers. But of course they can't actually say that in so many words.

Reading for a Monday

--An eyewitness, Ava, describes the mass arrest Saturday on the Brooklyn Bridge on Sunday, during an Occupy Wall Street event. She went to document the march and ended up arrested. Her conclusion?

In the end I’m glad I was arrested. This event has sparked something in me that’s been lacking since I came to university and busied myself with schoolwork and internships. I’m passionate about fighting for my country again, and I don’t plan on keeping silent.

The police may have tried to deter us, but instead they’ve impassioned us.

I am one of the 99%, and I’m mad as hell.

I love the photo she took of the woman with lavendar hair carrying a sign saying "I'm 87 and Mad As Hell."

--Over at the Los Angeles Review of Book's blog, Barbara Ehrenreich considers how much good getting banned has done for sales of her Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America and wishes a couple of other of her books would therefore be banned, also.

To judge from the gleeful responses of my publisher and literary agent, being banned is not bad for book sales. The first attempt to “ban” my book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America occurred in 2003, when it was assigned as required reading for incoming students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. When conservative students and state legislators protested this choice — with, for example, a full-page ad in the Raleigh News and Observer — I was deluged with interview requests from that state, and relished the opportunity to discuss itsappallingly low wages and high poverty rate. Nickel and Dimed’s recent ascent to the list of the top ten banned books in the United States has generated fresh interest, which has not, so far as I know, harmed sales.

So the question is: How do I get more of my books banned?

-- Slate has posted a five-part series by Farhad Manjoo on robots and computers taking over professional (and not just manufacturing) jobs. These, of course, are the jobs that people tend to believe are safe from such technological "progress." He notes, at the end of Part V,

As I reported in this series, computers are improving their language and visual processing. They’re better than humans at remembering stuff and finding new connections, and they’re even making inroads into human creativity. At the moment, robots fall short in two main areas—they have a hard time manipulating objects in the physical world, and they’re not good at face-to-face conversation. But as computer power increases, the first of these problems will be solved. And the second—face-to-face conversation—might also be within their capacities in decades to come.

This series doesn’t address what happens next: What will humans do when computers have taken most of our jobs? How will we spend our time? How will we make money? How will society work when jobs are no longer the central activity of human existence?

I’ve ignored these deep questions because, at this point, very few people are thinking about them; they sound more like subjects that a stoner sci-fi geek would ponder than questions that serious people should spend time thinking about. But that’s got to change. Humanity is being eclipsed, and we need to figure out what to do about it. This is really going to happen.

But of course those are the questions that interest me most. (Hey! Does that mean I'm "a stoner sci-geek"?)

--Over at Ms. Magazine, Ariel Dougherty evaluates gender balance in the mainstream media and considers the societal cost that imbalance incurs:

“I had journalists say to me: ‘I saw the women on the field. But they were so pitiful-looking that I didn’t film them,’” recalls Gini Reticker, director of the 2008 documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which documents women’s peace efforts in Liberia. While she had trouble finding footage of Liberian women’s peace actions, it was, however, easy to find hours of tape glorifying the AK-47-wielding boys who had been forced into warring militia.

With this disparity, the international media–much of it based in the U.S.–betrayed an enormous gender bias. On the one hand, young men, preyed upon and once-powerless, were recorded and elevated, despite dehumanizing and horrific actions. On the other hand, women who seized their own authority, created community and changed the course of a whole nation for good were absent from the public media record–and thus, nearly lost to history.

What is the societal cost when the media fails to be fully inclusive of the majority of its population in its storytelling? For one thing, as in the case of Liberia’s civil war, the real history is lost. How many voices of women or people of color were heard on U.S. TV or radio during this summer’s “debt limit” fiasco? Very, very few from my viewing, especially of the financial channels. So we did not hear the story of how the stimulus program, a key factor in the debt crisis, had less impact on women. In fact, women are bearing the brunt of the extended recession, being rehired at a much lower rate than men. Over 12 percent of households are run by unmarried women. Among African American women, that figure leaps to 29.1 percent. But the stories of how these women are struggling to feed their families are missing from the airwaves.

Loretta Ross, National Coordinator, of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, highlights another problem with mainstream media’s omission of women and people of color: Failing to find expert women’s sources can lead to bad framing.

Do, please, read the whole post.

Aqueductista News

*Sheree Renée Thomas has a post, "An Idea so Crazy It Might Come True," up on the New York Times blog.

*Cynthia Ward is interviewed here.

*Liz Henry's The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 3: Carnival of Feminism is newly reviewed here.

What I read last summer, part 2

[Note: the first installment of this series of posts can be found here.]

One of my most compelling reads last summer was Palle Yourgrau's Simone Weil, published in a gorgeous edition, lavishly illustrated, by Reaktion Books as part of their Critical Lives series. I say that it was compelling, but it also pushed some of my buttons and made me think hard, forcing me to momentarily set aside my usual categories for sorting and associating ideas, since my understanding of the implications of certain of Weil's statements were in apparent contradiction with my understanding of other of her statements. In short, I had to tolerate a certain amount of uncertainty and confusion about the meaning and implications of Weil's ideas throughout my reading of the book, which was a bit like fitting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle without a picture of the image you're supposed to be constructing. That uncertainty, of course, added a dash of urgency to the reading, which countered some of the negative feelings about Weil that I had had before I'd even picked up the book-- though I ended up thinking that some of my reservations about her (particularly her attitude toward embodiment) were justified.

As the series title indicates, Simone Weil's life is the focus of the book-- even as its central theme is its insistence that an appreciation for and understanding of Weil's thought has been distorted and overshadowed by the received notion of what that life was. Yourgrau notes in his introduction that Weil was omitted from the "groundbreaking" 1996 collection, edited by Mary Warnock, Women Philosophers, because Warnock grouped Weil's work with "the writing of women who, to put it crudely, seem to rely more on dogma, revelation or mystical experience than on argument." Yourgrau's bio of Weil, though most interested in Weil's Platonist preoccupations, does take note of Weil's work in political philosophy. So that makes me wonder: did Warnock know of Weil's work in political theory, or did Weil's political theory not count as "philosophy" (given how closely it was tied with analysis of labor issues)? Yourgrau notes that Warnock included Iris Murdoch--who, ironically, was strongly influenced by Weil-- in the book, then suggests that

Weil, by contrast [to Murdoch], resists all categories. While it is not accurate to say, as Warnock has, that she does not engage in extended argument, it is true that argument was but one of her weapons--and 'weapon' is the appropriate term, since Weil is an extremely dangerous thinker. The same is true, however, of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, yet both of these thinkers (men, to be sure, a not incidental fact) occupy well-established niches in the philosophical canon. Indeed, one of the key tasks of a presentation of Weil's life and mind that pretends to any kind of seirousness is to try to provide a ocnvincing account of exactly what kind of thinker Weil was.(13)

I think it is indeed true that more slack is cut for thinkers who don't fit neatly into formally recognized categories when they are men. Although Weil's thought is in many ways almost orthogonal to Nietzsche's (most glaringly in Nietzsche's pronouncing Christianity as the religion of slaves and castigating it as therefore insidious and demoralizing, while Weil pronounced it as is the religion of slaves and cherished it for that very reason), Yourgrau is right to point out some of the parallels between them (and between Weil and Wittgenstein, as well).

Reading this intellectual biography, what struck me most (apart from the fierce, even rigid stubbornness of this woman) was not how short her life was, but how much she accomplished and how seriously she lived for someone who died at the age of 34. I can well imagine that Simone de Beauvoir (who attended the Sorbonne when Weil did, and whose test score for entering the Normale Superieure was the second highest for the year in France-- while Weil's was the highest) found her intimidating, as Yourgrau comments:

'Her intelligence,' notes Beauvoir,' her asceticism, her total commitment and her sheer courage, all these filled me with admiration, [though] I could not absorb her into my universe, and this seemed to constitute a vague threat to me.'

Neither Beauvoir, it seems, nor Sartre, could, for all their admiration, incorporate Weil into ther life's view, a discordance unsurprising, as [John] Hellman wisely remarks, 'in a couple who remained pure intellectuals, seeking a "meaning" for human existence sooner than addressing its sufferings and misfortunes....' Whereas Weil aspired to become a 'slave,' Beauvoir's goal was to become a master, of herself if not of others. Where Beauvoir is the mother of feminism, Weil would reject even the label. Asked to lead a discussion group, she lashed out, 'I'm not a feminist!(41)

I'd have been interested to hear what Beauvoir made of that response, myself. Yourgrau, though, denies us that pleasure.

It seems to me that Weil's early and persistent identification with "the slave" lies at the heart of her life, her thought-- and my long-time difficulty of opening my mind to her ideas. This identification started, not surprisingly, in early childhood, since children often hold the notion of sacrificing oneself as a proof or achievement of goodness, sometimes on a grand scale. Weil was raised in an extremely affluent (secular) Jewish family in Paris in the first decades of the 20th century. (She was born in 1909.) She was raised like her brother Andre (yes, the famous gifted mathematician) as a boy, and they were very close. Yourgrau observes: "Signing her letters, 'your respectful son,' Simone became Simon-- a favourite nickname for her in the family-- a brother to her only brother, a second son. When, in the course of time, she wrote about the legendary Cathar civilization of Laguedoc, she adopted the pen name of a man, the anagrammatical 'Emile Novalis.'"(17) When, as a child during World War I, Simone learned that soldiers at the front were "being denied their ration of sweets," she gave up chocolate. As an adult, she developed the habit of sleeping on the floor (as a practice of humility). As early as the age of three, she refused a gift on the grounds that it was "luxurious." Here's Yourgrau:

It was other people's pain that moved her, not her own. From early in life to late, no border could contain her empathy for the plight of others, from soldiers on the front lines to enemies subjected to harsh treaties, from workers in the luxury hotels in which her family vacationed to factory workers, slaves to machines, from present holocausts to those buried in the distant past. But what she could least bear was separation-- holding herself apart from those outside, in pain....

....As a child, she would sit herself down in the cold snow and refuse to budge if her brother was given the heavier bags to carry. Why should his burdens exceed hers? On vacation during her gradute studies, she shared the harvest in Normandy, heaving sheaves of thistles bigger than herself....When the war came, she could never understand why only men should be asked to die. Hence her plan, never realized, of organizing a volunteer corps of front line nurses, aimed more at the sharing of death than at the saving of life. (22)

My mother would have derided Weil as suffering from a "martyr complex"-- a sneering phrase she trotted out to counter my own tendencies, as a child, toward self-sacrifice (because I associated it with "being good."). As an adult, Weil would ask people who were providing her with hospitality to give her "the worst room" in the house. On reading that, my response was to imagine being confronted with that request from a guest. Except for the most unwelcome guests (and sometimes even for them), most people are anxious to make their guests as comfortable as possible. (Their own self-esteem and self-respect depends on it!)

I found her utter obsession with being assigned a resistance taks that would inevitably result in her death the most repellent thing about her. But what makes me feel that I'm unlikely to ever properly appreciate her thinking is her attitude toward embodiment. Yourgrau asserts that Weil was "suspcious of the very fact of embodiment" (17)--which, to my mind, dovetails perfectly with her passion for Plato and Platonism. She could not tolerate being touched or embraced by anyone. She pretty much malnourished herself all her life (something that would eventually hasten her death from TB), she hated her own beauty and did everything she could to conceal it (except when, during her phase of forsaking teaching in order to take up the harsh-- and ultimately flattening and depressing-- life of a factory worker, she needed to doll herself up to get hired at Renault). It occurred to me, though, reading that as an infant she became seriously ill and could not tolerate her mother's milk, and that when she was weaned, refused food entirely, and that in general sh "never really recovered her taste for food" [if before 11 months she had ever had one], that abstaining from food was not the sacrifice it would have been for most people, particularly since as an adult she was a caffeine and nicotine addict. Ascetism is much more of a challenge for people who love the things of the flesh than for those who have all their lives felt indifferent to them even before they came to despise them.

As you've no doubt figured out by now, Weil's distate for embodiment and the wish to be exalted by the glory of sacrificing her life for others added up, for me, to something pretty negative.

I got pulled up short, though, when I read this, because it initially called into question my sense of her loathing and contempt for the body:

God is in the details, it is said. For Weil, as for van Gogh, he is in the vineyard--close to mother earth. Indeed, especially in his early paintings, it is difficult to distinguish van Gogh's peasants from the earth they are working. In his famous De Aardappeleters ('The Potato Eaters'), there is a kind of alchemy in which there is as much potato (aardappel, 'apple of the earth') in the peasant as there is on the table. In Weil's alchemy, too, the transformation comes from labour. Her 'labour theory of value,' like van Gogh's, owes more to St. Augustine than to Karl Marx. Yet, with Marx, she comes to believe that it is precisely one of the sins of capitalism, of industrial society, that it not only separates the worker from his product, but more importantly robs his activity of its intrinsic worth and dignity, for it is 'work... [which] creates respect for the human person, and equality'. For both, the opposition of mental work to physical work is one of the great lies of the modern world. 'From the bottom of her heart,' writes Jacques Cabaud, 'Simone Weil desired to work for the abolition of the degrading division between intellectual work and manual labor.' And not just a degrading division, but the illusion of a chasm in epistemology. '[Even] to see space', she writes at Normale (to the amusement of all), 'is to grasp work's raw material...Geometry, like all thought, perhaps, is the daughter of labour's fortitude' ain work not only is the person himself realized but for Weil, it is there that his mind takes command. A Cartesian, for Weil it is not a question of cognito ergo sum but rather, 'je veux, donc je suis' ('I will, therefore I am'); I bend my will to work.

This mishmash of the Platonic and the Cartesian with the organic at first appeared (to me) to be carnephilic. That, I think, was an illusion created by Yourgrau's invocation of Van Gogh's De Aardappeleters). For slowly I began to realize that Weil did not value laboring with one's hands for its organic connection with the world and as a valorization of embodiment, but rather because-- for her, a highly educated child of wealthy parents who voluntarily left her comfortable job teaching to repeatedly damage her malnourished, clumsy body with dangerous factory work (entailing repeated burns and cuts and other injuries)-- laboring with her body required an act of will to subject herself to the harsh discipline of manual labor. She found it good, in other words, because she chose (willed herself) to do it. But just think about it: that kind of reasoning simply cannot work for people who labor in order to eat and keep a roof over their own and their children's heads. They don't have a choice (other than to starve)! I think I can see how that might not have occurred to her, ever-- and how the people around her might not have thought of mentioning that to her, either. It strikes me as a somewhat...tragic misunderstanding, one that some people might see as presumptious rather than glorious.

On the other hand, I have no problem grokking her intense distress over exclusion, which, I think mistakenly, she held against the Jewish religion, and which ultimately prevented her from becoming a Roman Catholic, and which also prompted her to think of the Vietnamese when the Nazis marched into Paris, and write in her notebook "A great day for Indo-China"-- meaning that the colonialist French who had been occupying Indochina for so long were now the occupied themselves-- a remark that Jeffrey Mehlman interpreted as indicating that she was siding with the Nazis rather than expressing her awareness that the oppressed could also be oppressors. (73) In fact, the invasion and occupation of France prompted Weil to do a lot of interesting, critical thinking on the subject of patriotism, and I think I would like sometime to read the writings that resulted (and were later collected and published as The Need for Roots.

I realize that except for mentioning her critical thinking about patriotism I've mostly talked about the aspects of Weil I have trouble with. There was more than that that I found interesting, and I think I'd be very interested to read what she has to say on the Cathars as well as on Homer's Illiad. So please don't be put off by my focus on her disdain for embodiment. I assure you, her strength of will and persistence in thinking beyond the obvious come through with such clarity in this book that I have no reservations about recommending the book highly. There is nothing dry about it, and the author's choice of presenting Weil's thought side-by-side with her development and the events of her life makes it a surprisingly easy, sometimes amusing, and occasionally poignant read.

So just how important is women's suffrage in Saudi Arabia?

Because, ya know, this news is just in:

Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Two days after Saudi King Abdullah's historic decision to allow women to participate in elections, two Saudi women were punished for breaking the ban on female driving: One was sentenced 10 lashes by a court in Jeddah and another was detained in Riyadh.

The incidents highlight the continuing disparity between the rights of men and women in the kingdom. Women may be able to vote and run in the 2015 municipal elections, but they still can't drive, argue in court before a judge, travel, get an education or a job without male approval.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/09/27/bloomberg_articlesLS7FRD0D9L35.DTL#ixzz1ZDPaOgm2

Democracy needs the arts: but do the arts need democracy?

I've been reading some essays in the Spring/Summer issue of Salmagundi, collectively presented as a symposium titled "Good Art/Bad Art: Is There A Difference?" At the end of Benjamin Barber's "Patriotism, Autonomy and Subversion" [yikes, Salmagundi apparently can't make up its mind on whether or not to use the serial comma!], Barber concludes:

The reality is that democracy needs the arts more than the arts need democracy. The arts have flourished under tyranny and authoritarianism where, though he may generally be in for a rough ride, the artist is always firmly grounded in his freedom, independence, and critical imagination. And although the arts do not need democracy, and they may sometimes even be paralyzed by it, democracy sorely needs the arts. Without a vibrant arts culture, democracy cannot flourish, perhaps it cannot even survive. Apart from the relevant gift and technique, freedom, stubbornness, autonomy, eccentricity and rebelliousness turn out to be the characteristics we most look for in the well functioning artist, as well as in the well functioning citizen. Democracy offers a home for the contrarian virtues that are indispensable to democratic life and that make markets possible.

Hmm. What do you all think?

Aqueductista News

-- Karen Burnham reviews Redwood and Wildfire for Strange Horizons.

--Nic Clarke concludes her four-part series on Gwyneth Jones's Life at Torque Control.

• part one, on the practice and politics of science in the novel
• part two, on the major characters' relationship with feminism
• part three, on relationships and gender roles
• part four, on sex, gender, and how the central sfnal conceit may (or may not) change the world

--Paul Kincaid reviews Gwyneth Jones's The Universe of Things for the SF Site.