I.L. Peretz and the 53%

A couple of years ago, trying to track down an old grad school classmate online, I found that he had written a dismaying manifesto about why he’d recently become a hardcore conservative. He had realized that The Left was motivated solely by a vile irrational hatred of President Bush that by 2005 had become almost irresistibly sublime. Sure, the fact that Bush’d won the presidency illegitimately and justified war with Iraq dishonestly were initially causes for concern, but he’d turned out to be a fine leader, and conversations with Iraq war veterans had persuaded my classmate that liberating the Iraqis had been worth it. But the breaking point had been the reaction of the Left to Hurricane Katrina: how, the newly conservative professor asked, could they have gone so ‘round the bend as to blame Bush for a hurricane?

I lost a lot of sleep over that. How much does one have to ignore in order to say that about Katrina? “Heckuva job,” FEMA trailers, the very existence of disaster relief, the air guitar, disaster policy in other countries and in previous years, wow. This professor’s position is well to the right of Bush’s own: Bush and his ghostwriters in Decision Points take for granted that Katrina was dealt with very badly, for all that they blame the governor of Louisiana. But I’ve heard the same “hurricanes happen” argument elsewhere, once from a guy who did not leave the Democratic Party.

In 2004, I had a little apartment in Chestnut Hill, an affluent neighborhood in the far northwest corner of Philadelphia, more Republican than the areas to its south. Lunching on the eleven-dollar bluefish special at a nice restaurant at the top of the hill, I heard loud conversation nearby. I saw a party of five or six at a round table, most of them in late middle age or older; but there was a younger guy dominating the conversation. Looking again, I saw that he was a white man with curly dark red hair and a head, wow, a head that was a dead ringer for the type that Confederate phrenologist Josiah Nott (still a hero among white supremacists) called the “Apollo Belvedere”: it was almost completely flat in the back and inclined inward as it rose, rather than being visibly convex like the skull beneath it. Nott thought this shape indicated the highest of civilized life, but if that’s so, the highest of civilized life doesn’t communicate very well. “And who is Howard Stern?” asked the older relatives. “He’s a shock jock,” said Apollo without elaboration, as if someone who hadn’t heard of Stern could know what that meant. But what Apollo and his family all agreed on was that it was disgraceful that the 9/11 commission was quizzing Condoleezza Rice as if she, or anything she knew, could suggest that the 9/11 attacks represented a failure on the Bush Administration’s part. “People keep looking for blame, or asking for explanations,” he said, “but sometimes things like that just happen.” 
 

 

Last year, in response to the Occupy-inspired tumblr “We are the 99%,” on which people describe the desperate circumstances they live in thanks to the precipitous rise in inequality in this country, conservative propagandist Eric Erickson founded a site called “We are the 53%.” The name alludes to the fact that 47% of Americans are freeloaders, too poor to owe any federal income tax. And people living under desperate circumstances sent in pictures, talking about how their lives are hard, but they don’t complain like the 99% people: they just suck it up and take pride in what they do, without any of this nonsense about blaming Wall Street, ‘cause that’s just the way things are. Here is one liberal’s attempt to rebut a 53%er, "Open Letter to that 53% Guy." Even more striking is the one described here by E.D. Kain of Forbes:

My father came to NY from Croatia in 1971, with KNOWLEDGE in his head, LOVE in his heart & the clothes on his back. 

He built up a small construction business and put me & my 4 siblings through Catholic school and college, while my mother raised us and put home-cooked meals on the table. 

Business has been steadily declining and my family (still honestly abiding by the regulations, TAXES & fees imposed by the gov’t) now lives paycheck-to-(hopefully!) paycheck. 

We found out he has thyroid cancer — had a 10-hour operation this past summer. 

He was back to work FULL-TIME (12 hrs/day, 6 days/wk) within a month, even though the doctors told him to take it easy (he works manual labor). 

The cancer still grows. 

THAT is the American dream. 

WE are the 53%.

In 1894, the great socialist Yiddish fantasist I.L. [Yud Lamed] Peretz published “Bontshe Shvayg” — the title is not quite translatable because English lacks an active verb for “to be silent” like “shvaygn”: say, “Bontshe the Silent” or “Bontshe Stayed Silent” or “Bontshe Said Nothing.” Here is a description of how two characters see it in Sarah Schulman’s second novel, Girls, Visions, and Everything.

 

Isabel read it then and there while Lila watched her react. It was about a guy named Bonche who never had a good moment in his whole life. People would shit all over him and he consistently took it . . . When he died, he had to be judged in the heavenly court. The defense attorney proved that no matter how much he suffered, Bonche had never cursed God . . . Bonche won the trial and could have anything he wanted in all imagination.  That was his reward. God would give him whatever he asked for.

“What I want,” said Bonche, “is, every day, a hot roll with some fresh butter.”

Then, said Peretz, the prosecutor broke out laughing . . .

“You get it Isabel?” Lila was hysterical with enthusiasm. “In the end, the prosecutor really won. Bonche was turned into such a schmuck from never tasting anger or desire or revenge that when his moment finally came, his spirit was too dead to be able to do anything . . . “

By contrast, look at what Alfred Kazin, a revered figure in literary criticism, had to say about Bontshe in 1960:  
But in his technique of ambiguity [Isaac Bashevis] Singer speaks for our generation far more usefully than the old ritualistic praise of Jewish goodness. While Bontsha and Tevye are entirely folk images, cherished symbols of a tradition, Gimpel . . . significantly has to win back his faith . . . 
Doubtless Peretz and Sholem Aleichem liked folk images, but I look in vain for “ritualistic praise of Jewish goodness” in their stories. The 1950s U.S., as I learned from Delany’s “Midcentury,” had forgotten a lot of turn-of-the century radicalism; but it still seems bizarre to me that Kazin thought Peretz was praising Bontshe’s humility. The old Yiddish writers were not running a Sunday School.  

The late Harvey Pekar seems to have thought that one of them was. In his and Paul Buhle’s 2011 Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land, he argues that Peretz is overrated:   

. . . some of his stories seem based on folk tales and are excessively sentimental [true, but what does Pekar use as an example?] I refer to such pieces as “Buntcheh the Silent” . . . When he gets to Heaven . . . He is offered everything he sees. Is he greedy? No! He only wants a roll with butter for breakfast daily. There’s irony here, but it’s overwhelmed by schmaltz.  

The Peretz of Pekar’s imagination is a 53%-er: Bontshe has suffered immeasurably, been unpaid and sick and humiliated and trampled in the gutter, but he doesn’t blame Wall Street! He is happy with simple things! In fact, it is Bontshe’s own vitiated imagination that recalls the pathos of the 53%-ers; and Peretz isn’t commending that.

Last week, I had the privilege of attending a presentation called “Continuities: from World War 3 Illustrated to Occupy Comics,” hosted by Seth Tobocman and featuring artists from both journals. And the Occupy Comics creators gave an impassioned talk about how we have to create new myths and offer different narratives to people in order to fight the power and attain more social justice; and I thought of how Aqueduct Press and most radical SF has that among its goals as well. And I know that Occupy did change the discourse, and millions of Americans do regard Katrina as a failure on the part of the Bush Administration, and scores of Sunday Schools actually have taught “Bontshe Shvayg” as a story of protest. But the task of offering alternative narratives sometimes seems overwhelming in the face of mindsets that see explanations as paranoid or resentful acts ‘cause sometimes things just happen, that resist the idea of causal connections between societal events, or that sees the highest virtue in slogging along and accepting Things As They Are.

 

How hopeful can one be when otherwise-astute writers see a celebratory or sentimental ending in a scene where the angels hang their heads in shame and the only sound in Heaven is the laughter of the Adversary? 

Readercon

I'll be attending Readercon this year (which I only very occasionally do), which falls this year on July 13-15. I seem to be scheduled for a lot of programming. I did think, when I saw how much I'd been scheduled for, of dropping a panel, but I couldn't bring myself to give up any particular one, so promising do the panel descriptions sound. In fact, there's a good deal of programming this year that I'm also keen to attend. How, I'm wondering, will I get in all the conversations I'm eager to have as well as all the alluring programming?

Several other Aqueduct authors will be attending, by the way. Here's my own schedule:

Friday, 2:00 PM   G   Evaluating Political Fiction. L. Timmel Duchamp, Alexander Jablokov (leader), Robert Killheffer, Vincent McCaffrey, Anil Menon, Ruth Sternglantz. This panel examines the intersections among story as political expression, story as entertainment, and story as art and craft. When an author takes a clear political stance within a work of fiction, how does a reader's perception of that stance–and the extent to which we find it compelling or intriguing–affect our sense of whether the work is entertaining or well-crafted? Given the diversity of opinions among readers and the ways that judgments of quality are necessarily influenced by culture and personal experience, should readers aim to achieve consensus about a political work's merits and meanings, or do we need to embrace a more pluralistic understanding of how literary works are both experienced and evaluated? What are best practices for critics, academics, and other professional readers as we navigate these tricky waters?

Friday, 3:00 PM   ME   Readercon Classic Nonfiction Book Club: How to Suppress Women's Writing. Samuel R. Delany, L. Timmel Duchamp, Gwynne Garfinkle, Andrea Hairston (leader). First published in 1983, How to Suppress Women's Writing remains a touchstone for many people, the sort of book often passed from one reader to another with the words, "You have to read this!" Tansy Rayner Roberts wrote of it in 2010, "This is not an angry book. It is not a book that condemns men. It is a book that shows how our culture's traditional (patriarchal) way of reading and studying and archiving literature has forced limitations upon all of us, preventing us from understanding the importance of a huge percentage of the work written in our language. Men and women both have been convinced that women's writing (and indeed, art in general) is less valuable and less significant." How do we read Joanna Russ's work now, nearly 30 years after the book first appeared? Which of her ideas remain the most potent? Has it become, as critic Niall Harrison said in 2005, "a book that is most often referenced by its soundbites"? Do the soundbites do justice to the complexity of Russ's analysis?

Because I'll be participating in this panel, I've been doing a re-read of the book, which I've read several times since I first read it in 1983. Needless to say, I'm doing a lot of remembering of what the book meant to me at the time, as well as the difference between my first reading and this one. The most obvious difference is that my first reading was in a single sitting-- lying on the made bed in our first New Orleans' apartment on Hampson St., avid and devouring, unwilling to stop reading until I'd read the very last word. Apart from its effect on me as a writer (I was one year from starting the Marq'ssan Cycle), it rendered some of the most terrible aspects of being a graduate student in the mid-1970s from a sharp new perspective. 

Friday, 5:30 PM   NH   Reading. L. Timmel Duchamp. L. Timmel Duchamp reads from her novel in progress.

Unfortunately for my reading, Jeff VanderMeer's reading has been scheduled at the same time. Will even one person come to mine? That's how it goes, though, at multi-track cons. There are always trade-offs.

Saturday, 11:00 AM   G   Samuel R. Delany's Golden Jubilee. Matthew Cheney, Ron Drummond (leader), L. Timmel Duchamp, Elizabeth Hand, Donald G. Keller, Jo Walton. 2012 can be seen as a milestone year in the career of Samuel R. Delany: his 70th birthday; the 50th anniversary of his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor; the 35th anniversary of his classic critical work, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw; the 24th anniversary of being GOH at Readercon 2. Few writers have contributed so much over so long to all aspects of our field—science fiction, fantasy, critical theory, comics, autobiography, editing, teaching, even a documentary film. And he's still going, with a new novel out this year! This panel will celebrate Delany’s past, present, and future contributions to the field.

Saturday,  1:00 PM   G   Why Am I Telling You This (in the First Person)? Richard Bowes, Helen Collins, L. Timmel Duchamp (leader), Caitlín R. Kiernan, Kate Nepveu. In some narratives it is clear why and how a first-person narrator is telling their story (the tale is a found document, a club story, etc.); in some narratives the reasons for the telling must be deciphered (Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun) or the revelation of the reasons forms a key part of the story itself (N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms). But in some cases it seems counterproductive or otherwise quite unlikely that a narrator would be telling us the secrets they want to keep hidden, their plans for world domination, etc. What do we make of this question of narrator motivation? To what extent should we read the telling as part of the tale, a chosen act of character, versus simply an extra-textual conceit required for the story to exist? Is this different for present vs. past tense? And to the extent that authors consider these questions when choosing a narrative point of view, what are some interesting examples of how they've used the fact of the telling of a story to affect how that story is read?

*

Hope to see some of you-all there. 

New titles in e-book formats

Aqueduct Press has just released two new e-book editions: Kiini Ibura Salaam's Ancient, Ancient and The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry edited by Rose Lemberg. They can be downloaded now from Aqueduct's site, and will be available elsewhere (Wizard's Tower, Weightless Books, and  Amazon.com) shortly.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Vol. 2 No. 3

The Summer issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone is out!

The issue begins with a tribute to poet and theorist Adrienne Rich, who made an enormous contribution to feminism as we know it today, and includes poetry by Alex Dally MacFarlane and Kiik A.K., Graham Joyce's thoughts on Angela Carter's magnificent Nights at the Circus, a very personal essay by Abby Koenig on that expensive, tricky sfnal procedure known as IVF, reviews of new work from Samuel R. Delany, N.K. Jemison, Nancy Kress, and others, and concludes with the art of Meredith Scheff. If you aren't a subscriber, you can purchase a single issue or subscribe here. For me, personally, Thomas Foster's essay-review of Nalo Hopkinson's Report from Planet Midnight alone is worth the price of the issue.

Current Issue
Vol. 2 No. 3 — July 2012

Essays

In Memoriam: Adrienne Rich
  by L. Timmel Duchamp

Back at Day 1, Again
  by Abby Koenig

Poems

adam
  by Kiik A.K.

wedding in the uncut hair
of the meadow
  by Kiik A.K.

Most Beautiful in Death
  by Alex Dally MacFarlane

Grandmother Magma

Nights at the Circus
by Angela Carter
  reviewed by Graham Joyce

Reviews

Through the Valley
of the Nest of Spiders
by Samuel R. Delany
  reviewed by Victoria Garcia

Report from Planet Midnight
by Nalo Hopkinson
  reviewed by Thomas Foster

The Killing Moon
by N.K. Jemisin
  reviewed by Ebony Thomas

Fountain of Age
by Nancy Kress
  reviewed by Cynthia Ward

Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually
Fluid Science Fiction
edited by Brit Mandelo
  reviewed by Paige Clifton-Steele

Featured Artist

Meredith Scheff

Update on the UVA conflict

In my post Sunday, I expressed pessimism about the University of Virginia faculty's likelihood of prevailing against its governing board. I'm delighted to report that I was mistaken. Yesterday, under orders of the Governor of Virginia to "resolve" the situation that day or resign en masse, the board reinstated the university's president.

An interesting aspect of this situation that I may not have mentioned is that the president, Teresa Sullivan, began her career as an academic rather than an administrator. Although this used to be standard for university presidents, in the 21st century, it mostly isn't. Sure, mid-level administrators like deans still tend to also be faculty, but at the upper echelons, they're mostly people trained as managers. And of course that has a lot to do with the vast shift, beginning in the 1980s, in the values determining policy in higher education. All the academics of my acquaintance began revolting against business-speak when it first appeared in the 1980s, but they seem to have been helpless in preventing the imposition of the business model.

Reporting Sullivan's reinstatement, Time warns in its headline "But Colleges Face More Drama Ahead." It then presents three key issues without providing a reasonably complex context that would give a less than warped view of what is involved. These unhelpfully simplified issues are: (1) Should universities be run as businesses by CEOs or by faculty when, as the article claims "colleges need business acumen at the top to take quicker, more decisive action than is typical of academia, move more responsively to changes in the marketplace and balance budgets." (2) "One of the more contentions issues that emerged in the Sullivan saga was uncertainty over how higher education is being altered by the rise of MOOCs, or massively open online courses." The article invokes online courses at Harvard-- but fails to mention online diploma mills like Phoenix University, which is the model the key board member was eager to emulate. Nor does it mention all the statistical exposes of how poorly students are served by such places. (3) "Rising costs for students. Over the past year, state funding for higher education has declined by nearly 8%." Not just the past year, but the past two decades. No mention of why this is. And worst of all? The assumption of the article is that this is not a remediable situation. And certainly no mention that at many universities the division of the budget has shifted to insecure positions and low salaries for almost half of the faculty and the most valuable (but least valued by high-level administrators) staff members and enormous, bloated compensation for administrators, athletics programs, and public relations firms.

The Washington Post has a piece of analysis by Susan Svrgula on"the lessons" that can be drawn from "the episode." These mainly seem to be of the order of managing public (including student and faculty) opinion and perception. "Some experts think the final decision was lousy: 'It will undermine public university governance for decades to come,' said Sheldon Steinbach, a higher-education lawyer. 'Public university trustees could be viewed as gutless political appointees who would succumb to pressure when harnessed by faculty and outside influences that perhaps don’t understand the nuances of a given situation.'"

In short, mainstream news venues seem determined not to understand what was and continues to be at stake for real people vis-a-vis higher education.

Links for a Sunday afternoon

Summer officially arrived in the northern hemisphere this week, but Seattle's weather continues to be Spring-like, as though we've settled into mid-May weather for good. Which is all very pleasant, but I worry about my tomatoes and other hot-weather vegetables. (The lettuces and spinach and kales like it just fine, of course.)

I still haven't managed to write anything about WisCon for this blog. (Getting a bit late, I know...) I still hope to do that. In the meantime, here are some links.

--Versification has posted a review by Francesca Forrest of The Moment of Change. "Lemberg," she writes, "has chosen poems that represent the unruly, ungeneralizable expanse of human female experience."

--Electra at Starlady reviews Andrea Hairston's Mindscape-- and does so adopting the narrative form Andrea uses for character Lawanda Kitt's sections of the novel.

This is, in a way that I suspect many people would not want to really acknowledge, a truly American science fiction (science fantasy?) novel, and probably one of the few that I have read. Though there is a lot of Afro-futurism in here, there is also a lot of specifically American history, particularly the history of U.S.-Indian relations - born-again Sioux Ghost Dancers are central to the plot, and the final scenes take place at Wounded Knee. Furthermore, movies and a lot of Hollywood permeate the characters' lives and worldviews, as well as the fact that many of them are involved in movies as directors or actors or unwilling Extras. I liked the way that some of the characters were explicit about the fact that they didn't want to be co-opted into mainstream narratives, and probably my favorite character overall was Lawanda Kitt, a loud and proud ethnic throwback who shakes up the corrupt and rotting zone of Los Santos without fully realizing her own power, even though we only get her viewpoint in transmissions to various people. I didn't like Elleni quite so much, but by the end I understood her - indeed, one of the awesome things about this book is just how many awesome female characters there are.

--I've discovered a fantastic blog for high-quality local bird gossip: Union Bay Watch. Not only does the author, Larry, post his (and others') observations of avian life in Seattle, but he also provides spectacular photos (currently of eaglets and ongoing crow harassment of eagles, ospreys, and other larger birds) and very brief videos (for instance, of a Northern Flicker performing a mating dance). If you're at all interested in  birds, it's well worth checking out.

--A battle is under way at the University of Virginia between the board that governs the university (all of them--excepting the student representative-- the governor's political appointees who have contributed huge sums of money to political campaigns) on one side and the university's administration, faculty, and students on the other. To kick off its grand plan of turning the university into an online, for-profit diploma mill (explicitly, like Phoenix University), it fired the president of the university. I've been told of similar agendas at work on other campuses, but I've never heard of such a full-frontal assault quite like this one. The corporate-speak board members apparently conceive of themselves as enacting something known in the business world as "strategic dynamism." It's basically an embrace of instability as a way of ramming through measures of massive change before anyone has a chance of questioning much less thinking through the potential consequences of those measures. (Sort of like what happened in the US Government after the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush as POTUS.) The board has also hired the notorious Hill+Knowlton Strategies to manage public perceptions of their machinations. Although the protests at the UVA campus are tremendous (as seen by the refusal to serve of the person the board appointed as the president pro-tem), the fact that it is summer makes it seem unlikely that the protests can be sustained. I also wonder how far the main source of protest-- the faculty-- will be willing to go in the struggle. Of course it is their jobs (and their workplace) that will eventually be on the line. But since lost jobs aren't imminent, and almost all notions of personal interest tend to be located in the short-term, my hopes aren't high.

Vaginagate

Vagina what? Yeah, vaginagate. If someone had told me that legislators in Oklahoma, Arizona, or even Texas had banned (women) representatives from using the word "vagina" when talking about legislation determined to control that anatomical organ, I wouldn't have first thought that the story was a hoax. (Yeah, you guessed it, once again I'm reporting a piece of ideologically-driven insane political behavior that sounds like something out of a dystopian sf novel.) But no. This is Michigan behavior. (You know, Michigan, where the governor is dismantling elected municipal governments and replacing them with supposedly non-governmental corporate authority whose only interest is making as big a profit as possible without respect to public interest.) Here's the story, in case you haven't already heard it:

Two female US politicians were banned from addressing the Michigan house of representatives after one used the word "vagina" and the other tried to argue for regulating vasectomies during a debate over a controversial anti-abortion bill.
The house bill, which was passed by 70 votes to 39, will introduce new rules and insurance requirements for abortion providers, make it an offence to force a woman to have an abortion, and regulate the disposal of foetal remains.

It is part of a package of proposed legislation that has been described by critics as one of the most hardline recent attempts at passing anti-abortion legislation in the US.
Lisa Brown – the Democratic state representative for West Bloomfield in Michigan – found herself gagged after house Republicans took exception to her language.

Brown, who has three children, said that the bill's proposals ran contrary to her Jewish beliefs. But it was the manner in which how she concluded her speech: on Wednesday that infuriated Republicans.

"Mr Speaker, I'm flattered that you're all so interested in my vagina, but 'no' means 'no,'" she said.

Her use of the word "vagina" led house Republicans to prohibit her from speaking on school employee retirement bill.

Brown then called a press conference and demanded: "If I can't say the word vagina, why are we legislating [on] vaginas?" she asked. "What language should I use?" If you think this is a fluke, think again. Another woman legislator was banned from speaking, too:

Barb Byrum, the a fellow Democratic state representative for Onondaga, also caused a disturbance on the floor of the house after Republicans refused to allow her to introduce an amendment to the bill that would ban men having vasectomies unless the procedure was needed to save their lives – a key clause of the anti-abortion bill. She was ruled out of order after protesting that she had not been allowed to speak on her proposal. "If we truly want to make sure children are born, we would regulate vasectomies," Byrum told reporters.

On Thursday, Ari Adler, a spokesman for the Republican speaker of the house, said Brown and Byrum would not be allowed to speak on the floor of the house that day because of their conduct on Wednesday. Their "comments and actions", he said, had "failed to maintain the decorum of the house of representatives".

However, both women hit back at house Republicans, accusing them of censorship and misogyny. "Both Representative Byrum and I were gavelled down without cause yesterday while voicing our opposition to the Republican's war on women here in Michigan," Brown told the Detroit Free Press. "Regardless of their reasoning, this is a violation of my First Amendment rights and directly impedes my ability to serve the people who elected me into office." Byrum said she had been ignored and prevented from speaking on an amendment that would hold men and women to the same reproductive standards.

This tactic of insisting that officious governmental control of deeply personal decisions and choices be applied in some way (though usually much more mildly) to men whenever it is applied to women-- a tactic we're seeing in state legislatures more and more these days-- is, in my opinion, brilliant. It demonstrates graphically just what the politics of such legislation is about. Look! they are saying. Women, like men, have an interest in reproductive freedom! If you're going to take this prerogative away from women, then you're also going to have to take it away from men. Is that what you really want?

And that linkage is just what the Republicans don't want to allow into the public sphere (much less the public record). You can tell just how desperate these people are to keep such a comparison out of people's minds. (After all, the propaganda has always been about appealing to people's emotional identification with embryos and fetuses rather than with the women who must risk their lives and human potential to gestate, bear, and raise them.) It is no surprise that banning speech that illuminates just how vicious these attacks on women are has become a desperate strategy for maintaining the momentum of the relentless Republican campaign to dehumanize women. It's a fitting irony that controlling who can talk about women's vaginas and uteri is both tactical as well as perfectly symbolic of the Republicans' campaign as a whole.

The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 6: Futures of Feminism and Fandom

I'm pleased to announce the release of the The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 6:  Futures of Feminism and Fandom, edited by Alexis Lothian. This volume of the WisCon Chronicles celebrates, challenges, and discusses the varied faces of WisCon 35—including the pre-con controversy surrounding an invited Guest of Honor and the revocation of that invitation, as well as the history and ethos of WisCon, memorial tributes to Joanna Russ, Steampunk, and other issues and subjects. Its contributors include a mix of writers, scholars, and fans, among whom number Nalo Hopkinson, Nisi Shawl, Liz Henry, N.K. Jemison, Jeanne Gomoll, Debbie Notkin, Amar El-Mohtar, Andrea Horbinksi, Eileen Gunn, and others. As with previous volumes, it does not shy away from controversy.

''We are all stories,'' Nisi Shawl says in her Guest of Honor speech included in this volume, and ''changing stories changes everything.'' What will the stories we tell ourselves about feminism, about science fiction, and about fandom change? How will--and how should--we change those stories? This volume of the WisCon Chronicles documents the conversations, the dramas, and the joys that shaped the world of feminist science fiction fandom before, during, and after WisCon 35. From founders' recollections of the excitement and conflict of the con's origins, to many different, difficult conversations about intersections of race, culture, class, and gender, to new forms of fannish engagement that changing media landscapes make more visible, the contributors explore feminism and fandom's past, present, and future.

You can purchase the volume through Aqueduct's website, here.

Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett's New Amazonia

I recently read a 19th-century feminist utopia that Alexis Lothian brought to my attention, New Amazonia: a foretaste of the future, by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett, a British journalist and novelist. Alexis discusses it in the first chapter of her dissertation. Although it bears some resemblance to other feminist utopias of the ear (particularly in its classist, eugenicist, ableist assumptions as well as its total erasure of race), it's different in three interesting respects:

 First-- the novel was clearly written as a white-hot response to an anti-feminist petition for denying women the suffrage-- spearheaded by best-selling novelist Mrs. Humphrey Ward and signed by more than a hundred "ladies" of the literary sphere of the day (including Virginia Woolf's mother). Throughout the novel, Corbett rails against "feminine nincompoopity" and "women who are too bigoted in their own ignorance to know what is good for themselves or others," whose "name is legion." Here's a paragraph from the prologue:

Indeed, were it not that some of the perpetrators of this outrage on my sex are well-known writers and society leaders, I would doubt the authenticity of the signatures, and comfort my soul with the belief that the whole affair has been nothing but a hoax, got up by timorous and jealous male bipeds, already living in fear of the revolution in social life which looms before us at no distant date. As it is, I am able to avail myself of no such doubtful solace, and I can only feel mad, downright mad—no other word is strong enough—because I am not near enough to these traitors to their own sex to give them a viva voce specimen of my opinion of them, though I resolve mentally that they shall taste of my vengeance in the near future, if I can only devise some sure method of bringing this about.

She has a few insights that are promising, but doesn't seem to know what to do with them. "Corrupt, Degraded, Rotten to the core is British Civilisation, and yet we find women who ought to know better, actually pretending that they are perfectly contented with the existing order of things." Shortly after this, she interestingly suggests that these anti-feminist women are betraying other women out of class loyalty at the expense of the rest of their sex:

The principal signatories are in comfortable circumstances; have no great cares upon their shoulders; they plume themselves upon occupying prominent positions in society; it is to their interest to uphold the political principles of the men whose privilege it is to support them; they do not see that life need be made any brighter for them, therefore they conspire to prevent every other woman from emerging from the ditch in which she grovels.

Unfortunately, she doesn't take the insight farther.

Second-- She imagines a utopia in which men & women are equally involved in governing, public life generally, and in all the crafts and professions. This is a step beyond imagining a separatist scenario-- her utopia begins as initiated by women who organize a new government (a "colony" that isn't a colony) and find financing for it, but then allow men in without fear of their taking over.

Third-- When her narrator arrives in New Amazonia in 2472, she learns how New Amazonia came to be-- which is to say, she offers a future history, which looks back to the Victorian Age (which she regards critically) and imagines a social & geopolitical history in which New Amazonia came into existence. (Hint: there are a lot of wars, and New Amazonia in built on the ashes of Ireland.)

I was particularly entertained that at one point in the book the narrator remarks "There is a town in Kansas, called Oskaloosa, of which the Mayor and other members of the Corporation are all women. Their first term of office has been so triumphantly progressive that they have been enthusiastically re-elected, and within twelve months the place has made such wonderful strides in the trifling matters of social morality, sanitation, and prosperity, that it is the wonder of surrounding towns." She cites this as a "signal proof of feminine capacity." As you might imagine, on reading that, I just had to undertake a Google search. Sure enough, I discovered at the Kansas Historical Society site a bibliography of Jefferson County History that offers a photo captioned "First all woman city government in Kansas, Oskaloosa, 1888. (New Amazonia was published in 1889.) The women in the photo all look as though they're between 25-40 years of age. What particularly strikes me is that Corbett knew about that "all-woman" (interesting slip, no?) government, out in the middle of the North American prairie-- and that clearly that knowledge and its inspirational effect on her fueled her frustration with the anti-feminist women in English literary circles who were raising their voices to proclaim that women should be silent. (Have there always been Phyllis Schlaffleys, I wonder? Women who make a career out of denouncing other women for speaking for themselves?)

With all its flaws-- flaws I think it's well worth our while to take note of-- this is a fascinating document of the history of women's political imagination. I plan to bring it out, properly introduced by Alexis Lothian, in Aqueduct's Heirloom Books series. How, after all, can I resist such turns of phrase as "timorous and jealous male bipeds" and"feminine nincompoopity?"

WisCon Chronicles Vol. 7: call for submissions

I'm pleased to announce that Joselle Vanderhooft will be editing the next volume in the WisCon Chronicles. Here's her call for submissions:

I’m thrilled to announce that I’m editing this year’s Wiscon Chronicles, and even more thrilled to say that this volume—volume seven already!—will focus on disability issues, disability in SF/F/H, and fans with disabilities.

It was an awesome year at Wiscon for disability as far as papers and panel topics were concerned, which means that there really is plethora of ways that this volume can shape up. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

· Write-ups of disability-themed panels (some panels I’m particularly interested in seeing write ups of are Body Acceptance: From All Sides; Assistive Technology is One of My Fandoms; Body Impolitic; Disability and the Final Frontier; Feminist Perspectives on Elder Care; Intersectionalism: It’s Not the Oppression Olympics; Passing Privilege; Addiction in Fiction; Disclosing and Advocating for Your Disability; We’re in Your Classics, Harshing on your Disability Tropes; and Accessibility 201)

· The evolution of disability policies through Wiscon’s history, as experienced by con staff and con-goers

· Essays about fandom by fans with disabilities.

· Essays about inter-disability politics.

· Essays by and about PWD whose disabilities are often marginalized or ignored (for example, invisible disabilities,

· Experiencing disability at Wiscon

· Essays about disability in SF/F/H TV, film, books, and other media in general

Note: Although many people both on and not on the autism spectrum do not consider autism and Asperger’s syndrome to be disabilities, society at large often treats autism as a disability. Therefore, I am very interested in receiving essays by and about autism as it pertains to ableism and fandom.

I will also gladly consider essays, poetry, play excerpts, and short fiction (under 3,500 words, please) that deal with disability, particularly if said essays, poetry, play excerpts, and short fiction were read, presented, or workshopped at Wiscon 2012. (Note, if you presented “Theorizing Vulnerability in Feminist SF,” “The Tribe of Maiden and the Tribe of Monsters,” “Disappearing Natives: The Colonized Body is Monstrous,” or “Darwin and the Digital Body,” I am especially interested in talking with you!)

Most importantly, I truly want this book to be intersectional. Therefore, I’m especially interested in panel write ups, essays, and more written by PWD who are also of color, LGB, transgender or genderqueer, fat and fat-positive, immigrants, non-Christian, and from all marginalized identities. The default PWD isn’t white, male, straight, and cisgender, and I want this volume to reflect that fact.

Have something that isn’t disability-related that you’d like to write up or have written up? That’s great, too! I’d love to take a look at it. While this book is centered on disability, essays that focus on other topics—whether that topic is racism, postcolonialism, or just how kick-ass the Chicks Dig Comics reading was—are very much encouraged. After all, Wiscon, like almost any con, is never “about” just one topic.

Before sending your essay, please query with what you want to write at jo.vanderhooft@(remove this)gmail.com. For ease of sorting, please put Wiscon Chronicles 7 Query: [Your last name] in the subject. I'm asking for queries mainly to avoid, say, receiving 5 different write ups of the same panel or 5 different essays on a very similar topic.

Ultimately, submissions should range from 1,000-3,500 words.

Submission deadline is August 15.

Any questions? Shoot me an email or comment here!

Thanks!

- Jo Vanderhooft

A few links of interest

--Apex Magazine has an article by Tansy Rayner Roberts: Girl Meets House: Kitchen Sinks, Joanna Russ and the Female Gothic.

--Amal El-Mohtar, reflecting on the requirement of exceptionality for women characters in the 1970s Sandbaggers spy series, posts More Thoughts on Feminist Characters: Sandbaggers and Female Exceptionalism.

--Brit Mandelo reviews The Moment of Change for Tor.com. "These poems," she writes, "are howling, and they are whispering, and they are calmly—or madly—telling stories about what it means to be a woman, any kind of woman, any person who reaches out for the name “woman.” I appreciated the inclusivity of this text, and the concern with gathering in as many voices as possible to put them in tension and in conversation. Some of the best poems of the text—and, having heard them performed, I may be biased—are JT Stewart’s “Say My Name” and “Ceremony,” one short and one long, both poems dealing with issues of race, immigration, and self-definition Also, it goes without saying, but: they are beautiful, wrenching, astounding pieces. Which is not to say that the whole book isn’t fabulous, because it is. With enough time, I would review every single poem of the approximately 70 pieces included here." You can read the whole review here.

--Gary Trudeau distills the reality of sexual harassment and rape in the US military into 20 frames of his Doonesbury strip.

Impolitic! by Andrea Hairston and Debbie Notkin

Now that we're back from WisCon, Aqueduct is ready to offer the latest book in our WisCon Guest of Honor series, Impolitic!, to those who didn't make it to WisCon this year. We always wait to offer this because we print only 175 copies. (They are also numbered.) Impolitic! is 180 pages. In a long essay, Debbie samples her incisive blog posts on body politics, examining the narratives told about our bodies and how we are told to live in and think about them, inciting her readers to the most profound rebellion. Andrea offers us a short fiction, “Griots of the Galaxy,” that enacts that profound rebellion in all its visceral, thrilling drama. Her essay, “Prophetic Artists,” grounded in the early twenty-first century, looks to Octavia Butler and others to illuminate the immanent possibilities of the here and now, reminding us of why sf/f is so necessary to us in 2012. And finally, Debbie and Andrea interview one another. Impolitic! is, throughout, an exemplar of what Hairston in that interview calls the “theatre of the mind,” where “lived experience is transformed into meaning and performed.” 

You can purchase it here. Just fyi, the GoH books are the only books we allow to go out of print when their runs have sold out.

The most democratic forms of literature

WisCon is over, and as you all can see, I failed to continue posting after the single report I made Friday. I just never had time to sit down and write another. I never retired to my hotel room early enough to do that, and I never left my room late enough. My body, in the hours between, craved sleep, and I surrendered to the imperative. I'm hoping that I and other members of the blog who attended may be writing about WisCon over the next week or two, as we've done in past years. In the meantime, there's the following, which I wrote yesterday morning-- and then found myself without time enough to post:

As I write this, I have about an hour before I'm due to take the shuttle to the airport to begin the trip home. I'm sitting at a table in Michelangelo's with Tom, who's begun composing an exam he needs to give tomorrow, while I read a few of the reviews in the latest issue of The American Book Review which I intend to finish reading on the plane. One review particularly interests me (and seems apropos, given all the discussions about democracy that I've participated in this weekend. Donald McQuade, writing about The Best American Essays 2011, remarks:

Of all literary genres, the essay has remained, throughout its distinguished history, and especially in this country, the most egalitarian form of literature: in its subject matter, structure, voice, and readership. The essay's accessibility--for writers and readers--exemplifies the art of democracy.

That accessibility remains both its most distinctive and problematic features. The essay is one of the most readily intelligible and attainable forms of self-articulation and individual power in contemporary writing. So, too, virtually anyone can write an essay marked by recognizable literary merit. This may well be one reason the essay as a literary genre has been marginalized for so long in literary "canons" and in the academy, which privileges the exceptional and the seemingly unattainable.

This assertion fascinates me. I myself am a voracious reader of essays-- if I'm browsing in an interesting bookstore, I'm almost certain to end up purchasing a book of essays. The shelf holding collections of essays is the shelf in a bookstore I always go to first. I'd never thought of the essay as a particularly "democratic" form of literary expression, but now that I consider his assertion, I'm certain McQuade is right.

It occurs to me to wonder if it's not the case that it's easier for a writer to avoid cliches when writing essays than when writing fiction. How many people, after all, sit down to write an essay for a general readership when they don't actually have something to say that fascinates and compels them to articulation? So much fiction seems not to be driven by a passionate fascination with the subject of the story as written because its writer is a writer and that is what he or she does, such that the story is the end product that must be marketed to justify the time spent writing it. Passion-driven writing, it seems to me, is less likely to produce tired, lackluster prose, regardless of the technical skills of the writer.

McQuade continues:

In "The Modern Essay," Virginia Woolf offers an incisive assessment of the state of the essay as a literary genre at the turn of the twentieth century as well as a prescient forecast of its near demise in the decades that followed. Woolf points to the emergence of expository writing-- in the ascendancy of the magazine article in an era fixated on a systematic measurement and generalization-- as the source of the "common greyness [that] silvers everything." With the widespread application of Frederick Winslow Taylor's principles of scientific management far beyond corporate enterprise, reading habits shifted from pleasure to information. The "gentle reader," long assumed as the primary audience for such established periodicals as Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, and The Century, was soon lost amidst the crowd's pressing need for new information about the world and seeking advice about how to manage and succeed in it. More and more magazines surfaced to address the increased demand for timely and specialized information from impatient audiences as well as to capitalize on the pervasive fascinating with consumption. Popular magazines quickly evolved into the informational counterpart of the retail department store.

The end result of the shift is the "voiceles dullness of utilitarian prose" replacing the essay. McQuade quotes Woolf's propsal of an antidote to this dull prose essay writing that "has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea...and thus [employs] compelling words to its shape..." He notes the shunning of teaching the essay as literature in the academy, "relegating instruction in essay writing to the margins of the university-- to first-year 'service' courses in composition."

Not surprisingly, McQuade hails the "democratic spirit of the essay" for serving as "an especially important portal for self-expression among writers in post-1960s America-- particularly women and people of color--whose voices weren't featured nor even heard in most literature courses well into the 1980s." Reading this, I am struck by the realization that this must be why I am so addicted to essays. (And I will admit it here, that this addiction was part of my compulsion for starting the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Essays and poetry were essential to me in the 1970s and 1980s: they gave me much of what I needed to sustain and nurture me as a feminist in a hostile world. They helped me to go beyond my own experience-- and to connect my own experience to that of others. Essays and poetry, over the years, have repeatedly assured me at my loneliest moments that others are thinking about what I am thinking about and willing to spend the time to give me the benefit of their insights and the pleasure of their company in print. (We don't, after all, having WisCon more than a few days a year.)

So here I am, linking poetry with essays, essays with poetry. It feels right to do that. They're both under-appreciated forms. They are both, in McQuade's terms, "democratic." And they are both forms that, like the best fiction, bring us to our senses. We need them all, don't we? And as much (if not more) than we ever did.

WisCon 36!

Last night, taking the stage in the back room of Room of One's Own Bookstore in Madison, Debbie Notkin and Andrea Hairston launched WisCon with considerable panache. Debbie opened by reading a piece, both poignant and funny, on her mother. Her tone, reading, was understated and matter-of-fact, creating a striking and highly effective contrast to its intense emotional content. And then in a wild change of pace and tone, exuberant and crackling with energy, Andrea, accompanied by Pan Morigan, filled the room with the drama of excerpts from Redwood and Wildfire. Andrea's performance was interpolated by songs from the novel, which Pan (who composed the music to go along with the songs) sang. (Pan's banjo also created a distinctive atmosphere as Andrea read.) Andrea's reading culminated with one of those songs in which Pan's voice soared, and into which Andrea drew the audience to join. The audience's applause was absolutely thunderous.

All of this was part of the WisCon tradition. Debbie's reading nonfiction and Andrea's theatrical performance with Pan rang interesting changes on the tradition. Isn't that part of what we love about WisCon's traditions? That they offer forms that can be flexibly stretched to accommodate so many different approaches and kinds of creativity?

I do love this traditional Thursday evening opener that Room hosts. It's a wonderful bookstore to start with, and becomes even more wonderful when it fills with people most of whom haven't seen one another for months or in many cases for an entire year. Granted my travel day yesterday, which started at 4:30 a.m., was unduly protracted (including about an hour spent in an airplane without ventilation much less air-conditioning, parked at the gate, apparently waiting to have its auxiliary power supply restored). All of that fell away from me as I immersed myself in WisCon sociability. Before the reading, which starts at 6:30, Room always offers a spread of wine and cheese and veggies, which people sip and munch while moving among the book displays (so many Aqueduct Press books! Yay!) and hugging and chatting in a terrific crush of bodies. The trick is to make it into the back room in good enough time to snag a chair. (There are lots of chairs, but somehow, every year, quite a few people end up standing or, sometimes, sitting on the floor.) When I first started coming to WisCon, I'd arrive on Friday. Only later did I realize what I had been missing.

I took some photos of Debbie, Andrea, and Pan, but they didn't come out. (I've never managed to take a decent picture in that room yet.) So I apologize for not being able to offer you visual images of the event. But I'm hoping to report in, maybe even later today, perhaps with pictures.

Infamous federal legislation declared unconstitutional

Here's some good news: U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, in a 68-page opinion, ruled last week that the infamous Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which President Obama signed into law on Dec. 31, 2011, is unconstitutional. The fact that two branches of the US Government saw fit to perpetrate such legislation meant that such a ruling was never a sure thing. Here's journalist Chris Hedges, who was one of the plaintiffs:

It was a stunning and monumental victory. With her ruling she returned us to a country where—as it was before Obama signed this act into law Dec. 31—the government cannot strip a U.S. citizen of due process or use the military to arrest him or her and then hold him or her in military prison indefinitely. She categorically rejected the government's claims that the plaintiffs did not have the standing to bring the case to trial because none of us had been indefinitely detained, that lack of imminent enforcement against us meant there was no need for an injunction and that the NDAA simply codified what had previously been set down in the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act. The ruling was a huge victory for the protection of free speech. Judge Forrest struck down language in the law that she said gave the government the ability to incarcerate people based on what they said or wrote. Maybe the ruling won't last. Maybe it will be overturned. But we and other Americans are freer today than we were a week ago. And there is something in this.

The government lawyers, despite being asked five times by the judge to guarantee that we plaintiffs would not be charged under the law for our activities, refused to give any assurances. They did not provide assurances because under the law there were none. We could, even they tacitly admitted, be subject to these coercive measures. We too could be swept away into a black hole. And this, I think, decided the case.

"At the hearing on this motion, the government was unwilling or unable to state that these plaintiffs would not be subject to indefinite detention under [Section] 1021," Judge Forrest noted. "Plaintiffs are therefore at risk of detention, of losing their liberty, potentially for many years."

The government has 60 days to appeal. It can also, as Mayer and Afran have urged, accept the injunction that nullifies the law. If the government appeals, the case will go to a federal appellate court. The ruling, even if an appellate court upholds it, could be vanquished in the Supreme Court, especially given the composition of that court.

We still live in a police state, but this ruling offers hope. In theory at least, the bill of rights is still in effect. And the theoretical, especially in this case, matters. Without it, we'd be hopeless.

This seems an appropriate moment to quote Augustine of Hippo: “Hope has two beautiful daughters: their names are anger and courage. Anger that things are the way they are. Courage to make them the way they ought to be.”

Cultural change and the human skeleton

The May 4 issue of Science reports on a study of "more than 2000 European skeletons" from over the last 30,000 years tracing how cultural changes like switching from hunting and gathering to farming and herding, from "life as nomads to settling in urban centers; from eating meat, nuts, and tubers to consuming grains, sugars, and dairy products" has altered the human physique. Over this time, the study documents a significant drop in strength in leg bones, the loss of asymmetrically larger right arms as compared to left arms, and fluctuations in weight and height. (The loss of resistance to fracture, according to the article, declined by 25% from 27,000 years ago to 1900 C.E.) 30,000 years ago, apparently, the average European male was as tall as the average European male today. With the onset of agriculture, height and weight both dropped. (Agriculture, apparently, provided poorer nutrition than hunting and gathering did.) I'm not clear, from the article, who exactly conducted the study. The article quotes a few paleo-anthropologists and bio-archeologists who attended the meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists last month in Portland, but offers not a single reference to the title of the study, its place of publication, or its authors. (Presumably some of the people quoted are authors of the study...)

Interesting to imagine what differences might be seen in the human skeleton, say, 1000 years from now...

The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry

Aqueduct has just taken delivery of another book in its spring list: The Moment of Change, edited by Rose Lemberg. The contributors to this anthology include many fine poets, among them Ursula K. Le Guin, Delia Sherman, Theodora Goss, Amal El-Mohtar, Vandana Singh, Nisi Shawl, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, Athena Andreadis, Jo Walton, and Catherynne M. Valente. The cover art comes to us courtesy of the fabulous Terri Windling. Rose Lemberg writes in her introduction that “Literature of the fantastic allows us to create worlds and visions of society, origins, social justice and identity,” but notes that “even though we are in the world, our voices are folded into the creases. We speak from memory of stories told sidewise. We speak from pain; is that serious enough? The world has not been welcoming, but what other world is there?”

“In these pages,” Rose summarizes, “you will find works in a variety of genres—works that can be labeled mythic, fantastic, science fictional, historical, surreal, magic realist, and unclassifiable; poems by people of color and white folks; by poets based in the US, Canada, Britain, India, Spain, and the Philippines; by first- and second-generation immigrants; by the able-bodied and the disabled; by straight and queer poets who may identify as women, men, trans, and genderqueer.” Rose reminds us, quoting Audre Lorde, that "poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence." I published this book because I thought we needed it. 

Copies are available now from Aqueduct Press here; we'll of course be selling it at WisCon, where Rose and several of the contributors will be launching it at a reading. And by the end of the month, it should be available elsewhere.

Superlatives for Gwyneth Jones's fiction

Lovely to see Ian Sales's review of Gwyneth Jones's Universe of Things at the Daughters of Prometheus website.

This is one of the strongest collections of genre short stories I have ever read. There is not a bad story in it – even the single-page ‘One of Sandy’s Dreams’, originally written for The Drabble Project in 1988, manages to do more in 100 words than China Miéville’s BSFA Award nominated short story ‘Covehithe’ did in several thousand.

If that is not praise enough, consider Sales's conclusion to the review: "Gwyneth Jones is the finest writer of science fiction who is currently still writing that this country has produced. Highly recommended." Indeed.

Kiini Ibura Salaam's Ancient, Ancient

It's May, and that means a bouquet of new publications from Aqueduct Press-- viz., the rest of her Spring 2012 list. The first of these has just arrived here in Seattle, and so I'm pleased to announce the release of Kiini Ibura Salaam's Ancient, Ancient. For many sf readers, this is a new name. But her stories have been appearing in a variety of anthologies over the last few years-- in Sheree Thomas's Dark Matter and in Nalo Hopkinson's Mojo: Conjure Stories, to mention only two. I had read and taken special notice of her stories, myself, so when she sent me a manuscript, I was excited at the prospect of becoming better acquainted with her work. (She will, by the way, be attending WisCon later this month.)

I asked Nisi Shawl to write an introduction to the collection. Her brief essay remarks particularly on the sensuality and erotic power of Kiini's prose. “Sexuality-cum-sensuality is the experiential link between mind and matter," Nisi writes, "the vivid and eternal refutation of the alleged dichotomy between them. This understanding is the foundation of my 2004 pronouncement on the burgeoning sexuality implicit in sf's Afro-diasporization. It is the core of many African-based philosophies. And it is the throbbing, glistening heart of Kiini's body of work. This book is alive. Be not afraid.”

"Salaam treats words like the seductive weapons they are. She wields them to weave fierce, gorgeous stories that stroke your sensibilities, challenge your preconceptions, and leave you breathless with their beauty."   — Nalo Hopkinson, author of The New Moon's Arms and The Salt Roads
 
"Kiini Ibura Salaam's collection of short fiction, Ancient, Ancient, demonstrates that she deserves to be considered as one of today's most promising contemporary genre writers. With writing that challenges assumptions on gender, the nature of fantasy, the uses of myth and much more, she offers the readers stories that they will not soon forget. A marvelous introduction to a marvelous writer."
  — Jack Womack, author of Random Acts of Senseless Violence
 
"Kiini Ibura Salaam is a natural-born storyteller and a gorgeous writer who chooses her characters and words with the care and skill of a poet. Her stories are transformative, wise and vivid with the quality of fantasy and fable. I loved reading this!"   — Sheree Renée Thomas, author of Shotgun Lullabies: Stories and Poems and editor of the award-winning Dark Matter anthologies

"My favorite piece is one of three original to this collection, “Pod Rendezvous.” A long and entrancing look at the last libertine hours of a future female who must dedicate her remaining life to selfless nurturing, it swoops on gossamer contrails from crèche to club, from finger-shoveled cafeteria food to bars dispensing star juice. It is the book’s final story. At its end the heroine disappears, a bright spark flying out of sight, and the story is done but not over, or over but not yet done. The pull, the sometimes literally visceral attraction of what Kiini does with words, continues on beyond them."   — Nisi Shawl, author of Filter House, from her introduction to Ancient, Ancient

Ancient, Ancient received this review from Publishers Weekly:

"Salaam's collection of 10 reprints and 3 original stories introduces readers to alternate worlds built around magic, sensuality, sexuality, and the search for emotional comfort, however tenuous. A lusty god temporarily bestows his sexual spark on a worn-out and unappreciated young woman in ''Desire.'' The world of mothlike aliens who feed on the heated ''nectar'' of human sexual energies is explored in three linked tales. A young man's grandfather sends him time traveling into danger as a punishment in ''Battle Royale,'' while ''Rosamojo'' is a straightforward revenge story about a young girl who uses magic to punish her rapist father. Unearthly magics frame ''Ferret,'' an intriguing snippet about a space colony ship guided by animal divination, and ''Marie,'' in which a pregnant Creole woman is willing to sacrifice anything to feel at home in New York City. Salaam's unusual settings and lonely characters will call to readers who hunger for sex, identity, or just a place to belong."

You can purchase a copy from Aqueduct Press here. 

Project for funding a feminist speculative fiction anthology

Everyone who reads this blog probably knows already about the kickstarter project to fund a speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, & horror) anthology devoted to feminist themes, to be edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Here's a reminder that this is a project that will likely be dear to the heart of anyone who reads Aqueduct Press books. Check it out here, and if you can, do contribute!

Rebecca Ore's Alien Trilogy

I'm happy to announce that Aqueduct Press has just released e-book editions of Rebecca Ore's Alien Trilogy: Becoming Alien, Being Alien, and Human to Human. I remember, on first reading Becoming Alien, running around from one Seattle bookstore to the next, in desperate, needy search of the other two. There'll be no need to do that now! The trilogy was first published in the late eighties and has been out of print for a long time. Aqueduct Press is selling them here for $7.95 each.

Aqueduct will, by the way, be releasing e-book editions of more of Rebecca's backlist in the near future.

ETA: It occurs to me that I should mention, this trilogy features a protagonist who thinks of himself as "a country boy" (which others call "hillbilly"), and offers a lot of insights into class relations from a view that's not middle class.   

Learning to feel unsafe

Kirstyn McDermott has an interesting post-- Girls and Consequences-- delving into her childhood revulsion for femininity and one of the possible sources of that revulsion. The post was inspired two other posts, one by Stina Leicht on why boys court risks more than girls and by and the other by Kate Elliott, on how, at the age of twelve, she completed a sentence beginning "I wish..." as "I wish I was a boy." The expression of this wish didn't come from a sense of gender dysphoria. "What it meant to me," Elliott writes, "was that it wasn't worth being a girl." How many of us could find that feeling in our own emotional history? I know that I certainly could. The bit from Leicht's post that McDermott quotes resonates powerfully:

It’s because girls run head-long into consequences much, much sooner than boys do. They are barraged with the knowledge that the world is a dangerous place for them specifically at an early age. I have memories of such information filtering down to me at age eight through ten. So much so, that I went through a phase of denial. I took on male behaviors, thinking that would make me safe. (I was a tomboy.) I also went through a phase of not wanting to be female — not because I thought I was mistakenly born a girl, but because I was beginning to understand what was ahead and that the world did not like females. In fact, society at large might even hate females.

As it has probably done for any woman reading the post, this sent my thoughts back to my pre- and early-teens. I never told anyone I wanted to be a boy. But I did want, oh so much, to be Beethoven, and everyone around me let me know that it wasn't possible to be Beethoven unless you were male. And though I wasn't a tomboy, I did things like cut my hair short (shorter than I ever wear it now-- something not much more than a buzz cut) at a time most of the girls in my high school wore their hair long and ironed it, making myself the Complete Freak, got myself a boy's cap (never worn by girls back then), and often passed as a prepubescent boy when I was wearing a jacket or coat, and wore pants whenever I could (though girls were never allowed to wear pants to school back then, not even in sub-zero weather). McDermott writes

Thankfully, I have a wonderful mother who I can’t ever remember saying that I couldn’t/shouldn’t do something or like something or be something just because I was a girl. (Once or twice, when I was being particularly gross, she might have expressed an exasperated admonishment that I wasn’t being very ladylike. Huh? Who cared about being a lady!) I do remember being told such things by lots of other people, though — including some male relatives. And the consequences stuff? Although I didn’t think I ever consciously took that on board when I was a kid . . . I reckon it did manage to seep in. And I reckon I reacted to it just the way Stina Leicht did, by rebelling against everything girlish.

These days I’m constantly unpacking my thoughts about the colour pink, and my newly rekindled love of cooking, and whether or not to keep shaving my legs, and so many other things. Trying to work out how much of what I love and/or hate comes from a genuine personal response rather than a habitual reaction to/against The Feminine. (A process which, of course, is complicated by the recognition that those anti-feminine reactions are really just as “genuine” or otherwise as anything else I feel.)

McDermott then goes on to pose disturbing questions thinking about what all of this raises for her anent her preferences in footwear. And she arrives at this gut-wrenching conclusion:

Because, in my head, wearing spiked stiletto heels isn’t safe. Because being a girl isn’t safe. And that’s precisely the sort of unconscious internalisation I’m talking about. Now, it’s not as though I go about my days with ears pricked and eyes darting about like a gazelle en route to the watering hole, but this is a genuine psychological underpinning that has helped define my choice of footwear as much as it has influenced my decision never to accept an invitation to an otherwise all male NFL drunken victory party.
Because being a girl isn’t safe.

Reading this suddenly made me remember not just some of the occasions when I definitely didn't feel safe "being a girl" (particularly in my teens), but also how I was taught to believe that. You see, I flashed on something that I'd totally forgotten-- something that sort of shocks me now, because in a way it's a strange and jarring memory that I don't think I've ever before consciously recalled. The memory I flashed on was of one of the black and white short films my (small) eighth-grade class were specially shown. Very occasionally the whole school (small, parochial) would be shown moves in the gym-- movies that were in some way instructional-- about, say, missionaries in faraway lands, fire safety, how to give first aid, and so on. On one such occasion, all the students were sent out except for those in the eighth grade. There were about 30 of us. We were shown at least two additional films that the rest of the school didn't see that day. One was on the dangers of smoking pot and taking drugs (yeah, something like Reefer Madness-- it could, actually, even have been Reefer Madness), the other on the dangers of sex. Only, though they didn't say so, it was really on the risks of getting raped and getting pregnant. (I.e., the dangers were for girls only.) Mind you, we hadn't had any sex education in my school. It was a fundamentalist Lutheran school, after all... In high school we had sex education, which was at least partly about the dangers of pregnancy, and partly about venereal diseases, which not only girls, but also boys were at risk for. This film was basically about what terrible things kissing boys could lead to. (Just as pot was the first step to becoming a "dope addict," so kissing was the first step to getting raped or pregnant.)

I obviously don't have a really distinct recollection of all that was shown (though I do, oddly enough, remember the girl who got raped wearing bobby socks for godsake-- though I suppose, given that this was the 1963-64 school year, the film could have been made as much as ten years earlier). But I remember being really upset by the violence of it-- because it showed the girl in a situation, basically, of date rape (though it didn't show the rape itself-- only showed her afterwards, with her clothes ripped, crying, and then the consequence of pregnancy supposedly following her rash behavior in kissing this boy in the first place. What strikes me half a century later is that this little "instructional" film had an effect on me that rippled through the next five years of my life-- even though the showing of the film was never framed by discussion or reinforced through mention at any time afterwards by my teachers or peers (any more than other such "instructional" films ever were). With all that silence surrounding it, I'm sort of shocked to realize that it nevertheless lurked in deep memory, with just a few images burned into my brain. In hindsight, I'm sure it heightened my fear of a scary boy in my neighborhood a year or two later, a boy with whom I had several really scary encounters and who was notorious because it was "known" about him that his father constantly beat him, his parents sometimes made him sleep in the garage, and finally, because he was a runaway who had a juvie officer checking up on him. (Now that I think of it, I recall that that juvie officer was the father of one of my brother's friends (a boy who, himself, was something of a delinquent creep.)

The cues telling them they're not "safe" are always there for girls, regardless of whether they are explicitly warned. (And of course now, any child who grows up with 21st-century television can't possibly escape the din of the constant subtext about violence against children, girls, women.) I'm sure if I began looking for more traces of this education (socialization), I'd find them.
Interestingly, this remembering-- the process McDermott plunged into with her boots-- reminds me of a marvelous book that Verso published in 1987, in translation from the German, Female Sexualization, ed. by Frigga Haug, recording the work of German feminist collective doing what they called "memory-work." Here's Haug:

The book records a collective's attempts to analyse women's socialization by writing stories out of their own personal memories: stories within which socialization comes to appear as a process of sexualization of the female body. In the first chapter on what is called 'memory-work' (Erinnerungsarbeit), the reader is introduced to the method of collective work undertaken by the group. Described as a method for the unravelling of gender socialization, this involves choosing a theme connected with the body--legs, hair, stomach, height--and calling on members of the group to write down their memories of past events that focus on this physical area.

In the second chapter, we pursue the process whereby the stories are circulated amongst the group, discussed, reassessed and rewritten. The group searches for absences in the text, for its internal contradictions, for cliched formulations covering knots of emotion or painful detail.(13)

Theirs is a complicated process (and fully theorized). But the key, as Haug says, is that "we looked everywhere for traces of situations in which we had either voluntarily submitted to our own subordination, or, conversely, in which we had developed early forms of lived resistance."(50) Perhaps most interestingly, this collective saw writing (rather than speaking) as key to their process, because of what happens when we write down memories as personal history (as opposed to informally telling them as anecdotes). I think also, as someone who writes fiction, that this difference also shows up when delving into a memory by using it as a moment in a fiction-- it gets separated from the ego (to use both general and Freud's parlance) in a way that frees it for a less-emotionally fraught consideration. Anyway, thank you, Kirstyn McDermott, for such a provocative post. You've left me with much to think about.