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Bookish Foodish Geekish

"Well, it's certainly uncontaminated by customers."

Dear used bookstore proprietor person:

Yes, you did remember me correctly as the same person who had sat down with a handful of books for roughly half an hour, and then left without buying any the other day. Yes, I was about to sit down with a handful of books again when you told me that unless I were going to buy something, browsing was not okay.

Speaking as someone who owns roughly a metric fuckton of books, I feel obliged to point out (again: yes, I did say something to this effect and I realize you were resolutely unmoved): generally speaking, most bookstores cheerfully allow for, even encourage unlimited browsing. This is not because they are kind generous people; this is because they understand that in bookstores, generally speaking, the people who sit there and browse are repeat customers; and yes, most of them do buy something, if not this time, then next time, or the one after that. For example, today I went and browsed in a different used bookstore, and they left me the hell alone, as they always do, and I ended up buying two books. See how this works?

Well, no, I can see that you don't. Okay. What I didn't say: you may also want to consider that maybe the reason you remembered me was because I was, that time, like this time, pretty much the only person in the store.

I mean, I'm not suggesting your attitude is the only reason for business being slow: the economy's bad, used bookstores aren't necessarily always exactly booming, and also your selection is kind of crap. But yeah, there was one book of food lit/crit I'd never seen elsewhere and I was seriously thinking about buying it. Even with the plastic on the cover and the relatively high price. Still, I'm sure it was worth it not to have to deal with the annoyance of watching someone look at books, in a bookstore, that you run.

You know what would really solve the problem? If you just got rid of all the books. You could have, like, those dummy copies they have in furniture stores, you know? It'd be great. And the customer could come in and be like, "Do you have anything in red?" and you could lead them silently to the back and glower at them until they found the right one to match their drapes, and paid for it.

Addendum: if you were even half this entertaining in your churlishness, I would have gladly let it pass. Sadly, you are not.

Fucked up books of my childhood

Respectively, the Sweet Valley High (and satellites) books, as examined at The Dairi Burger

and VC Andrews (Inc), Trapped in the Attic.

If you, too, had your formative years at all warped by these literary classics, and had blissfully put most of the details out of your consciousness, now's your chance to have it all come flooding back to you, with hilarious commentary.

If you don't know what I'm talking about...check the sites out anyway. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll spork. Most important, you'll realize "Twlight" had nothing on the 80's for professional Mary Sues. Tragic orphans! Terrible accidents! Murder, even! Ghosts, werewolves, and vampires! And that's just the Sweet Valley series.

Perfect size six suburban twins with sparkling blonde hair! Perfect helpless heroines locked away in secret-and-spider-riddled garrets! With sparkling blonde hair! Many, many lovingly described outfits and other material details, which were of course in no way why I read the things in the first place. And of course, a whole shitload of men, some of whom are teh sexxy and buy pretty things before revealing themselves to be as bastard-y as all the others, not that there is ever any other ultimate goal besides landing one.


******

Edited to update:

A conversation elsewhere got me thinking more seriously about this essay by Joanna Russ in To Write Like A Woman on the modern Gothic, "Somebody's Trying To Kill Me And I Think It's My Husband." It's basically second-wave feminist analysis applied to lit crit, but she's by far one of the better ones out there.

More details and quotage shortly, but essentially her point is that in the Gothic the female "subject" position isn't really much of one; the protagonist doesn't really initiate plot, she stands there and things happen to/around her. Her main task is figuring out the "mystery" of what the hell is going on around her. Much of which involves figuring out other peoples' feelings
(especially the Man, natch).

It's interesting because her thesis not only fits the gothics she was writing about as well as the more sensationalistic VC Andrews books that probably came out after she wrote the essay, but also applies to True Blood and of course Twilight, no doubt among other contemporary hits.

As far as that goes, I was snarking when I first noted that the Sweet Valley Books, once they started not just jumping the shark but doing trapeze acts with it, eventually have all the elements associated with more standard "gothic" books like the VC Andrews books, but actually, it's not that dissimilar. There *is* no real action in SVH as such-the girls don't really *go* anywhere, despite having cunning plots to defeat rivals and hook boys and career aspirations and such-they stay forever frozen at a perfect age, and they don't ever really set anything in motion. So in order to be "exciting" it has to get soapier and soapier...

I had figured that the reason for this in the SVH books was more because having them actually change and grow would defeat the magic fantasy stasis of Perfect Teen Suburbia, but actually the Mary Sue-ism isn't at all unrelated to that fetish. I mean, it's specifically a woman's fantasy Perfect Teen Suburbia (Francine Pascal, more or less, via her many ghostwriters), a retro one, I mean. So the "waiting for something exciting to happen, which will almost certainly come from a Man" is probably kind of implicit in that.

Anyway, here's Russ in her own words:

The Modern Gothic is episodic; the heroine does nothing except worry; any necessary detective work is done by other persons, often the Super- Male. Whenever the Heroine acts...she bungles things badly. [Hi, Bella!] There is a period of terror, repeated sinister incidents, ominous dialogue spoken by various characters, and then the sudden revelation of who's who and what's what. In terms of ordinary pulp technique, these novels are formless. Even so, they obey extraordinarily rigid rules. There must be a reason for these rules.

I would propose that the Modern Gothics are a direct expression of the traditional feminine situation (at least a middle-class [white] feminine situation) and that they provide precisely the kind of escape reading a middle-class believer in the feminine mystique needs, without involving elements that either go beyond the feminine mystique or would be considered immoral in its terms.

...and here she puts a finger on the Mary Sue phenomenon in all but name:

Most striking about these novels is the combination of intrigue, crime and danger with the Heroine's complete passivity. Unconscious foci of intrigue, passion, and crime, these young women (none of whom are over thirty) wander through all sorts of threatening forces of which they are intuitively, but never intellectually, aware. Most of all, *they are of extraordinary interest to everyone*-even though they are ill educated, ordinary, characterless and usually very hazily
delineated (as one might suspect) as a stand-in for the reader.

Sometimes Heroines are very beautiful (although they don't know it) or heiresses (which they don't know, either) or possess some piece of information about the Secret (which they are incapable of interpreting). Their connection with the action of the novel is always passive; they are focal points for tremendous emotion, and sometimes tremendous struggle, simply because they exist...

In the face of this really extraordinary passivity-for if the protagonist of a novel is not active in some way, what on earth is the
novel about?-it is tempting to see these books as genuine family romances, with the Heroine as the child who is trying desperately to figure out what the grownups are up to...At their best Heroines merely stand (passively) for love, goodness, redemption, and innocence. They are special and precious because they are Heroines. And that is that."

This becomes a lot more evident with VC Andrews, who made the "family romance" part way more explicit than any of the earlier goffics Russ was examining.

As per the Mary Sueism, passivity and all, I think that's what had irritated me so much about True Blood, more so in the first season. Sookie is a *classic* of the type. And she only gets more special and precious and besotting of others as it goes on.

BTVS, whatever its flaws, was satisfying because it explicitly *doesn't* do this: Buffy really is a true protagonist, a Hero with a journey, not just someone who radiates goodness while all the fighting takes place all around her.

That said, I'm digging True Blood more in its second season probably precisely because there's so much more focus on all the subplots and secondary characters, most of whom have a more interesting "story" imo than Sookie.

So Russ concludes:

"The Modern Gothic, as a genre, is a means of enabling a conventionally Heroine to have adventures at all. It may also be a way that conventionally feminine readers can see their own situation...validated, justified, and glamorized up to the hilt, without turning Heroines into active persons or into sexually adventurous persons, both of whom violate the morality of conventional femininity.,

[It'd be interesting to see her take on the later Judith Krantz and such genre. wherein the Heroines do become much more sexually adventurous-within certain strictures-and nominally have careers, but a lot of this still applies. The "Lace" books as I recall them could be termed the Cosmo Gothic. More sex, more designer name dropping, the women become successful fashion designers or that sort of thing, and the rest is still pretty similar]

...

1. Housework, etc. is banned. I'm on holiday.

2. I'm upper-middle class, not lower-middle class.

3. My upward mobility is achieved through marriage.

4. I'm a good girl-modest, not too pretty but quite pretty, not too rich but rich enough, womanly, loving, dependent, and somehow "average" (even though I am uniquely precious)

5. The Super-Male *really exists* (all evidence to the contrary)

6. He really loves me, even though I am not strikingly beautiful, brilliant, talented, famous, or rich. I do not see why he loves me, but he does. He may appear to treat me badly or brusquely; still, he loves me.

7. I do nothing. I do not have to do anything. Merely because I exist, violent emotions and acts spring into being.

8. I am rewarded for being good. Aggressively sexual, beautiful, worldly women are wicked and are punished accordingly. Men don't *really* like them.

9. I have intense emotional relations with places-houses, weather, nature. (Scenery-painting is often the best-written part of these books).

10. I have pretty, romantic clothes (but not sexy or flamboyant ones). Clothes really are very important.

11. *My sexual value is my personal value and is respected by all but villains and villainesses.* Men's desire is a testimony to my personal, individual worth. I have no character, interests, or achievements, but those who do come to a bad end (if female).

12. I am a virtuoso at interpreting faces and feelings. [Sookie in True Blood takes this one further by being actually *psychic.*] This ability is not "wasted" on the everyday drudgery of infants' needs or husbands' grumpiness-it is vital in saving my life and the happiness of all about me. (Even if I come to the wrong conclusions, my intense over-reading of everybody else's emotions is still justified).

13. If I don't know what's happening, that's all right: my man does.

14. I can't save myself, but my man will do it for me. [More often torqued these days, if not consistently; Sookie's killing Rene in self-defense has shades of Final Girl, but she still has the men running to her aid, the distraction helps enable her to defend herself, and they do outright rescue her on many other occasions]

15. Life with the Super-Male is *really satisfying.*

Sookeh! SOOKEH!!!...

annnd

*sparkle out*

Harold Bloom IS my sister!

From everything I've read, from the anecdotes that I've heard, from the fanvids I've watched, from the dreams I've had, especially those that involve my going back to school and/or losing teeth, Harold Bloom is an intellectual who cares deeply about maintaining standards. He is one of the few people in academia that has the courage to say that JK Rowling is cliched, and that is a message that benefits all writers, including JK Rowling, because it gives her something to strive for. It does not surprise me that there are many so-called writers unable to respect the integrity of their Structure. It does not surprise me that there are many academics who are unable to hear what Harold has to say when being against the decay of everything good and pure about the Canon and Civilization is called ""pompous" and "reactionary" and "chode-esque." When people who read Harry Potter can only defend themselves by saying "well, at least it's better than 'Twilight.'" When four out of five absinthe-addled penguins can write better than Stephanie Meyer with one flipper tied behind their backs. As if there is any logic in that. As if Twilight is "literature." As if penguins would even drink absinthe if it weren't for the international cartels flooding Antarctica with the stuff. It is saddening but not surprising.

Anyway, I think we've all had our say here. I am not interested in continuing this conversation. In fact, I'm not even interested in starting a conversation. I don't care to be "deconstructed" by the posties, thank you VERY much. This conversation is over. Over! LALALALALALALALALALALA ---beeeeeeeeep--

We briefly interrupt this quasi-non-hiatus to say: Fuck Amazon.com

Here's why. It's not just affecting LGBT "adult" books either. Also see re: why it matters.

If you'd like to let them know your feelings, here's their express customer service form. or call 1-866-216-1072. or just join the boycott.

good a reason to patronize indies as much as possible anyway. Powell's still seems to be okay, also.

eta: "Book Depot" in the UK looks promising. free worldwide delivery!

eta again: someone cynical theorizes this is a sophisticated trolling effort of some sort. if so, as far as I'm concerned all it means is "hey, still another party is (also) an EPIC asshole!"

and, this is also not the first time this sort of thing has been discussed wrt Amazon, apparently.

but, yeah. "lulz." wtfever. well, hey, if it turns out to be the case I guess we'll hear it from the PR eventually. can't wait for it. so far the response, "skeleton crew" or not, has been less than satisfactory.

In other but sort of thematically related postage: I can't get behind lesbian comic author Erika Moen anymore, much as I've liked a lot of her cartoons in the past. Here's why. And disgusted with Annalee Newitz--another person I -wanted- to like-- for similar reasons: here's why. (including comments section).

O.K. Really, I'm...busy. no more blogging for a while. hold my calls. Really. Oh, and happy Zombie Rabbits And Candy Eating Day.

p.s. Doctor Who special was v. disappointing. why can't Tennant stick around for Moffat? whhyyyyyyy???

later to all 7.8 of my readers...

ETA okay, whether he's actually behind it or not, I think we can all agree that "Weev" is a smug entitled POS

Hay dude. Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here's a nice piece I like to call "how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code".

I really hate reputation systems based on user input. This started a while back on Craigslist, when I was trying to score chicks to do heroin with. My listings like "looking to get tarred and pleasured" and "Searching for a heroine to do the paronym of this sentence's lexical subject" kept getting flagged. The audacity of the San Francisco gay community disgusted me. They would flag my ads down but searching craigslist for "pnp" or "tina" reveals tons of hairy dudes searching for other hairy dudes to do meth with. So I decided to get them back, and cause a few hundred thousand queers some outrage.

I'm logged into Amazon at the time and see it has a "report as inappropriate" feature at the bottom of a page. I do a quick test on a few sets of gay books. I see that I can get them removed from search rankings with an insignificant number of votes.

I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently.

[some code which I have no fucking idea about really]

...and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every fag book on Amazon.

Now from here it was a matter of getting a lot of people to vote for the books. The thing about the adult reporting function of Amazon was that it was vulnerable to something called "Cross-site request forgery'. This means if I referred someone to the URL of the successful complaint, it would register as a complaint if they were logged in. So now it is a numbers game.

I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites. I show them my idea, and we all agree that it is pretty funny. They put an invisible iframe in their websites to refer people to the complaint URLs which caused huge numbers of visitors to report gay and lesbian items as inappropriate without their knowledge.

I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse.

...The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon.

I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay and outrage across the blogosphere
ain't so bad.

Funny. Really funny.

More on why Amazon still isn't off the hook:

What I think is going on: there is a severe vulnerability in the Amazon flagging-for-inappropriate system, and it's been found and exploited by one or more nerds with too much time on their hands. Amazon's mistake, vis a vis the brave new world of social media, is two-fold:

Refusing to acknowledge a vulnerability. People are reaching the point not just that they like transparency in dealing with people who hold lots of important info on their behalf, but they are coming to demand it. Amazon's "nothing more to see here" approach is damaging to the relationship they have with those outraged by the exploit.
Refusing to acknowledge the pain of affected people. If you have an entire relationship built on trust (with personal info, with commitments to move products, with referrals and wishlists, etc), you have the obligation to have that uncomfortable sit-down when a betrayal is introduced to the relationship. Amazon hasn't done that yet. Yikes.
There's a livejournal blogger out there now claiming responsibility for the exploit. I won't link over, because I actually think he's full of crap, as do those who've attempted to reproduce his exploitative code. It's a well known practice for those with no skillz to take responsibility for things they have no part of to build up their hacker cred. Please. You know what tipped me off, for the record? The references to wanting to have anonymous sex with women and heroin from Craigslist. Fetishy-objectifying of women is common in the hacker community, for sure, but this guy is just… silly.

This doesn't mean that someone didn't come up with something similar– I'm almost positive they did. Which means that Amazon has a serious problem, and they better have a better explanation than the "glitch."

There's a bigger picture here: cultural implications

From a tech point of view, recommendation systems and flag-as-inappropriate tools that aren't built to handle gaming the system are just no good. It's unacceptable that a masterminding giant such as Amazon wasn't prepared for this kind of attack. Especially considering how much it affects Amazon's contract and relationship with the people that provide them with the goods its users demand, and how much users trust Amazon to do the Right Thing.

On a wider cultural scale, as I'd mentioned in the article in the WMC, the cultural implications of these attacks — especially when it's big enough to get this kind of attention — are huge. Geek culture is one of the last vestiges of an overtly sexist and toxic environment for anyone who's not a straight guy, most likely white and middle-class. (Not limited to the nerds of computer love, either– check out this post on misogyny and comic books from Amptoons.) When these attacks occur, it reveals not just the hatred that the hackers themselves have for women and LGBT folk, but the wider cultural intolerance we still have running rampant.

...Some would react by clamping on the anonymity, the level of free speech and the accountability, often all at once. Sure, keeping trolls off your comments section is probably a good idea. Enacting laws making it impossible to operate independently and anonymously online? Bad idea. Very bad. We need to be addressing the root causes of our misogyny, our racism, our homophobia — not piling on bandaids, duct tape and bailing twine to keep people's mouths shut...

While we're on a literary note:

An lj comm for a reading challenge: 50 books by writers of color in a year (or pick your time frame).

I have a lot of books I need/want to -finish-, I suppose that would count. my attention span's shot to hell in general wrt finishing books lately, I've noticed (I Blame The Internets). Among them:

"Women, Race and Class" by Angela Davis

"Time On Two Crosses" by Bayard Rustin

and on the SF tip, I've been meaning to give Octavia Butler another go, maybe Kindred, maybe something else.

I want Toni Morrison's essay collection "What Moves at the Margin;" I liked "Playing in the Dark" a lot. ( "Writing Without Whining" is something I could probably learn more about: )

and I think I must be the last person who hasn't read "The God of Small Things," so, one of these days.

In other news: the Klassik Arthers are better enjoyed if we don't have to know they had Teh Homosexshul. It's True You Know.

Okay, literary meme time

Via the lovely Natalia.

1) What author do you own the most books by?

Was gonna say Neil Gaiman or Shirley Jackson, or possibly Somerset Maugham; and then I realized, fuck me, I have all seven of the Harry Potter books…

2) What book do you own the most copies of?

I actually got rid of my duplicates in the last purge I think.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?

What for?

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?

…mind hazy, ask again later.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)?

Probably “Of Human Bondage” by Somerset Maugham.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?

When I was -ten- I was reading the friggin Sweet Valley High series. srsly. I had better taste when I was five (The Wizard of Oz and so forth). uh besides that probably Harriet the Spy was up there.

7) What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?

I don’t think I’ve completed anything that godawful in the past year. Life is short and so is my attention span.

8) What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?

Un Lun Dun by China Mieville.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?

Collected essays by George Orwell, the one including “Politics and the English Language.”

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?

fuck if I know, I’m so not paying attention…

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?

“Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell,” if they could actually do justice to it (I’m dubious)

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?

See above re: dubious.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.

Have dreamed at least once of writing a great story that of course I forgot once having woken. Not that weird, but deeply aggravating.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?

I’m going to have to go with the National Enquirer book about Michael Jackson (”Freak!”)

15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?

I’d say “Ulysses” or “Gravity’s Rainbow,” but truth is I never read either completely through or even close. Can tell you all the dirty bits in both of them, though.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you’ve seen?

It was so obscure I’ve forgotten it.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?

The Russians. They’re funny even in their angst. Or especially. The French are just insufferable.

18) Roth or Updike?

…I guess Roth for “Portnoy’s Complaint,” but I’m not really interested in either.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?

Not interested in either.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?

Shakespeare.

21) Austen or Eliot?

Austen.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

A whole shitload of “classics” apparently. A lot of WoC writing I’ve been meaning to get to. Pretty much everything ever really.

23) What is your favorite novel?

Probably “American Gods” at the moment. Used to be “Of Human Bondage.”

24) Play?

Would’ve said “Angels in America” once, seen too many mediocre productions to still think so. “Skriker” by Churchill, maybe, although “favorite” isn’t exactly right.

25) Poem?

“The Queen of Wands” by Judy Grahn.

26) Essay?

“Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” by Orwell. A couple by Joanna Russ from “To Write Like a Woman” come close.

27) Short story?

…can’t think of a “favorite” off the top. Some I’ve liked a bunch: “Bliss” by Katherine Mansfield, “Grail” by Neil Gaiman (actually quite a few by Gaiman), “Come Dance With Me In Ireland” by Shirley Jackson

28) Work of nonfiction?

Jon Ronson, “Them!” for the lulz

29) Who is your favorite writer?

Orwell or Joanna Russ for nonfiction, Gaiman currently for fiction.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?

Judging by what little I’ve seen of his work, I guess I’d go with David Sedaris. I don’t get it.

31) What is your desert island book?

I’d be too busy freaking out to settle down with a book, sorry.

32) And… what are you reading right now?

Couple of books on leadership by Arnold Mindell, “Love Belongs To Those Who Do The Feeling” (Judy Grahn’s newish collection), Perdido Street Station finally, the latest “Angel” comic (shut up)

*********

I tag whomever the spirit moves, here, there, or anywhere. Here is fine. MOAR COMMENTS PLZ /subtle hint

But their acronym wasn't very catchy

80 years ago or so:

Ms. Blee, 48, first became interested in hate groups nearly 20 years ago, when she discovered a Klan pamphlet from the 1920's advocating women's suffrage. She also found pamphlets advocating eight-hour days for mothers and the use of maiden names by married women. "I thought, This violates all my sense of historical categories," Ms. Blee said. "The role of women in the Klan has been overlooked. They were not incidental, but the glue that held it together."

So she decided to write a book focusing on Indiana, where she grew up and where nearly a quarter-million Klan women lived during the 1920's. In old age homes, she found survivors. They hadn't changed their views. Interviewing them was "hateful," she said, adding, "They assumed because I was white I would agree."

Some Klan women were suffragettes, Ms. Blee discovered, because they believed that the women's vote would counteract votes of African-American men. Some joined because of the temperance movement. "They would say: 'Drink is ruining the family. Who is to blame for that? Catholics,' " said Ms. Blee, who was raised in a Roman Catholic family in Fort Wayne. Catholics as well as blacks, she noted, were targets of the early Klan. (Ms. Blee asked that no other details of her personal life be published because of the dangers of her work.)

Although women did not participate in lynchings, they spread rumors against Jewish store owners and Catholic teachers to drive them from communities. Women also sustained the rituals necessary to cement membership, Klan weddings, christenings, cookbooks, parallel Little Leagues...

more:

"Thanks to Kathleen M. Blee's superb scholarship in Women of the Klan I must now live with the fact that the Klan contained 'all the better people': businessmen, physicians, judges, social workers—even Quakers, political reformers and (this is the truly discomforting part) feminists. . . . Women of the Klan stands before us as carefully garnered, irrefutable evidence that women are capable of asserting their gender rights in the most noisome settings."—Barbara Ehrenreich, Los Angeles Times

...Description
Ignorant. Brutal. Male. One of these stereotypes of the Ku Klux Klan offer a misleading picture. In Women of the Klan, sociologist Kathleen Blee unveils an accurate portrait of a racist movement that appealed to ordinary people throughout the country. In so doing, she dismantles the popular notion that politically involved women are always inspired by pacifism, equality, and justice.

"All the better people," a former Klanswoman assures us, were in the Klan. During the 1920s, perhaps half a million white native-born Protestant women joined the Women's Ku Klux Klan (WKKK). Like their male counterparts, Klanswomen held reactionary views on race, nationality, and religion. But their perspectives on gender roles were often progressive. The Klan publicly asserted that a women's order could safeguard women's suffrage and expand their other legal rights. Privately the WKKK was working to preserve white Protestant supremacy.

Blee draws from extensive archival research and interviews with former Klan members and victims to underscore the complexity of extremist right-wing political movements. Issues of women's rights, she argues, do not fit comfortably into the standard dichotomies of "progressive" and "reactionary." These need to be replaced by a more complete understanding of how gender politics are related to the politics of race, religion, and class.

note

In the 1920s, as many as half a million women joined the ladies' auxiliary of the KKK (the WKKK). Were they just aping their husbands or were there specific motivations that brought women to an organization notorious for rough-neck violence? Well, sexual fears may indeed have played a role. The fraudulent portrayal of ex-slaves assaulting white women in the vile racist movie, Birth of a Nation, is credited with stimulating the resurgence of the Klan. Women had received the vote nationally only in 1918, on a wave of optimism that their votes would naturally fall on the side of justice, decency, and pacifism. ..

Of course, also too, there are always those who are deeply, hilariously unclear on the concept:

In the [Men's Nads Daily] article, [“Feminism, the WKKK, and the Gender-Lynching of Michael Jackson”], David Usher claims that “Feminism as we know it is the direct ideological and political descendant of the Women’s Ku Klux Klan (WKKK).” When I read this, I didn’t know whether I should burst out in laughter or throw my laptop across the room. He continues with a long list of “connections” between the WKKK and the feminist movement, and claims that feminists left the KKK, simply omitted the word “black” from its ideology and replaced it with “men.”

Usher also manages to insist that, “The greatest problem faced by blacks is not racism itself. Sexism and discrimination against the black male, both in family and society, is the greatest single factor keeping blacks a desperate underclass.” Wow.

To back this up, he then throws Michael Jackson’s trial into the mix, and how the feminist “lynch mob” is actually responsible for the charges against him:

“So the new WKKK set out to perform a lawyerly lynching of Michael Jackson. Every mob motive is present. He is a male. He is very rich, eccentric, and black too. It was an irresistible invitation to misuse false allegations of sexual improprieties, for profit and political gain.”...

Seriously, though, Martian Rights Advocates aside, it's not that surprising. Ever read "Gone With the Wind?" I mean the movie's a subject in itself, but the book is...interesting. On the one hand, Margaret Mitchell writes about Scarlett O'Hara in this way...I don't have the book in front of me, but it's full of authorial asides like, "No one was there to tell her that her own personality, frighteningly vital as it was, was more attractive than the artifice..." something like that. You know, she was a strong woman chafing under the hidebound rules of an extremely sexist and rigid society who didn't let (white, duh) women be full humans; this is actually the point of the whole damn book, or one of them.

The other of course, being, goddam Yankees fucking up a perfectly good system, sending good families to ruin and privation and giving THEM ideas. And yes, there's a bit where one of the husbands rides out with the Klan; this is considered a good thing; because, see, while Scarlett was just mostly going along to get along, black people acted the way they did because, well, that was just TRUE about their inherent nature, see...

"They were like children," I believe O'Hara muses in a fury at the ignorant Yankee woman who was mean about one of her beloved former (and of course loyal) servants, and would prefer a "good Irish girl" to nanny her children because, you know, she doesn't KNOW -them- like Scarlett (and Mitchell, obviously) does...

MAKE WAY FOR DUCKLINGS!

I used to love that book as a kid.** And last week, it's happened for reals.

thanks for sharing, Lina. too sweet.

**the Wiki review is cracking my shit up. "Poor characterization?"

Critics note that the "loosely plotted" story gives no true explanation for why Mr. Mallard leaves the island in the Charles River or why the Mallards did not simply stay on the lagoon island in the first place and avoid the bicyclists on the shore.

Yes, personally, I prefer your more gritty, naturalistic, three-dimensional duck stories. However, in a more deconstructionist reading, we see that in fact Mr. Mallard is merely a symbol of the war-torn country's existentialist anxieties; in fact, in an era of mass displacement, there IS no "true explanation" for one's actions, no way of guaranteeing one can forever evade the bicyclists, and thus we may understand Mr. Mallard's decision to leave the island as an absurdist expression of protest in a meaningless...okay I really need to stop that now.

Quote of the day, 6/12/08

Unlike Winston, [Julia] had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:

"When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear for you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?"

That was very true, he thought...For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force?

--Orwell, 1984

Banned book project

via Sarah J, coupla months later, mostly because this is exactly the sort of thing that I can focus on right about not.

How it works: these are the 110 top banned books. Bold what you’ve read, italicize what you’ve read part of. Read more.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes


Mind you, how many of these I can -remember- more than vaguely would be a different question.

I'm still boggling over "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble." WTF? Someone has a problem with donkeys? Pebbles? Picnics?

Just a few brief notes

or, The fifteen second version of the posts I would be making if I had the time, energy, and/or inclination:

1) A stranger on the Internets objecting on their own blog to what they perceive as your assery regarding one of their posts, even saying something to you along the lines of "sit your ignorant ass down and shut the fuck up till you know what the hell you're talking about," does not, in fact, amount to your "being silenced."

2) Transpeople are not actually out to steal your precious wimminly fluids, rare and desirable as those undoubtably are.

2a) They're not out to steal your precious Andrew Sullivan fluids either.

3) Yes, racism still is socially acceptable. Yes, so is sexism. No, you don't win anything. Yes, you are still being an asshole. No, you don't win anything for that either.

3a) Phyllis Chesler, oh, and Judy whosis, I'm looking at you. Also, Phyl, the whole mutation into a rabid Islamophobic Pajamas Media-blogging possible McCain supporter, neocon thing? David Cronenberg called, he wants to film it. The rest of us really don't enjoy the spectacle, though.

4) Monday was International Sex Workers Rights Day.

5) I know this is a really difficult concept, but generally speaking, if you want other people to give a shit about you and your problems, it helps if you in turn give a shit about them, once in a while.

6) There is no point six.

7) Baby raccoons sound a lot like baby birds, and dogs get -really- excited about their presence in one's chimney.

8) Stephen King is a pretty good writer, except when he isn't.

9) sweet steaming baby Yog-Soggoth, you're more loathsome every day. p.s. shouldn't you be out campaigning, anyway?

10) This is not, in fact, an autonomous collective.

11) This is not your beautiful house.

12) This is not your beautiful blog.

13) And the London Underground is not a political movement.

14) And, oops, neither are you.

Quote of the day, 9/26/07

"...Poor old gentleman!" she said to the old man. "Mrs. Archer is certainly not going to let you leave here without a full meal inside of you."

Mrs. Archer looked doubtful. "I have some eggs," she said...

"I would rather not trouble you," the old man said to Mrs. Archer.

"Nonsense," Kathy said. "We've got to see that you get a good hot meal to go on with." She took Mrs. Archer's arm and began to walk her out to the kitchen. "Just some eggs," she said. "Fry four or five...I'll tell you, fry up a few potatoes too. He won't care if they're half-raw. These people eat things like heaps of fried potatoes and eggs and..."

..."Kathy," [Mrs. Archer] said, "I'm just a little worried. If he really is drunk, I mean, and if Jim should hear about it, with the baby here and everything..."

"Why, Jean!" Kathy said. "You should live out in the country for a while, I guess. Women always give out meals to starving men. And you don't need to tell Jim. Blanche and I certainly won't say anything."

"Well" said Mrs. Archer, "you're sure he isn't drunk?"

"I know a starving man when I see one," Kathy said. "When an old man like that can't stand up and his hands shake and he looks so funny, that means he's starving to death. Literally starving."

"Oh my!" said Mrs. Archer. She hurried to the cupboard under the sink and took out two potatoes. Two enough, do you think? I guess we're really doing a good deed."

Kathy giggled. "Just a bunch of Girl Scouts," she said...

...Then Kathy came, leading the old man by the arm. "There," she said. "Now, Mrs. Archer's fixed you a lovely hot meal."

The old man looked at Mrs. Archer. "I'm very grateful," he said.

"Isn't that nice!" Kathy said. She nodded approvingly at Mrs. Archer...

..."What's your name?" Kathy asked.

"O'Flaherty, Madam. John O'Flaherty."

"Well, John," Kathy said, "I am Miss Valentine, and this lady is Mrs. Archer and the other is Mrs. Corn."

"How do you do?" the old man said.

"I gather you're from the old country," Kathy said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Irish, aren't you?" Kathy said.

"I am, Madam." The old man plunged the fork into one of the eggs and watched the yolk run onto the plate. "I knew Yeats," he said suddenly.

"Really?" Kathy said, leaning forward. "Let me see--he was the writer, wasn't he?"

"Come out of charity, come dance with me in Ireland," the old man said. He rose and, holding onto the chair back, bowed solemnly to Mrs. Archer. "Thank you again, Madam, for your generosity." He turned and started for the front door. The three women got up and followed him.

"But you didn't finish," Mrs. Corn said.

"The stomach," the old man said, "as this lady has pointed out, shrinks. Yes indeed," he went on reminiscently, "I knew Yeats..."

...Then he turned and thumbed his nose at Mrs. Corn. "I hate old women," he said.

"Well!" said Mrs. Corn faintly.

"I may have imbibed somewhat freely," the old man said to Mrs. Archer, "but I never served bad sherry to my guests. We are of different worlds, Madam."

"Didn't I tell you?" Mrs. Corn was saying. "Haven't I been telling you all along?"

Mrs. Archer, her eyes on Kathy, made a tentative motion of pushing the old man through the door, but he forestalled her.

"Come dance with me in Ireland," he said. Supporting himself against the wall, he reached the outer door and opened it. "And time runs on," he said.

--Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories

Book Club

I haven't forgotten. I'm gonna be busy this next week, (please, if someone sees me online, tell me to get back to work, will you?) but after the 13th or so, I'd like to get this going.

A bit more on modesty: the Divine Miss Ros

Amanda McKittrick, that is, bless her, fervently.

The Old Home.

Don't I see the old home over there at the base
Of a triangle not overcrowded with space:
'Twas there I first breathed on the eighth of December,
In the year of Our Lord the month after November.

I've been told it was snowy and blowy and wild
When I entered the home as a newly-born child,
There wasn't much fuss, nor was there much joy
For sorrow was poignant I wasn't a boy.

I felt quite contented as years flitted on
That I to the coarser sex did not belong
Little dreaming that ever the time would arrive
That of female attire I would be deprived.

By a freak of the lustful that spreads like disease
Which demanded that females wear pants if you please,
But I stuck to the decentest style of attire
And to alter my " gender " I'll never aspire.

During that hallowed century now dead and gone
In which good Queen Victoria claimed to be born
From childhood her modesty ever was seen
Her exalted position demanded when Queen.

She set an example of decency rare,
That no English Queen before her you'd compare
Neither nude knee nor ankle, nude bosom nor arm
Dare be seen in her presence this Queen to alarm.

She believed in her sex being loving and kind,
And modesty never to march out of line
By exposing those members unrest to achieve,
Which pointed to morals immorally grave.

But sad to relate when she bade " Adieu "
To earth and its vanities tainted with " rue,"
That centre of fashion, so French in its style,
Did its utmost to vilify decency's smile

And mock at these garments which proved in their day,
At a glance-who was who-and wherein gender lay,
But alas ! Since the death of our great and good Queen
That attribute " Modesty " 's ne'er to be seen.

It wasn't long after till modesty grew
A thing of the past for me and for you;
Last century's fashions were blown quite aside,
The ill-advised folk of this age now deride.

The petticoat faded away as we do
In circumference it covered not one leg but two,
Its successor exposes the arms, breasts and necks,
Legs, knees and thighs and too often-the ---.

Anyone interested in a book club?

I've been thinking, you know, I've got just a shitload of books that I've either been meaning to read, have gotten partway through and then abandoned, or wouldn't mind rereading. Most of 'em political/feminist, but really I'm up for just about anything, and would love to trade suggestions and then, like, actually have a motivation to finish and TALK about 'em. What say? If you're interested, drop me an email at bel4 AT earthlink DOT com.

Quote of the day, 6/9/07

As a culture, we are coasting on the tag-ends of our assumptions about a lot of things (including the difference between fiction and "propaganda.") ...Outside of commercial genres--which can remain petrified and profitable almost indefinitely--how many more incarnations of the Bitch Goddess can anybody stand? How many more shoot-'em-ups on Main Street? How many more young men with identity problems?

The lack of workable myths in literature, of acceptable dramatization of what our experience means, harms much more than art itself. We do not only choose or reject works of art on the basis of those myths; we interpret our own experience in terms of them. Worse still, we actually perceive what happens to us in the mythic terms our culture provides.

The problem of "outsider" artists is the whole problem of what to do with unlabeled, disallowed, disavowed, not even-consciously perceived experience, experience which cannot be spoken about because it has no embodiment in existing art. Is one to create new forms wholesale--which is practically impossible? Or turn to old ones?...Or "trivial," trashy genres?...

Make something unspeakable and you make it unthinkable.

...Outsiders' writing is always in critical jeopardy. Insiders know perfectly well that art ought to match their ideas of it...

But outsiders' problems are real enough, and we will all be facing them quite soon, as the nature of human experience on this planet changes radically--unless, of course, we all end up in the Second Paleolithic, in which case we will have to set about re-creating the myths of the First Paleolithic.

...Darko Suvin of the University of Montreal has suggested that science fiction patterns often resemble those of medieval literature. I think the resemblance lies in that medieval literature so often dramatizes not peoples' social roles but the life of the soul; hence we find the following patterns in both science fiction and medieval tales:

I find myself in a new world, not knowing who I am or where I came from. I must find these out, and also find out the rules of the world I inhabit (the journey of the soul from birth to death).

Society needs something. I/we must find it (the quest).

We are miserable because our life is out of whack. We must find out what is wrong and change it (the drama of sin and salvation)

Science fiction, political fiction, parable, allegory, exemplum--all carry a heavier intellectual freight (and self-consciously so) than we are used to. All are didactic. All imply that human problems are collective, perceptive, or cognitive--not the fictionally sex-linked problems of success, competition, "castration," education, love, or even personal identity, with which we are all so very familiar. I would even go farther and say that science fiction, political fiction (when successful), and the modes (if not the content) of much medieval fiction all provide myths for dealing with the kinds of experiences we are actually having now, instead of the literary myths we have inherited, which only tell us about the kinds of experiences we think we ought to be having.

...Our current fictional myths leave vast areas of human experience unexplored: work for one, genuine religious experience for another, and above all the lives of the traditionally voiceless, the majority of whom are women. (When I speak of the "traditionally voiceless" I am not pleading for descriptions of their lives--we have had plenty of that by very vocal writers--what I am talking about are fictional myths growing out of their lives and told by themselves for themselves).

Forty years ago those Americans who read books at all read a good deal of fiction. Nowadays such persons read popularized anthropology, psychology, history, and philosophy. Perhaps current fictional myths no longer tell the truth about any of us.

When things are changing, those who know least about them--in the usual terms--may make the best job of them. There is so much to be written about, and here we are with nothing but the rags and tatters of what used to mean something. One thing I think we must know--that our traditional gender roles will not be part of the future, as long as the future is not a second Stone Age. Our traditions, our books, our morals, our manners, our films, our speech, our economic organization, everything we will have inherited, tell us that to be a Man one must bend Nature to one's will--or other men. This means ecological catastrophe in the first instance and war in the second. To be a Woman, one must be first and foremost a mother and after that a server of Men; this means overpopulation and the perpetuation of the first two disasters. The roles are deadly. The myths that serve them are fatal.

Women cannot write--using the old myths.

But using new ones--?

--Joanna Russ, "What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write," 1971, as anthologized in To Write Like a Woman

I had several reasons for choosing this quote today, some of which are not quite as coherent as others--yet.

Quote of the day, 5/12/07

...He thought of Mrs. Athelny, cheerful mother of many children, with her kindly hospitality and her good humour; of Sally, grave for her years, with funny little maternal ways and an air of authority...and then in a bunch of all of the others, merry, boisterous, healthy, and handsome. His heart went out to them. There was one quality in them which they had that he did not remember to have noticed in people before, and that was goodness. It had not occurred to him till now, but it was evidently the beauty of their goodness which attracted him. In theory he did not believe in it: if morality were no more than a convenience good and evil had no meaning. He did not like to be illogical, but here was simple goodness, natural and without effort, and he found it beautiful.

--Somerset Maugham, "Of Human Bondage"

Guns and butter

In the beginning, like camels, we lived on our past. We had been well nourished. The Bougey is famous for its food and we didn't feel hungry until some weeks after strict rationing had been enforced...We were really very well off. What was lacking was milk, butter and eggs. There was an infinitesimal amount of these on our ration cards, but by the time the Germans had collected their requisitioning there was nothing left to distribute to the inhabitants. The German soldiers were interested in butter. It appeared many of them had never tasted it. Had not Hitler asked them if they wanted butter or guns and had they not given the right answer? One day, marketing for whatever unrationed food might still be for sale, a German soldier came into the shop. He pointed to a huge mound of butter and said, One kilo. One kilo, the clerk exclaimed. The German nodded his head impatiently. The butter was weighed and wrapped up. Unwrapping one end of the package the German walked out of the shop. From the open door where I was standing I saw him bite off a piece of the butter. It evidently was not what he expected it to be for with a brusque movement he threw it violently over the garden wall of the house opposite. The story got about. People came to look at it. No one would touch it. There it stayed.

--The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook

aw, hell.

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut.