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"A husband, finding his wife in bed with her lover: “Madame! Is this prudent? Supposing somebody else..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:52:58 -0400

“A husband, finding his wife in bed with her lover: “Madame! Is this prudent? Supposing somebody else had seen you!”

- Madame de Pompadour by Nancy Mitford, on the social climate of the French court (via marginalutilite)

blackwomenworldhistory: Una Maud Victoria Marson...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:40:18 -0400

blackwomenworldhistory:

Una Maud Victoria Marson (1905-1965)

Una Marson was a pioneer Jamaican feminist, poet, playwright and social activist. A black Jamaican woman, from the middle class and of strict Baptist upbringing, Marson emigrated to work in London in 1932, producing plays, poems and programmes for the BBC during World War II. She was the epitome of a black political artist.

Una Marson was born February 6, 1905 in Santa Cruz, St. Elizabeth. After leaving school, Marson worked as a volunteer social worker. In 1926, she got a job as assistant editor for the Jamaican political journal, Jamaica Critic. As the daughter of a middle‐class Baptist minister, Marson’s intellectual development took place within the context of a religious home and the conservative and colonial Hampton high school, where she had won a scholarship place. When Marson left school in 1922, she directed her studies at commerce and secretarial work, and her decision to work with the Salvation Army and the YMCA in Kingston was an early indication of her commitment to ideas of social justice. Her interests in journalism were also evident. In 1928 she became Jamaica’s first female editor and publisher of her own magazine, The Cosmopolitan in 1930, Marson published her first collection of poems, entitled Tropic Reveries, which won the Institute of Jamaica’s Musgrave Medal. The editorial statement of this bold and defiantly “modern” publication with a strong emphasis on women’s issues proclaimed: “This is the age of woman: what man has done, women may do.” Marson herself certainly lived up to this axiom, and by the time she left Kingston for London in 1932 she had also established her literary credentials, having published two volumes of poetry (Tropic Reveries in 1930; Heights and Depths, 1931) and staged her first play, At What a Price, to critical acclaim. In 1932 she left Jamaica for London.

From 1936 she moved back and forth between London and Jamaica. Her sojourn in England made Una Marson more aware of race equality issues around the world – from West Africa to the US. After working as an English-speaking secretary to Abyssinian minster Dr. C. W. Martin in London, Marson accompanied Haile Selassie as his a personal secretary on his last ill-fated plea for Abyssinia to the League of Nations on 30 June 1936. She subsequently returned to Kingston – having being told that she was heading from a nervous breakdown from over work. However, on her return to Jamaica, Marson continued at her usual pace. She promoted national literature by helping to create the Kingston Readers and Writers Club, as well as the Kingston Drama Club. She also founded the Jamaica Save the Children Fund, which was an organization that raised funds to give the poorer children money to get a basic education. In 1937 Marson published The Moth and the Star [poetry], followed by London Calling, [play] working with Louise Bennett, and Pocomania [play]. In 1938, Marson returned to London to continue to work on the Jamaican Save the Children project that she started in Jamaica, and also to be in the staff of the Jamaican Standard. Although Marson’s arrival in London in 1932 coincided historically with that of C. L. R. James, her cultural and intellectual ideas set her apart from both the “angry young men” who came in the 1930s and the later generation of emigrants. As her journalism and her creative works had already demonstrated, Marson was always concerned to represent issues of gender and women’s liberation alongside those of racial equality and cultural nationalism.

In London she lodged at the Peck ham home of fellow Jamaican Dr. Ronald Moody, and soon became involved with the League of Coloured Peoples, an organization founded by Moody in 1931 to address issues of racial division and prejudice. As editor of the League’s journal, The Keys, Marson was easily networked into black British circles and had opportunities to meet many of the key figures in the emergent nationalist and anti‐colonial movements. Her interest in Pan‐Africanism developed during this period, and in 1934 she met the King of Ghana, Ofori Atta. However, her interest in women’s rights continued to be equally strong and in the same year she gave a speech at the Women’s International League Conference in London. In 1935 her internationalism and conviction on issues of women’s rights meant that she was the first Jamaican invited to speak at the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship Conference in Istanbul and, in the same year, the first black woman invited to attend the League of Nations at Geneva, where a meeting with the Ethiopian delegation at the conference further raised her awareness of the urgent struggle against colonialism. Provoked and outraged by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, Marson immediately offered her help to Dr. Charles Martin, the Ethiopian Minister. She went on to work as personal secretary to HIM Haile Selassie, but by September of 1936 she was severely depressed and unable to continue.

Marson returned home to Jamaica during a period of intense social and political unrest, but the sense of social ferment and the anticipation of certain change appear to have restored her public voice and her commitment to politics. By 1937 she had a regular column in Public Opinion, the weekly paper of the People’s National Party led by Norman Manley, and published a series of strident articles, including one entitled “Feminism”. It was also in September of this year that she published her third volume of poetry, The Moth and the Star, with many poems clearly and purposefully addressed to issues of gender and race politics that also animated her play Pocomania, staged in January 1938. Retaining her early practical commitment to social justice, Marson worked hard to raise money for a Jamaica Save the Children Association (Jamsave) while also reporting for the Jamaican Standard. In 1938 Marson returned to London in order to report on and give evidence to the Moyne Commission (a British government commission investigating the riots and unrest that had swept across the Caribbean region) and to fundraise for Jamsave. After the declaration of war in 1939 she witnessed changes in the black community in Britain, as fewer students made the journey and many of those based in London moved north.

In 1941, she was hired by the BBC Service Empire to work on a program in which World War II soldiers would have their messages read on the radio to their families. By 1942, she became the program’s West Indies Producer. During the same year, she turned the programme into Caribbean Voices, which was a forum in which Caribbean literary work is read over the radio. Her radio show was said by writer Kamau Brathwaite to be the single most important literary catalyst for Caribbean creative writing in English. In 1945 Marson published a poetry collection, ‘Towards the stars’. It is a mark of her prominence at that time that on her arrival she was met by huge crowds, and a lunch organized in her honour by the Poetry League of Jamaica was attended by Edna Manley, a prominent sculptor and wife of the future Prime Minister Norman Manley. Marson worked for some years for the nationalist Pioneer Press, the book‐publishing arm of The Gleaner. Post 1945 details about Marson’s personal life are sparse. Many or her works were unpublished or circulated mainly in Jamaica. However, in 1960 she moved to the United States, but after a failed marriage, returned to Jamaica, where she died in 1965 of a heart attack. It was only in the 1990s that her pioneering work as a writer, journalist, and intellectual found sustained acknowledgement in both Caribbean and black British histories.

- Most of her writings are found only in the Institute of Jamaica, the parent institution of the National Library of Jamaica

Works of Mason:

▪   Tropic Reveries (1930, book)

▪   Heights and Depths (1932, book)

▪   At What a Price (1933, play)

▪   Moth and the Star (1937, book)

▪   London Calling (1938, play)

▪   Pocomania (1938, play)

▪   Towards the Stars: Poems (1945, book)

Also published many articles in various periodicals

Criticisms of Mason’s Work:

Critics have both praised and dismissed Marson’s poetry. She has been criticized for mimicking European style, such as Romantic and Georgian poetics. Denise deCaires Narain suggests that Marson was overlooked because poetry concerning the condition and status of females was not important to audiences at the time the works were produced. Other critics, by contrast, praised Marson for her modern style. Some, like Narain, even suggest that her mimicking challenged conventional poetry of the time in an effort to criticize European poets. Regardless, Marson was active in the West Indian writing community during that period. Her involvement with Caribbean Voices was important to publicising Caribbean literature internationally, as well as spurring nationalism within the Caribbean Islands, which she represented.

Information Acquired from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Una_Marson on March 27, 2011

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28320522@N08/2668447857/ on March 27, 2011

Book: The life of Una marson by Delia Jarrett-Macauley

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/01/2009_09_tue.shtml on March 28, 2011

Ruth Franklin: An open letter to a few good magazine editors; or, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore"

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:03:52 -0400

Ruth Franklin: An open letter to a few good magazine editors; or, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore":

Dear Jim, Scott, Graydon, Hugo, Josh, and Adam:

I hope you don’t mind that I’m calling you by your first names, even though I know only one of you. (Josh and I go way back.) I realize I could have just said, “Hey guys!” which, come to think of it, really makes my point for me. But I wanted this…

slaughterhouse90210: “I was always desired. But now I am...

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 11:05:28 -0400

slaughterhouse90210:

“I was always desired. But now I am valued. And that is a different thing, I find.”
—Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Always Be Counting

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 11:43:12 -0400

After the profoundly disappointing VIDA event on women and book reviews last month, I felt duty bound to attend this second VIDA event at the Center for Fiction last Wednesday, May 29th. This packed event in the charming but always too-hot second floor of the Center for Fiction was the public portion of the NBCC (National Book Critic’s Circle) meeting and part of BEA (Book Expo America), so not only was the room packed, but it was packed with important editors and writers and eager freelancers.

The panel was moderated by Laurie Muchnick, book editor at Bloomberg News and president of the NBCC. She took a much firmer hand than the moderator at the Housing Works event had taken, with welcome results. Muchnick was aided, too, by the panel’s composition: with one of the co-founders of VIDA (Erin Belieu), the editor of the New York Times Book Review (Pamela Paul), the editor of Tin House (Rob Spillman), the book critic for New York Magazine (Kathryn Schulz), and a novelist (Meg Wolitzer!), the panel included people with a wide range of perspectives on the problem.

You can read Laurie Stone’s thoughts on the same event here.

Paul, new in her position, knows first hand the special vitriol reserved for women in positions of power in the book world, and it was reassuring to hear her speak about her ambitious goals for a wide range of diversity in the pages of the Times. Wolitzer, as a novelist whose books treat Big American themese without getting Big American Male (FRANZEN! ROTH! UPDIKE) attention, spoke about reviews, blurbs, and marketing from the perspective of an artist wanting to make money through her art. By contrast, Schulz spoke about her position at New York, where she has complete freedom to choose books to review and was really smart about the real downsides of that freedom: for, while she reviews a fairly good balance of women to men (5 women for every 6 men), her predecessor, a man, reviewed 8 books by men for every 1 book by a woman. Spillman was a welcome presence on the panel: an editor whose journal had made big changes to assigning and soliciting pieces based on their originally very imbalanced VIDA numbers.

For me, it was Belieu and Schulz who best summed up the message of VIDA: for true change to happen, we need to always be counting: how many women are reviewing? how many books by women are getting reviewed? True, the count is crude and imperfect, but it also reveals a continuing inequity in our literary culture that is not trivial. And, though I, too, tire of counting, being tired of counting (and seeing, yet again, how little we count for), is no reason to stop.

Belieu spoke about the origins of VIDA, in Cate Marvin’s 2009 essay, emailed to like-minded friends, bemoaning the lack of reviews of and by women writers—a cri de Coeur that became VIDA. She said that, in spite of all the limitations, “we liked the simplicity and elegance of the count. We liked the fact that we were able to get a picture of the year.”

And Schulz returned to this at the end, positing that a structural answer is the only answer. That editors need to do what Spillman has done at Tin House: that part of curating a vibrant literary culture includes counting: how many books by women are we reviewing? how many by men? how many of our reviewers are women? how are people of color represented in the numbers of reviewers and of books reviewed? how are we doing in representing a range of class perspectives, in reviews and in books reviewed? If we don’t ask this question, and continue to think that all we want is “the best,” the best will continue to look like this hoary dinosaur.

Only after listening to this did I recognize how much counting is part of my life as an editor, a teacher, and a teacher of teachers.

When we edit The Norton Reader, we look for all kinds of diversity and we look to see that every section of the reader not just “Personal Narrative” includes contributions from women and people of color.

When I teach young teachers how to put a syllabus together, I demand that they look for essays old and new, difficult and easy, and that they make sure that there their syllabus represents women, people of color, gay and lesbians writers, and writers from a range of class backgrounds.

When I design my own syllabi, I demand the same of myself.

And when I was working on the introduction to the forthcoming (Summer 2013) special issue of Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies on Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies and Feminist Theory, Urmila Seshagiri (who has an article in the issue) and I engaged in our own, informal count. How many special issues on feminist theory had Mfs done recently? One, kind of. How about modernism/modernity (the other top scholarly journal in the field)? Zero, ever. So this forthcoming issue, with eight articles by eight women scholars using feminist theory to analyze the work of ten often neglected women artists from the early 20th century will be a good corrective, to say the least.

Still, I dwell so deeply and completely in a world of women that sometimes I wonder if I’m doing too much.

The other day, I asked the students in my summer graduate class why they were enrolled in a class on modernist women writers (100% women). One woman, a strong feminist, said that, as she came to the end of her M.A., she realized that for her coursework, she had only read three women writers.

People, our work here is far from done.

Always be counting.

It’s a start.

Tender Buttons (Mutton)

Thu, 30 May 2013 07:58:10 -0400

Tender Buttons (Mutton)

Mrs. Dalloway at 88

Sat, 18 May 2013 14:16:34 -0400

May 14th was the anniversary of the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, so I wrote up a little essay in honor of the anniversary. You can read it at The Awl.

Dull

Thu, 09 May 2013 15:03:01 -0400

“Mean” and “serious” criticism were discussed at last night’s star-studded and utterly, appallingly disappointing panel on women in arts criticism, Sharp, at Housing Works last night (May 8, 2013). Are women critics more reluctant to be mean? Are women getting a chance to write serious criticism?

At one point, as the panelists, accomplished women all, were congratulating each other, someone noted in passing how it was once the way of young critics to make their mark with an initial excoriating salvo: a “mean” review to make your name, and then, a career.

Ladies, allow me.

And yet, mean is really beside the point. In fact, throughout the evening, I found myself thinking of Henry James, a sharp writer, who also said “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” I value kindness as highly as James. However, it is being neither mean nor unkind to call out an event for failing to deliver on its promise.

Kate Bolick got the evening off to a particularly inane start by asking, rhetorically if her gravitating to the midcentury women critics (Hardwick, McCarthy) was indicative of her unconscious feminism—or was it sexism? Because, her hypothesis went on, they didn’t have to deal with feminism.

At that, I should have thrown my beer can on the stage and left. Those midcentury New York women are sharp as tacks because they had to figure out how to navigate the peculiarities of a Patriarchal Landscape for Literary Journalism (let’s call it the PLLJ) in the 1950’s which differs in texture from the PLLJ that Virginia Woolf faced in London in the 1920’s and 1930’s or what we face from the PLLJ in the early 21st century.

That texture was what was consistently missing over the course of the evening. Kael, Hardwick, and McCarthy were invoked. Sontag was mentioned—and at the mention of her name, I longed to summon her ghost to march up on the stage and sweep everyone off it with her grand white forelock. Vague things were said in praise of their sentences, their beautiful sentences. But not one beautiful sentence was quoted—and, in fact, on several occasions specific essays were cited for their great language and then paraphrased. People: quote the words, cut to the clip, it’s not good enough to hum a few bars and call it Beethoven, to say, “Then, Hamlet has this amazing speech where he’s thinking about whether or not to commit suicide, and he really, well, you know, it makes you think.”

As for serious, again, the wasted promise of all that talent on stage and a genuine disagreement, was infuriating. Laura Miller spoke against serious criticism, by which she seemed to mean pretentious, snobby, only-highbrows-need-apply stuff; Miriam Markowitz, by contrast, spoke for the serious, really deftly explaining how The Nation wants its reviews to eschew the consumer model and be about ideas, and how she is heartened to find women pitching her idea-driven reviews more an more. But why was it only at the end that they began speaking about a lively intellectual culture? It would have been nice to hear that word a little earlier. A long digression on how frustrating the marketing of books has become is hardly interesting to a roomful of people who know too well that tale.

The event was described in ways that gave me such hope:

Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael… In spite of abysmal byline counts at many publications, the English speaking world has a rich tradition of women critics of books, music, film, and the culture at large. Join some of today’s celebrated women critics for a spirited discussion of the women they’ve been inspired by, the challenges of being a woman of sharp mind and pen, and the question of whether women have a distinct purpose as critics at all.

I had hoped to hear more about these women, about the particular struggles they faced. Gossip. Anecdotes. Bracing tales to help me gird my loins as I try to pitch more mainstream publications. It would have been great if the organizer had assigned each of the really talented, smart women on stage a precursor, and asked the living critic to read a favorite quote from the precursor and talk about what Sontag or Kael or Didion or Woolf meant to them, why they could or could not be a model for writers today. Then, we would have had a treat, have learned something.

I had hoped to hear about the living critics’ experiences. Ruth Franklin joked that she spent time asking “are you my mentor?” but that thread was dropped. Parul Sehgal said, more than rivalry, she enjoyed stories of collaboration, but had none to hand, and then we had a tired rehearsal of the Arendt-McCarthy friendship. Franklin and Sehgal seemed every bit as smart as I expected but, like others, both women was hamstrung by the loose format, the general, dispiriting inanity.

I had hoped to hear more about reviews written and the reactions they elicited, about judgments withheld, about editors meddling, about if and how being a woman might have affected any of these hesitations or volleys.

I had hoped to hear more direct accounts of the VIDA count and how it affects these writers’ lives—in their pitching, their editing, their conversations with other writers at the office. Franklin said she’s worked with editors who care and editors who don’t. I can believe that, but, again, it wasn’t worth spending my one night out a week to hear it.

As I was getting ready to go to the ironically titled “Sharp,” I remembered Virginia Woolf’s essay “Why?” It’s a cri de coeur, a lamentation on the difficulty of asking any serious question in public and on the waste of time, consequently, of most lectures: “Why, since life holds so many hours, waste one of them on being lectured?” “Why encourage your elders to turn themselves into prigs and prophets, when they are ordinary men and women? Why force them to stand on a platform for forty minutes while you reflect upon the colour of their hair and the longevity of flies?”

Why indeed. Oh, Woolf, how you are missed.

"I resigned from my job yesterday as a matter of principle. I was given a letter to type by a senior..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 15:22:48 -0400

“

I resigned from my job yesterday as a matter of principle. I was given a letter to type by a senior secretary to the auditing firm that had recently been in our books. A woman headed up the team of accountants at our company for several weeks.

The letter was opened to “Gentlemen.” I changed it to “Greetings.” I was told that the letter must be redone because it was the policy of the company to use the salutation “Gentlemen.” I was told that management determined company policy, not uppity secretaries who didn’t know their place. I decided to resign and didn’t redo the letter.

I’m looking for another job, but I did raise quite a few eyebrows and, hopefully, someone’s consciousness.

Name Withheld
September 12, 1982

”

- One of the small acts of courage and defiance that sparked the Second Wave of Feminism and paved the way for much of what we take for granted today. (via explore-blog)

"After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: If anyone in the vicinity..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:13:29 -0400

“

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.

Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?

The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—
She stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,

Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her—Southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—
Non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.

And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,

With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped
—has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.

”

- Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.” I think this poem may be making the rounds, this week, but that’s as it should be. (via oliviacirce)

Noted without comment

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 14:19:57 -0400

“Maude [Margaret’s mother] had, according to family legend, dreamed of going to New York to become an actress. She seems to have stuck to her goal through college…but in opting for the security of marriage, Maude made a decision in keeping with both convention and common sense. With the leisure that married life afforded her she pursued her aesthetic interest along the avenues then open to women of comfortable means: decorating china plates, gardening, reading poetry, collecting early American glass, dressing her children” (10).

From Leonard Marcus’s 1992 biography of Margaret Wise Brown

thesufjanstevensmodel5000: My collegiate infatuation w/ Julia...

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 10:50:01 -0400

thesufjanstevensmodel5000:

My collegiate infatuation w/ Julia Prinsep Jackson (photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron). Prose poems, pencil drawings and songs on 4-track cassette (“Julia” demo probably from 1998 or 1999?). Unearthed last week in an Adidas shoe box (with postcards from the Guggenheim Museum, mostly abstractions by Paul Klee, who also made puppets). The world is abundant.

housingworksbookstore: harperperennial: mcnallyjackson: A lot...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:04:02 -0400

housingworksbookstore:

harperperennial:

mcnallyjackson:

A lot of our snobbier co-workers like to play chess during their breaks.

Daniel and I, on the other hand, like to take all the Biography books down and play a giant-sized game of Guess Who?

I WANT TO PLAAAAY.

Lovely! Also we spy Touré!

largeheartedboy: The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead album as books...

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:14:03 -0400

largeheartedboy:

The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead album as books print.

National Book Critics Circle: The NBCC finalists’ reading is tomorrow night! Please join us at 6...

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 11:13:49 -0500

National Book Critics Circle: The NBCC finalists’ reading is tomorrow night! Please join us at 6...:

nationalbookcriticscircle:

The NBCC finalists’ reading is tomorrow night! Please join us at 6 p.m. on February 26 at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street. Below is a list of readers confirmed to appear.

Poetry

David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago…

I WISH I could go just to see David Ferry….

humorlessfeminists: ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 06:35:35 -0500

humorlessfeminists:

ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET ATWOOD.

ayjay: Window-washers dress as superheroes as they work at a...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 21:29:27 -0500

ayjay:

Window-washers dress as superheroes as they work at a children’s hospital

Smashing Patriarchy After the Second Shift

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 21:40:04 -0500

These days, I’m teaching Woolf and working on revisions to the introduction to a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies. I’m reading feminist theory and reading modernist theory that neglects women. My antennae are up.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not still overwhelmed by the space-time problem of being the mom in a two-career household with two young daughters.

In fact, the combination of trying to do feminist work while trying to live as a feminist who doesn’t yell too much makes me long for Erma Bombeck or Nora Ephron to come and give me a good belly laugh. It’s too predictable.

At the pharmacy, the pharmacists hesitate over my desire for a recommendation for wart removal creams. If she’s really only six, she should go to the dermatologist, they think. I miss a job talk by a potential new colleague that I’d wanted to see, leave the office early and take her to the dermatologist. She recommends I go to the pharmacy for some over-the-counter wart removal cream.
During a stolen hour, re-reading A Room of One’s Own for a book club, I am interrupted in my study by someone requesting that, as long as I’m around for an hour, maybe I can run a load of laundry.
In an effort to be healthy and even lose some weight, I make pasta with lentils which is roundly rejected. The next day, the leftovers are gone and I have no lunch on hand.
The dog was jumpy but not unusually so, this morning, pacing around, cocking his head. Cool it, Flynn, I’m getting to you, I say, but get out of my office! He walks under my desk, cocks his head, lifts his leg and pees on the floor.

Ah, the second shift.

Tom Chiarella on the Happiness of Aaron Swartz - Aaron Swartz Eulogy - Esquire

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:09:19 -0500

Tom Chiarella on the Happiness of Aaron Swartz - Aaron Swartz Eulogy - Esquire

Heroines, All We Know

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 15:44:26 -0500

Heroines are pretty much all I think about these days, if they are not all I know. It’s all modernist women all the time here. And, when I’m not thinking about my introduction to the upcoming special issue of mfs Modern Fiction Studies (forthcoming: Summer, 2013; topic? Women’s Writing, the New Modernism, and Feminist Theory. In other words, fasten your seatbelts!), I’m teaching Woolf. So, it’s a lot a lot of thinking about, reading about, writing about, and reading modern women writers.

For all the work of a quarter century on Woolf (with more Woolf projects to come, no doubt), my passion right now is to shine that light on other women writers. I dream about a book that would profile multiple modern women writers who are not Woolf. Happily, for my reading life, there are two super exciting new books that do just that (and, happily for me, neither is a book I could have written). Community bookstore hosted Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines, in conversation with Lisa Cohen, author of All We Know, for an event last week. It really was one of the coolest book events I’ve been to in a long time. I left just aglow with the sense that, for all the other ills in the world, I could still find a pocket of brilliant women who worked hard in support of other women. That still fills me with hope.

I took to Twitter a few months ago to ask about favorite recent feminist theory and a couple people recommended Zambreno’s book, a meditation on modernist wives with a dollop of Woolf. I haven’t finished the book and I find it brilliant, exasperating, thrilling and crazy. I hope to write more about it separately, but the little fragments of what happened to Zelda Fitzgerald, bumping up against Valerie Eliot and Zambreno’s own frustrations as a “trailing spouse” in the rural Midwest (oh, we have lived that nightmare here, gentle reader) are provocative in the best way. Not since The Pink Guitar have I read a mixed genre feminist text with so much interest (and, it must be said, exasperation).

When I learned that she’d be appearing with Lisa Cohen at Community Bookstore, I jumped at the chance, secured childcare and flew (via the MTA) to Brooklyn. Zambreno was charming and interesting, but Cohen blew my mind: she is clearly a brilliant woman and a beautiful writer for she presented some of the key feminist theoretical ideas of the moment in clear but uncompromising terms. Most notably, her remarks focused on Esther Murphy, one of the three lives of bourgeois lesbians at the heart of All We Know, and Murphy’s inability to complete a book in her lifetime. How do we understand this failure? Cohen’s work fits right in to much recent theoretical work on failure as a queer art, on failure as resistance to socially constructed (straight, white, bourgeois) ideas of happiness, but in a book that one yearns to read for pleasure, not for a theoretical workout. I was so thrilled by the intellectual energy of what Cohen was reading that I whispered to my friend that I wanted to rush up and just give her a big hug of gratitude.

So imagine my sheepish delight to learn that we had been in grad school together! The narcissism of my youth, which prevented me from knowing a brilliant peer because I was too deep in my own worries, aside, this only made that sense of the power of brilliant women all the better.

To see, in the audience of thirty, several friends. To be introduced to new people through them, to learn, from a new friend that she went to college with—and loves—my amazing yoga teacher. All of this is a big thing that is right with the world right now.

I am still reading the books. Both continue to amaze and impress. More soon, I’m sure. Both books have lots of well-deserved press. I’ve tried to sprinkle links throughout the post—click away!