Freud is such a problem.

Partly this is because he was right, and partly it is because he was grossly, irredeemably wrong. Oftentimes in the same essay. And partly it is because his disciples and intellectual descendants have reified his ideas, transforming them from theories into universal truths. (Not that Freud himself did not contribute to that tendency with his pontifical--in fact, patriarchal--stance.)

And any truth Freud has to offer is most assuredly not universal.

But that doesn't mean he isn't thought-provoking and it doesn't mean he can't be illuminating. It just means you have to approach him with caution and an independent mind.

Case in point: I started reading Frederick Karl's biography of Kafka, Franz Kafka: Representative Man: Prague, Germans, Jews, and the Crisis of Modernism and very shortly thereafter posted a plaintive call for better biographies. Happily, perverse_idyll suggested Ernst Pawel's The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. I haven't finished Pawel yet, but I've found an oddly illuminating point of comparison which I think will demonstrate why I found Karl unreadable and Pawel compelling.

First, from Karl:
( this is where I started yelling )

Compare with:
( the analogous opening move from Pawel )

( And then I go on talking for a while )

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WORKS CITED
Karl, Frederick. Franz Kafka: Representative Man: Prague, Germans, Jews, and the Crisis of Modernism. 1991. New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1993.

Pawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1984.

TIME: 25 min.
DISTANCE 3 mi.
TOTAL: 43.4 mi.
NOTES: Shin splints. Ow, goddammit.
SHIRE-RECKONING: We've met up with the Elves. Tra la la lally.

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Wells. Again.

Not that I have anything against Wells, but spending two separate lectures on him seems a bit much. Especially when the only women who are focused on are Woolf, Shelley, and Le Guin (yes, we're all shocked), and there is no lecture devoted to the works of a person of color. I understand that he talks about Delany (presumably in the "Cyberpunk, Postmodernism, and Beyond" lecture), but honestly--you could spend THREE lectures on Delany and not be done. Plus there's Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison and . . .

I should note, btw, that I'm not surprised by this distribution. Not at all. Just, you know, kind of sad.

TIME: 25
DISTANCE: 3.1 mi.
TOTAL: 36.4 mi.
NOTES: Yelling at Prof. Rabkin again.
SHIRE-RECKONING: We're keeping off the Road now.

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I disagree with my learned colleague on so many different points that I can't even list them. So let's just go with the one wherein he is conflating "phallocentrism" with "science fiction." Feminism, goddammit. FEMINISM. You can't be feminist and phallocentric, but you can be feminist and write science fiction. This definition is flawed.

Also, please, for the love of rocket ships, do not generalize from NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE to the genre of science fiction. Please.

coffeeandink links to an excellent post about the ways in which white feminists are failing pretty miserably at the whole "feminism" part when it is--or should be--applied to women who are not white.

And I say, despairingly, didn't we do this already? That was the big feminist revelation of the 90s--see, for example, Patricia Hill Collins' Black Feminist Thought--that women who were not white, straight, middle-class American women were still, hello, WOMEN, and that their concerns were not the same as ours (Yes, I am, in fact, white, straight, and middle-class. Rocking the suburbs, yo.), and that that meant, not that they should shut up and let the white, straight, middle-class women drive, but that the white, straight, middle-class women should let go of their deathgrip on the steering wheel.

Apparently, we white, straight, middle-class women don't learn very well. As DWF points out, we are employing all the same strategies against women of color that men have been employing against women since we started trying to speak up for ourselves over a century ago. We're protecting our privilege. And this when we know, as women and feminists, that privilege is toxic. That it's real--all too real, thank you--but it isn't true. You don't get privilege in our society because you deserve it--which I suspect is why people get so panicky when they think their privilege is endangered. It's awarded arbitrarily, so, in fact, there is NO REASON for it to endure. The emperor is bare-ass naked.

The opposite of privilege isn't disempowerment. The opposite of privilege is equality.

I finally have an idea for my Gold Award project. It came to me in a dream.

Let me back up.

I was a Girl Scout. (Hard though that is even for me to believe.) I actually started out as a Bluebird (the Camp Fire Girls* equivalent of a Brownie), but my Bluebird troop "flew up" to be Junior Girl Scouts on account of a lack of Camp Fire Girls troops. So I was a Junior Girl Scout and then I was a Cadette and then I was a Senior Girl Scout (all of which seems to be now subsumed by Studio 2B which is seriously GIVING ME HIVES and would have ensured I quit Scouting a whole heck of a lot earlier than I actually did. I mean, really. When did Girl Scouting become about style and when did it start marketing itself like those repulsive girly teen magazines that made me think I was never going to be able to get this femininity thing right?), and I earned badges like a mad thing (talk about enabling overachievers) and I earned my Silver Award, and then I was a high school senior and supposed to be working toward my Gold Award (the Girl Scout equivalent of making Eagle Scout, and, yeah, "Gold Award" vs. "Eagle Scout"--lame, I know) . . . and I quit Scouting instead.

There were lots of reasons for that, including internecine politics which meant that my troop went from being extremely small--10 girls or fewer I think--to being part of a troop of 30 and that we went from having a scout leader whom I adored to having a scout leader whom I disliked very much, but one quite genuine reason was that I could not think of a project for my Gold Award.***

Well, now I've thought of one. I couldn't have done it when I was a Scout, and actually, I don't think it would have been nearly as necessary in Oak Ridge--which has an astonishingly good public school system. But goodness knows the college students I've taught here in the Upper Midwest could have used it. To wit: a one week course in how to close-read a text. Start with literature, sure, but the last day have everyone bring in a text of their own choosing. Advertising, politics, the damn mission statement of the Girl Scouts of the USA. Bonus if you bring in something that isn't text and close-read it anyway. You make it self-perpetuating (which is a condition of the award now and probably was in 1992 also) by having a younger scout serve as a teaching assistant/apprentice, on the understanding that she'll teach the class next year with an apprentice of her own. Make it something that students sign up for and make it available to everyone, not just kids in college track classes. I have a hobby horse about close-reading, but it is an actual skill and in a culture of spin and hype, it's actually pretty darn valuable.

So there. Closure. Weird and pointless, but closure nonetheless.

I do actually feel better.


---
*I notice that Camp Fire USA now prides itself on being coeducational**, which I think is pretty darn cool, actually. But back in the '80s in my hometown, no such thing.

**Whereas Girl Scouts prides itself on being girls only and Boy Scouts of America seems largely unaware that girls exist at all--and somebody could do a quite interesting study on the differences in presentation between these three organizations; finding the page where Camp Fire says "coeducational" and Girl Scouts says "girls only" took less time and effort than trying--and failing--to find anything on the BSA site that mentioned inclusion/exclusion policies. The "Organizational Identity" page is about copyright and trademark. I do notice that "Venturing" is at least nominally coed, but boy is that not where BSA is putting its money and its mouth. (And I wonder a little about how many teenage girls actually have the balls--if you'll pardon the expression--to stick it out when they're, in essence, joining a boy scout troop.)

Okay, longest digressive footnote in history, I'll stop now. Except that I should add that I'm well aware of the debate, both past and ongoing, about whether girls-only is a good thing or a bad thing. Having personally had rotten experiences with both teenage boys and teenage girls, my feeling is really that it isn't the sex of the group members that matters, but how they're taught to treat each other. It's certainly true that boys can be poisonous little shits to girls (and vice versa), but it's also true that girls, like boys, can be poisonous little shits to each other. So, I think girls-only can be a positive thing (cf. Carol Gilligan et al.), but I also think coeducational could work just fine, if the adults have a big stick handy and are willing to use it to whack the culturally conditioned sexual harassment bullshit when it rears its head. (And if the big stick is actually effective in getting it through kids' heads that what they're doing is cosmically Not Okay.) I also hope that the culturally conditioned sexual harassment bullshit isn't as bad as it was when I was a teenager, but, you know, I'm not holding my breath on that one.

Um. Oops. Okay, really stopping this time.

***Notice the requirement to purchase something. And then the further requirement to earn "charms" as steps along the way. Which, yes, the individual girl scout will have to purchase. This was a constant source of tension between scouting and family: the sheer amount of crap that Girl Scouts insisted you had to buy. For instance, Juniors, Cadettes, and Seniors all had different colored uniforms, which meant a new outlay of money every two or three years. Plus the handbooks. And all the insignia and badges and patches and this and that and on and on world without end. And let's not even get STARTED on the godforsaken cookie sales. Materialistic. Yes. And oh look. Of course they have an online store and a "boutique" aimed at the girls. Can't teach 'em too young to start searching for gratification through consumption.

Ahem.

I wasn't a really good match with Girl Scouts as a teenager, and I'm clearly even less well matched now. Although it seriously makes me want to start a program called Geek Scouts. Boys can come, too.

Paul Di Filippo reviews A Companion to Wolves (among others) for the Washington Post and thinks it's a soap opera for furries and yaoi readers. On the other hand, the ALA's Reading List Council thinks it's worth a mention.

ETA: myalexandria has a very thoughtful post about Isolfr and feminism. To which I can mostly say, yeah, that's what we meant.

wild_patience isn't real keen on me, but I can't argue with her raving about Bear.

More commentary on Mélusine from imani.

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N.b., I collect links to reviews of my books for several reasons. One is that, as a writer, I'm curious about what people think. Another is that, as a long-time reader and a literary scholar, I'm fascinated by the different ways one book can be read and interpreted and reacted to. Now, I could chart reactions to any book, any author's body of work. But, you know, I've got my experimental sample right here. Also, collecting reviews of somebody else's work seems weird and creepy and even a little stalkerish. Also, although this may sound counter-intuitive, it's easier for me to be impartial about reactions to my work than it would be for me to be impartial to reactions about somebody else's book that I loved (or hated).

But here's the thing. Mélusine was published in 2005. The last time I even looked at it, except for fact-checking for The Virtu and The Mirador and Corambis, was sometime in 2004. Today, in 2008, my head is full of Corambis and, guiltily, the stories I want to write once Corambis is finished. I've moved on, in other words. Which is not to say that I don't still love Mélusine and that I'm not proud of it. Because I do and I am. But, to swerve for a moment into a possibly florid metaphor, my novels (I hope) are like a chambered nautilus marking my growth as a writer and as a person, and Mélusine is a chamber I've grown out of. This is, I think, the way it should be. You shouldn't get stuck on one novel, one moment in your writing life, one chamber of your nautilus. So, for me, Mélusine is a record of who I was and what I was thinking, rendered in fictional form, in the first few years of the new century. Whereas (to pick an example at random from books I read and loved last year) Peter Watts' Blindsight is something I'm thinking about right now. I'm engaged with it in a way I'm not engaged with my own work by the time it gets published. I'm far more likely to be upset with a hypothetical someone saying something wrong-headed about matociquala's Dust than I am with a hypothetical someone saying something wrong-headed about The Mirador, because I love Dust in a way you can only love books you didn't write yourself.

Which leads me to my further point: I do not post links to reviews so that people will defend my honor. My honor's fine, thanks. I post the links so that I can find them again and because I think they're interesting. Which, you know, is maybe just egocentrism. But hey. My sandbox. I can build my sandcastle any way I want.

Has anyone out there read Anne M. Butler's Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865-90 (U of Illinois P, 1987)? I'm currently on p. 38 and am seriously wondering if there's going to be sufficient pay-off to reward slogging through the unsupported generalizations, the implicit but unexamined moral framework imposed by the author, the failure to define terms or produce a sufficiently theorized conceptual model ...

I'm coming perilously close to answering my own question here.

The book was worth purchasing ($6 at Half-Price Books) for the photographs alone, but do I have any hope of the text getting better, or should I just chalk this one up as "pioneering work in neglected field" and let go?

Sinisalo, Johanna. Troll: A Love Story. Originally published as Not Before Dark in the UK and as something with a heck of a lot of ä's in Finnish; as I don't have my copy with me, I cannot transcribe it at the moment. Won the Tiptree in 2004.

And I have to admit, I am a little puzzled thereby.
( spoilers and possibly more crabbiness than the book deserves )

So, leaving aside the expectations engendered (so to speak) by the Tiptree and then not met, my problem with Troll is the problem I'm finding with more and more fantasy and science fiction these days, which is that the novel stops just as the story gets interesting. Or, in other words, a lot of sf is about setting up a catastrophe in the same way a joke is about setting up a punchline. Ergo, once we get to the catastrophe, we stop. But, see, the interesting part of a story is what happens after the catastrophic punchline, when the protagonist has to pick him- or herself up off the floor and figure out what to do next. That's the hard part, both to live and to write, but by the same token, it's the part that matters. It's the part that would force Sinisalo's characters--Angel, Spider, Palomita--to become real people, queens (to borrow a metaphor from Carroll which has its own gendered and sexualized freight when applied out of the context of chess) instead of pawns.

mirrorthaw and I rented Tombstone this weekend.

( spoilery discussion, with some reference to Emma Bull's TERRITORY, follows )