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mouseworks at 12:05pm on 27/04/2010
mouseworks at 12:05pm on 27/04/2010I've been wondering about some of the power dynamics of any group X deciding that any group Y will appreciate and be pleased by Group X's praise, explanation, or direction.
When I was about twelve or thirteen, adult praise of children's art, the whole sentimentalizing of it, annoyed me quite a lot as a rather ambitious kid painter. I could see that what I was doing needed work, so I also felt like this was condescending or uninformed on their parts, one of those adult evil things. If adults praised a painting, and I was particularly annoyed by the phoniness of it, I'd make them take it home. Or at least out of the house. And at that age, I could manage to make them take the painting out of my sight without making it obvious that I was being quite cynical about the whole operation because they hadn't a clue about either how condescending the praise was, how manipulative it felt, or how annoyed I was that the local adult idea of an art class for children was to be boldly expressive and encouraging, and not teach any of the tactics that would give me any sense of mastery over what I was doing. The praise was about the adult's amusement in making a child trivially happy, without seeing the person in front of them. They could not have imagined that my giving them the painting had any cynicism in the act at all.
Fast forward some fifty years. In an on-line photography group, most of the comments on my work are coming from men, as in all but maybe one woman, and most of it assumes that the man making the comments will have something useful to say to me, and that his experience and taste is superior to mine. Most of the comments strike me as seeking particular things from women's work, not always the same things, but along certain lines that were not that different from what at least a fair chunk of men wanted to see in women's poetry -- emotionalism and/or flowers. More emotions, more what it's like to be a woman with a man (um, the first time I tried that, I felt motherly, which turned out to be unfortunately accurate -- curiosity is a terrible thing sometimes).
When I was at the big feminist meeting at Columbia University in 1970 or 1971, I tried to find some other women poets. One was a student of A. R. Ammon's who had told her that women wrote poetry about their yearnings for men. This wasn't that different from some minor poet who taught at Bard saying in A Controversy of Poets that what men wanted from women poets was how it felt to be fucked (this was the early 1960s, and guys weren't inhibited at saying things like that). Tom Clark, after 1971, wrote a poem about women's liberation being doing some self-experimentation and telling her man how to bring her to orgasm.
So, over here, the guys are encouraging women to stick to a narrow specialization that's focused on what pleasure they might get out of it, or what pain women suffer due to sexual obsessions (see Nan Goldin), or pretty stuff. They ask why women don't photograph more nude men, as if a person doing photo collages and reading John Cage, a person doing art nudes of women, and a person who took portraits of people with their dogs or news photographs the only times she's been paid for photography will all have a single unified answer to that question unless men tend to have a singular unified reaction to being nude in front of a XX chromosome type human individual. One guy goes ballistic about being called one of the guys. He's a distinct human individual. Excuse me, but this XY type didn't notice anything odd about asking the XX types why collectively they did or didn't do something.
Guys want to always be treated as individuals who earned what they go. About a third of them in most offices in the 1960s were supported by their staff, generally female -- and I've seen a guy who had been supported by his safe hired by a low-staff office (receptionist only) totally not get that he was failing to do a good job. The woman project manager who saw him hired for more money that he was getting promptly found another job. But women are considered as a category, with some exceptions. I've even been accused of being an ex-man who hadn't learned yet how to be a woman.
It's like the adults with children.
In a third and rather short dialogue happening about the same time, a woman professor I knew at a former job wants me to encourage a young writer whose senior project I read. When I read the project, I was appalled that someone who'd had two creative writing classes, who'd gotten a certificate in publishing, didn't know how to use point of view. She wasn't simply trying an experiment, hadn't figured out POV on her own and certainly had missed any classes where it might have been taught. My publisher says she sees this even in some slush that comes from MFA grads, so it's probably not getting taught. (I haven't seen any egregious mismanagement of POV in amateur slash fic, but I only read that when it comes recommended by trusted people). POV is how a writer controls the reader's attention. General readers expect to follow a particular character and get cued if the POV is going to change, and expect to meet the protagonist first. Writers can play with those expectations, but if a writer wants to write commercial fantasy, as this young writer did, following reader expectations sells more books. Random experiments can be cool; some of my best friends did aleatory fiction. But those things aren't commercial fantasy.
Okay, two years after I read the senior project, the young writer is despairing because she's not getting published. Cool, figure out how to make it happen or move on. The woman professor, who has never written publishable fantasy herself, who thinks that commercial fiction is done by naive little folk artists (couldn't imagine that a single Scottish mom on welfare would have known Latin and French), has been working with this young writer on her style which is now getting interesting. Did I say I found the woman professor wrote in a style I found completely off putting because of a sense that she was talking down to her audience? Is finely wrought style enough to have a commercially viable fantasy audience? And ideas are common.
I doubt the woman professor knows enough to say anything useful about professional fantasy writing, but she's asking me to drop an encouraging work, two years later, not for pay, to this woman who I thought had potential as a journalist. What the woman professor has been doing is what women have been socialized into doing -- being supportive, being encouraging. And it's useless in this case. I'm not a commercially successful fantasy writer, and I've never edited a commercial fantasy publication. I don't need a young writer's temporary relief and gratitude that she's getting acknowledgment from a published but not commercially viable writer who hasn't a real clue whether the young woman should be persisting in writing or mourning a dream that didn't happen and getting on with her life.
Writing in the real world, outside of the third tier universities, is about an adult doing something that other adults who are perfectly free to walk away find interesting. It's not trading flattery for acolytes; it's not the bullshit of "being supportive." If you're an honest writing teacher, you know those little monsters out there want every bit of knowledge you can give them to develop their own writing and they will determine whether you were an important writer or not. And if they're not focused on their own writing more than your encouragement, if they're not cynical about your encouragement, they probably shouldn't be in the game. The ones who are there for a name to drop (" said I'm ready to do a book') aren't likely to pull it off.
If <Famous Writer is also an acquiring editor, and if the editor is asking to see the whole manuscript, that's a different case, but most of the "You're ready for a book" stuff I've heard about was getting into a wannabe's pants or just cultivating attention, some what like telling a woman writer that she's a better writer than a more established woman writer. What amazes me is that the people who play these games don't know how obvious they are to anyone who's half-way bright. To do these things at all requires a view of the child, woman, aspiring artist that is biased. My contract with the young woman writer whose project I read was that whatever status the university did or didn't give me, she needed to have a sense for herself, independent of that, that I might have something to offer her. At this point, the only opinions that matter are editors' opinions. She either comes to understand that praise from people can give it cheaply doesn't really matter, or she doesn't. The world is full of coteries (artists, writers, poets, musicians, whatever) who support each other's egos and blame the world or luck or lack of connections for their failure to get recognition. People have gotten writers' organization awards playing on the insecurity and vanity of very minor new writers who show very little promise in reality. Cheap flattery gets to take the junk painting home.
When I was about twelve or thirteen, adult praise of children's art, the whole sentimentalizing of it, annoyed me quite a lot as a rather ambitious kid painter. I could see that what I was doing needed work, so I also felt like this was condescending or uninformed on their parts, one of those adult evil things. If adults praised a painting, and I was particularly annoyed by the phoniness of it, I'd make them take it home. Or at least out of the house. And at that age, I could manage to make them take the painting out of my sight without making it obvious that I was being quite cynical about the whole operation because they hadn't a clue about either how condescending the praise was, how manipulative it felt, or how annoyed I was that the local adult idea of an art class for children was to be boldly expressive and encouraging, and not teach any of the tactics that would give me any sense of mastery over what I was doing. The praise was about the adult's amusement in making a child trivially happy, without seeing the person in front of them. They could not have imagined that my giving them the painting had any cynicism in the act at all.
Fast forward some fifty years. In an on-line photography group, most of the comments on my work are coming from men, as in all but maybe one woman, and most of it assumes that the man making the comments will have something useful to say to me, and that his experience and taste is superior to mine. Most of the comments strike me as seeking particular things from women's work, not always the same things, but along certain lines that were not that different from what at least a fair chunk of men wanted to see in women's poetry -- emotionalism and/or flowers. More emotions, more what it's like to be a woman with a man (um, the first time I tried that, I felt motherly, which turned out to be unfortunately accurate -- curiosity is a terrible thing sometimes).
When I was at the big feminist meeting at Columbia University in 1970 or 1971, I tried to find some other women poets. One was a student of A. R. Ammon's who had told her that women wrote poetry about their yearnings for men. This wasn't that different from some minor poet who taught at Bard saying in A Controversy of Poets that what men wanted from women poets was how it felt to be fucked (this was the early 1960s, and guys weren't inhibited at saying things like that). Tom Clark, after 1971, wrote a poem about women's liberation being doing some self-experimentation and telling her man how to bring her to orgasm.
So, over here, the guys are encouraging women to stick to a narrow specialization that's focused on what pleasure they might get out of it, or what pain women suffer due to sexual obsessions (see Nan Goldin), or pretty stuff. They ask why women don't photograph more nude men, as if a person doing photo collages and reading John Cage, a person doing art nudes of women, and a person who took portraits of people with their dogs or news photographs the only times she's been paid for photography will all have a single unified answer to that question unless men tend to have a singular unified reaction to being nude in front of a XX chromosome type human individual. One guy goes ballistic about being called one of the guys. He's a distinct human individual. Excuse me, but this XY type didn't notice anything odd about asking the XX types why collectively they did or didn't do something.
Guys want to always be treated as individuals who earned what they go. About a third of them in most offices in the 1960s were supported by their staff, generally female -- and I've seen a guy who had been supported by his safe hired by a low-staff office (receptionist only) totally not get that he was failing to do a good job. The woman project manager who saw him hired for more money that he was getting promptly found another job. But women are considered as a category, with some exceptions. I've even been accused of being an ex-man who hadn't learned yet how to be a woman.
It's like the adults with children.
In a third and rather short dialogue happening about the same time, a woman professor I knew at a former job wants me to encourage a young writer whose senior project I read. When I read the project, I was appalled that someone who'd had two creative writing classes, who'd gotten a certificate in publishing, didn't know how to use point of view. She wasn't simply trying an experiment, hadn't figured out POV on her own and certainly had missed any classes where it might have been taught. My publisher says she sees this even in some slush that comes from MFA grads, so it's probably not getting taught. (I haven't seen any egregious mismanagement of POV in amateur slash fic, but I only read that when it comes recommended by trusted people). POV is how a writer controls the reader's attention. General readers expect to follow a particular character and get cued if the POV is going to change, and expect to meet the protagonist first. Writers can play with those expectations, but if a writer wants to write commercial fantasy, as this young writer did, following reader expectations sells more books. Random experiments can be cool; some of my best friends did aleatory fiction. But those things aren't commercial fantasy.
Okay, two years after I read the senior project, the young writer is despairing because she's not getting published. Cool, figure out how to make it happen or move on. The woman professor, who has never written publishable fantasy herself, who thinks that commercial fiction is done by naive little folk artists (couldn't imagine that a single Scottish mom on welfare would have known Latin and French), has been working with this young writer on her style which is now getting interesting. Did I say I found the woman professor wrote in a style I found completely off putting because of a sense that she was talking down to her audience? Is finely wrought style enough to have a commercially viable fantasy audience? And ideas are common.
I doubt the woman professor knows enough to say anything useful about professional fantasy writing, but she's asking me to drop an encouraging work, two years later, not for pay, to this woman who I thought had potential as a journalist. What the woman professor has been doing is what women have been socialized into doing -- being supportive, being encouraging. And it's useless in this case. I'm not a commercially successful fantasy writer, and I've never edited a commercial fantasy publication. I don't need a young writer's temporary relief and gratitude that she's getting acknowledgment from a published but not commercially viable writer who hasn't a real clue whether the young woman should be persisting in writing or mourning a dream that didn't happen and getting on with her life.
Writing in the real world, outside of the third tier universities, is about an adult doing something that other adults who are perfectly free to walk away find interesting. It's not trading flattery for acolytes; it's not the bullshit of "being supportive." If you're an honest writing teacher, you know those little monsters out there want every bit of knowledge you can give them to develop their own writing and they will determine whether you were an important writer or not. And if they're not focused on their own writing more than your encouragement, if they're not cynical about your encouragement, they probably shouldn't be in the game. The ones who are there for a name to drop ("
If <Famous Writer is also an acquiring editor, and if the editor is asking to see the whole manuscript, that's a different case, but most of the "You're ready for a book" stuff I've heard about was getting into a wannabe's pants or just cultivating attention, some what like telling a woman writer that she's a better writer than a more established woman writer. What amazes me is that the people who play these games don't know how obvious they are to anyone who's half-way bright. To do these things at all requires a view of the child, woman, aspiring artist that is biased. My contract with the young woman writer whose project I read was that whatever status the university did or didn't give me, she needed to have a sense for herself, independent of that, that I might have something to offer her. At this point, the only opinions that matter are editors' opinions. She either comes to understand that praise from people can give it cheaply doesn't really matter, or she doesn't. The world is full of coteries (artists, writers, poets, musicians, whatever) who support each other's egos and blame the world or luck or lack of connections for their failure to get recognition. People have gotten writers' organization awards playing on the insecurity and vanity of very minor new writers who show very little promise in reality. Cheap flattery gets to take the junk painting home.
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