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posted by [personal profile] mouseworks at 06:52pm on 06/05/2010
http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/lear-tolstoy.htm

Orwell is rather good at deflating pretentions.
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posted by [personal profile] mouseworks at 10:00am on 03/05/2010
http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2010/04/maid-as-muse.html


We have a cultural stereotype of Dickinson as average white woman in an attic, living at home. Her father was a US Senator; she went to an elite girl's school, and her productivity depending on having a good house maid.
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posted by [personal profile] mouseworks at 01:05pm on 28/04/2010
I keep remembering The Poetry Project, still in existence, supported by people who are mostly poets, but then a recipient of a considerable chunk of Federal money. Most of the people there were in the early stages of their careers as poets. Berrigan was teaching at either Buffalo or Iowa. The other Tulsa boys -- Padgett, Brainard, Gallup -- were all in their twenties. Anne Waldman was just out of Bennington, married to Lew Warsh, a friend of Chip Delany from the Bronx High School of Science. Peter Schjeldahl was a poet. Time Magazine swooped down either the first year I was there or the next, and profiled the place, featuring Ted Berrigan. And Diane Wakoski, who I had heard of (I've met most of LeRoi Jone's Four Young Lady Poets by now; but Diane was the first) was sitting in the workshop room looking like her photographs. Her books were coming out from Doubleday: Inside the Blood Factory.

Rebecca Wright, the woman who is going with me to Nicaragua at the end of May, and I met some time shortly before a party at Ed Saunder's Peace Eye Bookstore. Anne Waldman passed my name to Maureen Owen, and I apparently introduced Rebecca to Maureen though I can't remember the details now. We were all in mimeograph magazines. Maureen was publishing Telephone. Anne Waldman was publishing The World.

Bill Zavatsky showed up in one or the other of the workshops. Daniella Gioseffi tried to impress us with her priors as a t.v. or radio personality. Anne's mother, Frances Waldman, was also there.

The thing is that what we got out of this wasn't encouragement in the usual sense of naff art teachers being in love with ART, or the usual displacement activity of teachers identifying with their students accomplishments. It was being serious about writing together, learning more things we needed to know, publishing work that came, from time to time, under the eyes of the senior poets like John Ashbery (O'Hara was dead before I moved to NYC), Kenneth Koch (who'd taught most of the Tulsa boys at Columbia), and Allen Ginsberg, who was with O'Hara, one of the ghosts who haunted the place, only he was alive and showed up from time to time. Burroughs was around, just not visible. John Giorno was setting up Dial-A-Poem. Larry Fagin came in to town to do Adventures in Poetry.

I've never been in an English Department with a similar flavor. The students were volunteers and there were no grades. If a poet didn't seem to have much to offer, there were other poets, other workshops, not all of them at St. Marks. Rebecca Wright took Bill Berkson's workshop at The New School.

There wasn't a division between the students in the workshops and the people giving the workshops. The closest I've seen to a university program like this was UPenn, where a freshman poet was invited to join the table at a dinner in honor of Bill Berkson, at Kelly Writer's House. The difference was that the student was in the presence of her teachers. We were in the presence of the people we wanted to be, and as volunteers. And what we learned wasn't just what was in the workshops but ways of being a poet, what did poets talk about when they weren't talking about poetry? What had they read? Did they drink tea or coffee (tea exclusively among the people who were in Wakoski's workshop. At that time in history, poetry looked like Ginsberg had been a leading edge, not the last full-time professional poet in US history since (and he ended up in academia at the end of his life).

Some people were in graduate school; some people would go back to graduate school.

We had kids coming down from Sarah Lawrence and in from Yale to take workshops: Cassia Berman, one of the editors of a Yale literary magazine, and kids who'd never gone to college, or who were going back (I ended up at Columbia University School of General Studies). The workshops were everything from traditional writing workshops to demonstrations to group exercises based on surrealist and Dada theory. At the end of the first year, four of the workshop attendees got a reading at St. Marks -- Daniella Gioseffi, me, and I can't remember the other two, one a guy, and I'm thinking maybe Rebecca Wright was the fourth. Wednesday nights were the arranged readings where the poets got paid and the readers included even some of the other guys: Robert Lowell and Ginsberg (but after my time) and Ginsberg and McClure, a wonderful jewel of a reading. Padgett brought in Stanley Kunitz, whose daughters feared the bohemian audience would make fun of the old man, but we all loved him.

The poets ran the place and chose who'd give workshops, who'd read.

I don't remember anyone getting encouraged in a top down way except when one poet was angling to seduce another one, but people knew who was better and who wasn't. Astonishing people was the best way to get attention. Nobody wanted to be bored. The people leading the workshops couldn't flunk anyone.

And even here, not everyone was equally good, and we'd hear from the cohort of poets around Wakowski's age that these young guys sounded all alike -- can you tell a Padgett from a Berrigan in the dark? Some of those people were people we'd read, too, so we learned about poets pummeling each other, jealousy, and that even poets I admire very much didn't always admire each other.

I never thought of this as equivalent of a graduate program in creative writing, but many MFA programs have less distinguished average faculty, and faculty which doesn't include students in other activities. Most of the St. Marks instructors are teaching in universities with full health benefits now. A few aren't. Some are teaching at Naropa.

George Alec Effinger said, of the Clarion he went to, was that what he'd got out of it were models for being a writer, the sense that this was do-able and I suspect that living with the students, going to their parties, or having them attend yours, is the big thing.

What do people who are successful at this kind of thing I want to be successful at do? What other interests feed into their writing, how do they feel about writing (Padgett admitted to thinking about giving up poetry; Wakoski didn't like writing poems much but enjoyed writing them), and how high were their SATs? How did they survive financially?

I never knew the answers to those questions from most academics. They often disappear to their own lives as soon as the school hour is over.
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posted by [personal profile] mouseworks at 10:15pm on 27/04/2010
Two Rebeccas on the road again. Leaving sometime in May, back in time for Father's Day.
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posted by [personal profile] mouseworks at 04:46pm on 27/04/2010
Life is never so bad that the solution is letting sycophants into your life.

B. Don't be one, either.
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posted by [personal profile] mouseworks at 02:08pm on 27/04/2010
I think having said what I said about the guys who stereotyped the XX people, I should write something about the guys who weren't like that.

One reason I'm drawn to s.f., especially biological s.f., is that when I was a young kid with a microscope in junior high, one of the people in the Clemson University biology departments actually talked to me as a young kid interested in biology. He explained why I didn't want to work with one of the acid fixatives, showed me iodine crystals, gave me various stains and reagents, and some advice on growing organisms. All he wanted was that I take a biology class at Clemson some time in the future (I'm feeling a bit guilty now that I didn't do this). He didn't make me feel like a girl in any of the ways that people tended to do with young girls in the arts.

Another example: Dr. Conis, who taught Russian at Clemson. In the language lab, I had hassles with the young language lab supervisor who thought it fun to stick his finger on the tape drive, who probably thought he was flirting and just as probably had no idea how young I was (sophmore in high school) or didn't care (I don't know what the age of concent was in South Carolina -- girls could get married at 16 without parental consent then). He didn't care that this annoyed me to the point that I almost stabbed him with a fountain pen. I bought the records the tapes were based on so I could avoid the language lab and continued going in to see Dr. Conis, then a student he recommended as a tutor. My family became friends with his family.

That's two. I think it's a rare skill for men to be human with other humans with XX chromosomes without expected gender dynamics and roles getting in the way. If I got fussy about all the guys who did slight variations of gender expectations, I'd be really fussy. It's probably as rare for white folks to be human with people who aren't, and sometimes the liberals, the people trying to be good with "them" are the worst offenders. The male who supports XX people has to reduce them to a stereotype of Woman that he's supportive of. The Americans who do charity in Africa have assumed that Africans can't take care of themselves. There's some evidence that supports the view that charity distorts African agricultural markets badly and that if the charity wasn't distorting those markets, African countries could be self-sufficient.

I won't even begin to say what I think of white hysterics who are so supportive of POC that if I were a POC, I'd want them to go away now and shut the fuck up. As one black adolescent working with us on the Five Points newsletter angrily pointed out, not all blacks are poor slum people.

David Hartwell, Ben Bova, Gardner Dozois? Hum. Good or good enough guys. Allen Walker Read, who taught me English grammar from a linguistics perspective and lexicography (some teachers are so good you'd take anything they taught, even a graduate course in British English lexicography). Honest with me ("We only support our super stars" when I asked about going for a Ph.D. at Columbia). Dr. Gunter Jacob -- my therapist in NYC. Good enough guy, better than I realized at the time. I should have the Kaddish read in his honor some day, but maybe making something of my economic exile to Nicaragua and living my orientation would be a better honor.

My father had three daughter who taught him something about the problems with stereotyping intelligent manipulative women. Mixed feelings about him, but a good enough guy for what he'd been through as a boy, the weird dynamics of his own family that I watched as an adult grandchild years later.


Some of the stereotypes are intended to be supportive, but XX doesn't make all people with it on that chromosome identical, perhaps not even close to identical. Jerry Lee Lewis's women are not the Door's women. And some cultures have a loose stereotype, but if a person decided not to fit in it, there's no stigma, no attempt to treat the condition. That's just them. They're not like other people like them, and everyone lives rather reasonably with it, whether it's the black friend of my uncles who dressed like a man or the captain of the apple picking crew at one of the orchards (Mexican woman, break my stupid Anglo stereotypes, thanks).

In a Photo.net thread, someone XY was talking about the women who succeeded in business having lost their femininity along the way. Why assume any of those women were born into a stereotype? I was ambitious at age two. I knew I'd never be married by grade school.


The stereotypes are so hard to break because the people holding them genuinely believe that they're truths and that while they are individuals untainted by cultural patterns or whatever real things may come of growing up with XY or XX chromosomes, the women speak as women.

Yet some people can manage to see human individuals in bodies with whatever secondary sex characteristics, orientations (the only people who can tell me I should listen to a queer performer are cute tall baby dykes who remind me of Vita Sackville West), skin opacity, or whatever else.
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posted by [personal profile] mouseworks at 12:05pm on 27/04/2010
I'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.
mouseworks: A crop of an orchid shot taken with a Nikon 105 macro lens (Default)
posted by [personal profile] mouseworks at 02:16pm on 26/04/2010
Notes to myself:

You can't always be friends with who you'd like to be friends with and people who dump themselves without negotiating it into your life are not friends.

You're not going to become someone else even if people would prefer that someone else they want you to be.

If you're going to throw away middle class security and comfort to be your own person and have time for things you want to do, do it as best you can.

What seems like a perfectly ordinary skill to you probably isn't necessarily.

Everyone is the center of attention.
mouseworks: A crop of an orchid shot taken with a Nikon 105 macro lens (Default)
posted by [personal profile] mouseworks at 12:48am on 26/04/2010
MFA programs for fan fic writers.
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posted by [personal profile] mouseworks at 10:59pm on 23/04/2010
Women don't write women/women as often as they write men/men because women/women would make too many straight guys see us as being available. Male/male, we enjoy it, our friend enjoy it, and it doesn't invite the straight guys in to convert us because what we wrote was so hot, we must be available.

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