finished the thesis, not the project

thesis
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

Turned it in yesterday to the bindery. It's done! And yet it's not done, because I had to cut about 100 pages of extra poets and their poem in order to get it done in a "finished" version on time. The *real* anthology will take me several more years for it to be good enough for me to be happy with its breadth of vision and depth of scholarship. For now, I will take the translations in here that are ... by my standards almost-done... and send more of them out to journals. And I will continue researching and translating.

It nearly killed me to leave Clemintina Suárez and María Villar Buceta out of this version, can I just say? And so many more! The more I look, the more wonderful work I find. And th e more I expand my concept of what's good, of aesthetic appreciation. That's a beautiful feeling. Several lifetimes would not be enough. I will make my best effort and try to contribute something... a small but solid brick in a very big cathedral...

TOWARD AN ANTHOLOGY OF SPANISH AMERICAN WOMEN POETS, 1880-1930


Liz Henry
San Francisco State University
2006

This thesis examines the valuation of Spanish American women’s poetry and is a feminist intervention in the ongoing construction of literary value. The body consists of an anthology that presents 42 poems by 25 women from 11 Latin American countries in Spanish and in English translation, with brief notes on each poet and their work. In the poems, metaphors of statues, swans, bodies, color symbolism, visions of women’s collectivity, and legends of Sappho’s life show the poets’ active participation in the literary discourse of their era. The introduction exposes sexist discourse in literary criticism of women poets and moves forward into feminist recanonization. The thesis aims to provide a wide variety of entry points for other translators who would like to translate work by women.

Some thoughts on fanfic and the Tiptree

My personal opinions and not meant to represent the award administrators or be any sort of official statement...


A rambling overthink:

I think "Arcana" and much fanfic should be looked at as an experimental form, or as being like artists' sketchbooks. Sketches in art are nifty, even if the artist isn't Davinci. As a reader and critic, I often enjoy raw, ephemeral work and find something of value in it, while I find much "professional-quality" writing to be dull, with all its quirky edges smoothed off by workshops, MFA programs, editors, the standards of market forces, considerations of literary genre, and so forth. I would rather read an ungrammatical unfinished poem of raw power that goes somewhere unusual than I would read a high-falutin' perfectly crafted New-Yorker-ish sonnet that doesn't say a damn thing. Both may have literary merit, and ideally, a work has all possible positive qualities (As our Tiptree winner this year, Air, does have.)

Literary standards vary widely. In an award such as the Tiptree, or in a comprehensive anthology, I believe that it is important to represent works that are good by different standards of value. A work is "good". Good for what purpose? Good for which people?

Of course, you may read all the above and agree with it, and yet still question the jury's decision to longlist this particular story.

What can I say? I like edge conditions, and I pushed a boundary, and a lot of people disagree with me. So, let's talk about this and learn whatever can be learned from it, and then move on to talk about the other books and stories on the list. For example, "Little Faces" which is also conveniently online. What's tiptroid or not about that story? How about the writing style and quality? What do we think of that?

How about "A Brother's Price" and its gender explorations? I'd be interested to hear from people who feel like it challenged gender roles and those who feel it didn't.

Anyway.

Objections to the longlisting of "Arcana" that I've read in the last couple of days include:

1. it's fanfic and should not be eligible under the bylaws of this award, or any professional sf award
2. it's not good fanfic of its type
3. it's not well-written
4. it's unfinished
5. it is not tiptroid enough. It does not expand or explore gender, but instead re-ifies traditional gender roles.
6. It is illegal because of copyright laws. The author and the award are in some kind of legal danger.
7. It is plagiarism. (I think the people who use this term are particularly unclear on what "plagiarism means. It is not plagiarism.)
8. The Tiptree jury should have more diligently gone through the body of fanfic to find more, and better, examples of tiptroid fic. IN their copious spare time.
9. It was unethical of the jury to longlist this work, because it might embarrass its author
10. The author should have been contacted and asked if it was okay to longlist her unifinished story. (By the award administrators or the jury, or me in particular.)
11. The Tiptree Award bylaws should be rewritten to exclude poor-quality writing. (I would love to see the subcommittee that writes those bylaws...)
12. Liz Henry has done something moronic. We thought she could not go lower than teh Venom Cock, but, sweet pregnant crack-smoking jesus, she has.
13. The Tiptree award is annoying and run by feminist cranks who should not be taken seriously by any rational human being or writer of Quality. They might have once had a shot at legitimacy in the Real World, but now they've blown it. How embarrassing!

Pantryslut, a former Tiptree juror, rolling her eyes at the kerfluffle:

1) You're allowed not to like things on an awards list. 2) The processes of even awards you like and respect are not without flaw or question. 3) I think there is a misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of the long list happening.

Vito-excalibur and commenters continue to wish that the story were a better representative of fanfic in general.

Matociquala's journal has an extremely lively discussion. In it, the predominant threads are not questioning the value of fanfic in general, but focus on the Tiptree Award's process of gathering nominations. Cija comments:

I think the inclusion of fanfic, especially dirty, self-indulgent fanfic, in the Tiptree longlist (or shortlist, or the award itself) is a fine fine idea, although judging from the quotes you provide, this one doesn't seem to be notably dirty or self-indulgent. Too bad.

In particular, I thought it was interesting that there was a perception of the story being the uninformed choice of a well-meaning outsider to the genre of fanfic... or maybe it would be more accurate to say the fanfic communities. (That earnest yet clueless outsider would be me (according to them... a lot of assumptions about how much of an outsider I am). More about this further down in this post.)

Am I an expert on fanfic? No. Have I ever read it? Yes. I'm not strongly part of any fanfic community, but I've read it a little here and there. I have even written it, though mostly badfic. I particularly loved the old "pottersues" community and its hilarious snarkiness. Might there be fanfic out there, mpreg fanfic, that everyone would hail with as Tiptroid and literary enough ? Hell yeah... Please nominate it asap!


About legality: I think this is bunk. I don't think about whether a story is "illegal" or not when I read it. Do people think that if there were censorship laws, that awards should not consider that kind of illegality? So, "free speech" is one thing when it's about a nation or a government... but another thing that we should respect when it's a corporation who "owns" an idea? What are people really worried about here? Last time I checked, fanfic writers were not being sued or thrown in jail... nor were they smashing the state or destroying the idea of intellectual property or sucking away the hard-earned dollars of authors starving in garrets... And the existence of the fanfic doesn't make people not read or watch the original/"owned" stories. At most, they might be sent a cease and desist letter which they could then put up on the Chilling Effects site which is part of some great legal efforts to fight that kind of atmosphere. About plagiarism: hahaha. Give me a break. Then go look up the dictionary definition of "plagiarism".

Moving on from there.

Then we get into the nitty gritty of what the story does and whether it's tiptroid or not (which is hard to talk about, since everyone has a different idea of what "expanding and exploring gender" means.)

Back for a moment to the idea of being Tiptroid, and "good"... Tiptroid for whom?
Am I demanding stuff that expands *my* concept of gender? Or what I think and percieve as "most people's" ideas of gender, or even "my idea of sf fandom who might be interested in the Tiptree's ideas of gender?" It turns into a lot of doublethink very quickly. And I wanted very much to avoid any sort of "more genderfuck than thou" chest-beating on the jury.


Okay, so, back on matociquala's journal, I said:

Once the story gets past the set-up and the rape scene, there's lots of detail about a macho guy's response to being pregnant. Nick's sudden vulnerability, loss of independence, and the changes he goes through were interesting. Snape's "protective father/husband" responses were really weird because of the (former) macho-ness of Nick.

katallen, cija, and others get quite deep into the issues. Katallen questions whether it's an mpreg at all, since Nick is "really" a hermaphrodite and has been all along, and knew it, and so did Snape and the Ministry of Magic. (Though I would add that Nick was in denial about it for most of his life.) "The macho image is shown to be a fraud -- and so a macho guy's reaction to being pregnant is never explored." She adds, "it didn't feel gender expanding so much as gender conformist... However much Nick hides or denies it, the sex that gets pregnant is there to be made pregnant, to bear children, and (once a feminine side is exposed) will be lusting after sex with their rapist, crying every five minutes because of their hormones, and need a real man to get them safely through pregnancy."

cija says:

there are ways to wallow in illicit fantasy without making the narrative defend the essential rightness of the false construct, if that makes any sense. I am all for the wallowing, but not so much for the embedded defense. It is tricky to do the one without the other, but vastly preferable.

Yowza, cija, if I were a man, I'd be begging you to let me have your babies. I still disagree, but there you articulated the exact location of the problem and point of disagreement.

and katallen again:

I don't read a lot of slash fic, but enough to have met dozens of stories where two masculine characters, subsequent to sex or falling in love, gradually morph into a het couple -- with the smaller/prettier/smarter of the two men taking up the feminine role (homemaking, sexual jealousy, physical and emotional dependance etc)

Coffeeandink made some cogent remarks and gave a link to thasallia's post on how distinctive characters are often transformed in fanfic into more conventional roles (wow, I loved this post...):

But, getting back to flipping gender expectations, I can think of several body-swap fics in FS fandom that do a lovely job of this, but I also think there have to be other gen or het fics that do a good job of showing how gender isn't the easy assumption that we tend to make it. And how are we defining gender roles anyway? How are we coding male and female these days? One of the reasons I rarely read slash is because I have little interest in seeing a masculine character feminized, in more than the subtle construct way (i.e., I don't want to see John Crichton act like a girl except for in the, "Shit, the whole way I look at the world is suddenly reversed and I'm getting my ass kicked by a girl" kind of way.) I'm not interested in that sort of coding between men, but again, that's my personal preference. However, again, that whole reversal of gendered expectation is interesting and I wonder (not reading a lot of femslash), if a similar thing happens there. Does one of the women become "the man" in the story?

Katallen says:

...what interested you wasn't examining how a man would cope with pregnancy but the reactions of a Western middle-class female who is secure in her equality and her personal relationship to her gender (75% of the world's population are still chopping wood and carrying water by three months and never aren't met with sexism) having to cope with a new image, that's imposed both by her own biology and societal reactions to pregnancy and motherhood.

So, the more sophisticated slash and fanfic readers read Brunson's Nick as a very typical-for-fic manly man who is feminized. Nick's weepiness and girliness and moments of vulnerability perhaps annoy, because they seem to reify this particular gender stereotype. Now, I don't like that stereotype either! And yet I know many strong, independent women who get pregnant and then start falling into many stereotypical roles. As I pointed out somewhere on the many-tentacled thread on matociquala's journal, this is a common theme of mommybloggers. "How did I get here? What's going on? What the hell just happened? How can I get my life as an independent person back?" Nick seems to me to react similarly. Coded as a man's reaction, that "wtf!" reaction can be seen as interrupted entitlement. Which exposes the interrupted entitlement that some women, raised to expect some measure of equal rights or gender-blindness, experience. I found that interesting, and I still do! Is that because I'm a United Statesian upper-class mom and housewife? Gosh... um... probably. However, I am not in ignorance of feminism, world politics, women who live in poverty, and class differences in general.

There was also a strand of people saying that I in particular (because I said in public that it was me who pushed to longlist "Arcana"... (and I said it in public because I felt I had to, since half the people reading already suspected it was me and were making coy statements to indicate it, and because of needing to stand up and defend my judgement and the story's author, and also out of consideration for the tender feelings of my fellow Tiptree jurist, who seems eager to distance themself from the OMG Not Literary Enough works on the list) ummmmm where was I?) People saying that I was an outsider to fanfic. Such as....

katallen:

...an external advocate who doesn't appear to be comfortable that they have a grasp of what's a typical or representative product from the community they're trying to gain attention for. (Rather like a missionary displaying poor quality domestic pottery when he could, at least, be showing what they trade with the tribe next door.)

and elisem:

What it easily can slip into being is condescending. Not saying the nominator in this case meant to condescend, but the missionary aspects of this...

This seems to me like a valid criticism. Well, since I have no professional status in anything particularly, and no vested interest in pretending that I'm a big expert and infallible, why should I not realize this fairly instantly when it's pointed out to me, and try to respond? And actually, I think about this kind of issue a lot, since I deal with problems of cultural appropriation both as a feminist and as a translator. I had not thought of being an outsider and of perceived condescension in this context. I did make some effort to learn and ask about fanfic communities, as I also asked around about tiptroid SF in non-English languages, and about other genres like comic books. (I actually nominated the comic book "Y: The Last Man" to that end. ) In retrospect, I did not make ENOUGH of an effort for the ambition to push the award's parameters a little further out. In my defense, I did put quite a lot of effort into it, and into the Tiptree Award as a whole, and overall, I think we all did a good job. It was an amazing education, the entire process.

(Slightly more defensiveness: I can't know everything about everything, but you know... I do know a hell of a lot about SF and about literature in general, and... (back to the comment made by katallen about class and feminism and women-chopping-wood) actually I am particularly well read in world literature in general, across a broad time span. This, at least, helps me be confident of my own critical judgement having a *very* broad base to draw upon. People who don't know me personally might not know this, and I tend to get treated like I'm a ditz, and about 20 years younger than I am, and I have found a generally suspicious attitude from some hard-core SF fans who think I have not been fannish enough, or something, because I did not go to Whatevercon for a bazillion years and don't get their filk jokes. Er, whatever... blow me... Actually I've gotten both the "Britney-Spears-listening teenybopper bubblegum-popping ditz" and the "romance-novel-reading menopausal crazy cat lady" judgements... make up your minds already... which is it? Oh, nevermind, I am large, I contain multitudes... )

(And a side note about comics: as I continue reading them I have developed a fascination with The Hulk, especially Peter David's work. And I think The Hulk does some amazing explorations of masculinity. The thought of explaining this to a Tiptree jury gives me hives, frankly... Hahahaha... Grimjack is also very cool. But anyway, I love comics now and am looking forward to a lifetime of reading more of them! )

As for the unfinished-ness and roughness, or rawness, of the story: this seems to me comparable to conversations about blogging. Blogging is its own genre. Its literary standards are not the standards of mainstream literature. I maintain that the rawness is part of it: You can blog as if you're writing a magazine article,but then you're just writing a magazine article. The experential quality of a blog is important, and its development, its immediacy. It is the exposure of process. It is a little bit like, it's part of a very intense conversation. A magazine article is a polished monologue. A blog entry is an offered bit of conversation, offered in a way not always possible in face to face life. (And, it woudl be interesting to explore the idea of intimacy, trust, exposure, intimate conversation and ideas people have about pillow talk, in this context.) People engage with blogs like they do with conversations. Now in some ways we think of all textual interaction as conversation. Intertextuality is the history of conversations. But blogs depend on that idea, and push it further, and we don't really understand what it's doing or how it works or what that means yet. Fanfic has something similar going on, and no, I am not super qualified to talk about that, but from my seat over here in a somewhat analogous country, I'm waving in recognition. A group production, a community involvement in the production... and absolute exposure of that as a process.

*deep breath* *realization of giant digression*

*** Oh yeah, and also I should link up to Nick Mamatas and commenters - but I haven't read any of that yet. I'm sure there's a lot of meanness but also a lot that's funny in there. At least he has the grace to make fun of the entire Tiptree award, instead of just one author, or me in particular.


It is kind of tempting to do a close reading and mockery of particular badly-written or quirkily-styled sentences from ALL the other Tiptree winners... because you know, that is something that I could easily do. All of them. I love parody, so why not apply it across the board, to make it less of a cheap shot?

***


The comments in juliansinger's journal are also interesting. I try to look past the "Liz is condescending" bits... which I have tried to answer, defend myself a little bit, and learn from... But you know, as if I need special lessons about queer feminist lit, and otherness? How can I help feeling a bit defensive!

***

Anyway, as I kept reading thassalia's commenters... and then branching out into their journals (omg, I love the web...) I came across stuff like alara_r's analysis:

If the body parts are girly, it isn't manslash. :-) If the characters know they have been switched, I am more likely to describe it as "genderfuck", because there you get a quasi-slash dynamic where Still Guy A *knows* Former Guy B used to be a guy, but now he's a girl, so the body parts are het but the minds are slash. However, the femslash was femslash because it was a universe where the characters were born women rather than men, so they had no reference point to understand themselves as men, though we the readers knew.

Can I just say again that I think that the theorizing about gender here is great and fascinating? A tip of the hat? Without being accused of being condescending, can I admire and enjoy this discussion? Can we get thassalia or some of these very knowledgeable people as Tiptree jurors? That would be excellent!

Here is a key thought: In order to *get anywhere deep* in discussing why a work is gender-expanding or exploring, you have to : a) talk about your own gender b) talk about your own sexuality and what makes a work "good" for you... jouissance is in many ways about sex. That is part of why these discussions are difficult for some people, perhaps.

And the goal, as I see it, of the Tiptree, and of many feminist endeavors, is to make space for difficult conversations.

For anyone who has gotten through this rambling brain dump... I don't have time to make it pretty right now ... In the interests of transparency and bloggishness, I'm just trying to be as honest as possible and put some ideas out into the world.

Feel free to trash me and my judgement, and make fun of me some more. *sicilian hand gesture* But lay off of the story's author, okay?

I should do a close reading of some sections of Arcana, and try to show exactly what it was I liked about it.

I liked this comment on Em's work, from one of her longtime fans:

I've been in fandom for a long time, long before the internet in fact. I was absolutely thrilled to see your name listed on the Tiptree Award long list. I remember having to re-read it several times to be certain that it was really you. You have no idea how thrilled I was to see a fanfic from you listed there. It made my day.

and this one:

i don't really know what we're talking about, but there are people in fandom who haven't heard of em brunson?

And I agree with Schnaucl and her commenters. I hope that Em puts her fic back up, and I look forward to reading more of her stories... the crackfic and also published work if that's where she goes with it in future. I thought her writing was fabulous, entertaining, funny, and thoughtful, and again, I stand by my longlisting of it. Yes, I know (and knew) it was an in-jokey crackfic in answer to a specific community's challenge... and I thought that was fucking cool.


***

*************

People have suggested the following sources for slashy, possibly tiptroid fanfic:

Amanuensis - LJ
We Read Crap So that You Won't Have To

from cofax7:

There are best of lists all over the net. They're call recommendations sites. Google "Bright Shiny Objects" or "Polyamorous Recommendations" and you'll find a ton of worthy fiction, of the slashy and non-slashy kind.

The sidebars of those sites look very intriguing.

Strange Horizons / Speculative Literature Foundation reading

Leia's half-drunk bartending skills
Originally uploaded by hdiwan.

This Wednesday, May 10, at Valencia Street Books -- There will be a rapid fire reading and generally fun hang-out at from 7 to 9pm. Rapid fire! 3 minutes each!

I'll be reading along with a bunch of other people, including Charlie Anders and Susan Marie Groppi, Tim Pratt, Heather Shaw, Jeremy Smith, Vylar Kaftan, Corie Ralston, Thida Cornes, Lori White, Pat Murphy, and Keyan Bowes.

I always have a great time at Valencia Street Books, because Alex generally greets me with the joy of a meerkat finding a, well, whatever the hell makes meerkats freak out with joy and spaz out, a nice juicy grub or a crippled grasshopper maybe. Anyway, zie always picks me up and swings me around in the air with strong skinny arms and a manic grin. We know each other from old "Skiffy" game-playing days at University of Chicago, where I used to kick Ken Hite's ass at every board game and make him beg for more.

call for art from Galeria de La Raza

0284
Originally uploaded by contextobject.

Galeria de la Raza put out a call for submissions for Latino/Latina artists for their Digital Mural Program.

Pass it on!

gender wars in Argentina

I'm still editing my thesis and while looking over the bibliography for the hundredth time I had the horrifying realization that I had dissed Jean Franco by only citing a book she wrote in 1969 and nothing since. I think it is too late... but anyway in looking up Franco's work online I came across this:

The Gender Wars

In July of last year, several members of the Argentine planning committee that had drawn up the guidelines for a nationwide curriculum resigned when they discovered that changes to their proposal had been made, apparently by the Minister of Education under pressure from the Catholic Church. Mention of Darwin and Lamarck had been eliminated, references to sex education had been erased, and the word "gender" had replaced by "sex."

"Gender" rather than sex (in this case género and sexo) was especially controversial.

its use "intended to provoke an ideological shift and to generate a new conception of the human person, of subjectivity, marriage, the family and society. In short what is proposed is a cultural revolution." Using the word gender "as a purely cultural construct, detached from the biological," he warned, "makes us into fellow travelers of radical feminism."

Then he quotes Shulamith Firestone. Ha. Kind of ha. Not really funny when you think about it.

Wow.

Absolutely fascinating... I am going to have to at least mention Franco's later work and I feel really dumb for not looking earlier.

Ejaculation and translation

I was poking around in violently engulfing Steiner's book "After Babel" the other day and imagining my parody regendering of some of his more ridiculous passages. All the bits where he writes about translation as penetration and ejaculation and most particularly the "onanism" sections about how when men masturbate there's "more" ejaculate (than what other times? haha, what?) and therefore translation, which is like sex, is less powerful than solo authoring, which is guys wanking off.

If anyone were to write... seriously... as a work of scholarly theory... something similar about women masturbating being a bold semiotic act, can you just picture the outraged backlash?

I'm going to write the nastiest, most pornographic parody...

Anyway, Steiner is a total nutjob. I prefer the lunacy of Mary Daly if I'm going to read some far-out mind-bending theory.

free wireless at the library

a guy using the library "internet cafe"
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

My network was down and so I headed over to the library to get some work done. It was surprisingly cosy, pleasant, and welcoming out on the sidewalk on Middlefield Road. Free wireless, cafe tables with umbrellas, and really good music on decent speakers... the only thing missing was an espresso cart. About 30 high school kids were there in a nebulous swarm, chatting, and I'd say over half of them texting on their cell phones. Something was being arranged... a lot of them were waiting for some other group which finally showed up and they all went into the library.

I remarked on the niceness of the "internet library cafe" to this guy in the photo and then on impulse was like, "Hey! Can I blog you?" He was slightly taken aback. "Yes." (unspoken: wtf! why is this little riot nrrd taking my photo? ) He (Bob) seemed like he could handle it just fine. Alas, I looked at the web site on his card and there's nothing there! But now I'm totally wondering if he's This guy and we were totally sharing a technological and social infrastructre? Or was he this guy and I could have had a fascinating conversation about the Khmu dialects & linguistics? Or is he the CTO of this company? Maybe he's ALL OF THEM.... But if so, what's with the cheap Vistaprint card and broken web site, dude?

Menlo Park... Palo Alto... check... tons of laptops. Redwood City? Not so much. I guess we're gentrifying. I hope the town doesn't lose its cool character as it gets richer and more silicon-valley-ish.

I wish some of those teenagers would have given me their myspace addresses.

Work on my thesis was horribly derailed by the lack of network at home - and by my having to pound on fixing it all day long. (After a lot of floundering, labelling everything in our co-housing network closet, 2 calls to comcast, and buying a new router, which helped, it finally was solved by upgrading my airport firmware and a restart/reset.)

The great thing about the library net cafe: I felt like it was really a public space, being used properly. A public square. There were no obnoxious rules, you didn't have to buy anything, you didn't have to be there for a particular reason. You could just hang out. No one came to give the teenagers a hard time (I *hate* that when I see it, and always speak up to point out how dumb it is.) We all spoke to each other - kids, guy in suit, and the kind of skeevy looking hairy guy in the painty shorts who was regaling the kids with stories of past drug busts as they tried to control their eye rolling and smirking and kind of failed. Anyway, it's a really nice public space. And right across from City Hall, too!

provocations

While I'm writing all this feminist criticism I do find that I spend a lot of time describing and refuting sexist criticism.

There should actually be a special category or word for works that especially offend, that are so egregiously sexist that they sting feminist to action. They make it all very clear. Really, work like this does us a favor. It needs special mention, a category of its own.

This occurred to me the other night as I was talking about feminist science fiction with Laura Quilter. What to put in the femsf wiki? I was trying to argue for this "worst offenders" category for feminist sf. What are the books that outraged me when I was 12, and made me suddenly realize I was not, as a girl, included in (male) universalist claims to represent humanity? What made me shriek, "Hey! That's not ME... and it pretends to be. So I better stand up, say something, and represent." What are the touchstones of sexist thought?

Instantly a few revolting candidates spring to mind... Asimov's Foundation trilogy, and certainly Podkayne of Mars. For me, I think, attempts to create the "plucky girl" stood out more strongly than the usual objectifications of women in fantasy and SF. I identified with John Carter of Mars easier than I did Arkady Darrell, for god's sake.

Well, I'm led to think of all this again as I contemplate the horrors of Sidonie Rosenbaum's "Modern Women Poets of Spanish America." It sounds good, doesn't it? But its horrible sexism was one of the main inspirations for me to translate Juana de Ibarbourou's work. Rosenbaum praises and insults Ibarbourou sometimes in the very same sentence - she'll refer to her freshness and sponteneity and then "lack of profundity" and "superficiality of thought." She's primitive, she's ardent, etc. It's a classic example of what (in How to Suppress Women's Writing) Joanna Russ calls denial of agency. It's as if the poetry just flowed unconsciously from Ibarbourou's "brain"... not that Rosenbaum thinks she has a brain, so I should probably say "flowed unconsciously from her very being." As soon as Ibarbourou writes about anything other than "take me now, i'm nubile and willing!" then the critics slam down on her for being a) pretentious b) boringly intellectual c) pretending to have understood suffering d) being obscure e) being too complicated. Even though they were previously saying she wasn't complicated or mature ENOUGH.

Well, it's endlessly annoying.

My point is, in part, that I have a strong impulse to slam the people who are trying to make anthologies of women writers and who do it in a way that exacerbates the entire sexist discourse of what women write and how and why and whether it's "really" any good or not.

This means that as I leap into publishing my thoughts on the subject I will be criticizing pretty much everyone else in my field.

Luckily most of them are dead.

Flora & Fauna & poems, oh my

04-21-06_1618.jpg
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

I help to organize the Art21 series of poetry readings in Palo Alto, and am going to miss tonight's reading. But I had to drop by in the afternoon to drop off the amp and microphone, and so got to meet Becca Goldman, the artist whose work is up in the gallery right now. I really enjoyed her graceful paintings... and it was nice to meet another sort of punky GenX-y person (she has a tattoo inside her ear) who is seriously into beauty in this complicated but gentle way. I sometimes write about punk rock lesbians smoking crack in the gutter while smashing guitars, and sometimes about lilies and egrets bending gracefully in the moonlight, so I'm down with the multiple facial piercings next to bunny rabbits and camellias.

I also love her for watching M. for a minute while I ran back to the car for the amplifier! She showed him a book about elephants who paint - he was charmed - and I tried to make him have an Educational Experience by pointing out that Becca was an Artist and look at all her paints and palette and stuff... "She is an Artist, just like your Auntie." M. acted nonchalant. I think he does not like to be observed in the act of learning something - he likes to know everything already when you tell him, but that's difficult when you're only 6 years old.

Tonight's reading features Sharon Olson and Murray Silverstein - both with books from Sixteen Rivers Press. I haven't yet read Sharon's book, "The Long Night of Flying," but I've heard her read for years at Waverley Writers, at Jeff Grinnell's Tuesday nights at the cafe on California Avenue, at the old San Jose Arts League, and at Art21. So I'm extra sorry not to get to hear her read a lot of her work all at once - it's good!

all the poets, they studied rules of verse....

It's not the first time I've noticed but I'm annoyed this morning at how Spain is apparently not part of "European poetry". It must take a lot of effort to keep doing the Spain Is Invisible Dance.

You know a lot about medieval French verse forms? Great! I love you! Bring it on! But you don't know everything, so don't act all like, You Are Europe. (Note the sidebar.) And Spain, how is that Not-Europe? All the Germanic languages? Everything else? (Oh... we meant only the most important and influential European forms.)

Of course we all know what it is. It's paternity anxiety, cultural inheritance, and the geneological tree - in that model, it goes Greece- Rome - Italians - France. Potency, real virility, can only reside in one cultural empire at a time, in the head of the household. Bastards aren't so important in that family tree and in fact might even be embarrassing. And there is room for only one tree. The whole rest of the world is bastards.

Is it too much to hope for, that the AAP might just mention Uncle Garcilaso or Uncle de Leon?

Leaving aside the bigger questions of the poetic forms of the entire rest of the world which also might... just might... have "influenced" someone.

"... and the ladies, they rolled their eyes."

More about the SXSWi women's visibility panel

(reposted) Here's my notes from before the panel. It's still rough notes - I tried to lay out the idea very quickly.

I also want to note that Ayse, Jan, Tara, Virginia and I all talked a lot over email and then again before our panel, and it was super interesting to see the evolution of our conversation. And I hope we can all post some of those conversations as well as what we said on the panel!


An immodest proposal

We need protocols for identifying authorship. At BarCamp at many of the women's discussions, we talked about people as tag clouds. Gender is just one of the possible tags. Put gender, identity into html markup just like the xfn markup for relationships. Or create some other protocol or standards.

Try doing some studies. We know what importance rankings look like with a genderblind algorithm. Then try labelling authorship and identities, try dividing the web and see what happens. Actually test it. Then re-integrate.

If you are going to ask a question like "who are the most important/relevant (to a topic) women bloggers" then you need to be able to identify them. Right now we can't.

Other people could maybe tag or ID you, but your self-identification is the one that counts in the most important way for most algorithms.

More information is good. The individual author or blogger has control over their own flexible cloud of identities. More information could then be put into transparent algorithms that are flexible, so you can have a technorati-like engine but adjust it to your own (or someone else's ) vision of importance.

Think of it like thermodynamics... through the identity-tag webs, right now you have a power imbalance on the net echoing existing power inequalities. I have this whole weird analogy of patriarchy as maxwell's demon, as an invisible, imaginary gatekeeper that keesp imbalances going. If this system existed, then, what mechanisms would you invent to reverse its workings? You can't kill Maxwell's Demon - that's not allowed, and it's just too hard. Making it past the gatekeeper on an individual level is how you get tokenized, and it also keeps up the myth of meritocracy. You have to invent structural workarounds, other maps and roads.

It's cheaper to experiment with restructuring technological spaces than it is to restructure society.

I think women need to be visible *to each other* in order for important conversations to develop. Trying to be "genderblind" doesn't help women, because we still have many systemic inequalities which stack the deck against us. I think self-identification in the form of tagging, or identity authentication like I've heard Kaliya (Identity Woman) talk about, or a new XML standard, would help with this: if we're going to ask who the most important women bloggers are, then we need to be able to find them in the first place. I'm arguing for identity-based markup and search, not just for all genders, but for any kind of identity like race, multiracial identifications, class, ethnicities, age. Authorship and identity in the mind of a reader (and the mind of a search algorithm) can't be separated. Self-identification should be differentiated from the ways other people identify an author. Visibility should also be broken down into frames of references, so that we can ask, "visible to who?"

For example, we could do a gender-based technorati search to see which women other women think are important; then which women men think are important; then which women everyone does - and see if those rankings are drastically different. I suspect they would be different, and those differences would be *interesting information*.

We need many ways of looking at visibility. If I'm a firefly, I don't care if humans see me. I want other fireflies to see me. Humans might *want* to perceive me. Or to put it another way, if I were an alien fnnargh artist, doing the fine art of fnnargh for other aliens, those aliens would want to be able to judge my fnnarghing compared to other aliens' fnnarghing. Humans might think fnnarghing is totallly hilarious and weird and cool, and so they might want to be able to find it too and talk about it compared to opera; but the aliens don't *care* what the humans think or how Snarx's Forty-Third Fnnargle is really similar to Wagner. And if they do, they can search on what humans think, or on what humans think with a little bit of what aliens think weighed into the mix. In other words, we need identity, authorship, and open, flexible search parameters.

the poetics of programming

I've been getting tech recruiter calls steadily for the last few years. They've stepped up in the last couple of months. The deal is, I don't have control over an old server I used to be on, and so can't change or take down a set of old web pages including my resume from 2001! So headhunters see 1999-present as a programmer and start drooling. Since I lost my job in late 2001 in the crash, and had 6 months of futile jobhunting... I have not kept my hand in with the programming. I told this to today's recruiter, who blustered, "Aw, you'd be back up to speed in a month!" While this is true, I'm not sure where I stand on going back into a tech job.

If the people were super smart and nice... and know how to communicate... and are sane... and the job was poking around in someone else's giant mess of Perl hackery and twiddling it... I would likely be quite happy. There is something nice about a huge data set and messing around with it and "seeing" into it various ways. On the back end - not live. And about the process of understanding someone else's code... very much like the logic of translation. I especially enjoyed the spamhunting part of my old job, where I could imagine being a keen detective or a spy. I'd go back to translating 1 night a week and on one weekend, like I did when I worked at That One Dead Search Engine Company. But is the company high-pressure and will they want me 12 hours a day? No way could I do that!

The thought of having oodles of money again is tempting. I could save it up like crazy. And yet I could also be quite happy with my plan of teaching community college part time and finishing the Wittig book and then the huge anthology.

going to talk to them. Mostly because their site is good and slick. If it was dumb I would not be tempted for a second.

I'm on the fence!

Lambda Lit night

lemon drop + mojito = I take photos of myself in the bathroom
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

I blame the Lambda Award reading last night and "Betty's List" for this photo of me feeling good and just a little tipsy. I will now regale you with my shallow comments on fashion! And a few responses to the actual literature!

The reading was in the Hispanic Room at the SF Public Library. "Do you think there will be real food? Or just cheese and crackers?" I asked... "Oh, they said 'catered' so probably something like real food. Maybe. But you might be allergic to all of it." The food was great; these endive apple cheese things, tomatoes and mozzerella with basil leaves, sandwichy wrap things, hellish lemon squares and brownies. All good and super fresh...

The room started to fill up. I bought a copy of Bullets and Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry. Between being tired, distracted by thoughts of my giant anthology project, and stuffing myself full of the mozzerella tomato things, I wasn't feeling too chatty. But I did talk with Horehound, and with Nikos Diaman who is an artist and novelist and was super nice. And then I went up to talk to Charlie and complimented the chick she was talking to's nifty fluttery-sleeved black gauzy trench coat thing, and she turned to me automatically in this certain way that was graciously accepting of my starry-eyed fangirl love, which was great except I had no idea who she was even when she said her name - it was Kate Braverman. I must fit the profile of her adoring fans... perhaps I'll join the throng of KB minions out there! She seemed rather mad and charming. "Are you a writer?" "Er, mutter mutter, um, yup." "You are? How come I haven't heard of you then?" I'm sure she meant it kindly. I'll hear her read this Saturday at Writers with Drinks!

Some library guy introduced things. Gayly. Then Charles Flowers did some more introducing and talked about the Lambda Awards & how they're important to the country... to declare our diversity and say "here is the best of what we're making, and it's part of the mainstream of culture too." I applauded this heartily!

Charlie Anders read from her fantastic novel "Choir Boy" - a few pages where Berry, a teenager who has started taking hormones so his voice won't break, gets awarde the "mack hat" by his fellow choristers and then talks to his choir director about music and "signal vs. noise". "If music is just about itself, then what makes it ... goddy?" I've read Choir Boy twice. I highly recommend it! Charlie's retro-stylish black dress fit her curves perfectly and I also loved her shiny-toed velvet and vinyl pumps. The dress was also cute with sneakers and a leather jacket, later.

Joshua Gamson read from "The Fabulous Sylvester." Great writing, I could listen to his descriptions of Sylvester's outfits and sparkling charisma all day long... I kept thinking of the feeling I get when I listen to "Mighty Real"... this sort of angelic utopian quality, ethereal and soaring... the sort of angel who would prance around in public in a dress made entirely of aluminum pie plates and silver angelhair christmastree tinsel. One sort of hoped... that the professorial dignity of Joshua Gamson himself might be influenced by his material... but no, he was something of a prepster. Maybe he was secretly wearing spangled underwear.

Let's listen to "Mighty Real" right now! Wooooo!

Tirza True Latimer then read from her book about women in Paris in the 1920s and lesbian visual coding. Like, how to tell if someone were queer or not from the subtle details of their outfit. Latimer's outfit had already been knocking my socks off, kind of an understated classy pimp butch thing, with a bronze satin wide-collared button down shirt and an oceanic swirly blue tie that made me think of all the modernista poetry and the ocean nymphs wearing only a blush and sea-mist. Well, Latimer went on to define exactly what we mean or don't mean by "Lesbian" and to complicate that word in the finest of academic-ese so that I felt I knew what she meant even though I didn't. I wondered if she had read Margaret Reynolds' "The Sappho Companion" and what she thought of its construction of what Sappho meant to artists and writers in the 20s and also felt like having a good long conversation about the public reception of "The Songs of Bilitis". Then I'd make out with her modernista necktie.

Katia Noyes read a bit out of Crashing America, a part "about guns and sex". It was awesome... I can't wait to read the book. I can't even talk about Katia's outfit because it was too cute. I wanted to steal her dress right off her.

Ursula Steck read from one of her mystery novels, a scene with two women in the woods, some creepy guys with baseball bats, and a dead maggoty raccoon. Eeep! Scary! She was dressed in black and had a cute nerdy butch dyke look with spiky black hair, thick-framed glasses, and black wheelchair. She totally had a matching girlfriend. "All in black" sounds goth but the effect was NOT goth but overwhelmingly library-nerd-hot.

Horehound read his poem "bottom who doesn't"... "A butch motherfucker with a twelve-year-old girl at my inner core/ I'm a huge sissy and one of the original punk rockers..." I love Horehound because I'm totally the opposite. I'm a twelve year old girl with a butch motherfucker at my core. And whenever I dress up like a guy I copy Horehound's punk sissy look. I hope he doesn't mind.


Mattilda then pranced... sashayed... runwayed... up to the front of the room to deliver a rousing diatribe against the title of her own book, Best Gay Erotica. We are against bad, boring, ho-hum erotica that follows the genre constructed with tame meekness! And we are against boring limiting constructions of ultramasculine masculinity and we are definitely not into Gay! We were all ready to start roaring and rioting. I think some gay guys hung their heads in shame, then ran out of the room to put on plaid pants and tear up the streets. But that was just the intro. The story, DogBoy and the Beta Goth, was an edgy story about two teenage boys named alec and ben. Nadyalec and Ben read us the story with irrepressible bouncy cuteness. They were ineluctably masculine, just like James Tiptree, Jr. I loved the story... and their outfits. Nadyalec was in a black nerdy-sissy outfit with a pink striped tie from hot topic. It is no wonder people sometimes mistake us for each other (only when my hair is slicked back.) Ben was gothy. And Mattilda was resplendent. I want to write poetry to his amazing outfits of stripey plaid flowery rainbowed glory! I used to get sent upstairs by my mom to change for wearing just such ensembles! They do my heart good.

Amber Flora Thomas read poems from "Eye of Water". I particularly remember one about the urge to carve names into wood and about love. They were sweet poems... I felt that I could not judge them without seeing them for myself... Amber's outfit was cute, mostly black, notably cute necklace with a big semi-precious stone... I did not figure out what kind of stone but maybe it had super crystal lesbian powers or emotional significance!

Then Katherine Forrest, who was nominated in three categories, read from her intro to Lesbian Pulp Fiction, all about how seeing (and, choking with fear, buying) an Ann Bannon novel in Detroit in 1957 changed her life and in fact saved her life. I bought Lesbian Pulp Fiction, which looks GREAT. We had a nice talk afterwards about SF and the wonders of Suzette Haden Elgin's books, newsletters, blog, emails, Laadan, philosophy; in short we are fellow inhabitors of the Suzette Haden Elgin Empire or Utopian Vision. I don't remember Forrest's outfit at ALL which probably means it reached a pinnacle of lesbian understatement. Probably you aren't supposed to notice it. Anyway, today I read Forrest's own pulp SF novel "Daughters of the Emerald Dusk" and ... well I kind of laughed my head off. I am totally going to send it to Nick Mamatas, I know he will LOVE it. It's sort of like the lesbotopian drug-orgy version of "Childhood's End" by Arthur C. Clarke. And it's pulpy to the MAX.

We went off to Lesbian Night at this bar and restaurant, Mecca, on Market Street which if I were a REAL lesbian hipster instead of a pretend one, I would have already been to. Instantly I ran into the organizer of the event, Betty of Betty's List, and tried to take her picture. It came out too dark. If you go to Mecca on Thursday night, do not have a lemon drop. Have a mojito. The virgin mojitos are also good. Anyway, we hung out with Elizabeth Stark, who wrote Shy Girl, and Angie and Katia and Wendy, and had a great time! It was far too crowded but still fun... and the drinks were expensive but the fries were cheap, delicious, hot, and came in a sort of bottomless basket of salty greasy-yet-still-chi-chi goodness.

damning with faint praise and no space

After two years of research, reading prefaces to anthologies of Latin American poetry and descriptions of women poets in literary histories, I'm a veteran of hateful sexism. You'd think I'd be inured to it.   But this sentence dripped with such venom I thought I'd share it and perhsps that would defuse some of its power:

"She acheived a sort of stark and uncompromising beauty that came very close to justifying the 1945 Nobel Prize she received at a time when Reyes, Neruda, and Borges were all still very active."

Thanks, Rodríguez Monegal... *sarcasm*. Why not just say right out, "Mistral did not deserve the Nobel Prize" and then explain why you think so?

There's another phenomenon I keep seeing. A critic will praise a woman poet's work to the skies, but then won't discuss it; instead, will briefly describe the woman's life, family, and reputation, while giving all the critical attention (and lots of space) to male poets who are not better writers. For example, Anderson-Imbert called María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira "the nucleus of Uruguayan poetry" and of modernismo; he praises her high level of complex thought and her technical perfection; but then he wraps her up in two paragraphs, following up with five pages in detail about Julio Herrera y Reissig, whom he calls "not a great poet..." If he's not a great poet and Vaz Ferreira is, why did she get two paragraphs and he got five pages?

partial response to Sour Duck's take on the women's visibility panel

This is in response to Sour Duck's commentary on SXSWi and specifically on the panel I was on... I commented it on her post but then realized it's so long I might as well repost it here. And I have a lot more to say later in response to her comments on other panels!

*******

First, I do know that some people got where I was coming from, and got something out of it.

I was trying to avoid having to explain what the patriarchy was or defend the very idea that sexism exists in general or on the web or in tech. Without having to explain that, I knew we could push much further into "So now what."  I was not there to do Feminism 101 for SXSWi. That would be a different panel...  It might be quite useful to have it, as well as a panel of "And here's about 8 bazillion examples of evil sexism that I as a woman in tech have experienced."  Which, actually, all of us on the panel talked about to some extent, but decided was not the point.

I think Jan's position was to approach the solution by facing down internal barriers women have that make them feel that self-promotion is wrong. Her solution was not just "kick ass 10 times more than the men around you"... but also "and don't forget to tell the world about it." What she was saying on the panel was a direct demonstration of that philosophy. Not to wait to be asked, or looked for, but to step up and say "I'm great at my work and here's why and here's how to find me."  I agree with Jan that this is crucial. Diffidence and niceness isn't going to help fix anything. I think it's possible to do this without becoming part of the problem - i.e. do it without stepping on anyone else.

I wanted, though, to take a different approach. I suggested a systemic technological fix  -- as the furthest thing I could think of from Jan's solution. (At least, the furthest thing that seems within women's grasp, and that doesn't involve violent revolution.)  

I was not suggesting tagging. Instead, two things: an extension to xml, something like xfn, that people could use to mark up their pages to indicate authorship and identity. It could be built in to existing tools, or added to whatever people like Kaliya are doing with identity authentication layers, or be xml... but it would create standards for people to declare their identities or affinities - including gender, but I also mentioned race as an example.   There's room for discussion of what that would look like.   

The second part of my proposal is that tools be built to use that information.  Currently, we look at a set of all pages (for google or other search engines) or of blogs (for Technorati or whatever other blog-specific search engines.)  so we know by Technorati's algorithms what blogs are considered the most important by other bloggers. We *can't* ask the question, "Who are the most important bloggers in the view of all the *women* bloggers?" or "in the view of all the *non-male* bloggers?"

If we had gender identity data we could see if the answer to that question.  What blogs do women rank most highly? What blogs do men rank most highly? What male-identified ( tiny joke...)  blogs do non-males think are most interesting?  etc.   Extend this to race and you might see how it could be both fascinating and useful.  

The mere fact that those answers would all be different means that we should do it and see what the answers ARE.   Also, seeing their differences shows directly how we construct "value" and ranking, and how that value depends on the identity of the constructors.  So what I am suggesting is actually rather radical. I am saying that tech can give us a direct way to take the power of constructing value, and own it, and make it very very transparent.

Of course that data could be used for scary purposes, but.... I guarantee you it already IS... or will be.  So why not build it to be open and used by everyone?

Not everyone would identify themselves, but enough would that we would get interesting data.  It would actually allow us to "name the problem" MORE than we can now with existing vision.

It would make women more visible to each other, and it would also make them more visible to men who cared to look at what women's standards of aesthetics, usefulness, and value are.  

You might argue that it will not matter if those aesthetics are visible; patriarchy basically guarantees that women's standards and power will be denigrated, belittled, etc.  In other words what women assert is valuable, patriarchy will devalue *because* women like it. One merely has to breathe a hint that "teenybopper girls" or "housewives" like something for it to become the epitome of unpowerful. Consider romance novels; they *sell*. By all rights their continued existence should change something about what is considered valuable - they have this huge economic power. But... are they Literature? Somehow... (sarcasm) Not.  HOrribly.. I remember this same dynamic being pointed out to me when I first joined the STC in the early 90s - I was warned that because women were succeeding in "infiltrating" tech writing, tech writing was going to become a low-power pink-collar job.  THAT sort of thing.   Anyway, you could argue this against what I'm proposing. And you would be quite right to argue it.  I don't think it's a good reason for not DOING it, though.

Tara and Virginia had other things to say, but I thought I'd try to make my own statement a little more clear.

My 2 metaphors, which I just didn't have time on the panel to go into, and I realized they were too wacky to pass without a lot of explanation... were ... well... "radical fuzzy separatism" which just cracked me up as a name... because I'm suggesting a temporary separatism and one with fuzzy boundaries.  The other metaphor is of Maxwell's Demon. Think of patriarchy, or racism, as being Maxwell's Demon, i.e. an invisible and imaginary and impossible Agency, a being sitting at the tiny doorway between two chambers and keeping them separate... picking particles out of the air with tiny tweezers, perhaps...    We could shoot the demon maybe; we could point out who's wearing the demon suit; we could exhort various particles to whiz around faster so they can trick the demon and get through the door; what I was proposing is to recognize the shape of the system itself and, well, drill some new holes between the two chambers. But first you have to know where the walls are.  

Imaginary argument with anyone who might care

In everything I've read about Cuban women writers, Luisa Pérez de Zambrana is either called a romanticist (and dismissed for it) or a not-quite-romanticist or post-romanticist-but-not-a-modernista (and dismissed for that too). I see the romanticism in a lot of her work, though I haven't found, much less read, everything she's ever written. And I see the not-quite-romanticism. But then, in other poems, I see modernismo. As far as I can tell there's no reason to call her not also a modernista.

What the heck do you call this, if not "modernismo"?

La poesía esclava a Aurelia Castillo Con túnica de nácar, pasa pura una dulce, una espléndida figura más blanca que el jazmín. Es un ángel con alas estrelladas, un ángel celestial que lleva atadas las manos de marfil. Tú eres esa beldad tierna y sombría ¡adorable y celeste Poesía! ¡prisionera inmortal! ¿Cuál es tu culpa, ¡oh cándida acusada? -¡Sobre mi frente pálída y sagrada llevar la Libertad!

Poetry Enslaved to Aurelia Castillo In her pearl-pale tunic, she endures, pure and sweet, a splendid figure whiter than jasmine. She's an angel with starry wings, a celestial angel, her marble hands in chains. You are that lovely maiden, tender and serious adorable and heavenly Poetry! Immortal captive! What is your crime, oh innocent accused? "On my pallid, bleeding brow I bear the mark of Liberty!"

White ethereal ideal marble jasmine maidenly starriness. Check. Art and Beauty internalized by Artist as a sort of metaphysical/aesthetic/political method of acheiving The Good. Check. Parnassian tendencies. Yup, got that too.

Perhaps the sticking point is the idea that modernismo is about exact form. This is true for one strand of it, but even Darío gets to be modernista in his long Whitmanesque rambles. Critics of the early 20th century were in surprising agreement for such a waffly topic that they were just making up anyway - that there were various strains of modernismo, formal and free verse, symbolist/imagist or symbolist/parnassian. Over time, this evolved to a more and more patriarchal geneology, where Darío sort of fertilized everyone else; but this is not true since plenty of other poets were reading the same things he was reading in Paris and elsewhere.

Perhaps the sticking point is the artist's life-myth? As the poet of modernismo had to embody Art in their entire life and whatever they did. Perhaps Pérez de Zambrana was too old and had too much of a reputation for stuffy elegies and elaborate patriotic verses. But then I turn to her elegy for Mercedes Matamoros, which also seems like a paragon of modernismo. In her elegy, "Ya Duermes!" she hits every point... Matamoros is hanging out in a tunic, dead and ethereal, like a lily... lyres are mentioned.. muses... silver and blue, sublimeness, infinity, alabaster, and finally Matamoros kind of waves farewell as she steps lightly out among the stars. As for being too old... That should not matter. Besides, Pérez de Zambrana was hangin g out with all the modernista chicks (whose existence seems in dispute of course) in Cuba, in the 1890s, and with Julian de Casal and that whole gang.

It irks me!

So why care? Actually, my ultimate argument is that we shouldn't care. But since stuff is getting published in "modernista" anthologies and bigger anthologies seem to need that handle to make poetry of that time hip and cool and valuable, it does matter that all the women (except maybe sometimes Agustini, with caveats) are excluded. If you think it's important, I'm gonna argue that plenty of women fit it. But fitting into a genre should not be all-consumingly important.

I would also note that another force is in play. Pérez de Zambrana gained some fame as a Romanticist, and then moved on to write in other styles. When male poets do this, it makes them versatile. When women do it, it's because they haven't mastered any one thing, they haven't focused, and they have no depth. Ah, fickle Woman!

Girls in tech

Note to self (and anyone else): This panel looks really neat.

7:00-9:00 pm
Panel: Developing Girls' Technology Fluency
Rebecca London, Jill Denner, Deborah Kim Emery, and Melissa Koch

liveblogging at the library

Since I read very quickly I'm done reading the poems for the Redwood City Youth Poetry Contest before the other judges. We've read, discussed, and judged K-1, 2-3, 4-5, and now are in the middle of reading poems from grades 6-8.

It's so much fun! The poems, a good selection and range from English- and Spanish-speaking kids, are knocking my socks off. One of them made me cry. Well, when the contest results are announced and the poems are on the Redwood City Library web site, I'll link to them and discuss them in detail.

The three of us judges have varying opinions about what make a poem good poetry. Trish likes complex thought and sentiments of beauty and I would say she values form highly. Leslie likes a social issue and a conscience, a poet who looks outside herself. I like to see daring, leaping, unusual juxtapositions, and an awareness of language and form whether that is free verse in its jazzy meter and flow, or regular meter and rhyme.

translation, Lit and Lunch

This sounds great. I'll be going! The Center for Art in Translation sponsors a lot of great events in SF, but I hardly ever get a chance to go to them.

We hope you'll join us on April 11 and the second Tuesday of each month
from
12:30 to 1:30 pm (doors open at 12:00)
111 Minna Gallery
Minna Street at 2nd Street (two blocks south of Market)
Downtown San Francisco

Spring 2006 Schedule

April 11: Writers from Europe and Latin America
Pulitzer Prize-winner and translator Galway Kinnell
Galway Kinnell has won almost every honor that can be bestowed on an
American poet, from the Pulitzer Prize to the National Book Award. He is
renowned for spellbinding readings. Kinnell has translated some of the
greatest modern poets, including Lorca, Neruda, and Rilke.

A quick attempt at Salome

I'm really digging Salome Urena de Henriquez, and though this is a rough draft of about the first third of a long poem, I thought I'd share it with you. When I come to a more final version I'll post the whole thing. My translation is very rough. I'd like to polish it up to reflect Urena's rhythmic invocations, which are very beautiful in Spanish! Very fancy-languaged and high-toned. This poem is like Krishna's call to action when he's talking to Arjuna... a little bit... I remember someone, maybe my friend Humberto, telling me I'd like Urena's work a nd now I see why. She praises tumult, destruction, and hubris! Cool.

Urena (1850-1897) was a fiercely political writer and a feminist.

In defense of Society (1)

Go through, go through the gates; prepare ye the way of the people; cast up, cast up the highway; gather out the stones; lift up a standard for the people. (Isaiah 62:10)

Creator spirit, fertile genius
you who with inexhaustible activity widen the making
of miracles from your sublime power,
you who perennially shine
in your good works, you who grasp
regions without end in your thoughts
and you who, with your love, extend from world to world
the laws of eternal movement:

Can it be be that the ultimate reward
offered by your august hand
would be condemnation to the repose of nothingness?
Would you have us be lethargic
before your show of active power,
indolent idleness spent in
admiring you - oh Lord - to pass one's life?

No: wake up, all you who from pleasant fields
in the flowery cushions
only hope for a serene spirit
for hours of peace in ignorant shade.
Rise up, all you who follow
the current of agreeable fashion,
be anathema to the popular uproar,
let out a shout, break the dreams of the most happy.

It's not pride - all you who raise up to heaven
a grand pyramid
and who exalt yourselves, aspiring to infinite flight:
it's the immortal spark, that huge and powerful
immense great work,
and in constant travail and internal labor
you create, so that man in his delirium will follow
something of greatness, to stand forever.

technorati tags: translation, salome urena, dominican republic, poetas, poesia, traduccion, poetry, women poets

third anniversary of war

It was a full moon three years ago as I drove down the highway crying, thinking of Salam Pax.  These days I still think of him, but every day wonder about Riverbend and her family...  Jeremy, of Daddy Dialectic and othermag,  asked me to post something as a parent on the anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Baghdad.

moon veil your mirror

    March 19, 2003


Moon, sky-hook, when I turn to you
my face is turned away from my mother.
My face is turned away from my mother.

I want to forget I am part of this world.
I want to forget I am part of this world,
so I can become round enough to pity the dust.

Future light won't shine here.
Future light won't shine here,
because the wheel of stars will dip below
a housing development conveniently named 'Purgatory',
built where teenage boys wake up
handcuffed with their black bandanas.

Moon, breathe the atmosphere of sorrow,
suck it from my dying mouth
as I prepare to put out the light,
because what you are about to see is blood.

What you are about to see is blood.
Turn your face away
if you aren't strong enough
and for a moment I'll look for you
long enough to put out the light,

because teenage boys like thin colts
veiled in ash & black bandanas
nerve their legs and put out the stars in their eyes,
preparing for that day when no light will shine.
That's why they can stare at the sun
while I can only look at you, moon.

Because I don't have any blood to give.
I've bought too many telescopes
in my housing development coincidentally named "The Shadows".
I don't have any blood to give.
I've bought too many telescopes that fold up like ice
and they'll endure until licked away by a cow's warm tongue.

Moon
shutter your face
to cut out the harsh light, the violent light.
Wear a black bandana
because a silver lamb unfolds from your pocket like a sailing ship.
Because you can't close your eyes,
I'll give you my black veil.

Moon
veil your mirror,
because my eyes have been defiled.

Because my eyes have been defiled
by the future of my country,
because the light gathered by you and thrown back in our faces
has seen the blood that I can't bleed or see,
because of that, I'll look, though I have no tears to give,
because my tears are gathering dust in a gallon jug
under the sink, where I keep my lambs and my telescopes,
where I keep my mirror, and the ruins of the Golden Gate Bridge,
and a cow's hoof, and a ship in a bottle.

technorati tags: poetry, war, parenthood, antiwar, testimony,

Litgeek? Nerdaesthetics?

Liz Henry, Technoaesthete Mashup
Originally uploaded by Brian Oberkirch.

I'm so flattered that Brian labelled me a "Technoaesthete Mashup". We had a really random encounter at the SXSWi conference, where within 3 minutes we established that we both think computer/net/tech and literary theory and cultural studies have this strange point of intersection that barely anyone else sees.

Then when I started to talk about translation, meaning to lead up into mentioning Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Suzanne Jill Levine's translation of Tres Tigres Tristes, I swear this is true, before the words could come out of my mouth Brian said, "It's like in Tres Tigres Tristes..." How mind-boggling!

It was great to come across another literary theory geek in the middle of a computer conference.

Reading this Friday at Art21 - Esther Kamkar and Julia Simone Alter

I don't remember Julia's poetry, but I heartily recommend Esther Kamkar's work to anyone in the Bay Area. She's one of my favorite poets on the SF Peninsula, really amazing. It's like watching someone carefully bleed themselves and make wine out of the blood, or something. She has this particular intensity and delicacy, especially in describing the darker sides of human relationships, and is never boring. I think she writes at times in Persian as well as in English.

From JC Watson, the MC for this month:

Hello to all my dears who are drenched by rain and darkness!

Friday night, March 10th, 06, brings some RELIEF!

Two Unforgettable Poets, ESTHER KAMKAR and JULIA SIMONE ALTER
will read their work at Art 21 Gallery, corner of Hamilton and Alma,
in Palo Alto at 7:30 p.m..

I promise Enthrallment for all.

MZ JC Watson will emcee and provide good food and drink.
(No Shrimp Chips here!)

So, get under that umbrella and light up your soul!

Parking is easily had in the garage, just a stone's
throw north of the Gallery.

JC Watson's own poetry is excellent, as I've mentioned on this blog before. She's well worth hearing. The Art 21 open mike is friendly and welcoming; it's usually around 10-12 people reading a couple of poems each. Quality varies, but sincerity and variety abounds!

Tiptree winner announcement!

Congratulations to Geoff Ryman, who has just won the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award for his book Air: or, Have Not Have. It's an unusual book and a great story.

The award goes each year to a work of speculative fiction that expands and explores gender. I had a great time being on the Tiptree jury this year!

The short listed works are:

Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender (Doubleday 2005)
“Wooden Bride” by Margot Lanagan (in Black Juice, Eos 2005)
“Little Faces” by Vonda N. McIntyre, on SciFiction, 02.23.05
A Brother's Price by Wen Spencer (Roc 2005)
Misfortune by Wesley Stace (Little, Brown 2005)
Remains by Mark Tiedemann (Benbella Books 2005)

The long list and special mentions will be announced in a week or so.

technorati tags: tiptree, tiptree award, gender, science fiction, sf, literary quality, canon formation

List of poets in the anthology

Here's the list of women poets that I have translated so far (some, many poems; some, only one).

limitation is that they should have been publishing or writing between 1880 and 1930. I have another list of many more poets from the same era - some that I want to translate and expand into a really big book. I will probably put the bios of the poets online. In fact I feel like I could have more of an effect by making Wikipedia pages for all these poets, and by tagging them up. But I would like a book.

The long list (not posted yet) is only a few of the many hundreds of women whose work I've seen.


*Luisa Pérez de Zambrana (Cuba)
*Jesusa Laparra (Guatemala)
*Maria Luisa Milanes (Cuba) (1893-1919)
*Maria Villar Buceta (Cuba) (1899-1977)
*Salomé Ureña de Henríquez (Dominican Republic) (1850-1897) "Herminia"
*Elisa Monge (Guatemala) (18XX-1932)
*Adela Zamudio (Bolivia) (1854-1928) "Soledad"
*Mercedes Matamoros (Cuba) (1851-1906)
*Nieves Xenes (Cuba)
*Aurelia Castillo de González (Cuba) (1842-1920)
*María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira (Uruguay) ( 1875-1924 )
*Emilia Bernal de Agüero (Cuba) (1884-1964)
*Delmira Agustini (Uruguay) (1886 - 1914)
* Antonieta Le-Quesne (Chile) (1895-1921)
*Juana de Ibarbourou (Uruguay) (1894 - 1979)
*Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva (Venezuela) (1886-1962)
*Gabrela Mistral (Chile) (1889-1957)
*Emma Vargas Flórez de Arguelles (Colombia) (1885 - )
*Alfonsina Storni (Argentina) (1892-1938)
* Adela Sagastume de Acuña (Guatemala) (18XX - 1926)
*Magda Portal (Perú) (1901-1989)
*MARIA MONVEL (Chile) (1897 - 1936)
*Nydia Lamarque (Argentina) (1906-1982)
*Olga Acevedo (Chile) (1895-1970)

Carnival of Blog Translation - a post from La letra escarlata

Here is my (rather hasty, last minute) translation of a post by Hester Prynne of La letra escarlata, "Primera persona del singular del futuro imperfecto"; done for the first Carnival of Blog Translation over on the ALTA blog. (I apologize for any mistakes or awkward phrasing, and anyone can feel free to correct me.)

And --- I have to say --- what fun this is!

First person singular future imperfect

A ticket for a bet on the films that might make it to the Oscars this year, four beer cans crumpled as if they were balls of paper where someone didn't find inspiration, a container of dirty paintbrushes, a radio set (playing happy reggaeton that everyone in the world tends to listen to lately and that gives me a headache), a smell that hasn't been aired out for several days, a mountain of sheets on the bed, a pizza box I don't dare to open.

"Did you find it?" asks my housemate from the kitchen, where she's making sandwiches, she'll leave everything messed up and I don't care very much, because I've gotten used to it. People in the United States are very disorderly; the most neglectful person in Madrid can't surpass it. I think it's becuase they have so many things, trivial things that sometimes don't seem to serve any purpose, things that they buy every time they go to the shopping center -- I don't know.

"Yes, here it is, thanks." I pick up the book I was looking for, under a pile of notebooks. I close the door.

Outside it's snowing. I put on my black overcoat, the thickest one I have, the scarf and legwarmers my bruja made me (isn't she wonderful?). The gloves my friend Henar gave me, the hat with earflaps that makes me look Peruvian.

How landscapes change according to time's passing. Now the leafeless trees show what was hidden when I arrived in summer to Saratoga Springs. many people walking hurried with their paper cups full of coffee. I nevertheless am stupified, with my nose redder and redder, gazing at infinity.

More and more, I grow conscious that I'm living a sort of privileged parenthesis. In this one year I've been put in a bubble whwere I know what I'm supposed to do with every minute. To go to class, to read, to study, to write, to work, to go to dinner, to take a walk... I don't have to set out to plan anything on my own, the elitist university system of the United States of America protects me.

But there, watching me, is the near future. June will come and in its backpack loads up verbs like: getting my degree, writing, (or salvation, for me it means the same), working, going back... It's a future that scares me but at the same time appeals to me. The great bourgeois problem of "what do I do with my life" that we have the luxury of being able to ponder.

Saratoga celebrates the Winterfest, an equivalent to Groundhog Day (Day of the Marmot) that is celebrated in Pennsylvania, and by which people predict how much winter is left (I don't know if you've ever seen the film by Atrapando about this time, about this event). There's a buffet of soups in all the town's restaurants, a display of snowmen, and somehow, a band plays with its trombones semifrozen. I have a book in my bag and there's my favorite cafe. Whenever I go in, my glasses fog up and with the paraphrenalia of scarf, bag, purse, and all that, it takes me a while to clean them off and look around me. The girl behind the bar recognizes me and knows that Iike the hazelnut coffee. She makes me want to say:
"Eeeeeh, could I have also just a little bit of the future, please?"

I hope that my life is always a mix of the Unitedstatesian messy room and precise protective bubble, of glasses misty with the heat of an agreeable place where they know what kind of coffee you like and the white cold of a snowfall predicted by the dreams of a marmot, that forces you to open yourself to a road of responsibility and risk. There are things that I know I want, things I don't know if I want, things that I know I don't want... There's fears, there's goals, there's laziness, there's the emotions of an uncertain and tempting future. I'm going to end this post with a rotten rhetorical question, but oh such a true one: who said going outside is easy?

technorati tags: translation, spanish translation, blog translation, carnival of blog translation, la letra escarlata, español, uncertainty, winter, student life

Woolf Camp

woolf camp
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

Here's some of the crowd at WoolfCamp, a writing/blogging retreat.

Duuuuude! It was heavenly to hang out with those 30+ women and 5 men, most of them with laptops surgically attached to their bodies. All people who find it normal to listen while typing. In fact, typing during a conversation is a compliment; it means you're taking notes because the conversation is so cool you want to write it up in realtime.

We had discussions on ideas like:

- Who is your audience, and why do you care?
- Gender, blogging as a genre
- Blogging, business, and feminism
- tagging; thinking about tagging
- memoir

And demos/workshops like

- nifty bloggy techie tools
- art blogging
- videoblogging and podcasting

And there was a poetry reading. I swear, I had no idea people really *wanted* a poetry reading. They did, and lots of people participated.

Grace, Jackie and I wanted to mix up literary, arty, and techie people a bit, and bring together people who love blogging, in an unconferencey, informal way. We had a feminist take on the event, are closely connected with BlogHer and mommyblogging, and wanted to work hard to bring people into the conversation who might usually hang back.

One of my main goals was to bring people together. I was so happy to see everyone making personal connections, and I got to meet a lot of awesome bloggers! Intensity, and people who get excited about ideas, give me energy. I don't require people to prove themselves as some kind of big technical expert, or a zillionaire, or ask them where they work, before I listen to their ideas and take them seriously! The non-"legitimate" people are often edge-thinkers who don't just think outside the box, they live outside it. (That automatically includes most mommybloggers, especially the potty-mouthed and dirty minded kind.)

My own favorite conversations were in the "gender and genre" discussion, diva-ed by Amber Hatfield; I also loved the ideas thrown around in "Who's your audience" diva-ed by Emily!

Personal blogging had many strong voices in the mix. It was a given that personal blogging can be a political and feminist act. I liked what Emily said: "If I like what you write, I want to read everything about everything. Your kids, your job, your bowel movements. So I like it all mashed up, which is how I love to blog."

Chris Heuer answered with this excellent thought about the importance of categories and tagging in mixy-uppy blogging: "The whole self is very intriguing. But we don't have enough time to get to know everyone on that deep level."

It was also a given that blogging was a serious literary or artistic endeavor - or can be. That in itself was interesting and empowering. We were a group of people who share that belief.

I have more to say, and in more detail, but I've been flying on one brain cell for the last couple of days, and have a lot going on, for school, writing projects, and friends in crisis.

Can some of the people who took notes in discussions, post them raw?

transparency, identity, blogging

Huzzah for this article... Jon Udell on transparency in blogging professional life.

The issue here isn't simply that employers don't get what blogging is or can be. I think that's changing. I think there is an emerging consensus that professional lives can, should, and will be lived more transparently. But a successful negotiation of the limits of that transparency will be incredibly tricky. I'm hopeful that we'll get there, but doubtful that we'll get there soon.

People are going there, but it's risky. I said last year at BlogHer that academic scientists are blogging about their work more than academics in the humanities. For example - Pharyngula. But no one knows the boundaries.

Are the most interesting details inevitably the most unbloggable, either because they're proprietary, or because they reveal interpersonal complexity, or because they go too far into "private lives"? I think the blogosphere is revealing the power and danger of gossip. Feminists have often reclaimed the idea of gossip - and that's going to happen again so that "what is trivial" will be redefined, remodeled. I know I harp on Feyerabend's "Against Method", but its ideas about how science works, how research and intellectual development actually unfold, are crucial here. What history points to as important, the narrative process of intellectual history, is not always "what happened". Blogging, especially professional/personal blogging, will expose the richness of experience to a wide audience. Autobiography will change. And we can apply blog or social network models of reality to the past, as well; what if we represented, say, a literary/intellectual movement not through biography which shapes lives into a narrative, or an encyclopedia of biographical entries, but instead, create "Orkut 1910"? What would that look like?

Just as it's pertinent information to know someone else's blogroll from now -- i.e. I share something in common with other readers of Pandagon and Bitch Ph.D., with the other commenters there -- it would be lovely to draw sideways-going, networky, intersecting nexi (nexuses?) of people in various disciplines.

technorati tags: blogging, autobiography, biography, memoir, social networks, representing information, narrative, history