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

function of the line

A handy link to Denise Levertov's essay On the Function of the Line. (So I don't lose it... I'll come back to this later.)

technorati tags: levertov, linebreaks, poetics, poetry, denise levertov

One book to rule them all

I just got back from the library/community meeting to choose the possible books for the "One Book, One Community" program that will happen in May. Our town has about 90,000 people and about half of them speak Spanish (counting the unincorporated part of town that has the most Spanish speakers, an extra 15,000.)

The library committee had chosen a list of possible books, but then the city council said, "Hey, why didn't you ask the community." So, they threw out that list, and opened an invitation. I came because I'm in the local mothers' club, and another mom asked a few people she knew loved books to participate. Two of us went. Other groups represented: high school teachers, elementary school librarians, senior citizens, librarians, one Latina librarian, men, and high school students.

At our first meeting, we brainstormed a list of qualitites we felt were important for The Book to have. This worked very well. The list of qualities was rewritten into loosely grouped categories. Then we voted, three votes each, on the most important qualities. Our top three picks were: available in Spanish and English; of high interest to the community; and ability to cross generational lines, i.e. be accessible as far downward in age as possible. "Good story" and "interestingness" I think got folded into "of high interest" which originally meant "topical, relevant to our town". "Literariness" was actually a negative quality even though many people in the room personally liked it.

Not voted on, but often mentioned, was that the book had to be something that would not be offputting to men. We all seemed to know what this meant. It was a dealbreaker quality. No one liked this idea, but there was a sort of pragmatic consensus.

That was three weeks ago. We all talked to people in our communities and came up with no more than 5 books each that we felt would have the right qualities, and that we felt passionate about. I put the question out there, "So are we committing to the idea of availability in Spanish?" And there was reluctance... though it had the most votes. Tonight there was a moment again where some books only in English might have slipped through, but I put my back up, and then the librarian agreed, and everyone else went with it. I was glad. My main goal of being there was fulfilled...

We had an interesting discussion of books that were good, but that were overused, were sort of too canonical. The Giver, or The Red Pony, or House on Mango Street. The high school student sort of closed her eyes and groaned at all these, which have become standard middle-school reading list fare. I was thinking of House on Mango Street as standard community-college fare, but that was 20 years ago. Now it's for middle school!

There were only a few of us for this second meeting: The high school girl (new), the senior citizen (she was in favor of more 'literary' options), the other mom-club woman's husband who is a community college lit prof and who was the only non-anglo, me, the librarian who was unbearably cool, and some other old guy who seemed quite well read and interesting, parent of a high school student. I was impressed with everyone. They had all made sincere efforts to ask around and get opinions!

We had some discussion, ruled out a few books, spoke up in favor of some others, passed books around the table, and came up with:

- The Kite Runner
- Before We Were Free
- Grapes of Wrath
- Seabiscuit
- Their Eyes Were Watching God

That's a pretty cool list. I could lose "Seabiscuit" and not care, but the rest of it's fine! I don't think anyone will vote for Grapes of Wrath, which IMHO is too long at 600-ish pages, and also too high of a reading level. "Before We Were Free" was my suggestion. I loved the idea of everyone reading "The Moon is Down", but could not find it in print in Spanish. The other book we wanted that wasn't in print in Spanish: Night, by Elie Wiesel.

I would have been unnerved to suggest The Kite Runner, but the high school girl's freshman class had read it and all really liked it and had super intense discussions. "It's got war, it's got racism, it's got father-son relationships, and going back to your old country, and class issues, it's got EVERYTHING," - radiating valley-girly intensity enthusiasm.
"And it's, well, it's sort of about, it's got this... rape. Of a guy." Okay, after that endorsement from a 14 year old, we were all voting for it! Plus the author lives here. I'll probably vote for it over my original choice.

Well, I wanted to write that all up because it was a great example of actual community involvement in politics and in canon formation.

Carnival of Blog Translation

Announcing the first Carnival of Blog Translation! Tuesday, Feb. 28th, 2006!

On the day of the Carnival, a participant translates one post by another blogger, and posts it on her own blog with a link to the original. She would need to email me, or post in the comments right here, and I'll compile one big post on the day of the Carnival with links to all the participants.

You can translate any blog entry that was posted in the month of February 2006. It can be your own blog entry, if you like.

From participants I need:

your name
name of your blog
your blog URL
post title in target language

name of blog you're translating
name of person you're translating
that URL
the post title in the source language

You should get permission from the person you're translating to post your translation of their work. I would also suggest that you might introduce your translation for the target-language audience, and provide some context if you can.

A Blog Carnival is sort of like a travelling signpost that points to a bunch of magazine articles. It is a post that contains links to other posts written especially on a particular theme. I'll host it this month, and next month will hand it off to another host. The content will not appear here; only links to that content!

If you're looking for a blog in a particular language, try searching on Technorati, a useful blog search engine.

This idea came from a discussion on Bev Traynor's blog and further discussion of bilingual blogging and tagging at BlogHer. I'm excited about the idea and its possibilities!

*** Rebecca Mckay points out that the "Translation Carnival" is a graduate student conference happening at University of Iowa in April. Here's some information on the U. of Iowa Translation Carnival; it sounds like a great event!

Waverley report, January reading

I'm behind in my notes on readings that I go to. Here's some notes from the January meeting of Waverley Writers, a large, friendly open mike that happens in a Quaker church. The MC, Jean Chacona, introduces people in groups of three.

Willy - "remember standing... wearing sheepskin vest, wanting nothing..." Streetcorner poem. "Before there was a before." A bit of messing with rhyme and meter. I think for a moment of the Tom Lehrer song, "The Folk Song Army."

Ron Lang - "Middle East Politics"

Ella Rae Locke - as always, her odd use of language stands out. She will always use a 50 cent word where you'd expect sparseness of a nickel one. It's jarring, I'm not sure it works, it struck me at first as if she took every noun and adjective, looked them up in the thesaurus, and replaced them with the longest most multi-syllabic word; and yet it charms me as part of her attempt at baroque style. "mouth to mouth resuscitation, loaded beyond recognition, and accrue malignant momentum, evolutionary editing as involuntary as wet clothes, consenting mandatory neutralizing meaningless significants awareness nuisances lay their libellousness immunity testimony reality...." That is not a direct quote but as I listened I was jotting down the Big Words. I like the effect, in fact, the more it grates on me.

*

Muriel - "Short Stories". "She is afraid of him. He was afraid of her. He likes his own friends more."

Anita Holz - "Paper making". Competently descriptive prose paragraphs. I wonder why it's a poem. In fact, it's not. Would be fine as a short magazine article or memoir about an experience.

Steven Riddle - "Notes of the bird." "My lost ghost tracks me... The egret stalks; beauty eats beauty."

*

Tom Digby - Quality vs. Quality. Dammit, I can't read my notes and I've forgotten the poem. Does this say "wheelmaker"?

Dude whose name I forgot. This poem was so long and simple in concept that I began to write down bits of it. "I was a bad boy. They didn't beat the others, only me. The cycle must end. Let it end with me. No abuse from me for my boys. So I left them. I was bad. I was not a bad man. I am a good man. I have done good things. I have done bad things. Fear into strength. Pain into enlightenment. " Okay, it was heartfelt and sincere. But it made me think of the children's book, "Pickles the Fire Cat". "Pickles was not a good cat. Pickles was not a bad cat. He was good and bad. He was a mixed-up cat." I recognize the value of such therapy poems. This one was very sweet and very clear. Just not my cup of tea.

Christine Holland - "so lightly out, brief candles... Fatima at 16... he murdered her to clean their name." Christine has been reading more political poems lately. Much more raw and painful than what she was reading a year ago.

*
Brucey Slama - "Merlot merlot/ low to the ground/ coy as a boy/ joy for all/ tall not small." and an ice cream poem. "Flavors with nuts/Best, I assert/ Don't like sorbet or sherbert." Okay. Let's move on.

Peter Chow - Guy who wrote that one really good, long, 100-poem, with the line I liked about bones and snow. This poem is one he wrote when he mom (recently) died, and it's a burial poem, an acrostic on "gratitude". He read a second poem about her in the morgue. "a quilt with eight swans over us / Plato says the swan sings... /the Sanskrit for swan/ you have a good heart, mama..."

Greg Kimura - Oh, now here's a poet. Huzzah! "The thousand and first kiss; or, how men love". So excellent and such a relief, I did not take any notes. I'd like to hear him feature somewhere.

*

David Cummings - "The last of the leaves". Hearing David's poems is one of the main reasons to go to Waverley. always excellent.

John Hutton - "July 4 1998". "You are celery and I am tomato/ and somehow we embrace/as your mother / cruises by on a Harley..." Excellent! Everyone liked it, too. Hutton's nerdy quirkiness worked well, here.

Aline S. - "in the hospital, 45 breaths per minute from the respirator/ to keep your organs pink and healthy/ later I counted/ the people at your funeral.... your urn... we can measure that too, you get smaller all the time/day by day by measured day." Good! Very quintessentially Waverleyish.
/>*
Rob Parry announce a meeting of Bay Area Book Arts.
(Announcement deleted at poet's request)
Someone recommends we take a look at the paintings in Books, Inc. in Mountain View.

*

Steve Arntson - "Helicopter dust". Another main reason to come to Waverley. One of the best poets in the Bay Area, but almost no one seems to know it.

Me - two poems, "queen of swords" which is just 2 lines, and "this is the first morning", a hard poem for me to read. It's like it's in the voice of me 15 years ago. "where is the surface of my body? organ sonorous,/ when in the wave-cold blast i shrink from touch/ the present mixes with the past and I tune out..."

Bruce Jewett - "I never get screwed by car salesman/ I never play video poker/ But I bought a war, once." So good! Another poem on paper-making; "paper a paper-maker just made.... long after I forget my own name..." I dig Bruce's work and his aesthetic.

*

(Deleted at poet's request)

Kit bliss Jones - "girlfriend" "Life is uncertainty, so eat dessert first." Rhyming poem.

Len Anderson - Flamenco poem. "The deeper his grief/ the ... consolation... / he too was... by the turning of the earth..." Damn. I can't read my notes, but it was a very good poem. I always enjoy Len's poems, usually explorations of a form, and he also has a keen pen for style. I love his marvellous parody of Howl - the silicon valley version, "Beep".
"I am always grateful for the repetition of notes; /it tells me the music will go on / after I leave the room." Aw yeah! Tell it, Len!

*
Judith Bishop - Ants. "I spray hot water over the crawling dishes... " Ants on the dishes. Suburban goddess of destruction.
Then a long story. Solstice - Native american ceremony - spirals - recovery from alcoholism. This, also, very quintessentially Waverleyish. But must it be a poem? Why not foray into memoir or "spoken word"? There's some necessary fermentation missing, a bit frustrating to hear because it's so close, and Judith is a good writer.

Jayne Kos - Temple... stairs... I'm sorry to Jayne but at this point I spaced out and lost the thread of attention.

Jean Chacona - "Infiltration" - love - entrails - black box - a lock, but also leaks - knowing there is no cure. Another good poem from Jean. Also, I admired her black, grey, and pink argyle sweater...

*
Mary Petroski - what trick of light/makes today/ different from other days?

Nelly Capra - "Job Interview in Alameda". Scene. wait and pray. breezes. butterfly. birds. truck. workers. sun. write and wait. Oct. 31. No clouds. Here is a diary entry or blog post...

Esther Kamkar - I'm a huge fan of her work. Esther, main reason #3 to come to Waverley and if you come and she's not there it's a disappointment. "Simple Words". 1. Bones A baker bakes bread/ A shoemaker makes shoes...."

*
Robert Parry - "Devil and the Deep Blue Sea"

Carol Hankemeyer - "Red" "Red is....." etc.

JC Watson - Excellent as always. Reason #4 to come to Waverley. I always scribble like mad when she reads. "Art is made in Death's kitchen... the war is made up. The leaves fell again this year. .." "Where is the tunnel? You may choose / darkness, / It's a good friend. Doesn't make promises, doesn't lick at your heart..."

*
At some point I began thinking hard about modernismo. The private aesthetic appreciation, and retreat into self and perception. Trying to make the moment glorious. Encapsulating a moment and its depth. How many connections can it handle?

me the moment has to have infinite connections and is a nexus of possibility. You can't wrap it up too neatly.

Reading tonight in Oakland

I'll be reading tonight at the Nomad Cafe in Oakland...

It's on Shattuck and 65th St., walking distance from Ashby BART. 7:00-9:00.

Serene will read a few poems, then I'll read my poems and translations, and then a break and an open mike.

like to try a couple of my translations of Nestor Perlongher. They're strange poems, and they don't make a huge amount of linear sense, and they work by talking around the subject in baroque fractal image/wordplay digressions. So that the images will all be of starfish and rays of light and greasy film running through a projector and rayon shirts and feather boas, and every word has three meanings and interconnections to other words, but somewhere in the middle you are hit by a blinding realization that the poem is all about the metaphysics of cocksucking. They were VERY hard to translate and I would dig testing them out in front of people. I'll read some of the short ones in Spanish, but most in English. I'd also like to read a sampling of my translations from the anthology I'm working on - Latin American women poets from 1880-1930.

If that sounds good, then I hope you show up!

genre or movement?

I was challenged to explain what I mean by "genre" and how it's different from a "literary movement". So, is modernismo a genre? A movement? Or what? Some theorists talk about genre as form - as poetry, drama, prose; elegy, epic, lyric. Then there's another way of talking about genre or subgenre, or "historical genres": science fiction, gothic romance, realist painting. And if a literary movement is some people copying each other to do something a new way, or a particular way, and create a different frame of reference of aesthetic judgement, how is that different from inventing a genre -- a body of work that shares some particular characteristics?

Or, think of it this way... a sonnet is a form, not a genre. But we could talk about a historical genre of "courtly love poetry" which often uses sonnet form. Or one could talk about a genre of writing about "courtly love" which would include various form-genres like poetry and exchanges of letters.

So am I way off base in using that word to talk about modernismo as a genre? And suggesting a countergenre? "Movement" doesn't fit, and I'm trying to talk about the beginnings of decisions about canonicity... though I suppose you can talk about being canonical within a particular movement. But how critics/poets decide who's in the movement and who isn't is quite suspect. So if a movement depends on traceable connections between writers, and I'm reframing rather than proving connections, I don't feel like "movement" is the right word. Plus - it makes me think of going to the bathroom.

East Coast bilingual poets

"In Two Tongues/En Dos Lenguas: Bilingual Spoken Word." Emerging poets (or student poets) living in the Mid-Atlantic region sought for a new reading series to begin this Spring in Arlington. Each emerging poet will be paired with a "master" poet. Poems will be presented in both English and Spanish. Submit 4 typed copies of up to 3 poems in English or Spanish.

Deadline: Feb. 24. Mail to:

Arlington Arts Center, 3550 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22201. For more info
and entry forms, see: http://www.arlingtonartscenter.org.

Dear Lillian,

Reading "Treason Our Text" is so orgasmic... it makes everything clear and beautiful. Well, clear and scary, but that's better than dark and scary.

Am I really going beyond it? I feel like I can see beyond it, but I'm still IN it. And no one I have read seems to have gone beyond it.

1) criticize existing canon - pick it apart
2) make case for individual women writers that they fit the canonicity
3) make countercanons (but: questions of aesthetics/quality)
4) women's culture, continuity, connections (evading "quality")
- break down class/elite/genre high/low (here is where I am pounding the keys on genre formation, which Robinson only lightly touches on: "an entire literature previously dismissed because it was popular with women and affirmed standards and values associated with femininity" )
5) style challenged

"Once again, the arena is the female tradition itself. If we are thinking in terms of canon formation, it is the alternative canon. Until the aesthetic arguments can be fully worked out in the feminist context, it will be impossible to argue...."

and then:

The development of feminist literary criticism and scholarship has already proceeded through a number of identifiable stages. Its pace is more reminiscent of the survey course than of the slow processes of canon formation and revision, and it has been more successful in defining and sticking to its own intellectual turf, the female counter-canon, than in gaining general canonical recognition for Edith Wharton, Fanny Fern, or the female diarists of the Westward Expansion. In one sense, the more coherent our sense of the female tradition is, the stronger will be our eventual case. Yet the longer we wait, the more comfortable the women's literature ghetto -- separate, apparently autonomous, and far from equal -- may begin to feel.

So my answer to that has been to construct not a countercanon, but a countergenre. Then within that genre (which might be the "women's culture" strategy) I propose to redefine literary quality. Then to reintegrate canons. (Of course: Someday? When? How?)

But where I go much further, or where I can see further, is in tech, in databases and tagging. Databases and indices, taggable entries, and open source algorithms that people can tweak to construct their individual or institutional canon of the moment. Obviously, large powerful universities would "brand" their own algorithm and perhaps might make them closed-source. I've been saying it for a couple of years now. It would be so beautiful. Tagging and tag clouds would make popular input possible. The construction of algorithms with spectrums of weighting desired important qualities would come up with results to construct syllabi, anthologies, and reading lists on the fly. Databases and the web make it possible to build infinite multiple dynamic canons.

at the BlogHer launch party

January 2006 068
Originally uploaded by Jo Spanglemonkey.

I'm blogging on Latin America as a contributing editor for Blogher. Karen Walrond of Chookooloonks is also covering the region - she's taking anything Caribbean and I'm, in theory, linking up with blogging women from the rest of Latin America. The idea is not to cover news, as Global Voices does, but instead, to look at what women are writing.

My hope is that English-speaking and Spanish-speaking women bloggers will become more aware of each other, and will jump into conversation with each other, unmediated by me, on each other's blogs. Even if they're monolingual, they can use automated translators like Google Language Tools or Babelfish to read each others' posts and comments.

I'm hoping to be a good party host, introducing people to each other and facilitating the start of their conversation. Look, there I am in the photo at the BlogHer Launch Party, raising my glass... It's a GREAT party.

If even a few people become aware of each other, I'll be so happy! And at the very least, English speaking bloggers will become more aware they aren't the only ones talking. I hope that I can serve as a translator, though I'll be an imperfect one, to help make this happen.

My other very strong hope is that someone will step up and "cover" blogging-women's Brazil, because I'm already overwhelmed and I don't know Portuguese! There are so many fantastic Brazilian bloggers, I'd go crazy trying to read everything.

Em duas linguas: B. Trayner

I was just reading Beverly Trayner's blog, and realized she links to one of my dusty old blogs ( a little embarrassing) where I was keeping my working notes for a project on bilingual poetry. She's talking about some great stuff - being in two languages, being a blog chick, and getting round the rules with one half your mind while following the rules with the other.

So on the one hand I am Beverly the duh-sent who goes through the motions, never upsets the status quo and talks of Bolonha, internationalisation, insucesso escolar and always cumprirs as regras.

At the same time I am also Beverly the Blog Chick who dabbles in being international, entrepreneurial and pedagogic and who knows how to get round all the rules just like any other Chica Esperta. It's the Chica Esperta who does and who makes things happen.

So far I've not been very adept either at keeping the rules, nor at getting round them. But organising my identity between Duh-sent and Chica Esperta Blog Chick is proving to be an empowering experience.

I love that, what she says about organizing her identity. It IS empowering. That's just what I've been trying to do. And it's also what Doris Lessing was writing about in The Golden Notebook, and Joanna Russ in The Female Man. We end up with "different selves" because of our multiple roles as women, and maybe because of the pressures of ... well, a certain impossibility of integration, or suspicion that integration of our selves would mean the erasure of part of the self that is loved and valued.

As I continue doing huge amounts of poking-around and researching and blog-reading and note-taking, for the new BlogHer site -- I'm writing about Latin American women's blogs -- I keep noticing women popping up in multiple identities, newly linked in the last year or so, just like me and my web presence... Gabby of La lesbiana argentina, hooking herself up with her other self at Pont des Arts; Dr. Kleine with a wild and woolly blog at En nombre del BLOG and then her polished essays at Olganza; Iria Puyosa with Rulemanes and Reste@dos. There's so many more, but those are the ones I've read the most of.

It seems to happen as a fragmentation over time and then a re-linking or coming-out (or outing) process.

I wonder if it will become more normal to have the ability to dig into the personal lives and personal blogs of people who have professional status in nearly any field? You don't necessarily want to know about your dentist's sex life, but you might like to know about their opinions and experiences as a dentist. You might want to only know their professional front. But... if we consider the possibility that we are not bigoted, and people have a lot of personal freedom, and we assume as human beings that everyone around us has a rich, strange interior life, why NOT have their personal voice, their intimate thoughts they'd like to reveal on a friendly level, why NOT have them be knowable. That voluntary openness, and deliberate fragmentation and organization, is very powerful. Of course it's not always comfortable.

WoolfCamp - blogging and writing

The date for WoolfCamp has been set! It's a writing-blogging-creativity-DIY retreat in Santa Cruz:

I invite you, Dear Readers and Interested Parties, to WoolfCamp, Winter 2006, Saturday, 2/18 and Sunday 2/19:

Behold, our tee shirt/schwag logo and image of our muse, Virginia Woolf, Her Very Self.

The "camp" concept is based on the barcamp and brainjam innovative models of conferencing- cooperative, participatory, zero bureaucracy, zero power tripping, total immersion, big fun.

Historically, these camps and jams have been geek-based. WoolfCamp will differ in providing a focus on the creative aspects of blog content. The goal is to help each other with writing on our blogs, in whatever form we wish to explore - memoirs, creative non-fiction, fiction, poetics.

And if a geek or two wants to join up and help me decide, once and for all, on which RSS feed I should be using, that geek will be welcomed.

If you'd like to come, sign up on the wiki, or send me email for help signing up.

outrageously erased

Today in the library I meant to write up a formal description of my anthology project, but instead skimmed through biographical dictionaries.

I checked out several huge fat multi-volume dictionaries of Latin American authors, and some other Spanish-language Encyclopedias of Famous Women. It was interesting to see patterns emerge. Some encyclopedists knew a fair amount of Cuban women writers, but missed all the Chileans. Others got the Argentinians and Uruguayans, or knew about certain of my own favorites like the Venezuelan poet Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva, or massively famous feminists like Adela Zamudio, but missed the Cubans entirely except for Gomez de Avellaneda. *Everyone* was blind to the very strong groups of Guatemalan women writers. Some of the encyclopedias who knew the Matamoros-Borrero-Xenes circle still missed Emilia Bernal, or perhaps left her out on purpose for being too scandalous - I have no idea.

Sainz de Robles' Diccionario de Mujeres Celebres, 1959, was strong on international and historical references. I'd enjoy reading all of it someday. If I found similar books from 1900 or so, and simply read them through, I'd understand these women's poetry better. I'd see their references, just as reading a historical review of Sappho-myths helped me understand the poetry of Mercedes Matamoros and Nydia Lamarque. And just as my somewhat random knowledge of Norse mythology clued me into understanding Juana Borrero's poem about Ran's daughters.

Anyway, I studied patterns, took notes, xeroxed some things, and added considerably to the short biographies of many of the poets.

I enjoyed skipping around in Cesar Aira's dictionary of authors. The appendices, which listed writers by country and then by birthdate, looked extremely useful. Though he missed quite a lot of the women I think are interesting. I like to think that he just didn't know about them - rather than that he knew them but rejected their work as inferior.

Then I got into a terrible history-of-literature book, Literatura Hispanoamericana, volume 5 of an enormous and authoritative-looking reference series, Historia de la literatura española. It's from 1969, and its author, Professor A. Valbuena Briones, included only one woman in his 600-page review of five centuries of Spanish-American literature, and it was... wait for it.... who do you think? There are only two possibilities and it is unimaginable to leave one of them out. It was Gabriela Mistral! He left out Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. Fucking incredible... of all the people you'd think it would be impossible to erase. I kept looking through the index in dismay and finally flipped through the books' opening chapters. Nope! No Sor Juana! I still hope I'm wrong. It keeps my faith in human nature going. The Valbuena B, he's an amazing guy. I started having flashbacks to my classes 20 years ago in the Spanish department at University of Texas... maybe those old fossils had learned off that very book. Since The Valbuena had huge bibliographies that made it clear he had at least opened the flyleaf of many fine books that had women in them, we have to think that perhaps he is the distillation of many filtering layers of sexist anthologizing and critical reviewing, so that all the times that women writers were shunted off into the last paragraph of the last chapter of the book finally came to a head, like an enormous, gross zit, and popped, leaving nothing for Valbuena Briones to work with. He didn't even have the obligatory section of "mention a couple of women while putting them down and lamenting that they aren't better and there aren't more of them" which I notice in so many literary doorstops of the 20th century.

Making lists and breaking aesthetics

Marilyn Hacker said on the WOMPO Women's Poetry mailing list recently:

If, as feminists,we can't discuss racism openly, if not "comfortably,"
then what did all the feminist writers who were discussing it in the 70s ,
and those doing so now --Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toi
Derricotte, Alicia Ostriker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marilyn Nelson, Joy Harjo,
Marilyn Chin, Elizabeth Alexander, Jane Cooper, Rita Dove, Irena Klepfisz,
Alison Joseph, Jan Clausen, among others -- -- accomplish ? There
are a lot more African American poets, Asian American poets, poets of
color, published now, enough of them that they don't have to conform to
any kind of mold or expectation , political or formal --- and yet that
change doesn't seem to have changed the consciousness of many women whom
I'd have expected to have READ those poets and thought about what they'd
read.

Yes, exactly!

I note that it is important to go on making lists like this and telling people what to read. Lists of names make paths and entryways for people who need the guidance. As readers, we can't rely on any sort of established power structure to represent diversity.

I also note that reading widely with an open mind needs to come first. THEN break and re-form your aesthetics and your poetics. In other words, upper class white people with the education that goes with it can't impose the aesthetics they've developed from that background onto what they read from who are not just like them Keeping your tired old privileged aesthetic is like saying that beautiful meaningful things can only be built with legos. Maybe Legos made of gold, but still -- so limited!

*** A rant I've been wanting to make for a long time***

I'm thinking of a particular incident with a person who happens to be quite powerful at the moment. I'll call him Mr. Darcy. A few years ago, Darcy was just on the cusp of coming into that powerful position. I was tagging along to an event with my friend Martin, a poet and translator. Darcy, Martin, and I ended up hanging out over coffee. I didn't register on Darcy's radar as a person... a mohawked callow youth, perhaps Martin's unaccountably freakish girl-of-the-minute.

And Darcy proceded to trash and eviscerate the idea of multiculturalism and political correctness. "Yeah, I make my anthologies and put in the really good poets, and then have to throw in some crappy PC person, and be all multicultural..." He spoke the names of some people of color with venomous bitterness and derision. I began to speak up to say that if he didn't like those particular writers, he should look further into the latino, black, vietnamese communities to find ones that he did like, because the ones he was referring to weren't necessarily the best by my judgement either... When I said this, it was as if a dog had spoken, an unexpected miracle. I talked about some ideas of poetry-of-inner-city communities poetry in public places, at bus stops, etc. And he got mad, saying that what people needed was to learn about real poetry, like Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman, and only the classics of American poetry should go up at those bus stops to force "real culture" on "those people". He said the same sorts of things about modern women poets, including dissing on "confessional" "disgusting" "PC" women. (Who should also get a forced dose of Dickinson; almost enough to make one hate Dickinson... almost...)

I was shocked that Darcy would be so open about his bigotry -- to someone like me, someone who clearly did not agree with him -- He assumed, maybe, that I was a person it was safe to be bigoted in front of -- that I would be complicit, even after I spoke up and argued with him. That purple mohawk radical feminist or not, I could be ignored or co-opted.

I am now grateful for this moment of my own invisibility on Darcy's power-map. From his dismissal of my importance, his figuring that I didn't matter, and his willingness to expose his own "pride and prejudice" in front of me, I learned some crucial and ugly things. I studied his anthologies to see the "presentable" face of racism and privilege, now armed with the knowledge of its unguarded scorn. Darcy's anthologies never picked the poets of color who had been around, who were part of a tradition. Instead they would pick a short inferior work by someone very recent, the youngest person possible... Darcy behaved as if he could safely assume there were no traditions, no leaders, no communities, but only isolated examples he could safely tokenize and encapsulate... in short he only saw mediocrity in work by people of color or women, because he didn't look deep...and then he actively promoted that vision of their mediocrity. This kind of tokenism harms everyone. I look back into anthologies all through the 19th and 20th centuries, and see the same pattern.

I still have trouble believing the depth of Darcy's ignorance or his active malice, whichever was foremost in the operation of his racist, sexist aesthetics.

When Ran's daughters meet

Oh happy synchronicity! I opened my juicy new "Poesía moderna en Cuba" and right smack in Juana Borrero's short bio:

Debido a esta doble cualidad de pintora y escritora, y la pintura, y a la precocidad de su geniio, Julián del Casal la compara con la fascinadora María Bashkirseff, cuyas analogías se acentuan despueés con la muerte temprana de nuestra poetisa.

My sister just gave me a ratty old volume of Marie Bashkirseff's journals (translated) which I devoured whole... Of course, I love to make the connections of who knew of whom and of course it makes sense that Borrero and her sisters would have known about Bashkirseff. And Bashkirseff wrote about Madame de Stael and George Sand, and other women who were inspirations for her. There was a hilarious day when she made her bumptious country cousin from Russia, who was in love with her, read Corrine... as if to say "And if you can take that, you might begin to understand the tiniest part of my little fingernail..."

I haven't yet gotten my hands on the volume "Grupo de familia", which collected work by several of the Borrero sisters, edited by Aurelia Castillo. I translated a few of Juana B.'s poems, and some of Aurelia's, and I'm reading some of Dulce María Borrero's. Others by Mercedes Matamoros, Nieves Xenes, and another Xenes sister make it clear that their poetic circle was not always focused on Julian de Casal as its center. The women read each other and wrote poems to each other. They read work by women from other countries and times. It seems important to say this, because most of the critical writing, the short bios, and the prefaces of anthologies, speaks as if de Casal was The Influence on everyone of that circle.

how long it takes to make connections

I was coalescing vaguely this morning about the length of time in a woman's life that it takes her to make connections with other women. Because of the ways tokenism works, if you're sort of "successful" in the male-dominated world then you're cut off in some ways... the isolations of nuclear families also factor in...

So I notice in feminist utopian fiction the women hit a point later in life where they start connecting. They get into the secret menopause club and all talk to each other. Like in Suzette Haden Elgin's "Native Tongue". I could make lists of books that show this pattern.

Maybe that's what blogs and the net are changing. We find each other earlier in life. We get reinforcement and like-minded ideas, we can go further in thought because we don't have to keep starting from the beginning in our explanations.

Gender and genre

As I continue reading Latin American literary criticism from the 20s and 30s onward, I keep noticing that critics often decide that women poets missed the genre bus. A critic will launch into a discussion of modernismo, and then mention at the end of the chapter that some women were writing, but they are really Romanticists who came to the party years too late. That in 1910, no respectable poet would still be writing in a Romanticist tradition; poetry has evolved beyond that. And then later, that in 1930, no respectable poet would still be writing in a modernismo tradition, because now the new thing is different.

As if only one genre could exist at a time, and as if there were a model of evolutionary progress. Literary Darwinism. And as if there weren't fuzzy boundaries, as if even a single poem didn't have multiple traditions feeding it - not to mention the entire body of work of a poet who might write in many genres, many styles.

But then, in a strange twist; the same critics lament that there was never a great woman Romanticist poet, never a real one who was Romanticist to the core; never a true poet of modernimso.

I see the same thing in science fiction. Oh, it's too bad women don't really fit "the genre" -- don't write "hard sf". (Despite all the ones who did, and still do.) But then when they do... Well, of course when women start doing it, they've missed the bus; they're out of date, they're stuck in the past, they're no longer the cutting edge. We men have already plumbed that genre to its depths and discarded it and we have our Great examples. We've gone somewhere else to redefine the center of power, now that you women have come.

And I begin to believe the same is true of the "where are the masterworks" argument. (Which is now happening, heatedly, on the WOMPO list.) Where are the masterworks by women throughout history? Where is our female Dante, Homer, Shakespeare? This question always asked as if there could be no possible answer except pity that the terribly sexist conditions of the past precluded women ever acheiving something great. How inassailably logical! Always, we are on the cusp of Now; because of the recent advances in women's rights and education, we might, someday, hope to acheive a masterwork; the problem is, this arguement has been around for hundreds of years at least. It's always almost. It's always as if the problem were new and the carrot were just out of reach. And ... this is a big fat lie. And women, if you buy into that lure of Now Almost Maybe and it might be you who surfs the new thing into the open arms of important history; well you're actually screwing over the women of the past in order to eliminate some competition, you're elbowing other women out of the way in a roller derby you aren't going to win, because that token position is a shaky one. Be careful what you're buying into.

It is very instructive to look at the ratio (As Beth Miller does in her essay "El sexismo en los antologías") of women to men in anthologies over a long time period. We need more studies like this, with charts and data analysis... To make the patterns and process more obvious to everyone.

I remain convinced that not only are the masterworks out there (one small example - I'd put the Heptameron up against Boccacio any day) but there is something wrong with you definition of masterwork if you think they aren't.

And I'm also convinced that one solution is to redefine genres. I like my idea of maenidismo as a genre. It fits so well. Redefine and recreate genres in which women's work is central, is the core. In science fiction, we have some of that with the push to define a canon for feminist speculative fiction. But I'd like to see more thought and discussion; more genres invented. Perhaps the beginning is to take the work by women, and put it all together, and look for patterns, create groupings, look for movements and feedback loops. Then define the genre. THEN look and see if there's any work by men that might half-way begin to fit in that genre.

I wonder if anyone else has used this approach? Probably; but it's a new thought to me and I've been developing it for many years. It goes beyond the creation of women's anthologies and studying work by women only. Create genres and traditions, and then let in men's work halfway, as tokens. This avoids pure separatism, and the ghettoization that seems to accompany it. Even if this doesn't "work", with the ripple effects of power that I'd like to see, well, then it ends up functioning like other gender identity-based efforts and anthologies; as pockets for information and women's work to be preserved for future rediscovery by people like me, which is maybe the best we can hope for.