The link below is to an article that looks at the question, ‘what is a book?’
For more visit:
http://blog.bookbaby.com/2016/09/what-is-a-book/
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Guide to the classics: Christina Stead’s The Beauties and Furies
Margaret Harris, University of Sydney
From the beginning Christina Stead’s fiction divided critical opinion, and reactions to The Beauties and Furies, her second novel, were no exception. Where some saw “garrulous pretentiousness”, Clifton Fadiman in the New Yorker found “such streaming imagination, such tireless wit, such intellectual virtuosity” that Stead must be recognised as “the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf”.
What Fadiman discerned is the extraordinary originality of Stead’s modernist experiment, ranking her achievement with that of James Joyce. Ulysses, published in 1922, was no longer banned for obscenity in the United States by 1936, when The Beauties and Furies was published.
Of the major novels published in that year, only William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood rival The Beauties and Furies in its contempt for prevailing realist-narrative expectations. (The big commercial success of 1936 was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, much to Stead’s chagrin.)
Once I would have thought Fadiman’s claim excessive. My introduction to Christina Stead was through the reissue of The Man Who Loved Children (1940) in 1965, which astounded me.
I was already reading her in earnest in the late 1970s when the Virago republications began, including The Beauties and Furies in 1982. I found it baffling, over-shadowed by its predecessor, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), and its successor, House of All Nations (1938) — the latter is Stead’s other Paris novel, based on her experience of working in the private bank where her partner, William Blake, was a financial adviser.
I wasn’t alone. The Beauties and Furies has never been taken up as The Man Who Loved Children and For Love Alone (1944) have been. Only in recent years, as I have thought more about Stead’s early writings, has it been borne in on me that it is arguably her most experimental work, disconcerting and disturbing, a searching, sometimes ironic, depiction of a decadent society. It is a quintessential modernist text that heeds Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new”.
Its affinity with Ulysses is marked. In letters back to Sydney after her arrival in London in 1928, Stead called Joyce “the modern Shakespeare, superior to Shakespeare in command of language, equal in music”, acknowledging that Ulysses is “hard work” because it “has to be read with a rhyming dictionary, an encyclopaedia, the grammars of ten languages, and an annotated ‘crib’”.
alrionun/flickr, CC BY
Joyce was far from being her only discovery in those heady years. Stead’s fiction from the start displayed the interest in dreams and the unconscious flaunted in The Beauties and Furies, everywhere mixing fantasy and reality in extravagant swoops of tone and register. The influence of surrealism is pervasive, reaching greatest intensity near the end, in the spectacular sequence in the Somnambulists’ Club.
Yet a plot summary could represent the novel as no more than a variant of 1930s lending-library romances: a bored London housewife, Elvira Western, leaves her solid doctor husband, Paul, for a younger lover, Oliver Fenton, a student in Paris.
At every turn, though, the narrative undermines romantic expectations. There is an undertow of incestuous and same-sex attractions among the various heterosexual liaisons, along with daring depiction of casual couplings, and references to prostitutes, venereal disease and abortion. This is not the Paris of romantic love: dreams are nightmarish in a city of night rather than light.
A ‘middle-class’ novel
The action takes place in a specific timeframe in 1934, in a moment of political instability due to an economic downturn and the menace of fascism. It begins in March, with Paris still unsettled following an outbreak of violence in February, and ends in the winter of 1934–35. Throughout there are references to contemporary events, including the workers’ rallies in May attended by Oliver.
There is much political rhetoric. Characters’ analyses of such issues as the operation of capital are largely Marxist-Leninist, and to a significant extent are attributable to the input of William Blake. But they are the views of the characters, frequently belied by their actions, and not endorsed by Stead. The weight of this depiction of bad faith rests on Oliver.
Although he supports the workers by attending rallies, he harbours a desire for a career in business rather than academia. His commitment to the labour cause is expedient. The topic of his thesis, on which he works fitfully, is The French Workers’ Movement from the Commune to the Amsterdam Congress of 1904, chosen for easy archival access and exotic appeal to his English university. However, his cynicism rarely finds such epigrammatic expression as in his observation that
All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.
According to this mocking definition, The Beauties and Furies is very much a middle-class novel, though bourgeois values and behaviour are among its targets. In the rich opening chapter, the first of a sequence of triangles is set up, involving the “runaway wife” (as Elvira is described in the List of Characters), her husband and “her lover, a student”.
The similarity of the names Elvira and Oliver is curious, and they are sometimes described as twins: Elvira’s brother Adam Cinips also enters the emotional equations. Oliver’s affairs with the actress Blanche and the lace artist Coromandel set up further triangles.
flickr
The idea of Paris as an underworld is spelled out by Annibale Marpurgo, “a lace-buyer”, a manipulative self- made cosmopolitan. His declaration that “Paris is Klingsor’s garden, to me” is typical of the range of allusion that Stead
deploys, here bringing into play Wagner’s opera based on the medieval Grail quest epic Parzival.
An “annotated crib” would tell us that in Wagner’s version, Parsifal, Klingsor— who has been denied entry to the Temple of the Holy Grail, despite having attempted to do away with his impure thoughts by self-castration — constructs a garden into which questing knights are seduced. The sexual connotations are especially relevant. Similar intertextual references proliferate in the novel, including an explicit invocation of Ulysses when Oliver reads to Elvira as she is lying ill (an episode that tells us a lot about Oliver).
Lace and capital
From the first chapter, where Marpurgo trades radical credentials with Oliver, political affiliation is a persistent topic in The Beauties and Furies. Marpurgo declares that they are “Brothermarxists … and brother fantasts”, tossing in mention of the Arabian Nights and Hegel.
Elvira refers to the economic determinism of capitalism, using imagery from lace manufacture to enunciate a tension between romantic dreams and fate: “Life’s a pattern, and we’re just shuttles rushing in and out thinking we are making jerks up and down freely.” The image is potent, playing into the role of the lace industry in the novel as well as signalling that these characters lack agency.
Although the characters articulate insights both about others and themselves, these rarely translate into action, any more than do such histrionic processes of irresolution as this:
Elvira sat at home and ate olives and chocolates alternately. She also wound herself, slow, cold, beautifully-diamonded, as a snake, round the problem, and colder and more forbidding grew her brow. She began to smoke, and was presently smoking the chamber full of her resentment, desolation and increasing resolution.
‘What a damned traitor!’ she cried, beside herself with impatience. Her smoke-trails, as she paced about, were like wraiths waiting about the ceiling to topple on Oliver’s much-cursed and oft-coddled black topknot.
Stead took pains to study the practical aspects of lace-making. The industry provides an economic case study of a venerable craft being overtaken by mechanisation.
The Dictionary of Needlework/flickr
The novel focuses on the businessmen who manage the trade, the Fuseaux brothers (“lace-jobbers”) and their employee Marpurgo: the operatives are not seen. Paradoxically, these economic issues are explored in some of Stead’s most fantastical writing, particularly in the presentation of the Paindebled family, whose members literally live off the past. Both the Paindebled house and shop are repositories of lace as a work of art, exemplified by the prized umbrella cover, a beautiful decorative object entirely lacking utility.
The Paindebled daughter, Coromandel, despite her family context has more agency than any other character in the novel — as demonstrated in a seduction scene that enactsa metaphysical poem like Donne’s “The Good Morrow” (“This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere”).
Later she carries Oliver off on a crazy drive into the countryside. She can operate in the bucolic environment of the farm in Burgundy, beyond the house and shop. Along with Blanche, the characters in the lace storyline are the only Parisians among the dramatis personae: the others are transients.
Stead reaches beyond the immediate setting in the allusion of the title to the Furies of Greek mythology, goddesses of vengeance who brought pestilence and misfortune. Marpurgo says that Paris “has many beauties — and furies”, and the three central beauties, Elvira, Blanche and Coromandel, all become destructive furies.
“Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone send me for you,” says the Machiavellian Marpurgo to Oliver — who he is about to lead into a hypnotic drunken revel. In a welter of allusion, Marpurgo casts himself as Laius, father of Oedipus, and addresses Oliver as Orestes, who was pursued by the Furies for killing his mother.
The classical references reinforce Stead’s alignment with Joyce, which is evident also in the wordplay of Oliver’s poems. Like Ulysses, The Beauties and Furies is concentrated in a particular city at a particular historical juncture, though its action extends beyond a single day to run across a full year.
The novel is shaped by the cycle of the seasons, within which is conducted the minuet of characters meeting and parting, mainly in interiors or nocturnal scenes from which the natural world is largely excluded. The seasonal round offers no promise of anything other than a different version of the same kinds of romantic illusion and delusion that have been delineated with such exhilarating energy over some 350 pages.
The Beauties and Furies is a challenging novel of breathtaking ambition. Surrender to it, and marvel.
This is the introduction to the new Text Classic edition of The Beauties and Furies.
Margaret Harris, Challis Professor of English Literature Emerita, University of Sydney
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
World’s Oldest Library Reopens
The link below is to an article that looks at the reopening of the Qarawiyyin Library in Fez, Morocco.
For more visit:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/sep/19/books-world-oldest-library-fez-morocco
Lionel Shriver and the responsibilities of fiction writers
Ariella Van Luyn, James Cook University
Lionel Shriver’s recent keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival – and the responses to it – have continued an important discussion about questions of privilege and power in writing.
Shriver criticised the recent trend of calling out cultural appropriation, which she felt muzzled fiction writers. Volunteer Yen-Rong Wong was the first to blog about the speech. Memoir writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied walked out in protest at what she described as Shriver’s arrogance and later wrote about why she did so. The ensuing debate has been covered by the New York Times and The New Yorker. Shriver has since responded to her critics in an interview in Time.
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Shriver defined cultural appropriation as taking knowledge, expressions or artefacts from another culture without their permission. She said it was impossible to ask for a whole minority group’s permission to write about its people. In addition, the idea that one person could speak for their minority group implied that culture was monolithic and static.
But Shriver’s definition, and her conclusion that cultural appropriation is silencing writers, is flawed. Cultural appropriation can be better understood as using another culture’s stories or artefacts devoid of context or genuine engagement.
Shriver spoke of being criticised for writing about obesity when she is not obese. She seemed to assume from this example that she is silenced from speaking about all minorities – but this fails to capture the complexity of the issue, or histories of colonisation, discrimination and intergenerational trauma.
How do you write about an experience if you have never experienced it yourself? In an article prompted by Shriver’s speech, a diverse group of Australia writers recently suggested that novelists need to personally grapple with this question.
Random House/AAP
I write on that personal level, from a position as a white, cis, able-bodied, female fiction writer, whose desires are unruly. I am still a new writer too; I am learning.
My recent novel is about a working-class Australian sex worker and petty thief, Lizzie O’Dea, a real woman whose voice is largely absent from the historical archives. Writing this novel forced me to consider my responsibilities in imagining her experiences. I also had to think about the how fiction interacts with history, a question that is particularly contentious in Australia’s national narrative.
This article is intended as part of a dialogue around how fiction writers negotiate complex power structures. This discussion has been going on for some time across fictional genres; for example, Anita Heiss has discussed how white writers can represent Indigenous characters in Australian fiction and Justine Larbalestier has considered this question in the case of Young Adult fiction.
Very few critics suggest that fiction writers limit their fiction to their own experience. Indeed, critic Nesrine Malik suggests this constrains understanding between people and the processes of empathetic engagement that can happen in writing and reading fiction.
Rather, writers in positions of privilege are encouraged to think critically about how this shapes their writing. Novelist Jim C Hines argues that engaging in a process of scrutiny actually creates better writers. Privileged writers could also consider how to support and help amplify the voices of diverse writers, who experience publishing bias and lack of access to writing opportunities.
Al Bogdan
For me, this discussion is a call to more deeply consider the power structures that shape both my own and my characters’ lives. Words — even invented ones — can, and sometimes do, cause harm and reinforce racist stereotypes.
The debate does not need to be a binary one: stealing culture on one hand, and avoiding it completely on the other. Nisi Shawl suggests fiction writers approach characters from other cultures as thoughtful tourists: ready to learn but also aware of their outsider status.
This was my experience when writing my novel; recall the quote “the past is a foreign country”. I wrote with a growing understanding that occupying the mind of a person from the 1920s was almost impossible, but that it can still be attempted to better understand women’s experiences in the past. Fictional language, often ironic and playful, has the capacity to draw attention to these difficulties.
Unresolved tensions about questions of representing others still exist in the novel. I made the decision to have Lizzie work alongside an indigenous woman, Thelma, in an effort to represent the multicultural diversity of 1920s North Queensland, which is present in the historical record. Yet, histories of sex work (see Raylene Frances’s Selling Sex ) pointed to Indigenous women having very different experience to white women.
Potentially, my privilege blinded me to aspects of Thelma’s characterisation. I was also confronted with questions of race when I considered how to represent racist dialogue and attitudes present in the archives. Fiction became a space to explore how dangerous and violent racism might be shown – without being reinforced. My path here was to express racist attitudes only in characters’ dialogue.
For me, engaging with these ideas also means reading texts from diverse viewpoints, setting diverse readings in classes, and teaching the canon with an awareness of the power structures that shape it. It means listening to thoughtful feedback, taking risks and learning from mistakes.
A writer in a privileged position might react to issues of appropriation with arrogance or anxiety. Neither are helpful for the evolution of my writing practice: instead I have found that awareness of privilege, research, and self-reflection continue to deepen my writing.
Ariella Van Luyn, Lecturer in Creative Writing, James Cook University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Friday essay: science fiction’s women problem
Bronwyn Lovell, Flinders University
Since 1953, the Hugo Awards have been one of science fiction’s most prestigious honours – past winners include Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clark and Ursula Le Guin. The 2016 results were recently announced, and women and diversity were the clear winners.
However, if you saw the list of titles in contention for the awards, you’d have noticed some oddities, such as Chuck Tingle’s Space Raptor Butt Invasion and My Little Pony’s The Cutie Map. That’s because the awards – nominated and voted on by science fiction writers and readers – have been targeted by two major voting blocs: the Sad Puppies, who started their campaign in 2013, and the Rabid Puppies, who appeared the year after and have been growing stronger ever since.
The Sad Puppies wanted more traditional, mainstream popular science fiction on the ballot. The more extreme Rabid Puppies, who have ties with the Gamergate movement, were about creating chaos. So their bloc included ridiculous-sounding works: both to mock the awards and stack the ballot to prevent more diverse books being nominated.
Both groups’ gripe is with contemporary trends in science fiction toward more literary works with progressive themes. Vox Day, leader of the Rabid Puppies, complains that “publishers have been trying to pass off romance in space and left-wing diversity lectures as science fiction”. Last year’s leader of the Sad Puppies, Brad R. Torgersen, likewise complains about “soft science majors (lit and humanities degrees) using SF/F as a tool to critically examine and vivisect 21st century Western society”. The Hugos, he says, are being used as an “affirmative action award”.
A significant number of those “soft science majors” writing “left-wing diversity lectures” are, of course, women. Female authors have dominated science fiction awards of late.
This year, women (and people of colour) did very well at the awards. Ironically, the Puppies’ activities have now galvanised more progressive members of the World Science Fiction Society to use their voting rights. The best novel was The Fifth Season, a tale of a planet experiencing apocalyptic climate change, written by NK Jemisin – a black, female writer. Best novella was Binti by Nnedi Okorafor. The best short story, Cat Pictures Please, was written by Naomi Kritzer and both best editor gongs went to women.
But the ongoing saga of the Puppies and their attempts to derail the Hugos exemplifies broader conflicts within the realm of science fiction – an enormously popular, lucrative and controversial genre that has major issues with women.
byronv2, CC BY-NC
A male dominated genre
In recent years, the bestselling female-authored Divergent and Hunger Games series have been made into multi-million dollar movie adaptations. But women’s contribution to science fiction has historically gone unnoticed – as a look at any compilation list of the “best” science fiction books will attest.
MIT Technology Review’s Top Ten Hard Science Fiction Books of All Time includes one woman. (“Hard sci fi” tends to stick to real scientific theories and physical laws. More on that later.)
Forbidden Planet’s list of 50 Science Fiction Books You Must Read includes three women, with Ursula K Le Guin appearing twice (making it 92% male). The Best Science Fiction Books website has four women in their list of 25 (84% male). And Goodreads’ Best Science Fiction list has ten women in the top 100 (making it 88% male), with Le Guin books chosen three times. (The books of Le Guin’s that appear in these lists – The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974), and The Lathe of Heaven (1971) – all have something very significant in common: male protagonists.)
Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association of America
Seventy five per cent of science fiction writers are men. Consequently, there are not a great number of realistic or relatable female characters. No wonder fewer female than male readers have traditionally found it a rewarding genre. Indeed feminist science fiction writer and critic Joanna Russ has famously stated that there are “no real women” in science fiction, only images of them, since so many women characters are based purely on male fantasy.
Last year, science fiction and fantasy reader Liz Lutgendorff published an article in the New Statesman after reading the National Public Radio’s list of the Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books – voted on by 60,000 readers. Lutgendorff found the “continued and pervasive sexism” within these books to be “mysogynistic” and “shockingly offensive”.
Speculative fiction writer and critic Sarah Gailey, meanwhile, recently noticed that, of the 31 genre books featuring female protagonists she had recently read, two-thirds included scenes of sexual violence. Writing on the Tor website, she called for genre writers to “do better” when it comes to imagining alternative realities for women:
… we can’t suspend our disbelief enough to erase casual misogyny from the worlds we build. We can give a wizard access to a centuries-old volcano-powered spaceship, but we balk at the notion of a woman who has never been made to feel small and afraid.
Phillip Leonian
Gailey mentions this year’s Hugo-winning NK Jemisin as one of the rare writers whose “imaginations are strong enough to let their female characters have stories that don’t include sexual violence”.
Still, this objectification of women in science fiction sadly extends beyond the page. Hugo award-winning fan writer Jim C Hines reminds us that science fiction superstar Isaac Asimov was notorious for harassing women at conventions. Hines recently urged the science fiction, fantasy and comics community to stop “looking away” from the problem of sexual harassment in the industry.
Hard science in science fiction
An ongoing debate in the science fiction community is about the merits of “hard” vs “soft” science fiction. And the role of gender is significant here.
Robert A Heinlein – considered the “dean” of science fiction writers and counted alongside Asimov and Clarke as one of the three key figures of the genre – has defined science fiction as:
realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.
Hard science fiction tends to stick to or extrapolate from real scientific theories and physical laws as they are currently understood (think of Andy Weir’s The Martian (2011), Carl Sagan’s Contact (1985), or Arthur C Clarke’s own 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)).
New English Library
Soft science fiction is not so concerned with exploring the finer details of technology and physics. Although its stories are generally set in the future, it is more interested in psychological and social aspects of the narrative (think of works such as Veronica Roth’s Divergent (2011), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948)).
Hard science fiction tends to be a boys’ club, while soft science fiction can be seen as more accommodating to female writers. There is a perceived hierarchy of merit operating in these classifications as well: “hard” sounds masculine and virile, while “soft” connotes a weaker, less potent, feminised form of the genre. This is why “hard” science fiction is more likely to be considered among the “best” science fiction, and why the “soft” science fiction that more women tend to write doesn’t often make the cut.
In 2013, the judges of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Britain’s most prestigious science fiction prize, disqualified a number of submitted books on the basis that they were not “technically” science fiction. They were deemed by the judges to be fantasy – a genre that does not require the realism of science – which has twice as many female authors compared to science fiction. As Damien Walters has observed, women’s writing is “dismissed as fantasy, while the fantasies of men are granted some higher status as science fiction”.
The Hugo Awards, like most major literary prizes, have also traditionally been dominated by books by and about men and boys.
In 2015, the Sad Puppies successfully placed dozens of books on the final ballot. They then released a tongue-in-cheek Terms of Surrender to their culture war with the Hugo Awards declaring:
… only those works embodying the highest principles of Robert A. Heinlein shall be permitted. Girls who read Twilight and books like it shall be expelled from the genre. We will recognize The Hunger Games as a proper SF novel, but the sequels are right out.
These jibes reveal sexist undertones, intolerance for diversity and disdain for the kind of speculative fiction that is written by women and read by girls.
The lessons of Frankenstein
This hierarchy of “hardness” in science fiction, as well as being a dubious way of judging merit, puts women at a distinct disadvantage, because there’s a serious shortage of women working in science. Only 28% of the world’s scientific researchers are women.
If women aren’t encouraged to pursue careers in scientific fields, it’s unlikely they’re going to have the confidence to write in a genre that uses science as a launch pad for fiction.
And yet, the first example of science fiction is often said to be Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s gothic horror Frankenstein: the tale of a man who, through scientific experimentation, discovers a way to imbue inanimate matter with life. The novel was first published anonymously in 1818.
Overall, it was popular and well received. But when critics discovered Anonymous was a young woman, the author’s gender caused such offence as to render the writing irrelevant. The British Critic famously concluded its scathing review thus:
The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.
Discrimination on the basis of sex isn’t surprising for the time, but what is surprising is how little has changed for women’s writing over these past two centuries.
Women may not be likely to publish anonymously these days, but they may still erase their female identities to appease male readership. Many women are encouraged to publish under their initials, to choose a gender neutral name, or even to take a male pseudonym.
Science fiction writer Alice Sheldon, winner of two Hugos and three Nebula Awards under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr, passed her writing off as male for around a decade between 1967–77 before she was exposed as a woman.
via Wikimedia Commons
Not only did she enjoy more success as a male writer, she was also in a better position to advocate for female writers. She even found that her female pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon was more likely to be included in anthologies if her submission was accompanied by a letter of recommendation from Tiptree.
Unfortunately, once it was revealed that Tiptree was, as she so sadly described herself, “nothing but an old lady from Virginia”, she lost much of the authority and respect she had previously enjoyed in the male-dominated science fiction community.
Today, the fact remains that most female writers would still be better off using a male name. In 2015, emerging novelist Catherine Nicholls found that when she sent her manuscript out under the name of “George”, she was eight times as successful as when she sent it out as “Catherine”.
More than half of the human race is female, yet three-quarters of the voices heard in science fiction are male; and the rest are under consistent commercial pressure to sound male too. Of the 30 science fiction writers named the industry’s highest honour of “Grand Master”, only five are female (16%).
A study of the habits of readers in 2014 found that men “tend to gravitate to reading more male authors“. During the first year of publication, it found a female author’s audience will be around 80% female. A male author’s work will be read by a 50% split of men and women.
But trying to tackle this problem by using a pseudonym or an author’s initials perpetuates the invisibility of women on bookshelves, denying other women role models. It’s vitally important to have more women writing science fiction – using their real names, being reviewed, being read and winning awards.
By the numbers
Both the Puppies groups stand against affirmative action as a way of redressing the imbalance between the sexes in science fiction. However, there are many reasons why affirmative action by publishers and reviewers is needed in a genre suffering from entrenched sexism.
The latest SF Count – the speculative fiction community’s own mini version of the VIDA count of women in literary arts – was announced in May this year. The SF Count tracks the gender and race balance of both books reviewed and their reviewers.
It concludes that six out of every ten books reviewed were written by men. But that’s an average of results across all publications, and there is wide variation within the sample. The lowest percentage of reviews of books by women was 17% from Analog Science Fiction and Fact. The highest was 80% from Cascadia Subduction Zone, a publication that specifically aims to represent women writers.
Analog
The story told by these figures changes significantly when you consider only the five publications that are purely science fiction focused – Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation: the international review of science fiction and Science Fiction Studies. Of these, the average percentage of reviews of books by women is 22%, meaning more than three in four books reviewed in science fiction publications are written by men.
The gender balance of book reviewers averaged across these five titles is similarly low, with just 18% of them women. What’s particularly shocking is that arguably the two most famous and prestigious science fiction publications – Analog and Asimov’s – both averaged 0% female reviewers. The fact that the two most celebrated publications in science fiction asked next to no women to review books is clearly unacceptable.
And yes, reviewers can cry the impossibility of reviewing what isn’t published, just as publishers can claim the impossibility of publishing more women’s writing when it isn’t submitted, and judging panels can lament the impossibility of considering more women’s books for awards when so few are entered.
But it would be far better for the science fiction industry to recognise it has an ethical responsibility to work to correct the imbalance it has perpetuated for far too long, and get started.
It is, as publishing veteran Danielle Pafunda points out, an important part of the position of editor to actively seek out new work and to shape the direction of a publication or publishing house.
We need women to be able to participate fully and equally in science fiction’s conversations about humanity’s future – to shape how women are portrayed in those visions, to consider the roles women might play in those futures, and to imagine what a truly evolved and advanced society might look like for women.
Until gender equality is achieved, science fiction remains only a fraction of what it could be. Affirmative action for women in science fiction is not only warranted; it’s essential for the growth of the genre.
Bronwyn Lovell, PhD Candidate in Creative Writing, Flinders University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Goodreads: Adding Rereads
The link below is to an article that gives advice on how to add rereads to your Goodreads profile and reading challenges.
For more visit:
https://andiabcs.com/2015/07/16/goodreads-tip-adding-rereads/
Guide to the classics: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and reading rape
Marguerite Johnson, University of Newcastle
Ovid’s Metamorphoses (AD 3-8) was not originally as controversial as his other poetic works. But as centuries have passed, its notoriety has increased. Recent calls to provide trigger-warnings to university students before they study the work tell us as much about modern Western attitudes towards sex, violence and censorship as the Metamorphoses tells us about the gender politics of ancient Rome.
Ovid’s 15-book epic, written in exquisite Latin hexameter, is a rollercoaster of a read. Beginning with the creation of the world, and ending with Rome in his own lifetime, the Metamorphoses drags the reader through time and space, from beginnings to endings, from life to death, from moments of delicious joy to episodes of depravity and abjection.
Such is life, Ovid would say.
The madness and chaos of some 250 stories, spanning around 700 lines of poetry per book, are woven together by the theme of metamorphosis or transformation. The artistic dexterity involved in pulling off this literary feat is testimony to Ovid’s skill and ambition as a poet. This accomplishment also goes a long way in explaining the rightful place the Metamorphoses holds within the canon of classical literature, placed as it is beside other great epics of Mediterranean antiquity such as the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid.
Kicking against the pricks
But for some, the Metamorphoses sits uneasily alongside its more morally and patriotically sound predecessors. Like a troublesome younger brother, an embarrassment to the family, Ovid’s epic “kicks against the pricks,” to paraphrase the paraphrase of Nick Cave.
Penguin
The Homeric Iliad (c. 850 BC) soars to the literary heights of the sublime, and shows us how to live and die, to meditate on mortality, to embrace sorrow, to grip and then release hate, to truly love.
The Odyssey (c. 800 BC) takes us on an epic voyage forever leading towards home, sometimes making us laugh, and occasionally letting down its high-brow hair with some sex and infidelity. Yet, appropriate to the gravitas of epic poetry, the Odyssey is also about the journey of a man determined to maintain his heroic stature as he navigates all sorts of dangers in strange lands.
Some 700 years later, when the Homeric verses were still regarded as the benchmark for epic poetry, Virgil composed the Aeneid (19 BC). This Latin epic casts a patriotic spell over its audience in its evocation of the foundation of Rome from the ashes of Troy to the glory of the Augustan Age. Unlike his poetic successor, however, Virgil is alert to literary censorship under the reign of Augustus (63 BC-AD 19), Rome’s first emperor, and carefully navigates its perilous terrain.
Rome is great according to Virgil. It always has been. It always will be. But Ovid is not convinced, and he seeks to capture an epic world of uncertainty and destabilisation instead of “drinking the Kool-Aid” that flows from Augustus’ fountains.
Ovid’s graphic tales of metamorphosis begin with the story of Primal Chaos; a messy lump of discordant atoms, and shapeless prototypes of land, sea and air. This unruly form floated about in nothingness until some unnamed being disentangled it. Voilà! The earth is fashioned in the form of a perfectly round ball. Oceans take shape and rise in waves spurred on by winds. Springs, pools and lakes appear and above the valleys and plains and mountains is the sky.
Lastly, humankind is made and so begins the mythical Ages of Man. And, as each Age progresses – from Gold, to Silver, to Bronze and finally to Iron – humankind becomes increasingly corrupt.
Ovid’s gods and humans never really escape the Age of Iron in the Metamorphoses. Throughout the epic, the setting that emerges in Book I functions as a brilliantly appropriate dystopic stage on which the poet-cum-puppeteer orchestrates his spectacles.
Drawing on the Greek mythology inherited by the Romans, Ovid directs his dramas one after another, relentlessly bombarding his readers with beautiful metrics and awe-inspiring imagery as that of Deucalion and Pyrrha, Arachne, Daphne and Apollo, Europa and the Bull, Leda and the Swan.
Hundreds of hapless mortals, heroes, heroines, gods and goddesses rise victorious, experience defeat, endure rape, and inevitably metamorphose into something other than their original forms. Chaos begins the world, and so into Chaos we are born, live and die. As the offspring of the Age of Iron, we must endure and struggle against corruption, brutality and injustice.
The Rape of Europa, Titian, 1560-1562.
A poem and a mistake
Ovid experienced a world of chaos and iron firsthand when, in AD 8, he was banished by Augustus. His wrongdoings were, in his own words, carmen et error (“a poem and a mistake”).
The poem was the Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), a three-volume lovers’ handbook that explains the dos and don’ts of personal grooming, how to organise trysts with married women (get her maid “on side”), repairing a broken heart (surprise your “ex” while she’s in the middle of her beauty routine – yuk!), names the best places for “hooking-up” (try the races or the theatre), and offers advice on keeping your girl (be attentive when she’s unwell). Interestingly, the third volume was written for women – quite a revolutionary move in view of the gender inequality in the twilight years of the 1st century BC.
Modern Library
What irritated Augustus sufficiently enough to relegate the poet to the middle of nowhere was his perception that the Ars Amatoria made a mockery of his moral reforms. Not one for frolic, Augustus had spearheaded and implemented a series of legislative campaigns that raised the moral bar for the goodly citizens of Rome. Adultery, while always illegal in Rome, was made especially so under the watchful eye of the emperor and legal ramifications were more actively enforced than in previous decades.
The mistake that Ovid mentions is more difficult to identify – with scholarly opinions differing on what it was Ovid actually did to offend Augustus. Theories range from Ovid engaging in an affair with one of the imperial women – perhaps Augustus’ daughter (Julia the Elder) or granddaughter (Julia the Younger) – to his accidentally witnessing an imperial scandal.
Whatever the error, combined with the ill-themed Ars Amatoria, it was sufficiently serious to result in Ovid’s banishment to Tomis (Constanța in modern-day Romania). Tomis, at the very edges of the Roman Empire, was regarded as a barbaric, frightening and uncivilised place. Ovid certainly painted it this way in his poetic epistles, the Tristia (Sorrows) and Epistulae Ex Ponto (Letters from the Pontus).
Forced to exist in a place where his native Latin was scarcely heard, Ovid’s despair is evoked in one of his most memorable couplets: “writing a poem you can read to no one / is like dancing in the dark.”
For the optimal punishment of Ovid, Augustus chose his location well, and he never reneged on his decision. Nor did his successor, Tiberius (42 BC-AD 37).
Ovid died in Tomis in AD 17.
An epic about silencing
In one of the definitive pieces of scholarship on the Metamorphoses, Reading Ovid’s Rapes (1992) by classicist Amy Richlin, it is argued that the epic was completed during Ovid’s time in Tomis. This may not initially appear to have any bearing on its content or intent, yet Richlin suggests a profound relevance:
The silenced victims, the artists horribly punished by legalistic gods for bold expression … read like allegories of Ovid’s experience …
Accordingly, Tomis not only gave Ovid time to augment the poem in view of his own experiences but, equally as important, its composition was being finalised during the emperor’s inquisition into the carmen et error.
Illustration for Dante’s Purgatorio 12 by Gustave Doré.
Indeed, Ovid’s own silencing by Augustus may be seen to be enacted over and over again in the Metamorphoses in the most grotesque of ways. Ovid’s tales describe tongues being wrenched out, humans barking out their sorrows instead of crying, women transformed into mute creatures by jealous gods, and desperate victims bearing witness to their abuse through non-verbal means.
The Metamorphoses is an epic about the act of silencing.
Jealousy, spite, lust and punishment are also consistently present in Ovid’s chaotic world.
So is rape.
Rape is undoubtedly the most controversial and confronting theme of the Metamorphoses. It is the ultimate manifestation of male power in the poem and the hundreds of transformations that occur are often the means of escaping it.
An early tale of attempted rape is narrated in Book I, involving the nymph, Daphne and the god, Apollo. Intent on raping Daphne, Apollo chases her through the forest until, utterly exhausted, she calls out to her father, the river god Peneus to rescue her:
“Help, father!” she called. “If your streams have divine powers!
Destroy the shape, which pleases too well, with transformation!
Peneus answers his daughter’s entreaty, and Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree:
… a heavy torpor seizes her limbs,
her soft breasts are encircled with thin bark,
her hair changes into leaves, her arms change into branches,
her feet once so swift become stuck with stubborn roots,
her face has a leafy cover; only her elegance remains.
The tale of Daphne and Apollo, like so many stories in the Metamorphoses, is classified as an aetiological myth; that is, a narrative that explains an origin. But, as the excerpt above testifies, it is so much more than that.
Apollo and Daphne, Nicolas Poussin, 1625.
Reading Ovid now
Where does a modern audience begin with a story such as Daphne and Apollo?
How do we begin to unravel the hundreds of other such tales that follow it?
During the last few years, the Metamorphoses has been challenged as a legitimate text for tertiary Humanities students. Defying the hundreds of years of pedagogical tradition that has seen the poem set for both Latin students and, more recently, literary students who study it in translation, the Metamorphoses has not only been interrogated by scholars such as Richlin, but has also been the subject of increased student complaints and calls for trigger-warnings.
In response to the growing number of objections to the work, academic and university executives have been called on to take a position – not only in relation to the Metamorphoses, but in response to other materials that are perceived to render the tertiary experience unsafe.
Suzanne/Plunkett
The Chancellor at Oxford, Chris Patten, has been quoted as saying that history cannot be rewritten to suit contemporary western morals. At the opposite end of this debate, are students such as the members of Columbia University’s Multicultural Affairs Advisory Council, who have challenged the inclusion of the Metamorphoses without an explicit trigger-warning in one of the core curriculum courses in the Humanities.
How close such responses to the Metamorphoses verge on literary censorship or, in the words of one journalist, Literature Fascism, does not only depend on one’s philosophical or educational viewpoint. Equally as important to the debate, and the decisions that may ultimately result from it, is the life-experience of every individual in the classroom. Amid a class of students taking notes from a lecture on the Metamorphoses, for example, may be a rape survivor.
Current statistics from the United States in particular suggest that the likelihood of this is exceptionally high. Emerging statistics from across Australia are painting a similar picture.
Such a situation requires alertness and sensitivity when handling texts such as the Metamorphoses. But should the work of Ovid be banned or placed among the shelves marked “Warning: Wicked Books”? What would such measures ultimately achieve? Would it augment safe spaces? Or, would it censor discussions around rape and shut down interrogations of sex, violence and female exploitation? Would it silence one of the means of opposition to the societal sickness of rape?
NewZulu/AAP
The Metamorphoses of Ovid has had a long and fascinating history. Its presence among the literary canon of the West has functioned as a strange but valuable mirror that has, for over two millennia, reflected social, moral and artistic customs.
From the time that Shakespeare read Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation and incorporated so many of the stories into his plays, to the thousands of artworks that have been inspired by the poem, to Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright’s 2006 extravaganza, The Lost Echo, to the production in the 2016 Sydney Fringe, to the student protests and the calls for trigger-warnings, the Metamorphoses – much like Ovid himself – simply refuses to go away.
Much like the self-portrait by Albrecht Durer, Olympia by Edouard Manet, the works of modernist painters that enraged European Fascists, Tracey Emin’s My Bed, the installations at MONA, Joyce’s Ulysses, and a host of films and photomedia, Ovid’s Metamorphoses testifies to the fact that great art is not necessarily created to please.
Recommended reading: Metamorphoses: A New Translation Paperback by Ovid, translated by Charles Martin (2005).
Montague Basement’s Metamorphoses is currently showing as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival.
Marguerite Johnson, Associate Professor of Ancient History and Classical Languages, University of Newcastle
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Jail For Overdue Library Books
A library in Alabama in the United States, is threatening people with jail time for overdue library books. The link below is to an article reporting on the story.
For more visit:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/03/borrowed-time-us-library-to-enforce-jail-sentences-for-overdue-books
Book Borrowing… Or Not!
The link below is to an article that is against book borrowing.
For more vsiit:
http://www.readitforward.com/article/against-borrowing-books/
Reading Too Many Books At Once
The link below is to an article that takes a look at the problem of reading too many books at once.
For more visit:
http://www.readitforward.com/article/the-trouble-with-reading-multiple-books-at-once/
At the BookShelf 
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