Fireworks, and clarity--

The speculative writing world has gone off like fireworks again, this time over remarks about "lady writers" and "lady editors" and then later about woman's "quiet dignity" (referring to Barbie, of all things!) As someone who, thanks to two Southern fantasies written for my children and a post-apocalyptic blank verse poem, is occasionally invited to the speculative party and asked for anthology stories, I am near enough to that world to understand what is going on and to sympathize with writers and readers who feel a deep anger over the latest Resnick-Mahlberg debate in the SWFA Bulletin. (If you want to see some samples, google SWFA and E. Catherine Tobler, Foz Meadows, or Jim C. Hines for a start.)

But as somebody usually tossed in the "literary" camp, and who has written poetry and novels of many sorts and has never been to a con or read a Bulletin, I also have distance. What strikes me is that the unifying thread between the absurdities in the original article (the "ladyness" and focus on beauty in an editor, Old White Guys, Sean Hannity, etc.), subsequent woman-as-Barbie response, and the also-absurd "woman warrior" in armor-bikini on the Bulletin cover is one fatal to the writer: a refusal to see accurately all human beings as whole people and then portray them as such.

If you see clearly and in fullness, and depict believable people on the page, then characters have a chance to be so alive that time cannot easily devour their vigor and life. As Shakespeare wrote of Cleopatra, "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety." This call for the writer to see and show with accuracy reaches past gender politics to the very heart of creation.

Likewise, if anyone sees other people clearly in ordinary life, he or she will tend to speak of them with the same clarity. To do so is to do them a kind of justice.

It is not because Resnick and Malzberg are Old White Guys, as they said of themselves, that their article so offended readers. Despite what some commenters have said, young people have no automatic claim on seeing more clearly and portraying more accurately than others. Nor do non-white people have such a claim. Nor do women. Nobody gets a pass on these things.

We all have blinders to remove. An Old White Guy has the same chance as any other to see clearly and in fullness--that fullness that leads to respect of one toward another and understanding--those who inhabit the changing world around him. An example? Melville was once an extremely Old White Guy, still striving for beauty and wholeness in words. So let's not let anybody off on an Old White Guy technicality. An OWGT is just not good enough. The goal for the Old White Guy in life or in written words should be the same goal as for the rest of us: to try harder to see, to know, and to catch the truth of human life in our daily words. And that includes the truth of women, who do not fight wars in brass bras, who do not care to be diminished and patted on the head, and who should be portrayed in their rich and "infinite variety." For a writer to fail to do so is to fail justice, and to fail creation's call.

Genre and the (Parenthetical) Laundry-Woman

Hideous day of laundry and cleaning here: reminds me of several things having to do with genre fiction--science fiction and fantasy in particular. You may find them interesting. Or not. But here goes the laundrywoman, emptying out the contents of her head into the blog pail.

1.  I saw on facebook the picture of the World Fantasy winners, and they were men men men plus two couples (for editing and press work.) I don't object to men; I like men. I just wondered. It was just an awful lot of male faces. All the writing awards. And art. It's nothing to do with the particular men (in fact, I sometimes correspond with several of the winners), but I'm still wondering. Is that how it always works?

2. While I fold laundry, I often read. And I started thinking about a science fiction and fantasy trope. You know how Luke Skywalker (I have three children, so I know these things) loses his hand in great pain and gets a fancy new robotic one? And how Wormtail in Harry Potter (I have three children, so I have read the entire series aloud) loses his hand (also with great pain) and gets a fancy magic one in its place from Lord Voldemort? (Oh, and isn't he just like Tolkien's Wormtongue? And there's an important arm injury for Frodo, too.) And you know how in Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy (I have three children, did I say?) Lirael loses her hand--her best friend, the Dog (who talks and is much more than a dog) bites it off to save her--and the close tells us that she will gain a beautiful golden hand in its place, made by Sameth, the prince and Wallmaker? No doubt you may add some lost hands and metal replacements of your own if you reach science fiction or fantasy; there are more. Take Eugenides, who is deprived of his clever hand by The Queen of Attolia... Well, you add what you like. Gene Porter's Freckles had no hand. Read that one as a child. And there's a precedent of dogs biting off a hand with Fenris.

Point being, thanks to my laundry-reading, I am wondering if all this comes most clearly from the famous tale of Gotz von Berchlingen (1480-1562, a nice long life for the times), who was known as Gotz of the Iron Hand (as, say, Lirael became known as Lirael Goldenhand.) A Franconian knight, he lost his hand in 1504 in Silesia, when a cannon shot broke his sword hilt (hey, there's another trope--the sword that is broken) and drove half of it, along with arm-plates, into his right arm. His arm was crushed and the hand ripped away entirely. Being a gallant knight, he rode to camp and found a surgeon. He was later given an iron hand and continued as knight till his death, or so the book claimed. What a formidable fellow. Still competent with only one proper hand.

Maybe everybody already knows this... If not, now I do, and you do.

3. I have completely forgotten the third genre-thought I had while folding the endless laundry. Oh, lucky you! And now I need to eat and go vote. You too!

"Beauty, Outlaw of the Arts"

I, Ferrywoman, battled snow devils and bursts of snow to rescue child no. 3 from camp near Greenwich; when I arrived, my incredibly skinny boy of 14 was perched on the very heights of the ridiculous, sporting a plush bathrobe over his jeans and large pink and white rabbit ears worn over an orange Cooperstown High School knit cap. Evidently there had been an Easter egg hunt in the snow, and he had worn the ears ever since.

On the way, I whipped into Old Saratoga Books in Schuylerville and grabbed a few--one for the boy, and three for me--Reynolds Price's The Collected Poems (you know you're gone when they collect you), a marvelous-looking book  called Leaves in Myth, Magic, and Medicine (the first book by Beaufort's  Alice Thoms Vitale, then 86), and a quirky choice of something called The Poetry Circus, a 1967 attack on modernist poetry that aroused my curiosity. How could I resist chapters called "The Plodding Muse," "Beauty, Outlaw of the Arts," "The Music of the Buzz Saw," "How to Write a Modernist Poem," "Strutters, Swaggerers, and Gesticulators," etc.?  As he was born in 1896 but was opposed to almost everything Modernism stood for, I am intrigued to see what such a man had to say--while I've read plenty of Modernist work of all sorts, I don't think I've ever read anything substantial from an opponent.

The author, Stanton A. Coblentz, had an active career. By 1967 he was around 70 and had published twelve science fiction novels, eighteen volumes of poetry, five poetry anthologies, and "several" other books (the back copy goes on to mention eight others as a portion of these.) He also published Wings, a quarterly poetry journal, for almost thirty years, which shows a stalwart spirit in those days of typewriters, submissions in envelopes, and painstaking layout! He wrote for The New York Times, the Sun, and The San Francisco Chronicle, and The San Francisco Examiner.

And here I had never heard of him, a pretty big fish in the great sea of words:  a man clearly active in the culture wars and productive in three genres. It gives one pause.

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Stanton Coblentz, from the introduction to The Poetry Circus:

All through my life, poetry has been for me a joy and a wonder, a pilot and an inspiration. Ever since the days of lonely adolescence, when it provided consolations and companionship, it has enriched my world with treasures beyond reckoning. But the poetry that has called to me has been a poetry of singing and ringing lines, of skylarks and a wild west wind, of lovers and midnight trysts, of mountains and stars and the towers of Camelot. It has been a poetry of all the dreams, the hopes and aspirations that make up life, all life's delights and sorrows, its searches and achievements and despairs, and its passionate reaching toward other worlds. Most of all, it has been a poetry of nobility and music, which has made life seem more meaningful and has given glimpses of universes beyond the senses and of truths beyond logic.

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It would be very interesting to compare the Coblentz book of 1967 with Tom Disch's The Castle of Indolence of 1994. They have a related stance, and each writer can be quite amusing--then, too, they have so much in common, each writing poetry and science fiction and nonfiction. I notice that they use some of the same tactics--for example, turning poems into blocks of texts and examining them for any qualities in the prose that might differentiate it from prose. However, the examples Coblentz uses are drawn from the major Modernists, so that Pound, Moore, Cummings, Eliot, etc. are examined.

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Marly Youmans's novel now in pre-order is A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. Her 2011 book of poems is The Throne of Psyche.