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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 06/05/92 -- Vol. 10, No. 49
MEETINGS UPCOMING:
Unless otherwise stated, all meetings are on Wednesdays at noon.
_D_A_T_E _T_O_P_I_C
06/24 HO: RAFT by Stephen Baxter (Gravity) (HO 1N-410)
07/15 MT: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO SCIENCE FICTION by David Pringle (SF
reference books) (MT 1P-364)
08/05 HO: THE SILMARILLION by J.R.R. Tolkien (Alternate Mythologies)
(HO 1N-410)
08/26 HO: BONE DANCE by Emma Bull (Hugo nominee) (HO 1N-410)
_D_A_T_E _E_X_T_E_R_N_A_L _M_E_E_T_I_N_G_S/_C_O_N_V_E_N_T_I_O_N_S/_E_T_C.
06/13 SFABC: Science Fiction Association of Bergen County: Trip
to Library of NASA in Manhattan (phone
201-933-2724 for details) (Saturday)
06/20 NJSFS: New Jersey Science Fiction Society: TBA
(phone 201-432-5965 for details) (Saturday)
HO Chair: John Jetzt HO 1E-525 908-834-1563 hocpb!jetzt
LZ Chair: Rob Mitchell HO 1D-505A 908-834-1267 mtuxo!jrrt
MT Chair: Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 908-957-5619 mtgzy!leeper
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 908-949-7076 homxc!11366ns
LZ Librarian: Lance Larsen LZ 3L-312 908-576-3346 mtfme!lfl
MT Librarian: Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 908-957-5619 mtgzy!leeper
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 1F-329 908-957-2070 mtgzy!ecl
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
1. Time for me to make a prediction on who is going to win the
Presidential election. I have looked at the issues and the
candidates and figured out who's gotta win. It will be a bit of a
shock because for the first time since 1850 it isn't going to be a
Democrat or a Republican. Does that narrow it down? No, it won't
be H. Ross Perot either. This time it's going to be M. Richard
Leeper. I decided it at dinner tonight, June 3, 1992. That is an
historic date.
Now I know what you're thinking. What a stupid joke. Every
jokester since Pat Paulsen has claimed he was running for
President. The difference is that I have a plan and will tell you
THE MT VOID Page 2
what I will do if I become President, and it's a plan so simple and
brilliant that people will be beating down my door when they hear
it.
What is the Number 1 problem this country faces today? What is the
problem that ties our hands so that we can't fight problems 2 to
20? It is the National Debt. We so are somewhere in the range of
_4 _T_R_I_L_L_I_O_N _D_O_L_L_A_R_S in the red. Why is there no money for the inner
cities? Why is there no money for conservation and the
environment? Why is the infrastructure falling apart like
confetti? Because for every dollar in tax money, more than 61
cents goes to pay off interest on the National Debt. Less than 39
cents goes to solving the other problems. We are in a hole and
get deeper every day. Our children are getting debt so huge that
they are bound to live in poverty. I am the man who can save us.
How do we get out of this mess? Future generations will blame all
the presidents back to Roosevelt for not having thought of such a
simple plan first. But it took our 42nd President, M. Richard
Leeper, brilliant but humble, to think of the plan so simple nobody
else thought of it--the man who realized the best thing to do with
the National Debt is ... (are you ready for this?) ... we default.
That's right. We wipe out our National Debt with a stroke of a
pen. That means for every dollar of taxes we can spend 100 cents
improving the country. Now the first thing that happens when we
default is the United States credit rating goes right down the
porcelain receptacle. Nobody's going to want to lend Uncle Sammy
as much as a plug of used chewing tobacco. Certainly not one red
cent. Do you know what that will mean? No more National Debt
ever! Nobody will lend to us. Any Congressperson who proposes a
program is proposing to raise taxes. But that might not be so bad,
since we will now have 68 cents more on every dollar we can spend.
And with nobody willing to lend us money you can be darn sure the
budget is balanced.
I tell you, the day will come when "fiscal" will be a word and
"sanity" will be word, but the phrase "fiscal sanity" will seem
naked without the adjective "Leeperian" in front of it.
Contributions will be gratefully accepted. (The first fifty people
to contribute over $200 each I promise a ride on Air Force One when
I am elected.) Thank you, my fellow Americans. And I do consider
every one of you a fellow American.
Mark Leeper
MT 3D-441 908-957-5619
...mtgzy!leeper
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on
sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis
is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he
had to be restrained by fear and punishment and hope of
reward after death.
-- Albert Einstein
HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING by Joanna Russ
University of Texas Press, 1983, ISBN 0-292-72445-4, $7.95.
A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
Copyright 1992 Evelyn C. Leeper
Having followed the recent discussion on Usenet about this
book, I did something apparently rare on the Net--I went out and
read the book(s) being discussed.
First of all, _H_o_w _t_o _S_u_p_p_r_e_s_s _W_o_m_e_n'_s _W_r_i_t_i_n_g is in print--it
had its fifth printing from the University of Texas Press this year-
--and is available from them if you can't find it locally. (I found
it in Tower Books in New York.)
But before reading _H_o_w _t_o _S_u_p_p_r_e_s_s _W_o_m_e_n'_s _W_r_i_t_i_n_g, I read
Virginia Woolf's _A _R_o_o_m _o_f _O_n_e'_s _O_w_n. The title _A _R_o_o_m _o_f _O_n_e'_s _O_w_n
is misleading--Woolf says what a writer (any writer, man or woman)
needs is _f_i_v_e _h_u_n_d_r_e_d _p_o_u_n_d_s _a _y_e_a_r and a room of one's own, with
the emphasis clearly on the former. Her explanation of the dearth
of women's writing is that women had no financial independence
(prior to 1882 and the Married Woman's Property Act in Britain,
which is where Woolf was primarily writing about) rather than any
lack of a separate room _p_e_r _s_e. Clearly the masses of working-class
men--coal miners in Wales, for example--were no better off.
I do find amusing Woolf's claim (on page 102) that Galsworthy
and Kipling "celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and
describe the world of men... the emotion with which [their] books
are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible. ... The fact is that
neither Mr. Galsworthy nor Mr. Kipling has a spark of the woman in
him." True this may be, yet I was immediately reminded of Robert
Silverberg's statement on page xii of the introduction to James
Tiptree's _W_a_r_m _W_o_r_l_d_s _a_n_d _O_t_h_e_r_w_i_s_e: "It has been suggested that
Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me
something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't
think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor
the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I
believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male." Well,
James Tiptree, Jr., turned out to be Alice Racoona Sheldon and
Silverberg was only the best-known of the people who couldn't deduce
this. Would Woolf have done any better? (This is important and I
will return to this idea later.)
Proceeding to Russ's book, I have to say that she did manage to
collect a lot of quotes from--and anecdotes about--some amazing
dense people. But I believe that a collection of such anecdotal
evidence could be made to "prove" the suppression of almost every
group's writings or art. See Richard Wagner for a starter set on
why Jews can't write music, for example. _R_o_t_t_e_n _R_e_v_i_e_w_s and _R_o_t_t_e_n
How to Suppress May 27, 1992 Page 2
_R_e_v_i_e_w_s _I_I edited by Bill Henderson will also be useful.
Russ then lists a variety of ways that women's writing is
suppressed. Note that she is not claiming, as Woolf seems to have
been, that women didn't write. Quite the opposite--Russ claims that
_m_o_s_t of the books written in the period she is covering were written
by women, though I find her evidence for that claim flimsy in the
extreme. (Of the much-discussed claim that "women wrote one-half to
two-thirds of the novels published in English in the eighteenth
century," I will merely note that Russ cites as her source for this
datum a "personal interview with Dolores Palermo.") But Russ is
examining why none of these books, or very few, made it into the
accepted "canon" of literature.
Under "denial of agency," Russ lists the technique of saying
"The man inside her wrote it." (I'm not sure how this supposedly
keeps things out of the canon, so I suppose Russ is saying that this
is a way of "explaining" the few women's works that are there.
Still, it seems to be somewhat out of the purported scope of the
book.) Yet the quotes she uses to illustrate this seem perfect
examples of Woolf's claim "If one is a man, still the woman part of
the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse
with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that
a great mind is androgynous" (page 98 of _A _R_o_o_m _o_f _O_n_e'_s _O_w_n).
Woolf is cited in _H_o_w _t_o _S_u_p_p_r_e_s_s _W_o_m_e_n'_s _W_r_i_t_i_n_g more than anyone
else except Charlotte Bronte, and while not always in support of
Russ's thesis, this "non-mention" is of some importance, if only to
indicate that Russ is picking and choosing her examples and quotes
to support her thesis where the entirety of the data might not.
This picking and choosing is even admitted at the end of the chapter
"Pollution of Agency": "And let's discount the idiocies of the
various forms of denial of agency and pollution thereof; most
critics, male or female, will not declare a work bad _i_p_s_o _f_a_c_t_o
because its authorship is female, or indulge in the indecencies of
pollution of agency by declaring the author _p_e_r _s_e improper,
ridiculous, abnormal, and so on." Then why spend so much time and
space on these techniques if they are so anomalous? Surely the fact
that she gives pages of evidence and then says, in effect, that they
don't count makes us take the evidence to come with a lot of
skepticism and a large grain of salt.
In the spirit of selecting what may or may not be isolated
incidents to support a theory, I will provide a counter-example to
Russ's "Double Standard of Content": Suzy McKee Charnas's "Boobs."
Russ says this double standard is saying, "she wrote it but look
what she wrote about." This is of course perfectly applicable to
Charnas's story, but the story nevertheless did achieve a certain
critical and popular success, even among men. And Connie Willis is
likely to break even more "barriers" with "Even the Queen" (which
you should all run out and read, by the way). Whether these stories
will achieve "canonical" status remains to be seen, but certainly
How to Suppress May 27, 1992 Page 3
they don't seem to be dismissed out of hand because of their
content.
Russ's contention that only female poets are negatively
categorized, while male poets when categorized are done so in terms
flattering to the ego is arguable--I don't think "Self-Destructive
Visionary" is notably more positive than "Madcap," and the
categorizations of Poe and Coleridge one sees are hardly likely to
arouse envy or emulation. Much is made of the negative
characterization of Emily Dickinson, yet that has not prevented her
from being ranked with Whitman as one of the two great American
poets. (And Whitman also had his detractors when his work first
appeared. They also said, "he wrote it but look what he wrote
about.")
There has been some discussion of whether Russ's theory is
scientific in the sense of being falsifiable--that is, can it be
demonstrated to be wrong. And apparently it can't, since any
statements which attempt to explain why there are so many more
well-known male authors than female Russ can claim are merely
rationalizations. No one can argue that there are _n_o_t more men in
the "canon" than women. What is at issue is why, and whether
"canon" is a reasonable measure. After all, as has been pointed,
Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs are
certainly non-canon, yet have survived perfectly well--better in
fact than many canonical authors. My personal feeling here (based
on what I have read, though of course your mileage may vary) is that
Woolf is closer to the truth than Russ: women never did the writing
in the first place--as with Woolf's example of Shakespeare's
(fictional) sister--or women wrote but never sent their work to be
published--even Emily Dickinson was hesitant about showing her
poetry to others, and how many others never even got that far. The
old adage that a woman's name should appear in print only three
times--when she was born, got married, and died--probably kept a lot
of writing in the desk drawer. As I said before, I am skeptical of
Russ's (actually Palermo's) claim of the large number of books by
women being published in times gone by.
But even worse, any attempt to correct the situation is met
with hostility. Nzotake Shange was "criticized by some blacks for
being anti-male" for her play _f_o_r _c_o_l_o_r_e_d _g_i_r_l_s _w_h_o _h_a_v_e _c_o_n_s_i_d_e_r_e_d
_s_u_i_c_i_d_e/_w_h_e_n _t_h_e _r_a_i_n_b_o_w _w_a_s _e_n_u_f. But when she "received praise
from white male reviewers ... one friend of [Russ's]
commented ... sourly, 'They don't think it's about them.'" If they
don't like it, that's proof of the suppression; if they do, that's
no good either, because it must mean they don't get it. (Russ of
course feels entitled to criticize or praise men's writing--is there
a double standard here?) So if male educators et al had admitted
all this women's writing into the canon, it seems as if there would
still be a problem--they would have admitted it because they didn't
get it.
How to Suppress May 27, 1992 Page 4
To be fair to Russ, she does then flail women (well, white
heterosexual women) for using the same methods to suppress or at
least disparage the writings of minority women or lesbians.
Unfortunately this, coupled with her comments on Shange, seems to
lead to a fracturing of literature--the implication that only black
women can appreciate works by black women, only women can appreciate
works by women, etc. This all gets to a very basic question: is
literature, or indeed art in any form, universal, or is it
specialized? Like many questions, this has a compromise answer (in
my opinion). Someone once said, "Anyone who thinks that music is a
universal language should try telling an Eskimo his igloo is on fire
using only a kazoo." We need to learn to appreciate different
musical styles. (Peking opera, Mozart's _D_o_n _G_i_o_v_a_n_n_i, and Glass's
_E_i_n_s_t_e_i_n _o_n _t_h_e _B_e_a_c_h are all operas--whatever that means--but have
little in common besides that word.)
So maybe what Russ is trying to say in _H_o_w _t_o _S_u_p_p_r_e_s_s _W_o_m_e_n'_s
_W_r_i_t_i_n_g is that we are taught to appreciate too narrow a range of
art. Certainly there are examples of men's art that was initially
rejected (Whitman, Stravinsky, etc.) and then eventually
"understood." But on the other hand we cannot say that everything
in every style is valid as "great art." (I'm not sure what "great
art" is, but if Russ is asking why women's writing is not in the
"canon," she must have some concept that there _i_s a canon.) Woolf's
answer was that the author needs to "be in touch" with both the
anima and animus (to borrow the Jungian terms) of her or his
personality. Russ seems to be saying that the author does not need
this, and in fact should reject this. Women haven't been accepted
because what they write isn't understood by men, but that's the
fault of the men, who apparently should either work to understand it
(though how can you ever tell if they do), or accept it on someone
else's say-so. This is cultural relativism and when carried to its
ultimate conclusion, ends up saying that every novel or poem is as
valid as any other, so long as it has some set of people that it
speaks to. But Woolf seems to feel that the great writers write so
that both men and women can appreciate them, which is why she feels
that Galsworthy and Kipling are not great writers. On the whole, I
have to say that I agree with Woolf. A great novel or poem
transcends the barriers of sex, race, religion, or class to touch
something universal. Yes, people should be exposed to a variety of
styles. Ernest Hemingway is not James Joyce, and Alice Walker is
not Jane Austen. (Though any discussion of books written in the
last fifty years is questionable--only time will tell what the
classics, or "canon" will be.)