An Important Message

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I have come down from the North to tell you this:

Despite all appearances, Spring is on its way.

It's almost here.

Don't lose hope.


Above:  Photo copyright by Robert Price and used with his permission.
 

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Is The Left Hand of Darkness Sexist?

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Twelve years ago, give or take a few, Gregory Frost and I guest taught one of Judith Moffett's science fiction classes.  This was back when she was at the U of P.  It was a good class.  The experience was satisfying to everyone involved.  Then, after the class, two of the female students approached Greg and me with a question that was obviously burning in them:  "What do you think of The Left Hand of Darkness?"  Which was a strange question because Judy worshiped at the altar of Le Guin specifically because of that novel and we were sure she'd taught it intensely.  Hell, in person she could hardly stop talking about it.

"We think it's a very great book," Greg said.

I nodded.  "Why?  What do you think about it?"

They looked embarrassed.  Then one of them said, "We think it's sexist."

To say that the male components of this exchange were flabbergasted is an understatement.  But we did as well as we could in the conversation that ensued to put the book into perspective in a way that did not condescend to either Le Guin or her young readers.

Time passed.

Recently, I wanted to re-read a specific section of LHoD and discovered that I was no longer satisfied with the copy I'd owned for decades, a coverless paperback bought back when I had far more reading time than money.  Time has reversed those proportions and so I bought a  hardcover.

Behold the (admittedly still partial) triumph of feminism:  Now I can see what those students were talking about.

Take a look at the last full page of this work about a sexless culture, starting with Genly Ai's meeting with Therem's father.  The male nouns and pronouns pop from the page:   old man... he... his... son... old lord... brother... son... him... he... he... old man's... boy... heir of Estre, my son's son... boy... king... old lord... he... he... Lord Envoy... the boy, Therem's son...

And then the conclusion:  "Will you tell us how he died?--Will you tell us about the other worlds among the stars--the other kinds of men, the other lives?"

It was as if the female pronoun and all related nouns had been banished.  It was as if being male were the default position of humanity. It was as if women didn't count.

It seems so obvious now, forty-four years after the book's first publication.  But the year before that, 1968, when Le Guin would have been writing the novel, I remember a friend (we were both freshmen at William & Mary then) who, crying and in extremis, drunkenly said, "Everybody says that men and women think differently -- but we don't!  I think exactly the same way a man does."  I could hear the truth in her voice.  But I was baffled by it.  Everybody knew that men and women thought differently.  All our literature said so.  Every woman I'd ever known said so.  My mother said so.

And here was a woman saying: No.  It's not so.

I didn't know what to make of it.  I thought about it for years, trying to understand it.

That was the world in which Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness.  Which had at its core what then seemed to almost everyone to be an obvious untruth:  Men and women are in essence the same.

What an extraordinary work for a woman of her times to have written!  Le Guin must have known, as she was writing it, that she was working on a novel that might well have been beyond her capabilities.  How astonished we were by it when it came out!

What a triumph for her that nowadays even a male reader can wonder, if only for a moment, if it's sexist.

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Hemingway Speaks from the Mountaintop

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There were two Hemingways.  One was Papa, the macho, boisterous, lion-shooting,  Cuba-libre-swilling, bullfight-chronicling, sports-fishing parody of himself.  This is a guy you'd like to be.  The other was Ernest, the serious writer who was a fine craftsman and set an extremely high standard for himself.  Only another writer would want to be him.  And even then...

I just now ran across something Hemingway wrote (not said; it was near the end of his life  and he was in no shape to go to Stockholm so he asked the US ambassador to accept for him) in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

If you're a new or gonnabe writer, I want you to take those words to heart.   And because you're a writer and thus have a particular genius for not hearing things you don't want to hear, I'll put what the man said in even simpler words:

Writing well is not enough to make your work last.  Retelling somebody else's story in flashier or leaner or "better" prose is not enough to make your work last.  You've got to go beyond what anybody else has ever said before in order to have a shot.  Worse, you've got to go beyond what you think you're capable of if you want to have the slightest ghost of a chance of your work enduring.

Even if you succeed, your work may not endure.  But if you don't even try... well, it was your own decision to fail.

Here endeth the sermon.  Children, go and sin no more.

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Print + Paper Three Potato Four

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I rarely blog on weekends.  But today I went to the Print + Paper Show at Three Potato Four on Shurs Lane here in Roxborough.  I liked it.  It runs through Sunday.  If you're local, you mmight give it a try.

You can find out about it at the 3P4 blog.

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Jay DeFeo's Rose -- and the Lesson We Should Learn From It

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How powerful is a story?  An article in the New Yorker about the artist Jay DeFeo sent me to the Whitney yesterday, to the first comprehensive overview of her work and life. 

In brief:  DeFeo was recognized as an artist of brilliance straight out of art school.  Her stuff was good from the git-go.  It got better and better, culminating in a group of large encaustic religious abstracts -- Veronica, The Jewel, Annunciation, and Incision -- which, for my money, established her as a great artist.  Go and look at them, if you doubt me.

Then she started painting Deathrose (later The White Rose and finally The Rose), a culminative work which was meant to express something profound and spiritual.

She worked on it for nine years, building up boulders of paint and scraping them back down, sometimes right to the canvas.  The only reason that she didn't keep on working on it until her death was that her landlord raised the rent, forcing her to move out.  Also to have a wall torn out so her masterwork could be removed by crane.

This was an emotional time for DeFeo.  She lost her husband, contracted gum disease, and stopped working.

For four years.

DeFeo  eventually pulled herself together and proceeded to create work that was consistently  interesting and often profound to her dying day.  But consider this:  She was a peer of Jasper Johns, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg a other artists who are household names today.  Yet she is not.

The Rose is good, but overworked.  The oils leading up to it are great. If DeFeo had refrained from obsessing over it, she might have produced a great work.  At worst, it would have been a flop, which would have been quickly forgotten.

But DeFeo forged on, obsessively, trying to create something better than she was capable of, and in the course of it destroyed her career.

The moral, as it applies to writers, is, I hope, obvious.

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Bristlebots!

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When Sean was a little boy, he and I took a cigar box, some powered wheels, a coat hanger and a superball and built a robot with one bit of processing power.  Not byte -- bit.  I was pretty proud of that, and figured that we'd just set a record that would last forever.

I was wrong.

A bristlebot is a robot with zero processing power.  It's made by taping the motor from a pager and a watch battery to the back of a severed toothbrush head.  Let it go and it skitters around randomly.  So far, pure motion, no robotic behavior.

When placed in a confined space, the bristlebots continue to move about randomly.  However, when they take up at least 8 percent of the space's area, swarming behavior emerges.

The above video explains it all.  But if you want to cut to the emergent behavior, skip ahead to 1:27.

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William Gaddis

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In 1987, my friend James Cappio drafted a legal opinion which led to him meeting William Gaddis.

Now Jim has written an account detailing the experience.  I love everything about his essay, right down to the name of the lawsuit that precipitated it.

Click here to find out what I'm enthusing about.


Above:  This book features in the account.

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