Jellyn’s Collection of Curiosities

The first reading is “Cult of True Womanhood” by Jeanne Boydston. This is an essay about a PBS documentary, “Not for Ourselves Alone”.

I started reading it and got to this part: “Anthony offers an especially striking example of the paradoxes of the “cult of true womanhood.” Like many other nineteenth-century women (before the Civil War, but especially after it) Susan B. Anthony did not marry, did not have children, did not stay home, traveled constantly, and was self-supporting through most of her life. Ironically, the closest Anthony came to the domestic ideal was when she took over Stanton’s household work to free Stanton to write and think for the movement.”

Which made me wonder if they were living in a same-sex relationship. This sidetracked me enough to go look it up. I found “Lesbians and Social Justice” by Victoria A. Brownworth. This says that “historians differ on whether Anthony was a lesbian”. Well, that figures. Historians love to differ on that sort of thing. Interesting that the first article didn’t even suggest it though.

Back to the first article. Hey, shout-out to Lowell, MA. I know where that is. :)

Boydston is (or was) a history prof at U of Wisconsin – Madison. I was looking at that school. In no small part because Madison is awesome.

I guess I don’t have much more to say about this piece. It’s basically saying there was a myth of domestic bliss, but women were out there writing and being politically active or active in the community, or working, like, jobs.

The second reading is “Human Rights Not Founded on Sex” by Angelina Grimke. This is a letter to Catherine Beecher written?/published? in 1837. Now, I have no idea who Grimke or Beecher are, so I’m going into this pretty cold.

To sum it up, she’s saying that women are equal to men and not designed by God to be lower than men. And she’s very concerned with moral rights and responsibilities because of it. And we see how it all goes back to Eve. If Genesis didn’t say she was created /after/ Adam and from his rib, would all of Western history after that bit was codified be different?

“then I contend that woman has just as much right to sit in solemn counsel in Conventions, Conferences, Associations and General Assemblies, as man—just as much right to it upon the throne of England, or in the Presidential chair of the United States.”

Alas, nearly two hundred years later and we haven’t gotten there yet. Though I hope before we actually reach 200 years!!

“The fallacious doc-trine of male and female virtues has well nigh ruined all that is morally great and lovely in his character: he has been quite as deep a sufferer by it as woman, though mostly in different respects and by other processes.”

I just point this bit out as showing that yea, it’s not women versus men, it’s everyone versus the patriarchy. The system. And this apparently isn’t a new idea!

Okay, the next reading isn’t available online. I’ve requested it through ILL. I might get it Monday, but probably not until I’m back from WisCon. I may skip ahead.

Because I’m between semesters and I don’t have anything else to do(!), here’s my start on the Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies class at MIT’s Open Courseware site.

I have requested one of the first readings via ILL. I shall pull another from our shelves here. A lot of the readings are just links to where we can read online, so that’s good.

Session #1 – No posted lecture or assigned readings. Done! :)

Session #2 – 3 readings (one the ILL) and a lecture summary

I knew (or thought I knew) I’d read a lot of the Tiptree award books/stories since I last updated it. But I was resisting updating it because I don’t have Dreamweaver installed on my new laptop. And with Dreamweaver, I only had to highlight the ones I’d read and change the style.

Well, turns out editing it by hand was pretty darned easy too. It was just adding: class=”read” to the tds. Though my first pass through, I failed to also put it in for the authors. So the titles were the right color, but the authors weren’t.

The most annoying part was adding two year’s worth of lists. Lots of tedious typing.

But, I’m done! You can look at my list of which books/stories I’ve read of the Tiptree winners right over here somewhere. Still plenty I have not read. A few of the ones there that I haven’t marked, I have tried to read, and failed. Maybe they should get their own color.

It’s been a couple of weeks now since I finished reading Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller. I totally should’ve written the review right after I finished it. Or, at the least, taken notes. I know this, yet I’ll probably repeat the same mistake anyway.

Patience and Sarah is a historical novel about two women on neighboring farms who find each other and start making plans to move out “West”. And I have to put that in quotes, because if upstate New York is out West, then why didn’t anyone teach me how to lasso a dogie when I was growing up?

What struck me when I first started reading it was the rhythm. It put my head in a calm sort of place and after my first session or two of reading, the book hung around in my head as I was doing other things. I don’t know if that’s the sign of a good book, the sign of a book that’s something new and different for me, or maybe the sign of a book that I’m reading at the right place and time for the universe to align. I won’t say it rarely happens, but it doesn’t usually happen when I’m reading a book, that the world and characters stick with me and I’m eager to go back to reading.

Patience is an old maid of 20-something (and if I hadn’t forgotten, I could tell you the exact number) living with her brother and his wife and their children. She’s got a pretty sweet setup, as her father cared enough about her to provide in his will for her. She’s guaranteed a room of her own and two cows and whatnot. Her only real problem is she doesn’t get along with her sister-in-law and feels obligated to help out with the chores rather than spend time painting as she’d like to. I started being interested in her at this point. She’s got an unusual setup and doesn’t seem to be all ‘woe is me, I’ll never get a man’. Breath of fresh air, that.

Then we, and Patience, meet Sarah. Sarah’s from a farming family that only managed to produce girls. So her father chose her as the biggest and strongest of the girls to turn into a boy. Their family doesn’t go to church or seem to interact much with their neighbors, so mostly being a boy means she helps out with the boy chores, and dresses in a practical boy fashion for doing so. Her hair’s long though.

They meet, they fall in love, they talk about moving to York State together, Sarah blabs about it, families get in an uproar. Sarah sets off on her own instead. And here’s the most annoying part of the book for me. I wanted them both to set off together and build a life together. I wanted the book to be about that. Instead we get Sarah going off as a man to make her way in the world and buy some land and set up a life for herself. But she’s rubbish at it. No one believes she’s 21. They all think she’s an escaped apprentice. So, rather than lie and say she’s 15 or a more reasonable age for a boy with no stubble, and make up a nice non-apprenticey story to go with it, she just keeps telling the truth and getting into trouble. But she meets up with someone who doesn’t care and her world is broadened. And then she goes home.

And Patience and Sarah clear up some misunderstanding or something stupid and angsty. And they start meeting regularly for makeout sessions on Patience’s bed. And here’s another annoying part of the book. Because I was never clear on how far they went. First base was obvious, second base is touched upon, but then it’s all vagueness. Grr. I don’t care if it’s all implied. Just make sure you’re implying in a way that’s clear to me.

More trouble ensues, but I’ll leave the rest in non-spoilery territory.

One very awesome thing in this book is the point of view. I think Miller actually taught me something here, as I came to realize what she was doing, rather than just noticing it. At first, the story is told by Patience in first person. She’s even the one to relate Sarah’s point of view, in a way that makes it clear Sarah must have told her about those parts at some point in the future. But she also slips in little comments about what Sarah must have been thinking or feeling, or how other characters must’ve been thinking or feeling, that contradict what Sarah told her about the situation.

When Sarah goes off on her own, we finally get her point of view straight from the horse’s mouth, and we see what we knew all along. That she’s not as ignorant and naive as Patience seems to think she is. Though she is a bit. It’s not a radical change.

Then when they meet up again, we get more of Patience’s little comments. So you come to really get a sense for Patience’s personality just from how Miller used point of view. Patience thinks she’s better than Sarah in a lot of ways; more well-bred, more sophisticated, older, smarter, wiser. You get the sense she’d like to think she’s in control of the relationship. While Sarah’s on the other side striving for equality and the give-and-take the relationship’s going to need if it’s going to last.

So, cool book. It’s one I’d read again. Even while wishing they’d gone out West to set up their little homestead in chapter 3. Maybe I’ll have to be the one to write that book.

Spoilers for this season of Smallville up until episode 11 behind the cut. Well, mostly just for episode 11. Unless you think it’s a spoiler that Clark’s survived this season.

Oopsie!

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Spoilers below the cut for the episode of Medium that just aired tonight.

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It seems the universe has decided I need more to watch. While at work today, one of the ladies at circulation had just checked in a movie and asked if I’d seen it. It was “The Jane Austen Book Club”, which was based on a book by Karen Joy Fowler. I admit I have not read the book (yet) and I also have read little (more likely none) of Jane Austen. But I was assured I’d like it anyway. It had been on my library list already anyway, so I definitely checked it out then and there. It’s a hot copy, so I couldn’t have put a hold on it.

Then about an hour later, the same situation occurs, but in another location with another person! This time it was Dan in Real Life, which gets bolded, because I watched it already. “The Office” is only so-so, but Steve Carrell is good. The movie wasn’t really my sort of movie, but it was pretty good.

Plus two DVDs I had on hold came in, so I came home today with a lot of stuff to watch.

Brainiac Science Abuse Series 6, Episode 8. Those of you lucky enough to have that cool video game-ish channel.. is it E4 or something like that?.. will recognize this show. It’s another British show, reminiscent of Mythbusters. The earlier seasons were better. It’s gotten more gross and more blowing-up-stuff and more sexist and more innuendoish. In other words, it’s moved further away from my demographic. But it’s still interesting, so I still watch. I do worry that Jon Tickle, who’s an awesome presenter and a science buff and, in short, a geek, is being made to seem this season and last like someone sub-ordinate to the other presenter and someone to be made fun of for his smarts. (And I could mention how Tickle got his start as a house guest on Big Brother, but I won’t. — Whoops.)

And I have a full night of TV viewing lined up starting at 7, so the rest of the stuff on my computer and the other DVDs will have to wait.

For some reason, I have trouble remembering the name of this show. Even though the song had gotten into my head.

I just felt like telling the world that it’s back with new episodes. You may not have watched it when it was on. Or maybe you didn’t particularly like it. The first episode had an annoying laugh track, but subsequent episodes got better. They played the first episode ad nauseum, and not entirely because of the writers’ strike.

Yes, the premise is an annoying one. Male geeks who have no social skills paired up with a hot woman. Ho-hum. But at least Darlene from Roseanne makes an appearance from time to time as a girl geek, proving they exist. :P

Anyway, I found it funny and some of the jokes are smart. Or, well, maybe they’re just geeky. They appeal to me in any case. And at least they have a variety of (male) geeks. Though where’s the big, burly, hairy one? Maybe they don’t have a lot of variety after all. What group of geeks is comprised of solely small and/or skinny guys?

Well, anyway, it does have some problems, but it’s funny. And sitcoms are supposed to be funny. So watch it when it comes back onto CBS on Monday. I think it’s on after How I Met Your Mother which you should be watching anyway.

There’s a library booksale at the end of the month. That’s a lot of reading to do to be able to stick to my plan and buy stuff at the booksale. Not helped by the fact that I started getting books out of the library again.

Books to read before buying new ones: 48
Books to read to reach 100 by 2008: 19

Added a book today without remembering it was a new month. Didn’t do too bad for August, and now I have a good start on September. Gotta love the manga.

Someone had ripped pages out of the manga though. Grrr. (Pervy fanboy top of my list.)

Peeps was good, as was Bloody Jack. I’ll be reading the sequels eventually.

I’ve been reading way too many library books. Can you imagine? A place full of books and you can read any of them you want? For free?!

The problem is I keep returning books and leaving with more than I returned. I think my current number is around 14. No more books from the library for me though. I need to finish what I have and that will be hard enough. I need to finish by Saturday the 16th so I have time to return them before I leave. That’s something like one book a day of the ones I have left to read. When will I have time to clean and pack?

Anyway, this post was also to point out that I’ve updated my James Tiptree Jr. Award list. It has the new winners. I noticed this year the Short List turned into the Honor List, which I think is a nice change. I’ve also updated it for the stories I’ve recently read.

I intend to put the Carl Brandon Awards lists up at some point. They’ll be short lists, as they’re new awards. I haven’t actually read any of them either, not even the Octavia Butler or Neil Gaiman.

C-net’s put up a list of the Top Ten Girl Geeks. (Turn images on, or the list won’t even make sense. ALT tags, people. ALT tags!)

While I’m a fan of Lisa Simpson, it’s pretty pathetic they had to go looking at cartoons for inspiration. But Lisa is more credible than some others on the list! Using a PSP does not make you a geek!

Maybe we should make our own list and it can be the first real entry on Fgeeks.

It seems like the winner of the most fiction Hugos ever, Connie Willis, should be on the list. Or LeGuin or Tiptree or someone.

Such a pointless list. Maybe I shouldn’t have even linked to the thing.

Seems like there should be some Veronica Mars joke in there somewhere that would make for a good title for this entry. But oh well.

This is going to be rather spoily, but I’m not going to cut, because I bet most people won’t care. If you do, you’re warned, stop reading.

Going a bit library-happy and because Heinlein got mentioned at the most interesting (and annoying) panel at Albacon (more Albacon reporting to come, really), I picked up some Heinlein on the last library trip. After I’d also picked up Starship Troopers at the con because it was cheap and the movie seemed to have had potential it mostly wasted.

Anyway, Podkayne of Mars was a particular title I was looking for. It tends to get mentioned because it has a female protagonist and oh-my-gosh-that’s-so-unique. I scanned the titles of all the books on the shelf looking for it and for interesting titles and completely missed it first time around. I only happened to look more closely on a second pass and saw the spine said Heinlein, but no title. The title was there, but nearly completely illegible. Certainly not with the lighting and at the height it was (over my head). The title on the cover was just as bad. Dark, dark grey on black? What’s up with that? First rule of book cover design, MAKE THE TITLE AND AUTHOR LEGIBLE. Maybe time and light had done something to the original colors, but.. not that much, I wouldn’t think.

Turns out I’m pretty certain I’ve read this one before. It certainly hadn’t made any large impression on me, but it seemed vaguely familiar in parts, so I marked it as (R) in my read list. In junior high-ish, I read all sorts of random and ‘classic’ science fiction, mostly stuff you’d find in the library, so it seems quite likely I ran across this one before. (Saved my book-buying for Star Trek books. Mostly.)

I started reading Podkayne with the mindset of looking for every little sexist detail to object to. Well, what other reason to read it? Turns out I needn’t have bothered. As you read further and further into it, it gets more and more sexist. Podkayne wants to be a space ship pilot, which is oh-my-gosh-so—something. It’s not a typical job for a chick, but apparently she’s allowed to do it if she wants. So progressive.

Her mother is an engineer or something and smart and can fire a gun nearly as well as her father can! Go Podkayne’s Mom. :P

There’s a point where you can say, okay it’s just the society she’s living in is a bit sexist. And you can say, okay, so this was written like 50 years ago, so it’s the society Heinlein was living in and he’s just extrapolating. There’s a point where you can say this, but then by the end, you’re not willing to cut him that much slack.

Podkayne wants to be a pilot, but she also is blonde, blue-eyed, with a cute nose she can wrinkle at men to get what she wants. She flirts with guys throughout the book, to learn more about spaceships, or just to alleviate boredom or something. She really loves taking care of babies and apart from one time when she forces her brother to, it’s only girls doing that. Random girls, rather than the mothers, which is the moral of the story, apparently.

She knows how to cook and sew and oh-my-gosh math and science! So weird!

The story is told as diary entries. And, immediately, we’re shown that her ickle brother is smarter than her. Because he’s read her diary (which she’s gone to some measure to encrypt) and has inserted secret entries of his own. Later on, he shows how much smarter he is than her, like constantly, and eventually takes charge to save their lives. Want to strangle the snot-nosed brat. Want to strangle her for being an idiot when she’s supposed to not be.

Then the moral of the story is her mother didn’t take care of her and her psychotic little brother enough, because she was off having a career.

Really, you could almost enjoy the story until the last chapter. After that, you just want to strangle everyone. Starting with Heinlein.

Oh, and she’s part Maori, which she sees as her savage side. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

Conclusion: Heinlein was a sexist (and racist) jerk with weird morals he wanted to share with everyone.

I’m not so sure I should be giving Harlan Ellison more publicity and attention by even mentioning his name, nor do I want to seem obsessed with him, but I did run across this blog entry that I think is good.

On Harlangate

I got several writing books out of the library. I do have a bit of trouble skimming such books. It’s a book; I should read it straight through! And then be able to add it to my list. This is especially true of short books.

So one of the books I got out was a short book. Probably would only take a couple of hours to read it. And maybe it has some content or ideas that weren’t covered in the other books I read on the subject. So I was fully intending to read Writing a Children’s Book by Pamela Cleaver straight through.

The preface did make me roll my eyes and start to think twice, however.

Please note that throughout the book I use male pronouns for clarity and to avoid clumsiness. If you find this offensive, please feel free to substitute female ones where appropriate.

Now was that really necessary? Since there’s no way you can ‘substitute’ pronouns without great attention and a lot of thought, even in your own thoughts, she’s essentially saying ‘I’m using male pronouns, and if you don’t like it, tough.’

I don’t care what pronouns you’re using. Personally I prefer switching back and forth, whether or not you concern yourself with a 50-50 split on them. I’m unlikely to notice what you’re doing unless it’s pointed out. Why bother to point it out? That’s defensive right from the start.

But if you’re going to point it out, just say which method you chose to use and your reasoning. That’s it. You don’t need to be antagonistic to these imaginary readers who are going to object to it.

How using all male pronouns improves ‘clarity’ and reduces ‘clumsiness’, I have no idea. This is a book first published in 2000 and revised for 2004. Aren’t people over the whole gender pronoun question?

Another book I read, which was written probably about 15 years earlier, was written with different pronouns in alternating chapters. And she made a point of saying so. Is it something about books about writing for children that inspires people to make a point about pronouns? I usually don’t run into this sort of thing in my other reading. Maybe I’m reading the wrong things.

That wasn’t the only problem I had with the book, though. On the same preface page, it says “You can contact Pamela at (ohhhh.. do I include her Email address or not.. spam spam spam…) pamela(censored, lucky her)@yahoo.co.uk if you have any queries about subjects raised in this book. However, Pamela regrets she cannot read your MSS. If you are in need of feedback on your story, why not join a critique group?”

Yahoo address. Giving it in the text of the book. She’d better expect some spam and some weird Emails. Does she really regret that she can’t read your manuscript? Kind of doubt it. It’s a very patronizing thing to say on the first page of the book. Put it in the text somewhere.. ‘Writers seeking feedback on their stories should join critique groups. It’s not a good idea to send your manuscript to other writers uninvited.’ Or, if you must relate it to your Email address, put it at the end in some sort of author’s bio. After the reader, whoever she may be, has gotten to know you and your writing style.

After that, the book reads like some sort of technical publication. They love breaking things up into a billion sections with bullet points and lists. Small doses of that are fine. Sidebars like that are fine. Appendices of checklists like that are fine. It is not fine to make your entire book like that. I started reading it and felt like I was skimming, because it invites skimming. I couldn’t get into the flow of what she was trying to say at all. Skim or skip a bullet point, and you may miss the one bit of new information it was worth reading for.

So I stopped. If she has something new to tell me, she went about it in entirely the wrong way.

I like one of the quotes on the back: “There’s an excellent section on writing nonfiction, a chapter on finding a publisher and a suggested reading list. — Writer’s Bulletin”

Apart from the word “excellent”, that’s just a laundry list itself! I’m surprised it was written in paragraph form and without bullets.

I’ll be thinking twice about trying other books from ‘howtobooks‘ in Oxford, England. Especially if they’re written in the same format.

I decided I was going to try to read all of the Tiptree Award winners. I think I should’ve counted them first. Or at least counted them before I decided to copy them all into a page to keep track with. Here’s my list. I only got up to 1994 before I decided I needed a break. I’ll update it more later.

Some entries I may have read, but I don’t remember for sure. So I didn’t mark those.

I totally don’t remember any gender issues in A College of Magics. I only remember it as boring. Unfortunately, I read it just before I started writing Epinions reviews, so I don’t have a review of it to refresh my memory. Was it only because it was set at an all girl’s school? That’s a lame reason. Totally baffled.

Update: I’ve finished the list. It’s freaking long! I’ve read about a dozen out of something like 350.