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Comet Book Report: Dr. Johnson’s Women, by Norma Clarke

I noticed recently that I’ve been very remiss in talking about the books going into the stew that is my next novel. I’m going to try to remedy that with some posts over the next couple of days or weeks, though it’s highly unlikely I’ll go through everything I’ve been reading.

***

Dr. Johnson’s Women could so easily have been The Dr. Johnson Show Featuring Dr. Johnson and Some Ladies. Thank God this is not that book. The author uses him as her starting point because he was good friends with a great many intellectual women, and occupied a position near the center of that social network, but he is important to this discussion only inasmuch as he was important to the women that are its real focus. Johnson was one of a number of men who served as advocates, patrons, and fans of women’s writing in the eighteenth century; his assistance, however, as well as that of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and other men, is never presented as a gift bestowed by a benevolent (and patriarchal) god. Instead it’s a commodity sought out, managed, and occasionally rejected by women navigating their way through the literary and intellectual sphere.

I am floored by this book. My knowledge of women English writers prior to Jane Austen consisted of maybe half a dozen names, if that, none of them seeming terribly important to literary history. I had no idea of the existence of, say, Elizabeth Carter, who spoke nine languages (including Arabic) and whose translation of Epictetus remained the standard for more than a century. Or Charlotte Lennox, who wrote hugely popular novels that grappled actively with the paradoxes of contemporary female life, and also a scathing feminist critique of Shakespeare. Or Catherine Macaulay, who produced an epic eight-volume history of England. Or Hester Thrale, Hannah More, Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Rowe, Catherine Talbot, or anybody mentioned in the second half of this book, which I haven’t read yet. I only barely knew of Elizabeth Vesey and Elizabeth Montagu, because I knew the Blue Stocking Society was operational during the period of my novel, and I certainly didn’t realize how far the trend went. These women corresponded, networked, encouraged each other in their efforts, argued bitterly over their divergent opinions, and had a whole world that never seems to appear in the histories I’ve read.

This was the book that sparked my previous post, because I can’t help but contrast this period with the Victorian Age. “Bluestocking” wasn’t a pejorative yet; Johnson was not the only man to think an educated woman was a source of pride for her nation and family. Clarke presents this as the happy consequence of the mind/body dichotomy as it was presented at the time: women’s bodies might be weaker and more fallible than those of men, but the mind was sexless, and it could be disciplined to control the body. The argument that women’s minds are also inherently weaker and more fallible doesn’t seem to have the force that it acquired later. A learned woman may not be a common thing, but she isn’t a freak of nature, either, on par with a dancing bear or a parrot that speaks French.

Which makes this sound like a rosy paradise, free of trouble. It wasn’t. Clarke outlines a triad of vanity-coquetry-power that no woman could entirely escape; even those who, like Elizabeth Carter, repudiated it as much as possible didn’t negate its existence. The publicity attendent upon life as a writer or scholar had to be accompanied, in the female instance, by a lot of self-deprecation and disavowals of one’s own importance. Egotism was most definitely not okay, and it was easy to lose one’s reputation while gaining fame. But Elizabeth Carter was supporting herself as a professional writer at the Gentleman’s Magazine when Johnson was a wet-behind-the-ears newcomer to London, and other women made a living through either patronage or the public sphere, and were respected for it.

I had no idea that was going on in the eighteenth century.

The political dimension seems to have been mostly lacking; Carter apparently disapproved of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Still, it’s a remarkable bit of feminism I was almost completely unaware of. And the book is quite readable, so if you’re interested in literature, feminism, or the ideals of the Enlightenment, definitely take a look at this one.

Two lies

One pattern of thinking is that everything was better back in the Good Old Days — a point in time that continually shifts according to the perspective of the observer. For much of Europe’s history, it was the Garden of Eden; a modern American might put it in the 1950s. Whenever it was, it was better that now, and we are continually falling from that idyll.

Another pattern is the gospel of progress. We’re getting better all the time. We’re continually climbing from the pit of our unenlightened past, improving on what went before, heading for the stars. Tomorrow will be brighter than yesterday was, and the day after that, brighter still.

The former is more or less a conservative paradigm; the latter is a liberal one (or perhaps it would be better to say progressive.) Taken in their pure form, both are lies.

Because human history isn’t linear. It squiggles and loops and goes in three directions at once. There was a fluorescence of female intellectualism in eighteenth-century London that withered in the nineteenth, but less than we have now; New Kingdom Egyptian metallurgy and sculpture made medieval Europeans look like enthusiastic but not terribly bright seven-year-olds, but their realism doesn’t match Michaelangelo; Minoans had better plumbing than Renaissance Italy, but no hot showers. And the problem is that buying into either lie blinds you to important things: the injustices hidden beneath the happy mask of Leave It to Beaver, the risk of those injustices coming back again in the future. Or new ones. It isn’t just two steps forward, one step back — maybe five steps back and three to the side and then do a backflip and end up facing a different direction entirely.

And yet it’s so tempting. It’s a lot easier to hold onto the notion of a line than an n-dimensional Gordian Knot with multiple strings whose number changes every time you look at them.

I know that I tend toward the liberal pattern of thinking. There’s a lot of truth in it, especially if you pick a certain set of strings and decide those are how you’re going to measure progress. Of course, there’s truth in the conservative pattern, too — especially if you pick different strings. But the more I read of history, the more it all dissolves. (Of course this post is brought to you by my research. I figure the eighteenth-century intellectuals gave it away, if nothing else.) History is really damn complicated, and it really is going in all directions at once. And no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to keep all its twists in my head, never be able to grasp the whole of it.

But I can think about which strings I’m picking, and which ones the person I’m reading has picked. And I can try not to make my own patterns too neat.

sprechen Sie (Neuhoch)deutsch?

1) How different is modern German from the language circa the eighteenth century? It looks to me like they were speaking New High German, which is apparently more or less the same as Standard German nowadays, but my own facility with the language ends with one proverb and one alarming speech about having a grenade (don’t ask), so it’s all Greek German to me. My guess would be that it differs in much the same way as eighteenth-century English does, i.e. more in phrasing and word choice than anything else, but I’d like to know for sure.

2) Once I’ve sorted that out, I will need someone to do small amounts (i.e. a few sentences) of translation work for me, either into the modern language or into New High German, if that’s noticeably different. If you have fluency with either of these, or know someone who does, please drop me a line.

(You would be justified in asking why I should contemplate translating into an archaic dialect of German when I haven’t been writing these novels in equally period English. The answer is, because I can. Assuming I can find a translator, of course.)

back now

Approximately twenty-two hours transit time for six waking hours on the ground in Minneapolis. >_<

But I got to see family, which was nice.

fyi

I’m going to be mostly away from the computer for the next three days, so if you have anything urgent, uh, contact me telepathically or something.

Donald Dickey, 1918?-2009

My maternal grandfather passed away today, the last of my grandparents to go. He was 91.

Closing comments, not because I’m too upset to deal with them — I’m not; I’m doing okay — but because they just don’t seem right. That social pattern is wrong for this situation, at least in my head.

oh yeah, I have a list

Adding in some new titles last night, it occurred to me that oh yeah, I have something on my website that could be useful as a racial-diversity resource. Of course, I’ve read only a fraction of the books listed there, so I can’t say they’re all worth reading; some of them may in fact be head-‘splodingly bad. But if you’ve got a hankering for fantasy novels that acknowledge the existence of a world outside of the usual feudal-Celtic-Norse triangle, well, there’s a starting point.

(A perenially incomplete one. E-mail me, or comment here, with others I should include: author, title, and which category they belong in.)

a question for speakers of Mandarin

I have a couple of different stories in the pipeline that take place in semi-Chinese societies — specifically, societies where I’ve decided to base the language on Mandarin, at least as far as the phonology of names is concerned. (i.e. I’m neither using actual Mandarin in the story, nor conlanging beyond deciding what to call characters and towns.) IANASpeaker of Mandarin, so my question for those who are is: how likely are you to be distracted by possible meanings for the names I’ve made up?

To put it differently: if I invent German-looking names for a story, I can (and do) check in a dictionary to make sure I haven’t named a character “Elbow” or something like that. And it’s relatively easy to avoid actual words, just by changing a few letters. With the semi-Japanese names in the doppelganger books, on the other hand, I kind of let it go, because any random pair of mora I threw together were likely to mean something in Japanese — tsue is a walking stick, for example, and katsu, depending on the kanji, means “to win,” “thirst,” “yet,” “living,” “cutlet” (when written in katakana) and something you yell at Zen practitioners when they screw up. (Or so my favorite dictionary tells me.) So the Cousin names and honorifics in particular were likely to mean something whether I wanted them to or not.

Mandarin’s more opaque to me, since I don’t speak more than about five words of it, and those very badly. I’m familiar with the function of tones in it, so I suspect it’s likely any random syllable I stick in a name is likely to mean one or more things, possibly incongruous ones. Hence asking the fluent speakers: how badly would that distract you, in a story written in English? Is it something you could just sort of breeze by (provided I don’t accidentally hit upon something flagrantly obscene), or is your brain likely to play the homophone game, coming up with variant translations of the character’s name?

a capella recs

My parents linked me to this cover of Toto’s “Africa” by a Slovenian a capella group (whose great performance is especially marked by its simulated thunderstorm at the beginning), and it made me realize:

I really like good a capella.

And, in parallel with my taste in instrumental music, what I especially like is neither the melody nor the beat, but the stuff in the middle: the harmony, the changing chords in the background, all that good substance. I never really paid attention to that layer of “Africa” before now, but something about hearing it rendered in human voices made it really appeal to me. So help me, o internets: can you recommend good a capella albums that do a lot of that kind of thing? (Not covers of Toto songs; strong and interesting harmonies.)

a kind of awesome list

Just saw the list of recipients for the 2009 Medal of Freedom.

One of the first thoughts I had upon reading it was, somewhere in America, there are people frothing at the mouth because only three out of sixteen are straight white men. (And of those three, one is physically disabled and one is a pillar of liberal American politics. I don’t imagine the people frothing think much of either of those guys.)

[Edited to add: I should have made it clearer in the first instance that the people I imagine are frothing at the mouth are not the entirety of conservatives. I’m talking about the birthers, the Sarah Palin worshippers, the Rush Limbaugh goons and the Freepers, and the rest of the wingnutty base. I honestly think it’s a shame that they have become the vocal face of American conservatism, because they’re doing their best to turn it into the party of racist reactionaries, and that’s an opposition I simply cannot respect.]

Six are women. Three are black. Two are Hispanic. One is Native American. One is Bangladeshi. One is Jewish (at least one — I didn’t check religion). Two are open gays. There are foreigners and the aforementioned disabled guy. Out of sixteen, only Jack Kemp belongs to the core Republican demographic.

And you know what? It warms the cockles of my heart to know that conservative bloggers are probably already bitching about this “affirmative action” list. I want them to be unhappy, because the list they would be happy with is not a list I want to see.

(Not actually true. What I really want is for even conservative bloggers to celebrate diversity. That would be far better than the ongoing fight with people who think the only “real Americans” are the straight white Christian ones. But until we have that, I’ll enjoy this.)

I’d be curious to know how the ratios compare to Bush’s picks, but honestly, I’m too lazy to sort through demographic info for eighty-one more people. At a glance, it looks more white male to me — but it’s hard to tell from just names, and I’m inclined to assume that interpretation anyway, so my glance is admittedly not a good basis for evaluation. Even if Obama’s choices over the next few years aren’t more diverse, people are going to view them that way, because the guy making those choices is black, and so of course he’s probably rewarding all kinds of undeserving minorities while ignoring the achievements of the Great White Male. Right?

<headdesk>

I’d rather focus on the good. Like, now I’m really interested to read more about and by Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow. He sounds awesome — and I’m not just saying that because he’s an anthropologist. <g>

Things I’m very bad at

#19 – convincing myself that taking a few days off to regroup and rethink will make achieving my deadline easier, not harder.

Not sure I believe that one. But I’m trying to, right now.

Let’s play pretend

I’ve been so busy this week that it’s taken me days to get this link posted, but: a fellow named Marshal Zeringue contacted me a little while ago with what amounts to a one-question interview question, which was, If they make my book into a film, here’s who I’d like to play the lead role(s).

I cheated a bit and answered for both Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie. Head on over there to see who I have faces for in my head (and who I don’t).

(As far as the comet book’s concerned — I don’t have a good visual reference for either Galen or Irrith yet. I should try to fix that.)

Measuring a drop in a bucket

It’s International Blog Against Racism Week again, and boy do we have things to choose from — at levels of fame ranging all the way from Sonia Sotomayor and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. down to things like the U.S. cover of Justine Larbalestier’s Liar. (And quieter things than that, no doubt, from one corner of the world to the other, in every city and town.)

Riffling through my brain to see what I might have something to say about, I landed on, of all things, movies. Specifically, the live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Most of my Avatar news has come via anima_mecanique, who has been posting off and on about the head-desk moves of the filmmakers in whitewashing their source. Avatar, if you don’t know, is an animated series set in a fantasy world that I tend to think of as western Pacific Rim in inspiration: the various elementally-themed societies are mostly different varieties of Asian in basis, with the Water Tribes blurring over into northern Pacific natives/Inuit. In other words, not Eurofantasy. But along come the filmmakers with their live-action movie, and suddenly not only is the whole cast white, they’re committing cultural blunders right left and center, like telling people to show up for casting calls in their “traditional cultural ethnic attire. If you’re Korean, wear a kimono.” <headsplode> Well, they backpedaled a little to cast some brown people, like that nice boy from Slumdog Millionaire since everybody likes him, right . . . only last I heard, that nice boy and all the other non-white actors are playing members of the Fire Nation. Who are, y’know, the enemy.

Oh yeah. That fixes everything.

The problem is, I’m not sure what I can do to protest this problem other than make a blog post. Boycotting the movie? Not effective. My one lost ticket sale won’t make anybody take notice, and if a lot of people boycotted it, enough that they did notice, Hollywood wouldn’t say “oh, I guess we should cast Asian actors next time.” They’d say, “oh, I guess we should go back to Eurofantasy.” I can buy the animated series, and I’m going to (I’ve seen the first season and loved it), but after that, it seems like all I can do is talk.

Which isn’t totally ineffective. After all, it was fan outcry that got them to cast Dev Patel (even though he would be way better as Sokka than Zuko). And now that I look on the IMDb, it seems they’ve got a Korean actor for one of the Earthbenders, so hey, there’s one who isn’t on the wrong side of the war. At least some of that has happened because people talked about the problem.

I just wish I knew how to do more. I’ll probably end up going to see the movie, because I suspect that I’ll achieve more by supporting baby steps toward non-Eurofantasy than holding out for perfection, but it’ll annoy me. Especially since it’s pretty obvious that the filmmakers don’t even really get where they went wrong.

everybody but me

Why do I have the niggling feeling that I’m arriving late at the party of Understanding That Working For Five Or Six Or Seven Hours On One Story Will Fry Your Brain For Working On Another That Same Day?

whee!

1,172 words and one crash course in seventeenth-century telescope design later, I have my first flashback scene.

I’d forgotten how much fun these things are. When I was writing Midnight, flashbacks were my candy bars: nothing but a neat idea, without any need for the kind of set-up or take-down ordinary scenes require. I may try to write another tonight, if I can sort out the details; I still owe this book three others, that need to go somewhere in the stuff I’ve already written.

(There’s another reason I really enjoyed this one, but you all will have to wait until the book comes out to learn what that one is.)

half a book!

Ladies and gents, we crossed the 70K line today. Which means this is officially Half A Book, assuming I end up in the reasonable neighborhood of my 140K goal.

I may celebrate by spending tomorrow, and possibly the next day, working on flashback scenes. I haven’t written any of them yet, and while I’m not sure which ones I want to stick in which parts of the story, I’ve come to suspect I won’t be able to figure that out properly until the scenes exist as more than one-line descriptions in my head. And while part of my scheduling here involves not counting flashback writing as words toward my daily goal, the early completion of Part Three means I’m still two days ahead of schedule, and spending those filling in other holes isn’t a terrible idea.

(I would do flashbacks and forward progress, but I’m also currently being sisyphized by another project, and three tasks at once is a bit much — even if the sisyphean one is a revision. I just can’t gear-shift that much.)

But hey. Half a book. Yay!

Word count: 70,393
LBR census: It’s going to be blood, if Irrith keeps on being so mouthy.
Authorial sadism: Hey, somebody needs to represent for eighteenth-century English chauvinism.

I’ll verb whatever I want to

Long ago, Tantalus turned into a verb: if something tempts you but you’re never allowed to have it, it is tantalizing you. Well, I hereby declare the verbing of Sisyphus, henceforth to be used for tasks which undo themselves every time you finish them.

As you might guess, this is because I’m being sisyphized by something right now. And not just in the usual laundry-and-dishes sense.

(Ixionizing, I suppose, would be when something goes round and round without ever getting anywhere at all, like a hamster on a wheel. Or, well, Ixion. On his wheel.)

poll time! but not here.

Over on FFF, I’m polling people about side stories — pieces of short fiction an author writes that are connected to a novel series. (Like, say, Deeds of Men.) If you’ve got any experience with those, as a writer or a reader, go over and vote.

And feel free to spread this elsewhere, if your LJ readership is interested in this kind of thing. The more data, the merrier!

This is kind of fabulous.

The VanderMeers, having been given a 13th anniversary ale to try out, decided that of course the thing to do was to see how it went with different books.

It kinda makes me wish I liked beer and/or wine. You could have a pretty ridiculous party, swigging down different drinks, trying to match them up with appropriate books. “I think this is more of a chardonnay kind of fantasy . . . .”

As it happens, Ashes didn’t go well with the beer at all, especially the selection Ann was reading. But she recommends a rich honey mead — Rosamund and Gertrude would approve. ^_^