cliterature

While Cleis released a full book of the 26 covers (which I reviewed here), it seems taht the actual alphabet themed book series has been cancelled.  So the actual anthologies will get no further than L, at least with this publisher.

Realms of Fantasy is closing, John Updike has died of lung cancer, Diamond (the main distributor for indy comic books) is becoming less accessable, In a continuing trend Borders is choosing not to carry the latest book by highly popular author L Bujold. In the world of words (and making money there-from) things, frankly, could be better.  But what’s a grrl to do?  I like to read and I like to write, and the entertainment genres do tend to stay boutant even in a downturn.  But perhaps it is not surprise which picture of mine has made the most sales of late:

The more I think about it the more I see it.  It is often said of women that they fancy the bad boy, but they marry a good man.  But isn’t the same story told just as often about men?  Even Puss in Boots, the “cat” is willing to doing anything for the miller’s son, even thought see is set aside for the princess.  And most recently I have been reading an old adventure/romance called, robustly, The Pirate and the Lady, by Leslie Turner White (Ace, 1961).

The blurb and inside synopsis is very focused on the relationship between the pirate and his “insatiable” lady.  The lady, Genevieve, is a gorgeous 40-year-old who married to avoid the unfortunate fate of a cavalier family on the losing side, and found the respectable husband she never loved to be unpleasant and impotent,  and proceeded to cuckold him–repeatedly.  By the end of chapter two she has been surprised in bed with a sea captain by her outraged husband, shot him dead, protected and cunningly implicated her lover, and made a break for America with him to escape justice.

My kind of woman.

The sad-but-true aspect of the story is that this is not the woman the pirate marries in the final chapter.  That is, as usual, a juvenile daughter of an influential father whom the pirate has greatly impressed–the father being an earl who will get the pirate a knighthood as well as a wife (So sue me, the pirate and the father seem more in love than any other couple in the book).  And Genevieve?  Said father of the groom brushes her off in the closing scene:  ”Faint heart n’er won fair lady … As for your affair with the Lady Genevieve, that can be chalked off to experience.”

Overall it is a rather interesting book, being an adventure romance not clearly aimed at only men or only women. But it does seem that if there is an exciting older, femme fatale in the bed during act one, there with be a wedding to a princess in the epilogue. Just like the gay stories that end with some kind of suicide, or career woman old movies where she proves to the man that she is his equal… then marries him and quits work to raise the kids.  (Eat the cake too?  I don’t think so!)

Just like a woman might date James Dean, but marry Pat Boone –it seems men are meant to fantasize about fooling around with Lilith before they settle down with Eve. And when it comes right down to it, it looks like double standards right across the board. Of course, I am still reading this book (you caught me, I skipped over and read the last chapter ahead of time) and haven’t yet discovered the ultimate fate of fiesty Genevieve–keep your fingers crossed for her.  Maybe she settles down with a hot Jamaican and lives lustily ever after (however I suspect not).

Pat Boone wrote a book for teenagers in 1958 called (with an excess of ‘Aw, Shucks’ styling) ‘Twixt Twelve and Twenty.  It is predictable that I would have quite a lot to say about such a book, not least the idea that a man who eloped and married at 19 might be the best choice for advice.  Nevertheless the idea of making a more general statement was eclipsed by my reaction to one small section.  Beneath the title “Sweet Sixteen” the following is said of (and to) girls of the ages 15 and 16:

“…there are even more rules of conduct for girls at this stage. One of them is that, even if a fellow runs like a three-legged hippopotamus, he must be the pursuer. In this game of hide-and-seek the male is always’”it.” The girl who makes the advance tips her hand immediately. That throws the game, for if she’s “it” then the fellow has to run hide, and usually does. This I know, from experience. Of course girls do have subtle ways of reversing the game. For example:

There once was a maiden of Siam
Who said to her lover, young Kiam,
“If you kiss me, of course
You will have to use force–
But you’re certainly stronger than I am.”

Undoubtedly, she got kissed.  But down Nashville way, we would have seen right through her.  We didn’t cotton to “bold” girls in Tennesse.  The fact is that one of the best ways for a galt o catch a guy is to let him chase her!”

It is hard to even remember a time when it was respectable to believe, and to advise children, that no means yes.  And this without even considering for a second that this might lead to a situation where a boy, or indeed a man, fails to accurately distinguish between a no that means yes and a no that actually means no–let alone how to deal with the consequences of the error.

Sometimes is can be tricky to explain to a guy why gender myths(a.k.a. gender stereotypes or false beliefs) are/can be a big deal.  Partly this is because most of the gender myths we are taught as children continue to just seem plausible to us throughout life.  The other is that myths about males are a bit more insidious than those about women.  Women are characterised as weak, emotional, hysterical and erratic.  Being characterised as strong, logical, laconic and herois doesn’t seem like such as bad deal (until you try to live up to it all the time without ever showing a hint of weakness).

It can be helpful to illustrate how gender myths can be unnecessarily limiting by reach for example from the past, and examples relating to the male gender.  In fact there is one particular example that I have found to very effectively in getting the point across.  I will illustrate it with some quotes from what was considered a rather progressive book about sexuality, circa 1912.

 ”…the growing man [up to the age of 25] needs the semen secreted to develop his own body.  It is now recognised as a fact that the semen, if not dissipated, will be reabsorbed by the system and aid materially in the development of the body.  Boys who waste this “elixir of life” during their youth do not develop as they should.  The youth who practices masturbation …  during this period of development is wasting energy he never can regain.”

That’s right, it was commonly believed that a male up to the age of 25 should (could) abstain from any emission.  And what would happen if he did not?  Well according to this author:

“…self-abuse has a weakening effect on the body … capable of producing the most serious of results, such as insanity, idiocy, impotency and sterility … Children who have developed the habit of self abuse usually sleep badly, become thin and haggard looking, peevish, nervous and excitable.  Some even have convulsions.  Older boys who are masturbators usually get  a sallow look and hang-dog expression.  They become  absent-minded and lose their frank expression.  The young man with this habit becomes overshy as he is conscious of doing something that should be condemned. Adult masturbators may show no signs otherwise than that they are cowardly and mean-spirited … He lacks the willpower necessary to succeed in any undertaking and drags through life as a failure.”

These days we joke about going blind or getting hairy palms.  But this was a real basis for shame and confusion for boys who did what came naturally.  They must genuinely have feared becoming a coward, pervert or weakling.  In fact this belief lingers in certain subcultures to the present day.  Young boys were watched closely, sleep on hard beds with light blankets on the understanding that being warm ’stimulates’ erotic desires–in fact if possible they were mean to sleep outside or at least with a window wide open.  Using condiments on food was also considered dangerous and cold baths both a preventative and curative treatment.  Children born to men under 25 are described as likely to be deficit and under-developed.

It may seem funny now, but I doubt it was at the time when many boys would have been ashamed of something they were told was, on a moral and scientific basis, abnormal.  How would we know which of the beliefs we hold today might eventually be shown to be just as fallacious?  It may seem easy to dispute the opinions in an old book (one that goes on to discuss ‘race suicide’ and the advisability of sterilising imperfect humans). 

But irrational shame still lurks in the form of gender myths in our own day to day lives.  We obsess about our sexual attributes, orientations, the strength or absence of libido, our appearances, our fantasies, what we view and read–and equally we are judgemental of others based on the very same things.  It should be simple, really.  There should be no shame where no-one is harmed.  But false science and moralising convinces many people that what comes naturally to them harms themselves or others.  And it is hard to sort truth from myth when another camp, especially on the online Wild West, will suggest any kind of abuse is actually normal and loving.

It may take a funny example to make the point.  But gender myths limit how people behave and who they are, not just sexually but in every way.  Some of these limits are beneficial and prevent selfish abuse or others, and some are arbitrary and perverse with a needless legacy of shame and self-loathing.  The trick, as ever, is telling the differemce between the two.  Or at least trying to.

 * Quotes from Himself: Talks with Men Concerning Themselvesby EB Lowry and RJ Lambert (Forbes & Company, Chicago, 1912)

Did you realise that the old oral tradition of ‘Puss in Boots’ normally featured a female cat?  When I discovered that it did rather make me look at the story in a new (a.k.a. more cynical) light.   Suddenly a pantomime fable started to feel more like furry femdom with a tragic ending–and that suggests that despite my best efforts I have one hell of a gendered outlook on characters.  So here is some feline fisking, to illustrate that point….

The version below is the synopsis as per Wikipedia but I have cast (caste?) Puss as female. 

The division of property after a miller’s death leaves his youngest son with nothing but the granary cat. Disappointed, the son contemplates eating the animal, but the cat bargains with him, promising him riches in return for a bag and a pair of boots. Though dubious, the miller’s son goes along with her and provides the items.

So if you want to be saved by a pussy, um, cat you need to let her wear the boots in the family.

Puss-in-Boots takes the bag and catches a succession of items of game - rabbits, partridges, etc. - which she takes to the palace and presents to the king as presents from his master, the “Marquis de Carabas”. Eventually the cat learns that the king and his beautiful daughter will be travelling by the river road. Puss-in-Boots tells the miller’s son (who is ignorant of all this) to go and bathe in the river at the time that the royal party is due to pass. The boy does so, and as he bathes the cat steals his clothes, and runs to the road calling for help for his master, the Marquis de Carabas, who is drowning. The boy is “rescued” from the river, and his lack of clothes is explained as the work of robbers. He is therefore wrapped in rich robes and driven off in the king’s coach.

You also need to be willing to get naked upon command and without even requiring an explanation.

The cat speeds ahead of the king’s party to the lands of a powerful ogre. She threatens the people working in its fields that they will be chopped to bits if they don’t say that the fields belong to the Marquis of Carabas. As the king’s coach reaches the ogre’s lands, the king asks after the ownership of the fields, and is told that they belong to the Marquis de Carabas. Puss-in-Boots goes ahead of the party, and confronts the ogre. She flatters the ogre on his magical shape-changing abilities and challenges him to turn into a mouse. The moment the ogre does so, Puss-in-Boots eats him, thus claiming the palace and lands in her master’s name.

And if a girl has to threaten the proles, steal, lie, murder and eat sentient beings to get ahead–well, the ends justify the means.

Upon reaching the ogre’s palace, the royal party is welcomed by Puss-in-Boots in his master’s name. The king marries the princess to the miller’s son.

 Although after making your boy rich, famous and influential, the odds are he is going to marry some pretty girl even with more money and influence–even though she is completely without wit or willpower and just does everything her ‘Daddy’ tells her.  

The moral of the story?  Um, I don’t even know any more.  Never eat pussy of you want to wed ahead?  A cat can look at a king, and create prince?  Master a kitty and marry the pretty?  Oh, I give up.

* Picture excerpted from an illustration by an uncredited illustrator in a version printed by McCall Publishing in 1969.

Some science fiction defies its era, even if it was written decades ago it can be read as if it was written yesterday.   I can still read ‘A Different Light’ or ‘Stardance’ with ease despite the fact they were written in a time before computers and cell phones.  Other science fiction retains its fidelity as period speculation.  The Victorian notion of the future remains so compelling that people continue to write the genre today in the guise of steampunk and slipstream fiction. 

 And then there are books like “Space Prison”.

“For seven weeks the Constellation had been plunging through hyperspace with her eight thousand colonists…”

Because ships are female, y’know.

“…fleeing like a hunted thing with her communicators silenced and her drives moaning and thundering.”

Wow.  Worse simile ever, because it isn’t one.  When a thing actually is being hunted, it actually is a ‘hunted thing’–not just like one.

“Up in the control room, Irene had been told, the needles of the dials danced against the red danger lines day and night.”

Because of course Irene has never actually seen the control room, that is self evident: Irene is a girl’s name.  An having a female ship piloted by a female would be all rather queer.

“She lay in bed and listened to the muffled ceaseless roar of the drives and felt the singing vibration of the hull.  We should be almost safe now, she thought. Athena is only forty days away.”

 Thank you, Little Miss Exposition.

“Thinking of the new life awaiting them all made her too restless to lie still any longer.  She got up to sit on the edge of the bed and switch on the light.”

She got up to sit down and… well I am almost too scintillated to breathe.  Presumably Little Miss Exposition has something we need to see.

“Dale was  gone–he had been summoned to adjust one of the machines in the ships’s X-ray room–”

Sorry, Little Mrs Exposition.  Mr Exposition being busy with one of those terribly complicated machine things.  X-rays and so forth.

“…and Billy was asleep, nothing showing of him above the covers but a crop of brown hair and the furry nose of his ragged teddy bear.”

Damsel: check

Freckled tyke: check

Teddy bear: now come on.  That’s just a little bit much, surely?  I shall start skimming a bit. The alien’s duly attack and Irene responds gamely.  By instructing said tyke to get dressed so:

“…we’ll be ready when they let Daddy come back to tell us what to do.”

Unfortunately it is the evil dark-skinned aliens that come to the door instead and maroon”Mrs  Dale Humbolt” and other the humans they find to be too useless to use as slave labor on a rather nasty planet.  Her 5-year old child asks what they will do and she helpfully replies:

“I don’t know … there’s no one to help us and how can I know–what we should do–”

At which point I am beginning to understand the evil alien’s point of view, because the 5-year old boy is left to try and reassure Mama and come up with some kind of plan.  However at this point (on page 14) some evil wolf-like aliens from the nasty planet eat both of them.  Something I found to be a welcome relief, accompanied by a complete loss of interest in reading the rest of the book where the Aryan wet dream on the cover presumably saves the day.

Oh, yes, the cover.  Well, I can’t say I wasn’t warned. ;)

It does not even bear mentioning, that gender roles were much more restrictive during the 1950s. The husband with his hammer and wide with her sewing machine epitomise a time when there was one ideal state that ever male and female was meant to aspire to. And traditional roles certainly remain an option, and a fulfilling one, for many people.  It has become a modern reflex to notice any publication that assigns certain tasks to one sex or the other.

Mother shops thriftily, cleans every surface using common household goods, cooks every kind of meal, sews, knits, smocks and decorates. Dad cares for the lawn, paints, repairs and builds furniture. But reading through this 1950s almanac it is not who does which task that strikes me the hardest. It is the sheer, regimented, perfectionism with which each role is described. Housekeeping is broken down into a system that would lead cleaning tasks alone to totally fill every day. Every item is to be ironed and folded in a manner specified as precisely as a complex feat of origami. Likewise the man is expected to have hundreds of tools and be completely self-sufficient in every task from reupholstering a chair to writing a will.

It is clear that the skill set of the man and woman are intended to be separate and complimentary, but throughout the almanac there is a pervading feeling of perfectionism. Each spouse is implicitly expected to excel in their appointed task The breadth and depth of the appointed roles is more than daunting, it is insane. I do not know how even the most traditionally mind man or woman could live up to the image presented by the cheerful couple on the cover and the confident instructions within to guide them through every eventuality–only very rarely allowing any role to any person outside the couple. Maybe, grudgingly, a butcher to segment a cow’s carcass or a doctor should one be bitten by a highly poisonous snake.

And buried amidst all this, a single page on mental health: “don’t brood on the past. Think about the rosy future … limit your desires … Above all, keep busy, and you will find you have no time for emotional upsets…”

Most of the information in this book is just as useful today as it was over 50 years ago.  But most of us would now carry out less that a few pages of these tasks in the average week.  Part of this is of course the appliances, the easy maintenance and disposable goods and the easy purchase of trade services that are now available to most of us.  But I think it is more than that.  I think the virtue of being busy has been largely replaced by the hedonism of having leisure. 

Some might say that is not such a good thing, it is certainly a mixed blessing.  But looking again at the cover art there seems to be a loneliness, a quiet desperation to the myriad of tasks laid out before the ideal couple whose downcast eyes are averted away from each other.  Some of these tasks necessary, but many of them feel like part of an ever escalating scale of display.  Look what a good male I am; look what a good female I am–an arms race of domesticity that seems to pit the couple against each other, and couples against other couples in a furious war of gender-appropriate competency.

 Maybe as a slobby single woman I am remiss in not having a partner and not even knowing my neighbor, but in our modern world we are all free to choose the area in which we strive to excel.  Whether they are traditional for our gender or not, none of us needs to be a walking half-an-almanac.  And I for one prefer it that way.  The Jones’s can live that way if it pleases them, but instead of keeping up I will be at Starbucks, not even bothering to make my own cup of coffee. 

Alphabet Erotica* ($10.95) is a book of 26 postcards, each showing a letter of the alphabet and tag line (B is for Bondage, Q is for Quickie etc) and a classic pin up girl. The postcards are derived from the Scott Idelman-designed cover art for a series of themed anthologies edited by Alison Tyler.

The designs are well-composed and the pin-ups are great examples of 50s illustration–although reproducing the whole cover at the size of a smaller format postcard does not show the pinup portion to full advantage. The cards are presented in book form but tend to detach as you flip through, so this product would be most useful to someone who wishes to collect or use the postcards as separate items (and at about 40c a card the cover price is more than reasonable).

The website and promotional material states: “Each sexy Vargas-inspired pin-up girl represents a different letter, seductively posed to highlight the best these books and letters have to offer visually.” I feel obliged to note that the pinups themselves are not modern, but reproductions of the works of contemporaries of Vargas (1896-1982), who might well not agree that Vargas was their source of inspiration.

For example, I recognised several works by the 50s pinup artist Peter Driben (see also).  Driben (~1903-1975) was very prolific as a pinup,  portrait, popular and fine art painter (amongst many achievements he painted a young Ronald Reagan–excerpted right–and President Dwight Eisenhower, the original poster for ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and a highly popular depiction of the raising of the flag in Iwo Jima).  His art is recognisable in the designs for B, D, F (below, Driben original to the left), I (also below), N, S, T, U and Z.

While the designs for the overall covers/cards are well-balanced and pleasing, it would have been nice to see some kind of courtesy credit given to the original creator of the pin-up portion of the design, even though this material is now in the public domain.

* Review copy provided by the publisher

I apologise, today’s topic is more than usually trivial, but here we go…..

I have this ongoing argument with MSWord spellchecker.  Well actually I have several, but that’s what custom dictionaries are for.  (An ‘e’ in the middle of judgment, I think not).  The word I am thinking of today is ’steepled’, specifically as it relates to hands.  Spellchecker assures me that the word ’steepled’ is a non-word, it fails to be, it is without existence in reality as defined by our friends at Microsoft.  (And remember, the computer is your friend.)

How to Read a Person like a Book(1973) assures me that steepling is a recognised hand gesture, but over the course of four pages absolutely refuses to use the word in adjective form.  ‘Steeple’, okay–’steepling’, fine–no steepled.  (How annoying).   I also read within that men steeple there hands high which signifies confidence–women steeple lower and in covert ways.  (With helpful pictures depicting a male in a business suit and a female in a short skirt).

I tour of the dictionaries available online, including my favorite Merriam-Webster, also fails to back me up.  Practical Aspects of Interview and Interrogation (2002) finally back me up with: hands may also be “steepled” where the tips of the fingers of each hand are touched together.  But the inverted commas are not exactly an unmitigated endorsement.

 Upon consideration (and because How to Read a Person like a Book mentions the fact) I think I learned about the gesture, and how it is described, from Sherlock Holmes stories.  A character who certainly embodies the kind of masculine arrogance that the body language experts attribute to it.  But a search of the canon, alas, also fails to produce the adjective.

 I can locate it in Sherlock Holmes pastiches by other, later authors such as a story by John Koons in the anthology called The Game is Afoot (but this is an anthology of parodies and so perhaps not to be counted on for establishing language conventions). I also find it in other less than authoritative works such as fan fiction and Amazon reviews.  Finally I find it in a number of moderately serious pastiche stories dating from the 1980s onward (The Einstein Paradox, 1998; My Sherlock Holmes, 2003; Ghosts in Baker Street, 2006 etc). 

However, “steepled’ remains elusive (not absent but extremely rare) even in modern works other than stories about Sherlock Holmes and references to architecture.  So, what do you think?  “Steepled” hands: corrupted and incorrect language, weird post-Doyle Sherlockian jargon, or a correct but modern usage? 

 And, I begin to wonder, has a female character ever been described as making this gesture?  I know that I steeple my fingers–normally with feet propped in my desk and some journal on my lap, disregarded for the moment do to having provoked a thought–or being so boring that some irrelevant thought has intruded.  Possibly this is just an affectation (and a pretentious one at that).  Or maybe just as the words describing the gesture have changed with time, its relation to gender has as well.  With women no longer keeping our confidence low and covert, perhaps women are free to steeple high and proud. (Or maybe I am just a Sherlockian Geek, or rather more butch than I realise).  Steepling, do you do it–and if so is it up high or down low?

p.s. I found there is at least two female characters in published novels described as having “steepled” fingers–can you name any?  Bonus point for each example up to a maximum of 5.