Impolitic! by Andrea Hairston and Debbie Notkin

Now that we're back from WisCon, Aqueduct is ready to offer the latest book in our WisCon Guest of Honor series, Impolitic!, to those who didn't make it to WisCon this year. We always wait to offer this because we print only 175 copies. (They are also numbered.) Impolitic! is 180 pages. In a long essay, Debbie samples her incisive blog posts on body politics, examining the narratives told about our bodies and how we are told to live in and think about them, inciting her readers to the most profound rebellion. Andrea offers us a short fiction, “Griots of the Galaxy,” that enacts that profound rebellion in all its visceral, thrilling drama. Her essay, “Prophetic Artists,” grounded in the early twenty-first century, looks to Octavia Butler and others to illuminate the immanent possibilities of the here and now, reminding us of why sf/f is so necessary to us in 2012. And finally, Debbie and Andrea interview one another. Impolitic! is, throughout, an exemplar of what Hairston in that interview calls the “theatre of the mind,” where “lived experience is transformed into meaning and performed.” 

You can purchase it here. Just fyi, the GoH books are the only books we allow to go out of print when their runs have sold out.

The most democratic forms of literature

WisCon is over, and as you all can see, I failed to continue posting after the single report I made Friday. I just never had time to sit down and write another. I never retired to my hotel room early enough to do that, and I never left my room late enough. My body, in the hours between, craved sleep, and I surrendered to the imperative. I'm hoping that I and other members of the blog who attended may be writing about WisCon over the next week or two, as we've done in past years. In the meantime, there's the following, which I wrote yesterday morning-- and then found myself without time enough to post:

As I write this, I have about an hour before I'm due to take the shuttle to the airport to begin the trip home. I'm sitting at a table in Michelangelo's with Tom, who's begun composing an exam he needs to give tomorrow, while I read a few of the reviews in the latest issue of The American Book Review which I intend to finish reading on the plane. One review particularly interests me (and seems apropos, given all the discussions about democracy that I've participated in this weekend. Donald McQuade, writing about The Best American Essays 2011, remarks:

Of all literary genres, the essay has remained, throughout its distinguished history, and especially in this country, the most egalitarian form of literature: in its subject matter, structure, voice, and readership. The essay's accessibility--for writers and readers--exemplifies the art of democracy.

That accessibility remains both its most distinctive and problematic features. The essay is one of the most readily intelligible and attainable forms of self-articulation and individual power in contemporary writing. So, too, virtually anyone can write an essay marked by recognizable literary merit. This may well be one reason the essay as a literary genre has been marginalized for so long in literary "canons" and in the academy, which privileges the exceptional and the seemingly unattainable.

This assertion fascinates me. I myself am a voracious reader of essays-- if I'm browsing in an interesting bookstore, I'm almost certain to end up purchasing a book of essays. The shelf holding collections of essays is the shelf in a bookstore I always go to first. I'd never thought of the essay as a particularly "democratic" form of literary expression, but now that I consider his assertion, I'm certain McQuade is right.

It occurs to me to wonder if it's not the case that it's easier for a writer to avoid cliches when writing essays than when writing fiction. How many people, after all, sit down to write an essay for a general readership when they don't actually have something to say that fascinates and compels them to articulation? So much fiction seems not to be driven by a passionate fascination with the subject of the story as written because its writer is a writer and that is what he or she does, such that the story is the end product that must be marketed to justify the time spent writing it. Passion-driven writing, it seems to me, is less likely to produce tired, lackluster prose, regardless of the technical skills of the writer.

McQuade continues:

In "The Modern Essay," Virginia Woolf offers an incisive assessment of the state of the essay as a literary genre at the turn of the twentieth century as well as a prescient forecast of its near demise in the decades that followed. Woolf points to the emergence of expository writing-- in the ascendancy of the magazine article in an era fixated on a systematic measurement and generalization-- as the source of the "common greyness [that] silvers everything." With the widespread application of Frederick Winslow Taylor's principles of scientific management far beyond corporate enterprise, reading habits shifted from pleasure to information. The "gentle reader," long assumed as the primary audience for such established periodicals as Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, and The Century, was soon lost amidst the crowd's pressing need for new information about the world and seeking advice about how to manage and succeed in it. More and more magazines surfaced to address the increased demand for timely and specialized information from impatient audiences as well as to capitalize on the pervasive fascinating with consumption. Popular magazines quickly evolved into the informational counterpart of the retail department store.

The end result of the shift is the "voiceles dullness of utilitarian prose" replacing the essay. McQuade quotes Woolf's propsal of an antidote to this dull prose essay writing that "has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea...and thus [employs] compelling words to its shape..." He notes the shunning of teaching the essay as literature in the academy, "relegating instruction in essay writing to the margins of the university-- to first-year 'service' courses in composition."

Not surprisingly, McQuade hails the "democratic spirit of the essay" for serving as "an especially important portal for self-expression among writers in post-1960s America-- particularly women and people of color--whose voices weren't featured nor even heard in most literature courses well into the 1980s." Reading this, I am struck by the realization that this must be why I am so addicted to essays. (And I will admit it here, that this addiction was part of my compulsion for starting the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Essays and poetry were essential to me in the 1970s and 1980s: they gave me much of what I needed to sustain and nurture me as a feminist in a hostile world. They helped me to go beyond my own experience-- and to connect my own experience to that of others. Essays and poetry, over the years, have repeatedly assured me at my loneliest moments that others are thinking about what I am thinking about and willing to spend the time to give me the benefit of their insights and the pleasure of their company in print. (We don't, after all, having WisCon more than a few days a year.)

So here I am, linking poetry with essays, essays with poetry. It feels right to do that. They're both under-appreciated forms. They are both, in McQuade's terms, "democratic." And they are both forms that, like the best fiction, bring us to our senses. We need them all, don't we? And as much (if not more) than we ever did.

WisCon 36!

Last night, taking the stage in the back room of Room of One's Own Bookstore in Madison, Debbie Notkin and Andrea Hairston launched WisCon with considerable panache. Debbie opened by reading a piece, both poignant and funny, on her mother. Her tone, reading, was understated and matter-of-fact, creating a striking and highly effective contrast to its intense emotional content. And then in a wild change of pace and tone, exuberant and crackling with energy, Andrea, accompanied by Pan Morigan, filled the room with the drama of excerpts from Redwood and Wildfire. Andrea's performance was interpolated by songs from the novel, which Pan (who composed the music to go along with the songs) sang. (Pan's banjo also created a distinctive atmosphere as Andrea read.) Andrea's reading culminated with one of those songs in which Pan's voice soared, and into which Andrea drew the audience to join. The audience's applause was absolutely thunderous.

All of this was part of the WisCon tradition. Debbie's reading nonfiction and Andrea's theatrical performance with Pan rang interesting changes on the tradition. Isn't that part of what we love about WisCon's traditions? That they offer forms that can be flexibly stretched to accommodate so many different approaches and kinds of creativity?

I do love this traditional Thursday evening opener that Room hosts. It's a wonderful bookstore to start with, and becomes even more wonderful when it fills with people most of whom haven't seen one another for months or in many cases for an entire year. Granted my travel day yesterday, which started at 4:30 a.m., was unduly protracted (including about an hour spent in an airplane without ventilation much less air-conditioning, parked at the gate, apparently waiting to have its auxiliary power supply restored). All of that fell away from me as I immersed myself in WisCon sociability. Before the reading, which starts at 6:30, Room always offers a spread of wine and cheese and veggies, which people sip and munch while moving among the book displays (so many Aqueduct Press books! Yay!) and hugging and chatting in a terrific crush of bodies. The trick is to make it into the back room in good enough time to snag a chair. (There are lots of chairs, but somehow, every year, quite a few people end up standing or, sometimes, sitting on the floor.) When I first started coming to WisCon, I'd arrive on Friday. Only later did I realize what I had been missing.

I took some photos of Debbie, Andrea, and Pan, but they didn't come out. (I've never managed to take a decent picture in that room yet.) So I apologize for not being able to offer you visual images of the event. But I'm hoping to report in, maybe even later today, perhaps with pictures.

Infamous federal legislation declared unconstitutional

Here's some good news: U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, in a 68-page opinion, ruled last week that the infamous Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which President Obama signed into law on Dec. 31, 2011, is unconstitutional. The fact that two branches of the US Government saw fit to perpetrate such legislation meant that such a ruling was never a sure thing. Here's journalist Chris Hedges, who was one of the plaintiffs:

It was a stunning and monumental victory. With her ruling she returned us to a country where—as it was before Obama signed this act into law Dec. 31—the government cannot strip a U.S. citizen of due process or use the military to arrest him or her and then hold him or her in military prison indefinitely. She categorically rejected the government's claims that the plaintiffs did not have the standing to bring the case to trial because none of us had been indefinitely detained, that lack of imminent enforcement against us meant there was no need for an injunction and that the NDAA simply codified what had previously been set down in the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act. The ruling was a huge victory for the protection of free speech. Judge Forrest struck down language in the law that she said gave the government the ability to incarcerate people based on what they said or wrote. Maybe the ruling won't last. Maybe it will be overturned. But we and other Americans are freer today than we were a week ago. And there is something in this.

The government lawyers, despite being asked five times by the judge to guarantee that we plaintiffs would not be charged under the law for our activities, refused to give any assurances. They did not provide assurances because under the law there were none. We could, even they tacitly admitted, be subject to these coercive measures. We too could be swept away into a black hole. And this, I think, decided the case.

"At the hearing on this motion, the government was unwilling or unable to state that these plaintiffs would not be subject to indefinite detention under [Section] 1021," Judge Forrest noted. "Plaintiffs are therefore at risk of detention, of losing their liberty, potentially for many years."

The government has 60 days to appeal. It can also, as Mayer and Afran have urged, accept the injunction that nullifies the law. If the government appeals, the case will go to a federal appellate court. The ruling, even if an appellate court upholds it, could be vanquished in the Supreme Court, especially given the composition of that court.

We still live in a police state, but this ruling offers hope. In theory at least, the bill of rights is still in effect. And the theoretical, especially in this case, matters. Without it, we'd be hopeless.

This seems an appropriate moment to quote Augustine of Hippo: “Hope has two beautiful daughters: their names are anger and courage. Anger that things are the way they are. Courage to make them the way they ought to be.”

Cultural change and the human skeleton

The May 4 issue of Science reports on a study of "more than 2000 European skeletons" from over the last 30,000 years tracing how cultural changes like switching from hunting and gathering to farming and herding, from "life as nomads to settling in urban centers; from eating meat, nuts, and tubers to consuming grains, sugars, and dairy products" has altered the human physique. Over this time, the study documents a significant drop in strength in leg bones, the loss of asymmetrically larger right arms as compared to left arms, and fluctuations in weight and height. (The loss of resistance to fracture, according to the article, declined by 25% from 27,000 years ago to 1900 C.E.) 30,000 years ago, apparently, the average European male was as tall as the average European male today. With the onset of agriculture, height and weight both dropped. (Agriculture, apparently, provided poorer nutrition than hunting and gathering did.) I'm not clear, from the article, who exactly conducted the study. The article quotes a few paleo-anthropologists and bio-archeologists who attended the meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists last month in Portland, but offers not a single reference to the title of the study, its place of publication, or its authors. (Presumably some of the people quoted are authors of the study...)

Interesting to imagine what differences might be seen in the human skeleton, say, 1000 years from now...

The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry

Aqueduct has just taken delivery of another book in its spring list: The Moment of Change, edited by Rose Lemberg. The contributors to this anthology include many fine poets, among them Ursula K. Le Guin, Delia Sherman, Theodora Goss, Amal El-Mohtar, Vandana Singh, Nisi Shawl, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, Athena Andreadis, Jo Walton, and Catherynne M. Valente. The cover art comes to us courtesy of the fabulous Terri Windling. Rose Lemberg writes in her introduction that “Literature of the fantastic allows us to create worlds and visions of society, origins, social justice and identity,” but notes that “even though we are in the world, our voices are folded into the creases. We speak from memory of stories told sidewise. We speak from pain; is that serious enough? The world has not been welcoming, but what other world is there?”

“In these pages,” Rose summarizes, “you will find works in a variety of genres—works that can be labeled mythic, fantastic, science fictional, historical, surreal, magic realist, and unclassifiable; poems by people of color and white folks; by poets based in the US, Canada, Britain, India, Spain, and the Philippines; by first- and second-generation immigrants; by the able-bodied and the disabled; by straight and queer poets who may identify as women, men, trans, and genderqueer.” Rose reminds us, quoting Audre Lorde, that "poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence." I published this book because I thought we needed it. 

Copies are available now from Aqueduct Press here; we'll of course be selling it at WisCon, where Rose and several of the contributors will be launching it at a reading. And by the end of the month, it should be available elsewhere.

Superlatives for Gwyneth Jones's fiction

Lovely to see Ian Sales's review of Gwyneth Jones's Universe of Things at the Daughters of Prometheus website.

This is one of the strongest collections of genre short stories I have ever read. There is not a bad story in it – even the single-page ‘One of Sandy’s Dreams’, originally written for The Drabble Project in 1988, manages to do more in 100 words than China Miéville’s BSFA Award nominated short story ‘Covehithe’ did in several thousand.

If that is not praise enough, consider Sales's conclusion to the review: "Gwyneth Jones is the finest writer of science fiction who is currently still writing that this country has produced. Highly recommended." Indeed.