China vs. Sweden, Part II

I've noticed recently that there are several things these places have in common, beyond a fondness for Ikea as a place to pass time. Today, three come to mind in particular:

1. A fondness for hotdogs
2. A love of systems
3. A love of ways to get around the systems in place

Going to keep my eyes peeled for more.

Writing Across Gender Lines

I've been giving a lot of thought to the project of writing from a gender perspective different from one's own lately, for fairly obvious reasons. At The Atlantic, Michele Willens has posted a nice meditation on some of the questions and potential roadblocks that arise with projects like these. 

I chose to write a male main character precisely because of these roadblocks. Had I written a female character instead, the reflexive shift into my own experience in China would have been too hard to avoid, and when I began my novel, that experience was still so close that it would have colored everything, and not in a positive way. By following a young man around, rather than a young woman, I was forced to sit at a slight distance, and it was this distance that allowed me to write fiction, rather than thinly-disguised memoir. 

As time has gone on and Will has survived more drafts than I can possibly count, other benefits to his being male have slowly emerged. For one, the experience of a white male expat in China is still quite different at times than that of a white female expat, and that allowed me to explore certain themes that would have remained at arm's length had I been writing a woman. That said, I am very aware that the majority of the supporting characters are decidedly female, and it would be dishonest of me to say that they weren't easier, in a lot of ways, than Will himself has been.

Some people have suggested to me that this might just be the main character effect, and that it's always trickier to figure that person out compared to those who are not so spotlighted. But I do think that writing a man is harder for me than writing a woman in a similar situation would be, even if it has been better for the project overall. 

That said, Sally Koslow, as quoted by Willens, may well be correct. It may be more difficult for men to effectively cross that gender line. Koslow believes that "By default, women have it easier than men when they attempt to craft characters of the opposite sex, because our whole lives we've been reading vast amounts of literature written by men." But even if we take this as truth, I have to wonder to what extent women writers are influenced by our years of reading women--as written by men. What have we internalized as somehow "necessary" or "true" about literary representations of women that may only be necessary/true because it became conventional through a long line of male authors? (Women's Studies 101, right here.) And assuming that there is at least something that's come out of that long line that's worth challenging, do women writers have a responsibility to represent ourselves in a fictional space that we create and control? 

Someone Develop This Already

This piece in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert is making the rounds, and her description of a night at a sleep research facility has me wondering: in an age of data proliferation, not least in the realm of our private lives and bodily functions, is home-sleep monitoring next? Because when the sleep researcher told her that she got a crappy night's sleep after this:

At around 10 p.m., a technician came to fetch me. She measured my head from various directions—front to back, side to side—and began attaching electrodes: three on the back of my scalp, two on each temple, three more on my chin, two on each leg, and two on my chest. Each electrode trailed a color-coded wire, which got plugged into what looked like a backgammon board. Some rubber tubes were stuck into my nose and mouth, belts were wrapped around my chest and waist, and an oxygen monitor that emitted an eerie red glow was taped to my index finger. I and the wires and the backgammon board got into bed. The technician plugged the board into a data logger and attached two more wires to each of the belts. Then she wished me good night

my only question was how sleep researchers ever manage to track and study someone getting a GOOD night sleep. I'm one of the apparent few Americans getting enough these days (between eight and nine hours, like clockwork, and I fall asleep just fine), but I doubt a stint in a lab would show that.

So iphone app, anyone? Cheap or disposable sensors you can hook to yourself and your phone in the comfort of your own bed to track your REM cycles and compare it with other biometric data that you are undoubtedly already collecting? It seems like the next logical thing...

I Play With Twitter: Fairy Tales, 140 characters or less

Buried my brothers in coffins of straw and wood. Now to stoke the fire--it's going to be cold tonight, and I'm expecting visitors.

If she fell for the comb and ribbons, this apple's a lock. Can one really be fairest if it requires the support of mining dwarves?

11 1/2 brothers rehumanized. Still, he will always see the wing. On his wedding day, his bride will hide tears, cutting the suit sleeve.

Cold and starving or fattened and baked? Small German children just can't win, to say nothing of witches these days.

#140tales

Lovecraft, Part Two: In Which Things Get Problematic

From "He," a description of New York City:

...the throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of the fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart.

And now I feel just a touch naive in my earlier assessment of H.P. Lovecraft--this is just one of many passages that I could have cited that dehumanizes those who are Not Quite WASPs. 

I'm not actually surprised by any of this; while I find the interwar period fascinating, if one reads enough written by white men and women in that time period, it takes a lot of work to not notice the blatantly racist comments and assumptions. And I'm not disowning the Lovecraftian aesthetic that is so often reimagined and recycled these days. Whether the problematic elements of Lovecraft seep into these contemporary works is a question worth investigating, but not one that I will handle here. What I'm most disappointed about is that I didn't see this coming--that is, that while my general 21st century cultural knowledge already included quite a bit of Lovecraftian themes and monsters, there wasn't so much as a footnote somewhere in the back of my brain that might have indicated that Cthulhu doesn't come without baggage. Lovecraft seems to have been whitewashed just a bit.

I remember vividly being about eleven years old and hearing Groucho Marx make a racist joke in Duck Soup. Suddenly an artist that I had, until that moment, been enjoying unreservedly, was placed within a socio-cultural milieu that had some pretty big problems. And it's only continued since then--the list of writers and artists whose work I enjoy in spite of taking issue with their politics, for lack of a better term, is long. And I won't lie--as a white woman, encountering racist themes in literature, film, and art infuriates me. But encountering misogynistic themes aches; the creator, to whom I necessarily am allowing pretty unfettered access to my mind and spirit via his work, is judging me. No matter how deep my previous intimacy with the author and/or characters was, it never quite recovers from knowing that, were he to meet me in real life, he'd be judging me by how full my lips might be, because we know that tells you something real and considerable about any woman beyond how much chapstick she might use (thanks, Steinbeck).

All this to say that I don't think we can realistically evaluate someone like Lovecraft while ignoring his bluntly racist tendencies. I'm not saying toss out the baby with the bathwater, but I am saying that when he is, on any level, culturally praised and elevated, omitting a discussion of these other issues not only sidelines a very real part of his work but sidelines a very real chunk of his, and our, readers.