It's Always More Complicated

I thought I might be reduced to bemoaning the fact that I was obliged to, after resisting it for months, months, go onto Zoom in order to attend the virtual AGM of an organisation of which I have somehow become a trustee.

However, dr rdrz, your hearts will be gladdened to hear that instead of this, I perchanced to come across an interview with the late and lamented Ursula K Le Guin, which had some delightful gems in it:

I mean, of course I had some idea. You have to have a feeling of the shape of a book before you begin it. But I didn’t know what the thing was going to be. After I finished the book, people would tell me: “Oh, I knew right away what it was!” This really annoyed me, because I didn’t.

An opportunity we must surely always regret:

If you have read my book The Lathe of Heaven, I would like to see Mel Brooks make a movie out of it. With Gene Wilder as George.... I’ve been locked into an image of being either depressing or extremely moral, and that’s boring. The Lathe of Heaven was the first funny book I wrote and the most despairing. I think a lot of writers take refuge in humor when it’s something that is pretty horrible or that they’re scared of.

So realistic:

I took a creative writing course in college. It was taught by a man who wrote for The Saturday Evening Post under a feminine pen name. I decided I was allergic to creative writing at that point. Writing my books has had nothing to do with any teaching. I qualified myself to earn a living otherwise, because I knew I wouldn’t do it with my books.

Reading this I was so reminded of the supposed would-be novelist in that movie Animals, who had, as far as one could tell, been labouring over the same bloody ten pages of her novel for the past decade or so:

This happens to young writers in particular (though I hate to use terms like “younger writers”), but the real trouble again may be getting started. It’s not that you don’t have an idea. But you write the beginning and then you go back and rewrite the beginning, and you never got off page one. It’s kind of a syndrome, and I have a rash piece of advice which is—Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. Then take it and tear it to pieces and squeeze it till the blood runs and rewrite it fifty times.

Answering the question: Do you usually let people in your stories write the story for you?:

Sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. Sometimes I feel myself in control of them, manipulating them. But characters do take over. Most novelists talk about this phenomenon, with a little awe. It is a little scary, when you’ve got a character and you can’t shut him up.

And this is hilarious:

All that sailing is complete fakery. It’s amazing what you can fake. I’ve never sailed anything in my life except a nine-foot catboat, and that was in the Berkeley basin in about three feet of water. And we managed to sink it. The sail got wet and it went down while we sang “Nearer My God to Thee.” We had to wade to shore, and go back to the place we’d rented it and tell them. They couldn’t believe it. “You did what?” You know, it’s interesting, they always tell people to write about what they know about. But you don’t have to know about things, you just have to be able to imagine them really well.

Don't worry about 'rewriting history': it's literally what we historians do.

It's not even re-writing - writing history is a continuing process. New sources appear. Old sources which have lain untapped are delved into (I'm an archivist, tell me about this). People revisit already visited sources with new perspectives.

Historians are standing in different places and that gives them new perspectives. Maybe they see the things that people were formerly too close to notice. Maybe they see the things they weren't looking at.

Maybe they say 'but how? why? what?'

It's a process.

I like the Blue Plaque scheme - and the other similar more local schemes - because it's not only a more modest way of memorialising people than statues, it links them to particular places, and even from the outset it tended to celebrate a much greater diversity of kinds of achievement. And it is trying to get better in terms of a wider and more diverse representation.

‘It’s a form of public monument that’s very accessible, and it also helps people to become conscious of the historic built environment and hopefully wish to preserve it. It’s eye-catching without being too obtrusive, so I think that’s why it’s become such a successful means of educating people about the past.’

I also rather like Wikipedia's list of blue plaques in the London Borough of Camden: as this includes both Bloomsbury and Hampstead, it is probably particularly diverse and eclectic.

If I were to be publishing the short stories of a given author in three volumes, with introduction and critical apparatus, information I think might be helpful to people interested in these volumes would be:

A LIST OF THE CONTENTS OF EACH VOLUME.

Okay, my own motivation in the matter was actually trying to find the title of a particular story by the author in question, or at least to glance over the titles to see if one of them stimulated the memory of the story I recalled.

But nowhere, no, not even on the publisher's site, was there such a list.

Chiz.

(I subsequently located one of my own collections of works by the author in question and looked in it and think I have found the relevant tale.)

Also, if I were proposing to do something based on A Particular Source recommended to me by another person, I would go and take a look at that source before getting a definite go-ahead, just in case when I got to it it did not set my little grey cells productively whirring, rather than only when I had.

But I daresay we all have our different processes...

I was synchronicitously pleased to find this blog post crossing my line of sight earlier today: Prospecting for kryptonite: the value of null results, because I had been thinking about incrementality and the time it takes for things to see results, and this is not just about scientific research.

Lately, at a symposium-thing I was speaking at, in the question/discussion bit somebody asked, was [change in the law] down to its being the Permissive Society at the time. And I was, actually that change in the law was made by people who had been working towards it for several decades, and had finally got into positions of power and influence and had the clout to bring it about, and it was more the final outcome of stuff that happened in the 30s than something that can be attributed to its beneficiaries, the Sixties Generation.

I think I've moaned on before about the 'Spaceships of the Gods' hypothesis and the idea that certain forms of knowledge came from Out There, because Infinite Regress: who found out how to build pyramids in the first place? why couldn't they have put on the show right here in the old barn gradually developed the capacity to do so over time and trial and error. The pyramids did not grow up overnight. So it might just as well have happened here as Somewhere Else and been brought to us by ?benevolent aliens.

There was also a good post somewhere I came across about archival research and how it is not opening a file and DISCOVERY!!! it is looking through files files files and putting little pieces together.

Yes, there are moments when everything comes together, and when the outcome of the process finally surfaces above the horizon: but it doesn't Just Happen. There was history.

So far, comments to my post yesterday about the concept of 'books that changed my life' pretty much confirm my own feeling that if books do affect us, it's by a process of influence or catalysis -

I.e. it's about what a reader gets out of a particular text at a particular time in their life (and it may not be a high-culture text at all, says woman who first encountered the term 'feminism' aged c. 8 in a rather silly feature in the Girls' Crystal and gained her knowledge of the suffrage movement from the Pankhurst Story in Pictures in a Girl Annual).

The revelation is less likely to be 'Wow! I never thought of that before!' than 'Wow! they are putting my inchoate feelings into words!/Articulately expressing my own rather confused thoughts'. Or else a subtle influence along the lines of 'What would a George Eliot character do?'

Which requires a reader who has those existing thoughts and feelings to be catalysed and a general approach to the world that can be influenced.

Which set my train of thought seguing into the dramatic Damascus Road narrative of change which focuses on some perceptible moment where change becomes apparent, and less on the less obvious process that got there, and the repercussions of changing afterwards.

To use an analogy of the suffrage movement, it's as if you get all excited about the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 and don't consider that this was the outcome of decades of campaigning, bringing about changes of attitudes, and also think that that was the endpoint, rather than the beginning of another phase (like just getting the Act implemented, e.g.).

(I also had a tangential thought about the books that influenced one even before one read them, and possibly even if one never has, in the way that I could hardly be unaware of Foucault when getting stuck into my PhD, but this is, pretty much, probably a whole nother thing.)

How much do I like this?

[S]cience is a process not a bank of knowledge, and the hard work is yet to come. The LHC experiments were the pregnancy, finding a Higgs particle the birth, and what follows is many lifetimes elucidating the mysteries it has revealed.

In genetics, our Higgs moment came in 2001 with the completion of a draft of the human genome, the 3bn-letter genetic code of an average person. That opened up myriad new avenues, rather than closing a scientific chapter, as many reported at the time. Instead of explaining humankind, we discovered the colossal domain of what we didn't yet know.

And this, although it's said of science in the review in question, is surely more generally applicable:
[R]esearch has to be born of informed ignorance, otherwise you are not finding new stuff out.

So true. So much of this seemed to me to be applicable to history as well: finding out New Stuff or applying a new methodological tool may answer some questions, but it usually brings along with it a whole lot more that we'd never considered before.

I see some connection between the 'NOW we know' mindset vs the 'now we have a whole new set of questions' approach to the depiction of utopias/dystopias. Very few of these, it seems to me, have the sense of the situation being an ongoing process rather than a system fixed in place and that there can be things that need adjusting or fixing without making the society an Eeeevil Dystopia to be overthrown.

Naomi Mitchison got this in Solution Three, and I think it's there in The Dispossessed.

Obligatory cite to Dame Rebecca and her musings on the need for a sense of process in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

Yes, it's glorious when one of those moments that embodies a sense of change and hope happens, when the pendulum visibly swings and the glass stops falling hour by hour.

But what really matters is what happens after that: it's not the end, it's the beginning.

(E.g. the 'flapper vote', 1928, 10 years after the rather grudging concession of the vote to women ratepayers and professionals over 20, granting the parliamentary franchise on equal terms to men and women, didn't just happen. See also all the other causes that women knew they had to have the vote even to begin to tackle.)

History: not an event, a process. Ditto change.

Have been observing hither and yon (and have done it myself) the auditing of last year, stock-taking of successes and failures, gains and losses.

And am beginning to be bit iffy about the whole process.

Without wanting to get all Last Great Scorer about it, or to channel an inspirational poem I had to learn (aged something like 9 years old) for an eloction contest, beginning

I learn, as the years roll onward, and leave the past behind
That much I had counted sorrow but proves that the world is kind.

On the latter, it's always a temptation to put in things that are measurable, that are targets or goals achieved, which may not be the most useful way of looking at things, as I am sure many of us already recognise within the work context. E.g. you may be turning around responses to incoming enquiries within 24 hours but if you're doing that by sending out standard form messages there's an issue of quality there as well. And I've had years in which my publications included 'reworking of existing material, nothing new here, pass along'. There may be other things which are far harder to measure but are far more important.

On perspective, can we always tell in the immediate aftermath of any particular timespan whether it was good or bad or even what the long-term good or bad were? Are we ourselves even the best persons to pronounce upon this?

I suppose I'm particularly bothered because there seems to be rather more self-beating-up about the failures or the not-achieved. Maybe this is just an admirable desire to avoid smugness and the kind of hubris about one's actual successes and achievements that tempts nemesis. Or perhaps it's because it's the mistakes and failures that gibber at one at dead of night, whereas I don't think contemplation of one's getting things right ever put someone back to sleep. Do they burn deeper?

My thoughts for the day, let me show you them.

Various debates hither and yon triggered by this post on the Feminist-SF blog.

Personal observations: The Left Hand of Darkness was probably the book that got me into reading sff. I didn't find The Female Man angry or difficult, but witty, scathing, incisive, full of neat imaginative touches. Partner credits reading Russ's 'When it changed' for Damascus Road-type revelation about feminism.

There seem to me to be at least two things intertwined in this discussion which are things in which I am particularly interested. (And others as well.)

One is the Name Book/Author phenomenon, where some particular work has become widely known not just within a particular field but outside it. I have several examples within my own historical areas in which people continue to cite 'classic' (hiss, spit) works which provide an agreeably simplistic interpretation of complex phenomena, and have no concept that there has been intense ongoing historical research which complexifies, if it doesn't completely overturn, the arguments advanced by these much-cited texts. And even if much-cited texts are good and of a sound scholarship, that doesn't mean that they are the only game in town or that other good work hasn't been done or doesn't need to be done.

Le Guin (it seems to me) has gained the status of 'genre writer who is recognised in circles outside genre readers'. This alone would tend to account for a certain amount of over-citation, or citation which doesn't take into account the fact that other people have been working in the area, riffing off similar themes, etc, etc.

The other thing that interests me here is a sort of NOW/SCUM divide, between the 'respectable' face of feminism and its more radical proponents.

Well, I could go off here on a tangent about whether feminism has a respectable face. There was a post that didn't get made during the week about 'being a lady' and how easy it is to lose the benefits that come with that status, and the suffragists/ettes. And that being (sometimes even in the technical social sense) a lady and making quite moderate demands didn't stop women from being thrown down the steps of government offices and molested by policemen.

But what any cause needs is both the Emily Wilding Davisons and the window-smashers and the hungerstrikers, and the ones who are doing the apparently dull and undramatic and unspectacular backroom work to get things done. And the recognition that the struggle is not just happening on any one front: the medical student Letitia Fairfield expressed her concern to the suffragette leadership that getting involved in militant action might get her expelled from medical school, which she had only been able to enter by borrowing money from better-off relatives. The suffragette leadership, quite sensibly, agreed that women qualifying as doctors was also work for The Cause. There are forms of intervention that make people think differently - or at least shake up their thoughts - without being way out on the radical edge.

The relative importance of visible militancy and background work is also going to vary according to particular historical context. Probably one reason why the continuing feminist struggles of the 20s and 30s have been overlooked to the point of claiming that feminism died once the vote was one, is that so much of the work was consolidation and implementation.

(People do so like narratives of struggle with an obvious 'win' conclusion, even if that 'win' is actually only itself a beginning: women finally admitted to the Medical Register, the grant of the (limited) suffrage to women. It doesn't stop there, and my own inclination is towards the complex stories of What Happened Then, what do you do to build on that victory.)

And historical context is, I think, also important to the very differing tones and attitudes of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Female Man (quite apart from the very different personalities and intentions of the authors). The 'second wave' of feminism was barely beginning to swell when TLHoD was being written; by the time of the publication of TFM there had been several years of intense feminist ferment.

There is no neat conclusion here, because it's always more complicated and there is much more that could be said.

Have been stimulated by various things out there to consider the mindset that thinks that if you get A Certain Thing, that you only have do once, Right, that's it. Life's problems will be solved and there will be no more of them. The original grit around which this thought started accreting was the report in the paper about the Scientology belief about the woman having to be silent in labour for fear of giving the child Bad Engrams (if I have the jargon correct).

There are a whole lot of things wrong with this - I can sort of see the point of the Odent dim-light-cushions-and-soothing-new-age-music approach to birth, since the mother feeling calm and relaxed is doubtless a good thing, but the whole blame-the-mother feel to this 'shut up woman and push' approach makes me feel a bit queasy. It also ties into things that I read about the natural childbirth movement and women being distraught because they had not had a peak mystical experience or had even had to have epidurals or a caesarean. But they did have a healthy baby at the end of it, nevertheless.*

But this Scientology belief also appears to be making the assumption that if you get the birth right then there are going to be no more problems in the child's life (sorry, can't help it, *sniggers*). Maybe this is an exaggerated view: but there does seem to be this got to get particular event right and then everything's sorted attitude somewhere there. Everything will run smoothly thereafter.

This is possibly also part of my objection to people who make big productions out of weddings, though I will cop to my own issues around marriage here. But the idea of getting that One Big Day perfect, and the stressing around its possibly not being perfect: hello magical thinking?

There's also (for me) a connection to that Hollywood representation of psychoanalysis/therapy, where it's all about getting that revelation of the buried memory and then, wow! catharsis and everything is all all right. It doesn't work like that, from my memory: it's less about uncovering deep hidden stuff and more about spiralling around, returning to, working over, getting different angles on, things one does remember.

There are so many things where it's not about An Event or a singular one-off achievement: it's about a process, about reiteration, about repetition. About stages on the journey. And also about second, or even more than second, chances. That things that go wrong can still be made up in some other way.

*Grantly Dick Read's first book, Natural Childbirth, was published in 1933, when maternal and infant mortality was still high. It made little impression. It was not until he published the revised version Childbirth with Fear, about ten years later when both maternal and infant mortality had declined, that natural childbirth became a phenomenon. Yes, I think there is a relationship there: wanting to come out alive with a baby trumps concerns of the quality of experience.