The Sunday Radical Roundup: Libraries, Lefties, and Lonely Lovelorn Ladies

This Week In Library Fun: Amidst the excitement about the reopening of the St. Agnes Branch of the New York Public Library, other libraries in the system are slashing their hours on February 16 in response to budget cuts from City Hall. (Why does the mayor always take out the neighborhood libraries in a budget crisis when he could fire twenty or thirty cops and get the same $$? I ask you.) Changes affect nearly all branches except those on Staten Island and the privately endowed research libraries in Manhattan. Go here for new hours. At least for now, scholars and organized crime families will continue with the service they have, but there could also be no starker example of the distance that is growing between the actual public sphere and the privatized public sphere.

On The Left, On The Left: Tom Manoff, a former civil rights activist who has been the classical music critic for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered since 1985, has a terrific interview with feminist author Jane Lazarre up on his website. Lazarre, the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, is currently working on a book about her father Bill, who fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Not only is Lazarre (the author of Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons) her typically thoughtful self about writing, race and politics, but the interview also gives a few hints about what I predict (you heard it here first) will be a blockbuster book about the American left. Want to interview Lazarre yourself, or better yet, book her for a reading during Black History Month or Women's History Month? You can reach her through her agent, Wendy Weil.

While We're Still On The Left: Go here to sign the petition to the American Historical Association Council, asking them to use INMEX, a conference booking group that works with unions "to ensure its clients are booking their events in destinations that are free from labor disputes and helps steer professional associations away from meeting venues that are likely to be disrupted by a boycott, a picket line or a strike." I know this makes INMEX sound like a protection racket, but trust me! It's the right thing to do. If this works, all we need now is to make conferences more affordable -- I know more than one graduate student who bled green in San Diego without being offered a single flyback. And has anyone looked at the rates that are being charged for rooms at the OAH annual meeting?

That Ever-Elusive M.R.S. Degree Just Got Tougher: I am waiting for Historiann to fire with every muzzle-loading fowling piece at her disposal on this story by Alex Williams from today's New York Times. It's about the the woes suffered by female college students who can't find a boyfriend because -- there aren't enough boys on many campuses to go around! At the 60% female University of North Carolina, Saturday night "has grown tiresome: they slip on tight-fitting tops, hair sculpted, makeup just so, all for the benefit of one another, Ms. Andrew said, 'because there are no guys.'" And the ones that are available, it appears, are a little soiled, since they are either previously owned or are cheating on the girl friend they have. Tales of taking what you can get and having the man you did catch snapped up right under your eyes help Williams sing the heterosexual blues: "Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box." Worse, girls feel terrible pressure to -- what do they call it now? Give it up? -- in order to seal the deal.

I mean, please, Alex: this is a throwback to Cold War domesticity, where we pretended there were no gay and lesbian people on campus and that if a girl didn't leave college with a ring on her finger she was damaged goods. In the face of budget cuts, tuition increases, a market crash that took college savings with it, and a crisis in lending to college-bound students, could you have written a more shallow piece about higher education? Could you? And girls, if the details of what you are doing at college are not as (or more) important than what you are doing on Saturday night, and you really can't do without a man, swap that English or psych degree for a Physics major, why dontcha? Boys never make passes at girls who sit on their asses. Or do what both genders do at Zenith and other liberal arts colleges -- keep the English major and trade in your sexual preference for a couple of years. Or trade in your gender!

Finally, For Those Of You Not On The CLGBTH Listserve: How many times do I have to tell you to join? Sheesh. This week, we have a CFP for a conference in Vancouver, BC, “'We Demand': History/Sex/Activism In Canada," August 25-28, 2011. From the organizers:

On August 28, 1971 over two hundred lesbian and gay activists gathered on Parliament Hill to demand the federal government bring an end to laws and practices that criminalized, marginalized, and stigmatized lesbians and gays. Acting in solidarity with their central Canadian allies, Vancouver activists staged the same action on the steps of their city’s Court House. It was the first recorded national political action undertaken by gay liberationists and lesbian feminist activists in Canada.

”We Demand” marks the fortieth anniversary of the 1971 action. The conference seeks to showcase current work on all aspects of the history of sexuality in Canada, from pre-contact to present times.

Keynote speaker: Ann Cvetkovich, author of An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures.
Other confirmed speakers include Mary Louise Adams, Karen Dubinsky, Gary Kinsman, and Steven Maynard.

We are currently accepting proposals for panels, individual papers, roundtable discussions, poster sessions, and other means of communicating ideas and generating discussion. We welcome submissions from scholars, archivists, educators, public historians, and past and present political activists from all sexual fronts.

Panel and round table submissions should include a session title, a brief description of the panel or round table, abstracts for each paper of no more than 250 words, and a brief biography or one-page c.v./resume for each presenter and for the session chair. Individuals should submit a 250-word abstract plus a brief biography or one-page c.v./resume. Those submitting proposals for other types of presentations should contact the organizers for further instruction. The deadline for submission is 1 June 2010.

Please send queries and submissions to: wedemand2011ATgmailDOTcom.

Go East, Old Radical: Home From the American Studies Association

I have spent much of my life going east, or going "out east", as they used to say in southern Idaho, a place where I spent a large part of my youth. Going East is, of course, for those of us born and/or raised in the former English colonies, a consequence of having gone West in the first place. So now I am Back East (another quaint phrase from the Mountain States), in my comfortable remodeled nineteenth century clapboard house, determined to spend the day at home after having spent the weekend working for Zenith.

This is one of the few times I have attended a convention without attending either a panel or a party. For all my careful collation of the many events where the big American Studies programs host gatherings of the interdisciplinary clan, the combination of interviewing, the time change, the thin air, and a tendency of the bodily fluids to evaporate without even becoming sweat first, caused me to be perpetually exhausted and unenthused about social life. Furthermore, the fact that the convention itself was across a faux Spanish Colonial plaza from the hotel, and not in the hotel, meant that the social space was divided. There were certain people who I wanted to run into who I did not; and of course, going to the parties meant effort -- not stepping out of common space briefly, seeing who was there, and electing to stay or go.

Friday afternoon I did zip around the book exhibit looking for wonderful new books that I have no time to read in the near future, but ordered anyway to add fresh color and style to the piles of books already in my office. One thing I learned, as I wove my way through all kinds of fabulous people I have not seen in too long, is that Harvard University Press no longer takes credit cards at conventions, as they are worried about keeping our personal information safe. As a result, upon my return, I simply ordered the Harvard books from the library consortium to which Zenith belongs, and saved about eighty dollars. Ka-ching! My advice to Harvard? If I want to be a credit card cowboy, let me! And your pals at University of Chicago and Duke, where I did spend my hard earned cash, were puzzled as to your new policy.

Friday's highlights also included drinkies with the delightful Gayprof, who has, it appears, acquired a little troll problem lately, attendant to (false) accusations that he has posted lies about the People With Balls and Sticks. A thorough look at his blog demonstrates that his assertions are true: he has not posted anything about these Fair Boys of the South. So what is that about? I made a quick pit stop at the trolls' normal home (where they are not considered trolls -- context is everything) and there is no incitement from the host of that blog either, so what gives, oh People of the Ball and Stick? I am a little worried that you found him through me, but Gayprof assures me he does not think so. New idea: maybe Joey777 thinks Gayprof is hot? Well, he would be right there, but there are better ways to get a boy's attention than peppering his blog with comments about an event he never mentioned until you started pestering him, but is -- um -- over. I mean over except for the cash damages and royalty payments.

(I am sure that my assertion that this crisis is over will launch another barrage of comments about justice delayed being justice denied, but all I can say is that if you are not one of those people regularly receiving a check from Duke, or a family member of such a person, get a life, OK???? And leave Gayprof alone: he has a blog to write and it isn't about you, Joey.)

Saturday's convention highlights included a trip to Old Town, where many purchases were made, including a straw cowboy hat that the saleswoman told me is also favored by Julia Roberts. "And," she said, taking a closer look at me, "Brad Pitt." Bingo. I bought it on the spot. My interviewing companion found just the right pair of moccasins, and I found a black cowboy shirt that will cause me to stand out in any crowd of aging East Coast lesbians.

If I did not go to any panels, I heard tell of a few: one apparently featured a paper on the work of feminist author Jane Lazarre who, by the way has a new novel out as of this month, titled Someplace Quite Unknown. Bravo: this is an incredibly complex, beautifully written book that reintroduces us to a ground-breaking writer.

So I am home again, souvenirs unpacked, laundry churning in the washer. Will this godawful semester ever end? Yes, eventually. But the travel schedule has become Radical in the Extreme, and I hope to do as much business by telephone as I can from here on out.

Writing, Publishing and the Opportunity to Change

Even though I am now part of the on-line publishing world because of this blog, I still have mixed feelings about how the internet changes the experience of reading. I suspect that this is because printed things that I can hold in my hand -- books, magazines and newspapers -- are so much part of the fabric of my life. In my youth, books were soothing talismans when other things were painful or scary; "The New Yorker" appearing in the mailbox was a portal to another life, a sign of hope that my bourgeois suburban childhood with its oppressive rules could and would come to an end. Because of this, although I am a person who knows that I should read "Slate" the way I read "The New Yorker," I don't: it doesn't *feel* the same. I can't take it on the train or to the gym the way I would take something printed on paper. And I never read the New York "Times" on-line. Ugh. I actually moved to Shoreline in part because I couldn't get a real paper delivered in Zenith, one that left grime all over my fingers and my morning coffee cup.

And yet, I have clearly adapted to certain kinds of changes already. I blog. I read blogs. I read academic articles on-line. For a long time after the invention of email I used to write letters, but now I don't. I will die with an archive that pretty much ends at age 35.

Because I don't write them, I also almost never receive a letter anymore either (except for the occasional thank-you note from a niece or nephew). I would say that the loss of letters has been adequately compensated for by how much I like email as a genre -- I like its immediacy and intimacy, even though having a fight over email is an awful feature of internet life I never could have anticipated and I had to learn not to do it. On the other hand, sending terrible, unretrievable thoughts to others that could be obsessed over relentlessly was not a practice invented by computer wonks. My maternal grandmother was apparently famous for sending awful letters to people when she was angry at them, to the extent that it has become an eternal maxim in my family that writing to someone is the most devastating way to express anger and is always an impulse to be checked.

The nature of correspondence has changed so radically, not just in my lifetime, but in the last ten years, that I can fully imagine that my other literary habits will too. And I am starting today.

My friend Jane Lazarre (this is her real name and she is not a character in this blog) has notified me that there is a new on-line fiction magazine called The Persimmon Tree, established in part because older women writers, many of whom are quite well-established literary figures, are having a rough time getting their work published in a corporate literary environment where movie deals and other kinds of marketing tie-ins tend to be determining factors in whether a manuscript gets to an audience in the form of a book. And even publishing in magazines is part of the marketing web: have you noticed that most magazine features, fiction and non-fiction, are now drawn from book manuscripts and are part of a pre-publication marketing plan? This isn't new, of course, but fewer short pieces are being accepted for one-time publication, thus shrinking publishing opportunities even more.

Whatever else you think of the industry, a trip to any chain bookstore suggests that publishers favor pop fiction and memoirs written by people in their twenties recovering from drug and alcohol abuse; and/or incest; and/or a strong need to cross-dress for which their parents are/are not to blame; and/or a swift rise to fame that was ill-managed. These books are also often published in six or seven different colors to match your decorating scheme and to encourage places like Starbucks to make selling books part of *their* store design (I am not kidding.) And I suspect that feminist writers -- as opposed to feminist-lite writers like Candace Bushnell and Jennifer Baumgardner - are having a particularly tough time because, although there is a substantial youth market for women's books, the vast number of younger female readers don't want to deal with an older generation's feminism that, as Katha Pollitt said unattractively but persuasively in the last "Women's Review of Books," might cause them to be associated with "hairy-legged lesbians" rather than life as a high-fashion executive or as the bisexual former girlfriend of a fashionable lesbian musician (who probably does have hairy legs, covered up by sexy ripped jeans and a lot of money.) Strangely, given how limited the academic world is, a new assistant professor has a far easier time getting a monograph published than an established writer whose book will not guarantee a (very large) profit and multiple tie-ins aimed at the youth market.

So far I have only read Jane's (completely amazing) excerpt from her unpublished novel, because she's my friend and I wanted to read it first. And speaking of marketing, take it from this feminist that you would be well-served to read Jane's other books. If you want to buy any that are in print (she also has a number that are out of print that can be purchased from used book dealers) go here. I recommend all of them. She is a beautiful writer of fiction and non-fiction, whose work is read and taught by academics, and has also served a more popular audience, for decades.