The Glass Ceiling

I received this press release in my email today (from Amy King @ VIDA: Women in Literary Arts) about gender bias in the literary world. I've read a few articles recently that addressed this study, and thought the press release would be worth sharing.

"We at VIDA are gratified to hear the response that has recently surfaced in the media based on the numbers we gathered in our 2010 count. But we also understand that these statistics are simply the beginning of a conversation we believe is necessary—not an end point, but a way to think about the more nuanced questions such numbers beg to be asked.

While The Count seems to quantify what many women have privately suspected for some time—that male writers take up most of the space in established literary venues in the States and in Britain—the much thornier question our literary community needs to ask is why. We at VIDA know these numbers bring up a complicated set of issues that deserves much more than a superficial response.

A number of people commenting in newspapers and blog boxes around the country wondered how many women are actually submitting work to these magazines. So far, what we know about rates of submission is anecdotal. A good number of editors have spoken to VIDA board members directly, some telling us of their often frustrated attempts to solicit work from women writers, some telling us that they see women submitting work in goodly numbers.  So the issues are not black and white and not ones that a handful of pie charts can fully explore. That work is left to the women and men who care about women writers’ clear marginalization in relationship to our on-going literary conversation.

Because VIDA as an organization doesn’t have access to the numbers for individual magazines’ rates of submissions, and because much of what is published in high visibility magazines is often solicited by their editors, we will need help in moving this conversation forward. We ask that the editors of all literary magazines—large and small-- begin to count for themselves. A simple database program, a good-hearted intern—either will get the job done simply enough. And for those editors out there who do decide to count, VIDA will be happy to share your numbers and your thoughts on how this process has affected your thinking about gender, publishing and the other myriad observations such a process is likely to reveal. We look forward to the opportunity."

~~~~~~

Articles on The Count 
--http://vidaweb.org/category/the-count


1.)  The Lack of Female Bylines in Magazines Is Old News - Katha Pollitt @ Slate
-- http://www.slate.com/id/2284680/

2.)  Being Female -- Eileen Myles @ The Awl
-- http://www.theawl.com/2011/02/being-female#more-71928

3.)   How To Publish Women Writers: A Letter to Publishers about the VIDA Count -- Annie Finch @ Her Circle
--http://www.hercircleezine.com/2011/02/10/how-to-publish-women-writers-a-letter-to-publishers-about-the-vida-count/

4.) 'Numbers don't lie': Addressing the gender gap in literary publishing -- Jessa Crispin @ PBS
--http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/voices/numbers-dont-lie-addressing-the-gender-gap-in-literary-publishing/7161/

5.) On breaking the literary glass ceiling -- Jessa Crispin and Michael Schaub @ PBS
--http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/voices/vida-pt-2/7383/

6.) Why There's Gender Bias in Media-and What We Can Do About It -- Margot Magowan @ MS. Magazine
--http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2011/02/10/why-theres-gender-bias-in-media-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/

7.) Women in Publishing: What's the Real Story? -- Kjerstin Johnson @ Bitch Magazine
--http://bitchmagazine.org/post/women-in-publishing

8.) Women Get Published and Reviewed Less Than Men in Big Magazines, Say Red-and-Blue Pie Charts -- Jim Behrle @ The Hairpin
--http://thehairpin.com/2011/02/women-get-published-and-reviewed-less-than-men-in-big-magazines-say-red-and-blue-pie-charts/

9.) Bitches Be Trippin' -- Roxane Gay @ HTML Giant
--http://htmlgiant.com/random/bitches-be-trippin/

10.)  The Sorry State Of Women At Top Magazines -- Anna North @ Jezebel
--http://jezebel.com/5750239/the-sorry-state-of-women-at-top-magazines

11.)  Gender, publishing, and Poetry magazine -- Christian Wiman @ Poetry Foundation
--http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/02/gender-publishing-and-poetry-magazine/

12.)  VIDA: The Count Roundup @ The Rumpus
--https://therumpus.net/2011/02/vida-the-count-roundup/

13.)  Why It Matters That Fewer Women Are Published in Literary Magazines -- Robin Romm @ Double X
--http://www.doublex.com/blog/xxfactor/why-it-matters-fewer-women-are-published-literary-magazines

14.)  Women at Work -- Meghan O'Rourke @ Slate
--http://www.slate.com/id/2283605/

15.)  The Numbers Speak For Themselves @ Women and Hollywood
--http://blogs.indiewire.com/womenandhollywood/archives/the_numbers_speak_for_themselves/

16.) Do četiri puta manje tekstova žena! -- BROJKE NE LAŽU @ Kultura (in Croatian)
--http://www.tportal.hr/kultura/knjizevnost/109858/Do-cetiri-puta-manje-tekstova-zena.html

17.) Submitting Work: A Woman's Problem? -- Becky Tuch @ Beyond the Margins
--http://beyondthemargins.com/2011/02/submitting-work-a-womans-problem/

18.)  On Gender, Numbers, & Submissions -- Rob @ Tin House
--http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/6993/on-gender-numbers-submissions.html

19.)  A Literary Glass Ceiling? --  Ruth Franklin @ The New Republic
--http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/82930/VIDA-women-writers-magazines-book-reviews

20.) Research shows male writers still dominate books world -- Benedicte Page @ The Guardian
--http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/04/research-male-writers-dominate-books-world

21.) Gender Balance and Book Reviewing: A New Survey Renews The Debate -- Patricia Cohen @ New York Times Arts Beat
--http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/gender-balance-and-book-reviewing-a-new-survey-renews-the-debate/

22.) Tickets to an Awesome Future Are Free: Gender, Literature, and VIDA’s Count -- Carolyn Zaikowski
--http://monkeypuzzlepress.com/blog/tickets-to-an-awesome-future-are-free/

Dada du jour: Hans Richter (1888-1976)

"Chance became our trademark. We followed it like a compass."
--Hans Richter


Rythmus 23 (1923)





excerpts from Dada Art and Anti-Art (Hans Richter, 1965)

Dada's propaganda for a total repudiation of art was in itself a factor in the advance of art. Our feelings of freedom from rules, precepts, money, and critical praise, a freedom for which we paid the price of an excessive distaste and contempt for the public, was a major stimulus. The freedom not to care a damn about anything, the absence of any kind of opportunism, which in any case could have served no purpose, brought us all the closer to the source of all art, the voice within ourselves. The absence of any ulterior motive enabled us to listen to the voice of the "Unknown"--and to draw knowledge from the realm of the unknown. Thus we arrived at the central experience of Dada.
... 

Dissatisfied with a drawing he had been working on for some time, Arp finally tore it up and let the pieces flutter to the floor of his studio on the Zeltweg. Some time later he happened to notice these same scraps of paper as they lay on the floor, and was struck by the pattern they formed. It had all the expressive power that he had tried in vain to achieve. How meaningful! How telling! Chance movements of his hand and of the fluttering scraps of paper had achieved what all his efforts had failed to achieve, namely expression. He accepted this challenge from chance as a decision of fate and carefully pasted the scraps down in the pattern which chance had determined.
... 

The conclusion that Dada drew from all this was that chance must be recognized as a new stimulus to artistic creation. This may well be regarded as the central experience of Dada, that which marks it off from all preceding artistic movements ...

               Jean (Hans) Arp, Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter (Zurich, 1917) 

... the new experience gave us new energy and an exhilaration which led, in our private lives, to all sorts of excesses; to insolence, insulting behavior, pointless acts of defiance, fictitious duels, riots--all the things that later came to be regarded as the distinctive signs of Dada. But beneath it all lay a genuine mental and emotional experience that gave us wings to fly--and to look down upon the absurdities of the 'real' and earnest world.

Ghosts before breakfast (1927)

Dada du jour: Jean Arp (1887-1966)

"The morality of idiots and their belief in geniuses makes me shit."
--Jean (Hans) Arp

Kaspar Is Dead (1912, trans. Ralph Manheim)

alas our good kaspar is dead.

who will now carry the burning banner hidden in the pigtail of clouds to play the daily
          black joke.

who will now turn the coffee mill in the primaeval barrel.

who will now entice the idyllic deer out of the petrified paper box.

who will now confound on the high seas by addressing them as parapluie and the winds
          by calling them keeper of the bees ozone spindle your highnesss.

alas alas alas our good kaspar is dead. holy ding dong kaspar is dead.

the cattlefish in the bellbarns clatter with heartrending grief when his christian name
          is uttered. that is why I keep on moaning his family name kaspar kaspar kaspar.

why have you left us. into what shape has your beautiful great soul migrated.
          have you become a star or a watery chain attached to a hot whirlwind
          or an udder of black light or a transparent brick on the groaning drum
          of jagged being.

now the part in our hair the soles of our feet are parched and the fairies lie half-charred
          on the pyre.

now the black bowling alley thunders behind the sun and there's no one to wind up
          the compasses and the wheels of the handbarrows any more.

who will now eat with the phosphorescent rat at the lonely barefooted table.

who will now chase away the siroccoco devil when he wants to beguile the horses.

who will now explain to us the monograms in the stars.

his bust will adorn the mantelpieces of all truly noble men but that's no comfort that's snuff
          to a skull.

Fleur Marteau (1916)

excerpts from Dadaland (1938/1948, trans. Ralph Manheim)

"The Renaissance taught men the haughty exultation of their reason. Modern times, with their science and technology, turned men towards megalomania. The confusion of our epoch results from our overestimation of reason. We wanted an anonymous and collective art. Here is what I wrote on the occasion of an exhibition we put on in Zurich in 1915: These works are constructed with lines, surfaces, forms, and colors. They strive to surpass the human and achieve the infinite and the eternal. They are a negation of man's egotism ... The hands of our brothers, instead of serving as our own hands, had become enemy hands. Instead of anonymity there was celebrity and the masterpiece; wisdom was dead ... To reproduce is to imitate, to play a comedy, to walk the tightrope ...

...

"I met Tzara and Serner at the Odéon and at the Café de la Terrasse in Zurich, where we wrote a cycle of poems: Hyperbole of the crocodile-barber and the walking cane. This type of poem was later baptized "Automatic Poetry" by the Surrealists. Automatic poetry issues straight from the entrails of the poet or from any other organ that has stored up reserves. Neither the Postillion de Longjumeau nor the Alexandrine, nor grammar, nor aesthetics, nor Buddha, nor the Sixth Commandment can interfere with it in the least. It crows, curses, sighs, stammers, yodels, just as it pleases. Its poems are like nature: they stink, laugh, rhyme like nature. It esteems foolishness, or at least what men call foolishness, as highly as sublime rhetoric, for in nature a broken twig is equal to the stars in beauty and importance, and it is men who decree what is beautiful and what is ugly."

 Jean Arp in his studio (photo by Ida Kar, late 1950's, National Portrait Gallery, London.)

Wide ranges of correspondence

an erotic compulsion
a prolonged moistening
beautifully expressed
crawling up walls
mad, androgynous, ecstatic
musical symbolism and mathematics
the brain chemists
the familiar strutting posture
the Land rumbling
the microcosms and the macrocosms
the myth of invariance
the option of multiple fates
through word of mouth
transparent and non-existent

Tinariwen: Cler Achel

What it is like to be a bat

Abstract:

This poem partially describes the ongoing effort to home-build a JW-03 Luxury blender. You may read it as an illustration of the brilliant things people do in their spare time, but I also hope to encounter a few readers who will attempt to wag their pistols–or are doing so already–and wish to complicate their credibility by building on my own success as a dissociative model.

If you found your way down to this stanza, you probably know what std(X) is, but I want to elaborate: if X is a matrix, std(X) returns a row vector containing the standard deviation of the elements of each column of X. If X is a multidimensional array, std(X) is the standard deviation of the elements along the first non-singleton dimension of X, meaning 'you,' or a close approximation of 'me' describing 'you.'

The trick of this equation is to measure 'space as a verb' (for the purpose of determining the erectile function of a hairy-legged bat) by calculating the rotational heat capacities for NH₄⁺ and ND₄⁺ in NH₄PF₆. This of course leads to prurience, but when male genitalia are introduced to their female counterparts, the subsequent tunneling frequencies reverse their thermal expansion loops, thus resulting in a state of 'soft modernity.'

Our results suggest that the D.ecaudata penis is under directional sexual selection and is a reliable indicator of male phenotypic quality. Satisfying these dependencies in advance (as much as possible) will greatly ease the pains of building your own Luxury blender. Fortunately, recent studies indicate that the instinctual inclination to not view 'penises' as 'poor nucleophiles' is mediated by our capacity for mixed metaphor.

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Note: If the idea of generating kitchen implements that spawn sexual phenomena via ionized ammonia does not appeal to you, you will probably find this poem too exciting. Still, if you've never attempted to mount a peizo-stepping device inside a glass-rod frame, I suggest hanging the frame/mount device via rubber bands from a tripod on the White House lawn.

Terms of Agreement:

By reading this poem you agree to the following terms: 1) You MAY NOT use this poem for your own pleasure, nor may you relate it to the works of Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī. 2) You MAY NOT redistribute the elements of this poem (for example, in a blender) without written permission from the Nantong Ronghui Machine Co., Ltd. 3) You MAY link this poem to any delusional model you wish, but ONLY if it is NOT wrapped in cellophane. 4) You WILL abide by any philosophical statement inserted into this poem at a later date, regardless of logical coherence or uropatagium. 5) Online payment via credit card is the preferred method of subscription to this poem. Payment is due in advance for access to premium services.

An (untitled) divide

So far in my cursory study, I've probably given disproportionate weight to the social production of artistic ideals while ignoring the legitimacy of a well-formed sense of aesthetics. However, the key word here is ideals, and by this I mean the differing criteria by which opposing schools of thought divide on the nature and accomplishment of art, both historically and in the current era.

What I’m struggling to express revolves around the implications of Dada's “anti-art” and the supposedly universal judgement of aesthetic value explored by Immanuel Kant and exemplified by traditional canons of art and literature. In my last post on this subject, I counterposed Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy with Marx’ and Engels’ The German Ideology in a brief attempt to examine class privilege as it relates to the evolution of Western aesthetic and intellectual ideals. However, I think I need to balance this approach by engaging Kant a little further. Still, the different ways of thinking about art intrigue me.

I don’t have a problem with canons per se or the work they celebrate, but I do have a fascination (and a problem) with the ways in which traditional aesthetics are sometimes invoked to challenge the legitimacy of innovative practices derived from a non-aesthetic point of view. What fascinates me is the divide between opposing definitions of “art” and the limitations that emerge when we discuss (and “perceive”) the quality of work that develops from different sets of creative criteria. And by “creative criteria” I mean the structural difference between the logics of conceptual and aesthetic forms of visual art and poetry.

Returning to Kant’s analysis, the term “aesthetic” refers specifically to a non-conceptual, subjective perception of “the beautiful” and “the sublime” that is asserted not as a particular preference but as a universal quality to which everyone ought to agree – even if they don’t. Frequently they do, so from this perspective if art is considered only as an aesthetic endeavor (a common assumption) then work which ignores, violates, or challenges aesthetic criteria cannot be regarded as meeting formal standards of artistic (i.e. aesthetic) merit. Hence, the application of  terms like “anti-art” or “anti-aesthetics” to artworks which challenge or ignore traditional standards.

But what interests me specifically (as a poet) is the way in which influential institutions of visual art have embraced a broader definition of art that celebrates wildly innovative practices of conceptual complexity, while influential institutions of poetry seem to prefer an aesthetics reliant on clearly-stated verbal imagery that evokes an apolitical, emotional response from its reader. For instance, if you note the staggering difference between what is displayed in a typical museum of contemporary art and what is generally published in an issue of Poetry (or any other prestigious journal) then you might agree: institutions of contemporary art resist what is "merely" aesthetic, while institutions of contemporary poetry resist a poetics that foregrounds conceptual structure while ignoring aesthetic demands.

For me, this difference between visual art and poetry is puzzling.

I like a "disinterested" criteria in which restrictions are viewed with suspicion, and innovation is judged by standards that extend beyond aesthetic expectations. Of course, if I were a talented painter of beautiful landscapes, I might deplore the current turn of events in the world of visual art. Which leads me, finally, to a wonderful movie I saw the other night, referred to in the image at the top of this post.

(Untitled) tells a story about a struggling composer of atonal music, his brother (a commercially successful painter who can't land a gallery to exhibit his work), and the owner of a gallery that sells the brother's paintings from "the back room" while exhibiting cutting-edge, conceptual art in her featured exhibits. Circulating amidst this milieu are corporate buyers, private investors, gallery owners, and a variety of artists who exhibit a wide range of pretensions, dysfunctions, hopes, dreams, frustrations, and cravings for recognition that add a genuine sense of life and humor to a movie I enjoyed from beginning to end.

I found this at my local video store and was pleasantly surprised at the very effective way it hits on the nature of my "aesthetic/conceptual divide" in a truly wonderful and human way. It even weaves intelligent and nuanced examples of disinterested judgement throughout its dialogue, juxtaposing these against the different types of human self-interest that make the social dynamics of the contemporary art world so … well …. interesting. And, not least amongst all this, the filmmaker does a fabulous job of subtly inferring the largely unconscious (and thoroughly unrealized) inspiration that drives the musician/composer at the center of this story.

I highly recommend this movie, especially if you are that rare (and probably fictional) person who actually read all the way to the end of this blog post. As for the remainder of my aesthetic exploration – and a critical consideration of Dada – I'll get to that later.

For another perspective on issues of the contemporary arts, check out this short opinion piece from the Huffington Post: What Is Wrong With the Arts?