[a website for the Editor and Narrator of the Circo del Herrero series]
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]
“Even so late as the mid-Victorian days George Eliot was accused of ‘coarseness and immorality’ in her attempt ‘to familiarize the minds of our young women in the middle and higher ranks with matters on which their fathers and brothers would never venture to speak in their presence.’
The effect of those repressions is still clearly to be traced in women’s work, and the effect is wholly to the bad. The problem of art is sufficiently difficult in itself without having to respect the ignorance of young women’s minds or to consider whether the public will think that the standard of moral purity displayed in your work is such as they have a right to expect from your sex. The attempt to conciliate, or more naturally to outrage, public opinion is equally a waste of energy and sin against art. It may have been not only with a view to obtaining impartial criticism that George Eliot and Miss Brontë adopted male pseudonyms but in order to free their own consciousness as they wrote from the tyranny of what was expected from their sex. No more than men, however, could they free themselves from a more fundamental tyranny – the tyranny of sex itself. The effort to free themselves, or rather to enjoy what appears, perhaps erroneously, to be the comparative freedom of the male sex from that tyranny, is another influence which has told disastrously upon the writing of women.”
-Virginia Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House.
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, and goodreads.]
Miller: As someone who is primarily interested in books, this idea does trouble me. The form of the book hasn’t changed. It might be delivered electronically but it is still a text narrative, good or bad. I don’t really care whether a novelist is charming or is adept at pitching their work in a video or website. When it comes to the David Foster Wallaces of the future, what I want is their books. That’s it. I’m concerned that I won’t get those books if the authors also have to be good at marketing themselves to have any career at all.
Doctorow: But that’s always been the case. It’s just who you’re marketing yourself to, and how you conduct yourself. My one certainty is that there is and always have been so many people who want to make art for reasons that are innate to the human condition. Whatever factors favor which artists, there will be more art than I can ever consume that I will love and that will uplift me. That just seems axiomatic to me. There is more beautiful, wonderful work being published today than ever before. And I can access it more readily than ever before. My concern as a working artist and someone who cares about the fortunes of the people who make the art that I love is that whatever money is in the system preferentially is diverted to them. And that in the process of making marketplaces for art we don’t set up the conditions for totalitarianism.
From here.
We will say it would be much harder to do our own art if we could not maintain a veil of anonymity. It is kind of the point.
In other news, we have a giveaway going on for the above book (^^^) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s THE LATHE OF HEAVEN. (Enter here!)
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, and goodreads.]
Read the rest here.
+1 for Japan for treating the Other equally.
Interesting insights on Science Fiction:
What makes a story science fiction? Is it an otherworldly location, the science, the time in which it is set?
I’m thinking about this because of a review I saw this week of a novel billed in The Times as science fiction, which sounded rather disappointing – and it’s put me on a bit of a mission.
I haven’t read the book so it would be wrong of me to name it, but it concerned a new planet populated by humanlike aliens. The main threads are the bringing of God to the indigenous people, and the exploitation of its resources by mining companies.
It seemed this story could have been set anywhere. The human challenges were no different from those in a historical novel. The other-world setting didn’t add anything fresh, except maybe to save the writer some research. (I see a lot of science fiction – and fantasy –…
View original post 612 more words
