Silly (Awards) Season

I'm a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards this year, so perhaps I'm more sensitive than normal to pundits carping about award results, but something about awards brings out people's desire to complain, and they don't usually come out looking very good by doing so.

The ones people always complain about get complaints again this year -- the Nobel and the National Book Awards. The two articles I've seen linked to most frequently are Tim Parks on the Nobel and Laura Miller on the National Book Awards.

The Parks piece isn't terrible, but I'd agree with M.A. Orthofer at The Literary Saloon that it's "somewhat careless". (Parks has written a bit more thoughtfully about the Nobel in his essay "The Nobel Individual".) I certainly agree that the Nobel is inevitably in a tough position because it's supposed to be so international and definitive, and people give it almost mystical reverence, but its track record really isn't that bad. Sure, I wish they'd give it to Chinua Achebe already, and then Ngugi wa Thiong'o (so I could say I once interviewed a Nobel winner), and not be so generally Eurocentric, but it's an award based in Europe, so, you know, whatever. And I've got no problem with it being anti-American. Michael Bourne can whine all he wants about Philip Roth not getting it, and maybe Roth will get it one of these days, but I hope not. When Bourne writes, "If Philip Roth doesn’t deserve the Nobel Prize, no one does," he just flaunts his ignorance of world literature. There are plenty of other writers out there who would benefit from it more and who are equally interesting and even influential artists.

Tomas Transt繹rmer, this year's winner, is a safe and relatively obvious choice. Some people have complained that he's an "obscure poet", but anybody who refers to him as such doesn't know what they're talking about. He's been translated into somewhere around 50 languages, has multiple translators in English, has books in print in the U.S. For a poet, that's rockstar status. Just because you haven't heard of somebody doesn't mean they're obscure.

Laura Miller's slam of the NBA is some of the worst writing I've ever seen from her. People have a habit of complaining about the obscurity of NBA finalists, and it always makes them sound stupid. Laura Miller accuses the NBA judges in the fiction category of deliberately seeking out books that are no fun to read and are published by small presses. She accuses them of seeking out books that deserve more attention and ignoring books that are popular. "If you categorically rule out books that a lot of people like," she says, "you shouldn’t be surprised when a lot of people don’t like the books you end up with."

That's not really an argument, though. It's more like a non sequitur. At the very least, it's irrelevant.

The judges for the fiction award this year are Deirdre McNamer (Panel Chair), Jerome Charyn, John Crowley, Victor LaValle, Yiyun Li. That's an interesting panel. My interest in a book would rise if I knew those folks had thought the book was worthwhile and even impressive.

Jury, Meet Peers

Lizzie Skurnick:

"I just want to say," I said as the meeting closed, "that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric, and we are giving awards to books I think are actually kind of amateur and sloppy compared to others, and I think it's disgusting." (I wasn't built for the board room.) "But we can't be doing it because we're sexist," an estimable colleague replied huffily. "After all, we're both men and women here."

But that's the problem with sexism. It doesn't happen because people -- male or female -- think women suck. It happens for the same reason a sommelier always pours a little more in a man's wine glass (check it!), or that that big, hearty man in the suit seems like he'd be a better manager. It's not that women shouldn't be up for the big awards. It's just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don't know . . . deserve them.

(Be sure to read the whole essay; it's a smart and sharp attack on a problem that we should be past at this point.)

The good people at Publisher's Weekly are probably speaking what they think is the truth when they say, about their all-male list of 10 "best" books of the year, that "We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz." I believe them when they say, "It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male."

But being disturbed is not enough. What they have done is shameful.

This is not just some blogger's list of favorite books of the year. This is the publishing industry's trade journal telling the world what ten books from 2009 deserve most acclaim and attention. This list will affect how books are stocked in stores and it will affect what books are bought by libraries. The fact that the list only includes male writers contributes to a problem.

The editors who created this list have chosen to perpetuate sexism. They have deliberately and knowingly made it easier for male writers to have access to sales and publicity at the expense of women writers. Their list perpetuates the idea that the best, most serious, and most consequential books are written by men, and that idea will continue to have an effect out in the world.

Our society has made plenty of great strides over the past centuries and decades in terms of reducing institutional sexism, but moments such as this highlight just how entrenched the patriarchy is. Yes, patriarchy. Male dominated, male identified, male centered. It's insidious, and it is self perpetuating.

There is no objective, essential "best". There is stuff we like and stuff we don't -- texts we have developed techniques for appreciating and texts that we do not, for myriad reasons, appreciate. There are texts about which we have built large critical apparatuses for justifying as "great". Perceptions of gender, race, sexuality, class, and other broad social categories mix with our experiences as readers, our educations, etc., to produce the judgments we make. Though we may struggle to create vivid and convincing justifications for our judgments, there are still mysteries to any evaluation that strives for nuance. But even so, we can expand our awareness, question our gut instincts, analyze our justifications, wonder why we are doing what we do and saying what we say. To assume that we can simply "not pay attention" to some of the central forces structuring our perception of reality is naive. We might be powerless to change them, but we might also be in a position to avoid perpetuating them and adding strength to them. We don't have any choice about whether the society we're born into is racist, sexist, heterosexist, whatever. But we do have some choice about how we relate to that society, how we work within it, what we pay attention to, and how we choose to make our choices.

I'm not ranting from a position of innocence -- most of the writers I most deeply value are men (many of whom are white, middle class, born within the last 150 years, and not from the U.S.). I have some hunches for why this is, hunches related to early reading experiences, prejudices about language and its relationship to reality, etc. Personal taste and judgment are too complex to explain simply or conclusively. Individual readers are strange creatures, full of prejudices and whims and blind spots and allergies. Individually, I expect there are weird particulars other than race, class, and gender that affect our taste more profoundly, more forcefully than those social categories themselves (if those social categories could ever be isolated, which I am skeptical of anyway -- any discussion of them is provisional and strategic). But when we move beyond the individual, as lists try to do, we're moving into the realm of systems and social structures -- means of distribution and consumption, gravitational forces that shape and warp how we talk about the realities we perceive, the tides we choose to sail with or against. And that talk itself then goes on to shape some more realities and turn some tides.

All of which is just me noodling around and trying to say the same basic thing: An institution with the power of Publisher's Weekly has more responsibility than an individual has, because the power that institution wields is greater than the power of most individuals (certain folks like Oprah excepted, although I can imagine people could argue that "Oprah" should be considered more of an institution than an individual).

Or, more basically, what I said above: The editors at Publisher's Weekly should be more than disturbed. They should be ashamed.

Here's a book to add to a best of the year list: A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter. I've got plenty of quibbles with the book, especially Showalter's dismissive attitude toward Gertrude Stein, but I'm also finding it (still reading; it's big) a rich source of information and delight. I've already begun seeking out writers I hadn't heard of until reading Showalter, and revisiting ones I had not paid enough attention to. Check out Katha Pollitt's review of Showalter at Slate or Rebecca Hussey's at The Quarterly Conversation or Sarah Churchwell's at The Guardian or Susan Salter Reynolds's at The L.A. Times.

Or watch Sarah Nelson, former editor-in-chief of Publisher's Weekly, interview Showalter.

I haven't read nearly as many books published this year as the editors at PW have, but I'm perfectly happy to propose A Jury of Her Peers as the best book of the year on a single criterion: It's the book we, the litterateurs and taste proclaimers, seem to need the most.

Dear Mr. Obama

I've been skeptical of most (not all) of Barack Obama's cabinet appointments, and even aghast at a few, but I've never felt "betrayed" by him, since he's been honest all along about his moderate views and his "pragmatism" (generally a support for minor changes to the status quo), and I do think it's worth waiting to see how he and his cohorts govern before giving up completely on anything resembling optimism. Obama's better than Bush or McCain and he's not another white guy, so I was quite happy when he won the election. I keep my standards for politicians low, and that way I can occasionally be pleasantly surprised. Idealists are always disappointed and depressed; honest cynics now and then have to admit that humanity isn't entirely dreadful.

But the choice -- not Obama's alone, but he's said he supports it -- of Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration really pissed me off. No softer words can encapsulate the annoyance, frustration, and real anger that I have felt about this since it was announced. Part of the strength of my feelings is annoyance at myself for letting my guard down, for buying into some of the symbolism of this inauguration, for wanting and expecting more from Obama than I've ever wanted or expected from a politician before. For letting my standards rise a couple of millimeters.

Since I had let myself slip into believing the symbolism, I thought I might as well go whole hog and actually join the discussion happening at the Obama team's website, change.gov. Those of us who felt the inclusion of Rick Warren in the inauguration to be not just a "bad decision" but a nausea-inducing kick to the gut can let our voices be counted, and perhaps even read. Here is what I wrote:

The choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at President Obama's inauguration is appalling not because of Warren's opinion about a ballot initiative (even if it was one that hatefully took rights away from people) or his apparent belief that homosexuality is a disease needing curing -- the choice is appalling because of the symbolism.

The inauguration is not a conference or a summit where ideas are tossed around and debated; it is a symbolic moment, one that, in this instance, for good or ill, will resonate for many years. The belief that not-primarily-heterosexual people are not equal to primarily-heterosexual people is not a simple opinion deserving respect and equal consideration any more than the opinion that another group of people is subhuman deserves respect. The invocation for this profoundly symbolic event will now be given by a man who believes -- and who acts upon his belief, encouraging other people to join him in it and to create laws based upon it -- that a group of people are, because of who and how they love, less deserving of equal human rights than he is.

Millions of people voted for Mr. Obama because they believed in equal human rights. Millions of people voted for Mr. Obama because the symbolism of his presidency would offer, they thought, a new hope for a more just future for all people. The invocation at the inauguration should have been an opportunity to strengthen and extend that symbolism, to encourage people to act for justice. Instead of encouraging "tolerance" of hatred and spite and ignorance, the invocation should have encouraged us toward a greater understanding of what it means to seek a better world for all people, regardless of who they pray to (or don't), what they look like, where they're from, who they love. It wasn't specific policy proposals that caused the widespread passionate support of Mr. Obama, it was our belief that he held a more generous view of his fellow human beings than do such people as Rick Warren.

It was written quickly in the heat of the moment, and I tried not to sound like a kook, which can be difficult at times. Hopefully, it won't just be kooks like me writing in.