Teh feminists got to me! Oh noes!

After reading Nicola Griffith's Ammonite and Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, I'm totally ready to go join a fightin' lesbian commune.

Circumnavigating Central Park

Walking her dog, a photo by TheTurducken on Flickr.

I've signed up to do a circumnavigation of Manhattan with a local hiking meetup in April. That's 32 miles, paved and mostly flat. While I'm in reasonable shape from doing other things, I've really only done two hikes since July, so I need to get back into hiking form.

Also, I figured I better practice circumnavigating things, just to be safe.

So on Sunday I decided to walk around the perimeter of Central Park. That's 6 miles, plus .5 each way to the park.

It's an interesting walk. Of course, you can see the park on one side, starting from the North Woods in my neighborhood, down past the reservoir, around past the zoo, back up to the Meer, and home. On the other side is mostly residences and a few nonprofits. There are very few businesses - nearly all on the north edge, which doesn't have the prestige of the other parkside properties, plus hot dog carts. The rest are expensive condos, museums, the Dwight School, and a few churches.

The advantage of urban "hiking" is that you don't really need a pack. Thirsty? Buy hot chocolate from a vendor. Tired? Use your metrocard to get home. But it's nearly impossible to find a bathroom on that route, especially in the winter. You can't exactly go behind a tree, even though there are plenty of those, unless you want to be arrested for indecent exposure.

Even in my weakened, debilitated state, 7 miles wasn't a challenge, although the 20-something temperatures were. It was too cold for my Five Fingers - not because of the thin soles, but I honestly think because of the toe separation. Only my toes got chilled; I assume it's the same reason gloves aren't as warm as mittens. But I don't own any tennis shoes or hiking boots at the moment.

So, next week, closer to 10 miles.

Loose threads

On working toward your goals.

What are you looking forward to reading this year?

A great article about what it means to be categorized in a particular genre, which was obviously on my mind in my previous post. (Only point I might pick at: "If you enjoyed "Visit From the Good Squad," you might like to read more about the music scene in America in the 90s." Good lord, that's the last thing I want to read anything about.)

Typewriters and India.

Professors doing yoga.

Space needs women

A batch of books on my hold list all came available at once: Cinder by Marissa Meyer, Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (the second Hunger Games Book), and Among Others by Jo Walton. The first two books are young adult (YA) and the third is about a young adult, although it is ostensibly aimed towards regular adults. A lot of the interesting stuff by women in the speculative fiction space these days is being done in YA, which is different from it was back when I was the target market. For example, there is sex now, and sex that isn't automatically used as a warning about teen pregnancy or Something Awful.

Still, there are YA books that don't really hold up to adult reading as well (I'd say Cinder belongs here) and those that do (the Harry Potter series). Then there are adult books about teenagers that can be enjoyably read by young adults (Sunshine) and those that probably shouldn't or can't (Hogg comes to mind).

Walton's book is an oddity, though. I should mention that her Farthing is quite brilliant, and I would recommend starting there. None of her books are YA, but as I read Among Others, I couldn't figure out why it wasn't marketed as such. It's the story of a 15-year-old girl who, after her twin sister dies and she runs away from her mother, ends up in a posh English boarding school. Our heroine - Welsh, bookish, and crippled by the event that killed her sister - is an outcast in a place where social success means adhering closely to conventional mores and the school's culture, which revolves around sports. Eventually (spoiler alert!) she makes friends with one sympathetic adult at the school and finds free-thinking friends outside of it, including a young man who becomes her boyfriend.

The book reminded me strongly of Madeleine L'Engle's And Both Were Young.* I highly doubt plagiarism has anything to do with it; it's more a matter of what a certain kind of school was (or is?) like for an bookish, aspiring writer. Unlike ABWY, where the heroine secretly develops a talent for skiing, Walton's protagonist was a sports aficionado before being injured, and her taste in books runs to SF.

There's an irony in both novels that the heroine, who is into books and doesn't whip out her compact the moment she leaves the campus grounds, who looks down upon her superficial peers for their boy-craziness, ends up finding true teen love - at least, a relationship that is still happily intact on the final page. Because I guess women need men? In some ways, Among Others has a strange tone of misogyny. Our heroine's boyfriend seems like a jerk to me, even after the "misunderstanding" that makes him an outsider has been cleared up to her satisfaction. I couldn't tell, based on the first-person narrative, if we were supposed to see through her rose-colored vision of him or whether the author intended for us to cheer them on.

The book reinforces, unintentionally I think, some gender cliches. Witches are female-only, and, whether they are trying to become evil queens or simply keep their conventional lives squarely conventional, their effects are bad. Non-witches are just conventional and uninteresting. Men are either misunderstood (her boyfriend) or oppressed by women (her dad). Fantasy is the province of women, and sci-fi that of men, and in the end, she chooses the latter. It's not quite as neat as all that: Fantasy aligns with women, but she loves (male) Tolkien, and we can see her nascent recognition of sexism at work in the SF book club she joins. Then there's the fact that her father attempts to sexually assault her at one point. This doesn't seem to affect her relationship with him - maybe after your mother has tried to kill you, it wouldn't seem like much - but it didn't encourage me to join Team Masculine.

The thing is, having read some of Walton's other books and many of her columns on Tor.com, I am quite certain Walton is not sexist or trying to prop up tired gender stereotypes. And when I did a brief survey of book reviews (one Google search-results page deep), I didn't see anyone else mentioning any of this. They focused on whether she nailed the voice of a teenager, whether not having read the SF novels she voraciously devours is a problem, and whether the plot falls a little flat. (My answers? Yes, probably, and yes again.) Which leaves me not knowing what to do with my observations. To what extent are we supposed to see more than the heroine does and reach different conclusions?** I am a reasonably observant reader, but hardly more perspicacious than WaPo reviewers or fans geeking out at the exhaustive sci-fi backcatalog listed in the book's pages.

[Insert something about Stanley Fish and reader-response theory here, just so you know I'm down like that.]

Seriously, though, the book left me confounded - not in intellectually pleasurable way of solving an author's puzzle, but unsure of whether the author was in control of her material.

*If you see the cover I linked to and have read the book, you'll probably be enraged. Why on earth do publishers put pictures of people that are clearly contemporary on novels that took place over 50 years ago? But notice what happens if you "Look Inside" at the cover.
**The only review I saw that delved into that vein at all only suggested that perhaps the "magic" was all in her imagination, since there was no proof anyone else could see it. This struck me as way off-base, since her boyfriend does see the fairies.

News from the MLA

News flash: Faculty jobs are scarce in the humanities. If there's one thing a humanities PhD can't do, it's be picky about institutional type, location, etc. So, as in many fields, the bar is creeping up. Community colleges want you to have teaching experience. Universities want strong publications. But what the article doesn't explicitly point out is that, since you'll have to desperately grab any job you can, a doctoral student really needs to do both of these things to have a shot at a job.

Also discussed at the MLA was shortening the time to graduation, which in the humanities is currently nine years. While it's the kind of thing almost everyone claims to be in favor of, how, exactly, is that compatible with the job market requiring more from candidates?

The kind of PhD students I knew who got out in four-ish years with stellar research were smart, worked very hard, and were the kind of people who didn't mind slotting themselves exactly in to their advisors' ideas. Does that model even work in the humanities, where people work much more independently, and do we want to encourage creating clones? On the other hand, the kind of PhD students I knew who got out in four-ish years with extensive teaching experience … don't exist.

Something is going to have to change in the system of producing and hiring faculty, but what, exactly? Right now, it's not much different than the production of pro football players. There's a larger supply than demand. While we excoriate young people who gamble on an NFL future and laud doctoral candidates, frankly, I don't see much difference between the 18-year-old with no football career or other skills and the 30-year-old with no full-time academic career and $100,000 of debt. They're both stuck, one unlikely to find a job that will put food on the table, and the other to find a job that will enable her to pay off the debt before her own kids are college-age.