almost no words (ii)
This is from Gordon Van Gelder regarding the Truesdale column:
One reason I gave the gig to Dave Truesdale is because his columns tend to be provocative, so I didnāt see any need to shy away from this provocative piece. But it does editorialize and I realize now that people might see my publishing an opinion piece in F&SF/online as an endorsement of itāit is, to the extent that I think the piece makes its point clearly and that the point is valid and worth considering.
[emphasis mine]
So there you have it. Really, the crux of this entire incident rests on that last sentence, and how valid one considers its assertion.
GAH.
Wow.
Thanks for pointing this out, Alan. This really makes me feel extremely thoughtful.
Interestingly, I just left my job at the Womenās Press because I didnāt want to have to worry about offending people, and yet . . .
Iām pretty annoyed with these two fellas, right now.
Oh my.
Reading this, it seems to me he only says he thinks the piece is valid in that it makes a clear point that he thinks is worth considering, not necessarily that he endorses the point. I think itās a really thin line of differentiation, but I do think in the end theyāre different things. The only thing I think thatās disgusting about Daveās rant was the writing itself. Itās scattered, rude, annoying, assuming, one-sided even in the attempt to attack the one-sided-ness that, in the hands of some people, feminism can sometimes take in relation to holding men to one kind of standard but not women. Itās examples are largely lost in the morass of a spitting, slobbering, fist-to-god shaking mess, and for all of that I think anything ātrueā it has to say is lost because of largely absent social skills due to one personās fundamentalist attitudes towards genre fiction and the gender wars that have historically been waged within it. If prose is a reflection of oneās personality at all, it seems to me Dave is very similar to Gollum.
I do think Gordon isnāt endorsing the point so much as the article as an article, which is ironic, because itās the low quality of the writing itself that raises my hackles more than what, beneath the oozing festering cantankerous language employed, is being said. From what I gleaned, he basically thought the Bookslut article was an example of a feminists hypocrisy that sometimes arises about what men canāt say but women can. I think the Bookslut writer actually did get that point from Dave, such as he is, and even must have felt he was right enough to write the apology note that she did, particularly to the Japanese Worldcon, which is probably a good thing, but this still doesnāt mean Daveās article wasnāt a sorry excuse for composition. I rarely read writing that, by its very nature, makes me go āughā and flinch more than Daveās. Best to avoid reading it altogether.
I think you articulated more or less what I was trying to get at, Chris. I think the low quality of the writing is definitely going hand in hand with the poor quality of thought. Actually, Iād even unpack it a little bit more and separate the assertions: āthe piece makes its point clearlyā (editorial failure) and āthe point the piece clearly makes is valuable to the larger discourseā (trickier-a grayer area, but Iād call this an ethical failure of some kind) Davidās just a troll-itās too bad that on the āmemory holeā of SFF.net itās not too easy to see all of his antics in 2002 on the Tangent board. The feeling that I have with this whole thing, actually, is sadness, b/c this publication which Iāve held in such regard as a kind of shining light in the field, is going down that shitty road, seemingly of its own volition. And that honestly I just canāt understand the mindset to give you-know-who a column in the first placeā¦thereās just that disconnect, you know?
I think by now Iāve spent more time reading and re-reading that sentence than GvG actually spent writing it. And I just canāt shake the idea that Mr. van Gelder is just so sick and tired of hearing people moan about bias and perceived gender inequity that when he finally saw DTās column he thought it a much-needed breath of fresh air.
When to the rest of us itās just another stale whiff of the same old shit.
You know what I think mostly? I think I could have halfway-respected Daveās article had he not indulged in āsatirizingā the Martini pieceās mistakes. Maybe less satisfying but still livable would be even if heād insisted on having the āsatireā included, having *not* gone even *farther* astray with the gender biased language than Adrienne did. Instead he really really indulged, and what people are reacting to is the very intuitive feeling that he really enjoyed writing that āsatireā way too much, that in fact it *is* how he feels and sees things, despite trying to call for equal standards in how women get to talk about men in these sorts of online posts that are mostly whining about who didnāt get on a ballot and who did.
Which, tangentially to this, Iāll add is really funny, because people bitched about the Nebula ballot, which was voted upon in a three step voting process (seems pretty airtight for not being able to logroll in the end of the process) and people bitched about the Hugo too, which, previous to its announcement, was being hailed as the ballot that would show that Nebula what a *real* ballot looks like. Lo and behold it looks even crappier to me, gender-wise, if the readers of science fiction and fantasy periodicals and books can only agree on Naomi Novik as the soul representative for women in the fiction writing categories (if Iām remember correctly). But hey, itās a vote determined by who goes or went to World Science Fiction Con, not the real entire readership of the genre, so itās going to have a very specific group of people casting its votes as well.
Every award has its blind spots though, I guess.
Thatās my off on a tangent to this post.
For the love of all thatās holy.
Making (or attempting to make) a point and making a point offensively are two different things. Why publish someone elseās piece that is needlessly offensive? I just donāt understand the decision-making process here.
I donāt understand either, and āwell, we gave him a column, we have to run what he submitsā is a meaningless argument, as far as Iām concerned. We give the SH columnists a similarly open-ended assignment, and Iām happy to let them write things that I personally disagree with, but if any one of them submitted something that was openly offensive, we wouldnāt just blindly run it and pretend weād had no agency in the process. (I donāt know exactly what we -would- do, but I know we wouldnāt do -that-.)