derivative work

A friend‘s FaceBook entry pointed me to an amazing article in Bitch Magazine: “Hard Times” by Sarah Seltzer. Seltzer defines and describes the pattern and statistics of the reviews of books by women, describing both the gender disproportionality, and an editorial pattern of assigning writers who are likely to dismiss feminist works.

Good going, NYT — on their new “http://midtermmadness.blogs.nytimes.com/”, which offers an array of commentators, professors, and pundits to comment on the 2006 elections … they’ve given us six (6) men, all apparently white, and dare I guess their class backgrounds? Way to seek a diversity of opinion.       

Research done on women’s and men’s favorite novels turned up that women have a diverse reading list; men are more focused on a smaller number of titles; and — surprise, surprise — women’s favorite books include both male & female authors, but men’s favorite books are pretty much all men. (Harper Lee is the exception.) [...]

Yet another instance of boys-read-boys makes the news. This time, Dave Itzkoff’s new “It’s All Geek To Me” column in the NYT. My partner thought I’d be excited — and I was — to see science fiction getting a column in the NYT. Alas, though, it’s only a boy-reads-boys column. The first column (March 5, [...]

Penguin Remixed. a cool project. But it misses half the world. Penguin Remixed is a competition of music remixes of various “classic” quotes & texts. Out of 29 clips they have one from a female-authored book (Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley; with a male narrator) and one by a male author with both a female and [...]

So call me one of those annoying people who count things up and then bitch and infer meaning from quotas and statistics: Boy Reviewer Michael Chabon, in his March 25, 2004, The New York Review of Books: Dust & Daemons review of Pullman’s His Dark Materials books, manages to cite, out of 19 references, only [...]

pet peeve: men reading men. More precisely, based on highly scientific studies of (a) watching what people on public transit read; and (b) reading & listening to interviews with people about their reading habits, I conclude that men (in a general, statistical sense) love to read other male authors and rarely read women authors. Women, [...]