Rules

My life is an eternal struggle against arbitrary rules and self-imposed categorizations. I know that sounds really dramatic but it's the truth. Little rules about what was "correct" pervaded my childhood: correct silverware, correct clothes, correct decor, correct speech. There were even rules about correct ways to hang pictures. I spent a good deal of my childhood reacting against rules and at the same time being anxious about whether I was doing things "right." It's shocking how unquestioned social conventions can choke off your creativity, and yet I sometimes wonder if that isn't the foundation of most art. Or at least most modern and post-modern art.

But that's a topic for another blog. Or is it? I don't know anymore. See, I just made this new self-imposed rule about what I was going to blog about here in Blogorrhea (and why did I pick a title that's so hard to spell?) and now I'm stuck with it. Which puts me in something of a dilemma when I get fired up about the strange concatenation of information on the web. Like this morning:

I'm scrolling through the backlog of entries in my Bloglines when I run across a book review on Powell's Review a Day for a book called Challenger Park about the trials of mixing a career as an astronaut in training with motherhood, written by a man. I haven't read the book yet, but the review (and it may be all the reviewer's fault, to be fair) got my feminist back up. Why does she have to be the one who has to drop the kids at daycare and agonize about it? Why can't her husband with the tanking career do it? Because then there's no angst of a woman torn between her intelligence and the fruit of her womb. Oh, right.

Then over at Arts and Letters Daily there's a link to a Toronto Star article (which also appears in Prospect Magazine) by Alison Wolf about how feminism has had dire consequences for society:

Three consequences get far less attention than they deserve. The first is the death of sisterhood: an end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than did their men. The second is the erosion of "female altruism," the service ethos which has been profoundly important to modern industrial societies—particularly in the education of their young, and the care of their old and sick. The third is the impact of employment change on childbearing. We are familiar with the prospect of demographic decline, yet we ignore, sometimes wilfully, the extent to which educated women face disincentives to bear children.

What frosted my flakes was the lack of recognition that the underlying and pervasive structure of society is still organized around male desires and power structures. Women have entered a male-dominated workforce in large enough numbers to begin tipping the balance of statistics in some cases (doctors, for instance), but the culture of corporations, service organizations, and government alike, and the assumptions behind why women work and the way society itself is structured (e.g., lack of childcare infrastructure, poor regard for teachers and childcare professionals, lack of emphasis on child welfare, even assumptions about whose primary job it is to raise children) are still very male. As Dr. Emily pointed out when I sent her the article, "It is not feminism that makes women too broke and exhausted to have kids—it's the particularly cruel brand of corporate industrialism practiced by global capital. Powerful wealthy corporations get that way by slashing benefits and creating a healthcare crisis of impoverished overstressed workers who get sick with no safety net." Until there are more women in the halls of power, where society's rules are constructed and imposed, there will be no true balance anywhere in society.

But—oops!—I'm supposed to be writing about books and art and, um, writing and stuff, not feminism. But it doesn't belong in The Perfidy Report, either, so does that mean I need another blog to write about all the other stuff I think about? This could really be a problem if I get into overcategorizing, because I've got one of those vacuum-cleaner brains that just sucks up whatever gets in its way. I read obsessively and widely; just look at my Bloglines account: under the "Books" folder, I have everything from Miss Snark to William Gibson to the London Review of Books. I have a Fandom folder (whose contents I am not about to reveal; go find your own), a Friends folder, a Paper & Artist's Books folder, a Politics folder (Alternet's Rights and Liberties, Back to Iraq 3.0, and Orcinus), a Science folder (which includes both Radioactive Banana and New Scientist's Latest Headlines), and a bunch of wide-ranging feeds like Tangled Bank, Metafilter (where I just found another science blog called Squidblog and a dive website called Deeper Blue with a great story about Giant Humboldt Squid), Design Observer, Pruned, and 3QuarksDaily, which alerted me to Seamus Heaney's new collection.

And all of it feeds my writing somehow or other. It also makes me a walking repository of interesting but not necessarily useful information. Friends in the know tell me I probably should have been a librarian. Now there's a profession for rules! I'd be recategorizing myself into a rubber room. A Million Little Pieces: fiction or memoir?

This is part of the problem with the fiction I write, too, though I never claim any of it is fact. True, maybe, but not fact. Is it magical realism? Urban fantasy? Interstitial fiction? Speculative Fiction? Or just plain, old literary fiction? When what goes in includes physics, ocean science, poetry, landscape design, architecture, painting physicists, civil rights, paper, mythology, history, typography, and feminism, where do you put what comes out? It's a bit like J.G. Ballard writing about Robert Smithson as a cargo cultist. (I'm not making that up, honest.)

And this is why I don't like being categorized as a writer, though I think categories qua categories are fascinating. I always found taxonomy interesting. The Grooved Tanner Crab (another mondo deep-sea critter), for instance, is Phylum Arthropoda, Subphylum Crustacea, Class Malacostraca, Order Decapoda, Suborder Plecyemata, Infraorder Brachyura, Superfamily Majioidea, Family Majidae. And then you get down to those little, teeny-tiny, minuscule differences of individuals that blur the line.

I like it best when things transcend their categories, or break them open, or teeter on the cusp between them. I like transitional states and objects, interstitial places, and the unclassifiable. I like that which defies convention and easy definition.

I guess that's a rule that classifies me as a weirdo. Or not.