We hear about sticking to our guns and materializing dreams but sometimes things just do not work out. It is equally impossible to remain unfettered during the lows (given that we are only human). Well, times like these only call for swallowing the bitterness of the moment and hanging in there. We did it and things did turn around, finally.

Did you ever wonder if God (presuming you are not an atheist) had a fixed share of blessings for each mortal, which he evenly or unevenly distributed during one’s lifetime? What if we desired more than our fixed share?

When I was doing my Masters, my mom visited an astrologer with her friend and as her friend was asking about her future prospects my mom was tempted to ask about her kids too. For me the astrologer predicted that there would not be much education after whatever I was doing at the time according to my birth chart. Coming home, when my mom told me the ‘truth’, it disheartened me for a while. What if it was really true? Nevertheless I gave my best to the course I was taking and scored well. Before long I also won scholarships for higher education. Perhaps I was too young at the time to even ponder on the bigger purpose of life and hence focused solely on my passion for the field of study. It worked in my favor. As we grow older the passion for the things we once had slackens and a general mode of acceptance of fate sets in. This is a dangerous turn because then we defend our share as a fixed one. The truth of the matter is that an extra share is out of question, we do not even claim our own share.

It takes effort to keep our passions vital and there is ample evidence in the world that with sincere motives and focused efforts we are sure to be showered with the bounty of the holy loot. Poet Iqbal says:

Khudi ko kar buland itna
Ki har taqdeer se pehle khhuda bande se khud poocche
Ki bata teri raza kya hai?

Translation (loosely): Make yourself so strong and capable o mortal being, that before penning your destiny God himself is compelled to ask, “How would you like yours?”

Your call,
Manjit

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I was recently in Seattle with former U.S. President, Bill Clinton and via-teleconference, Ex-Vice-President Al Gore, as part of a U.S. mayors' conference. The mayors of the two largest American cities, New York and Los Angeles joined the more than 150 mayors who attended the gathering. What makes this so special? Those participants represented more than 700 mayors who have signed an agreement promising to meet or beat the Kyoto targets of 2012. All of them together represent over one-third of that country's population.

Those mayors want to reduce their cities' greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, but say they cannot do it alone. Although mayors from both countries need help from their federal governments, they are already joining forces to take action.

The Midwest Global Warming Pact, for example, includes nine Midwestern states--including big polluters like Illinois and Michigan--and Manitoba. They join two other groups of states and provinces that are already working together on this cross-border issue.

In Seattle it was inspiring to see so many leaders get together to think about ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It reminded me of those old movies I saw as a child, when the heroes would band together to defeat the villain. But as inspiring as this mayors' conferences was, other conferences are less so.

Take last month's Commonwealth summit in Kampala, Uganda, for example where the prime minister called Kyoto a "mistake" because it only includes targets for wealthy industrialized countries. This was not only an attack on the Protocol but on the Climate Convention itself, which is the cornerstone of the UN's multilateral efforts to prevent global warming.

This past September at the APEC meetings in Sydney, leaders of the U.S., Australia and Canada, who had long questioned the reality of human-induced climate change, announced a new path to meet the challenge of global warming. Their three solutions? Aspirational targets, technology and reduced energy intensity.

Previous Canadian governments sought to achieve reductions by "voluntary compliance," which differs little from "aspirational targets". Basically, this approach requires the government to politely ask corporations to begin reducing emissions for the greater good. It doesn't work.

The second option is also great for leaders who want to delay action: tell citizens not to worry because we'll find some marvelous new invention that will allow us to continue with business as usual. Unfortunately, most forms of technology take years to mature and usually create other, unforeseen problems. The final idea centers on "intensity", the total energy used per amount of production or widget manufactured. Reducing intensity means using less energy per unit. But if intensity is reduced while the amount of production continues to climb, total emissions will increase.
None of these ideas is a serious attempt to reduce emissions.

And it looks bad on the world's stage that Canada is seriously pushing these approaches. As the only nation to have legally agreed to the Kyoto target and then reneged on it, Canada enters the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference negotiations in Bali with severely weakened credibility.

Canada will also arrive in Bali with an emission-reduction plan that four independent analyses have found will not even meet the government's targets that it has substituted for Kyoto's goals. Canada remains one of the few holdouts in the industrialized world to avoid a serious commitment on climate change. Any effort to persuade other major emitters to take on new commitments will surely be hampered by the government's rejection of its own existing obligations.

Canada's lack of real effort to reduce its own emissions means it is ill-suited to lecture developing countries on their responsibilities – especially countries with a tiny fraction of the wealth and emissions per person that this country possesses. With help from wealthy countries, developing nations can do more to shift to a low-emission energy path. But coming from Canada, with its current record, this message smacks of hypocrisy and will only harden resistance.

The Bali conference provides an unparalleled opportunity for the Canadian government to bring its climate policies in line with its rhetoric. Perhaps it's time for the government to take some lessons from its little brothers in the city halls and provincial legislatures.

Originally published on Dec 6, 2007

Dr. David Takayoshi Suzuki is distinguished Canadian geneticist who has attained prominence as a science broadcaster and an environmental activist. He is also a co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation.

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Yet as a feminist, when I am dealing with questions concerning women, I don feel in the least dispassionate; the "truth" is largely predetermined by the feminist values that I hold; and while I'm willing to look at all evidence, I reserve the right to interpret it in a way that will support my position. To be a feminist, in effect, is to advocate a particular point of view. Starting from the premise that women and men have the same potential for individual development, this view examines the way in which social institutions create differences; it rejects the idea that there is any meaningful choice for members of either sex as long as there are socially prescribed sex roles and social penalties for those who deviate from them. This is the description of a decisively political position -- which I use my academic. training to support.

Such an alliance of scholarship and advocacy would have been thought an unholy one fifteen or so years ago. Those were the days when the myth of value-free social science predominated. People really believed -- or at least said they did -- that they could approach a fresh research problem uncontaminated by their past experiences and present circumstances. Since then, however, the radical critique of social science has made us aware that all knowledge reflects a bias. People's background and position in the social structure not only determine their interpretation, but filter out what they think they see. In the words of one anonymous pundit, "How you stand depends on where you sit."

Fortunately, this critique preceded the women's liberation movement. It therefore made it easier to be both advocate and scholar. Most academicians are now sensitive to the fact that we all have values which lead us to particular research projects, which define our methods, our conclusions. Points of view not only exist within disciplines but can be brought to disciplines. Sociology has even been described as the attempt to draw a mathematically precise line between unwarranted assumptions and foregone conclusions. Thus, the fact that my scholarship is guided by a feminist perspective does not make it qualitatively different than that of others.

Nonetheless the awareness of ubiquitous bias does impose upon one some responsibilities which those who thought they were value-free could blissfully ignore. The primary responsibility is to not be blinded by one's own politics. There is a time for pure advocacy and a time for critical reflection. Just as the awareness of the inevitable bias of any scholarship makes it easier to apply one's own, so must that awareness make one constantly reexamine one's perceptions. This responsibility grows greater as the acceptability and influence of one's perspective -- feminist or non-feminist --increases. When one is an outsider, criticizing the established view, one can legitimately muster all one's forces for the assault without tolerance for differing points of view. But singlemindedness is a privilege permissible only to those out of power. The more established one becomes, the less one can afford it. To fail to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with power, is to undermine the right to hold it.

Feminists are a long way from gaining much institutional power, so in many ways this responsibility is still a theoretical one. Nonetheless, the need for it can be seen in those few situations where we do exercise significant influence. The best example is the classroom. You may personally like, associate with or support someone on the basis of whether or not they agree with you. But you cannot morally grade them on that basis. Good teaching does not permit pushing a line. power must always be used with discretion.

Provided this discretion is used, feminist advocacy is as compatible with being a scholar as are the many other political views scholars hold. But if feminism is compatible with scholarship, is it necessarily compatible with academia? Frankly, I think it is not. Not only is there an inherent contradiction between the values of the academic world and those of feminism, but that world does not look favorably upon serious dissidents from the status quo -- especially if such dissidents are brash enough to live their beliefs (as feminism requires). Cooley pointed out almost 50 years ago that:
It is strange that we have so few men of genius on our faculties: we are always trying to get them. Of course, they must have undergone the regular academic training (say ten years in graduate study and subordinate positions) and be gentlemanly, dependable, pleasant to live with, and not apt to make trouble by urging eccentric ideas.1

To explain the above conclusions, I must digress from the subject of feminist scholarship to examine the structure and values of the academic profession. Contrary to popular belief, the academic establishment is not in business to pursue truth, promulgate knowledge, or even to package people. Its purpose is the production of prestige.2

The Prestige System
Once one accepts the prevalence of the prestige-motive, most of the otherwise strange actions of academics become quite clear. After all, why do intelligent people spend five to ten years of their lives, paying their own way, to earn the Ph.D union card necessary for a possible job whose starting salary is less than that of a New York sanitation worker? Why is a school's value judged more by the number of Nobel Prize winners it can list in its catalog than by the number or success of its students? Why is the American Council on Education's regular rating of graduate schools based on faculty peer group estimation rather than by the kinds of courses offered? Why is it that we all categorize universities according to their prestige ranking without wondering if there is any substantive basis for this ranking? Why do academics prefer to publish in low circulation journals, and literally thumb their noses at anyone who seeks a wider audience through the popular press? Why are academicians' status determined not by the courses they teach but where they teach them?

Just as the "profit-motive" has informed the analysis of our economic system, so the "prestige-motive" underlies our academic system.

Not all institutions of higher education pursue prestige down the same paths. But academia is a hierarchy and at the top the thirty or forty "major universities" set the ethos for the academic world at large. They do this through their hegemony over public attention, their connections with the private and public elites, their role as gatekeepers to the professional journals and most of all through their Ph.D.'s, who staff a preponderance of all four-year institutions. Even when these graduates commit themselves to institutions with a different purpose than those in which they were trained, they still carry with them the values of their home institutions -- institutions who measure "productivity" by publication.3

Despite myths about merit, in the prestige system "productivity" is determined not by any objective rating, but by the subjective feelings of one's disciplinary peers. What counts is not what you do but what other people think of what you do.4 In order for others to judge what you do, they must see it. They don't see teaching. How many faculty members ever visit the classroom of another. or inquire of their students as to their colleagues' pedagogical effectiveness? One must publish because that is the only way to be seen -- and hence the only way to count.

However, one's colleagues rarely see publications in journals out side their own discipline, or even their own specialty. After all, no one has time to read everything. They do see publication in those journals they read, and/or on the topics they do their own research on. Thus, where you publish and what you publish on is more important than the quality of what you say. Research on women, for example, is rarely read by male colleagues, and is largely considered to be at worse faddish, and at best narrow. Even if one has written twenty papers on extremely diverse aspects of women's existence, it is still considered to be in the same subfield and hardly comparable to five good papers on voting statistics or Melville's novels.

The topic of women aside, most disciplines are subject to their own intellectual and stylistic trends, and if one is not going with the tide, one often can be washed out. Departments quite deliberately hire and fire, in part, on what kind of research they want to support, and many young scholars have seen their careers go down the drain because they didn't fit the right category at the right time.5 The moral to this story is that one must not only publish or perish, one may also publish and perish.

One can try to opt out of this game by decisively insisting on doing one's own work regardless of the consequences. The usual results are not conducive to scholarship, feminist or otherwise. One either ends up as a research assistant finding the facts for someone else's theories, an overworked instructor in a "low-prestige" school with a teaching load so heavy one barely has time to do one's lectures let alone one's research . . . or unemployed. The continuing constriction of academic jobs does not make these prospects appear brighter in the future. It is only when faced with one of these prospects that one becomes acutely aware of why the prestige system manages to hold together.

The more prestigious places usually have the resources young scholars desperately need. Laboratories, government grants, research libraries, collegial expertise, small course loads, computers, contacts with foundations, publishers and journals, are just some of the more tangible assets. Universities get these by playing the prestige game and thus do not look favorably upon those
who violate the rules.6

It is only when one lacks the institutional supports one needs that one realizes how dependent individual scholars are upon them. The ivory tower thinkers who need only their own books and their own muses are very rare, and usually in the humanities. Because success begets success it is easier to attract even outside support if the scholar is associated with a place that has a tradition of receiving it. After all, the people who give out the grants are part of the same networks as most of those who receive them. They look after their own. Prestige is not a very mobile good, and tends to remain in its place of origin. A new school takes years to acquire a reputation, and a declining university takes years to lose one.

The Double Bind
Let us suppose the scholar is one of those fortunate few who comes equipped with most of her resources and could care less about prestige. What then? As a general rule of thumb, the lower the school on the prestige ladder, the greater the course load. Since there are only so many hours in the day, one is then faced with the onerous choice of either shortchanging one's students or shortchanging one's research. Some energetic souls can manage to do both, but most would collapse in physical exhaustion. If one does manage to work in a place with a small course load it is still difficult to be both a good teacher and a good scholar unless one has tenure.

Education is not the purpose of academia and teaching counts for little in most tenure decisions. A poor teaching reputation will be used against you by your opponents, but a good teaching reputation only makes you a threat. In their struggles to make a name for themselves, most faculty cannot afford time for students. A popular teacher becomes a standard of comparison which they cannot meet. Students begin to question why other faculty aren't as good, while they flock to the popular courses. This has roughly the same effect as the efficient factory worker has on his assembly line-known in union terms as "speed up." One can much more justifiably be satisfied with poor teaching if everyone else in the department does the same.

If one is at a school which looks on teaching favorably, the fear of "speed up" is still prevalent, but it is focused on "excessive" research (generally known as "careerism") rather than popular teaching. In these schools it is simply assumed that if one publishes frequently the time for research must be at the expense of other faculty responsibilities. This excuse is used to rid the department of productive scholars who might raise the standards for tenure.

By now it should be clear how the structure of the academic world makes it difficult to be a productive scholar of any kind outside the major universities. These universities in turn operate as exclusive clubs and by so doing define what is acceptable scholarship. Even if a woman should find herself admitted, temporarily, to some of these clubs, she is still limited in the kind of research she can pursue by the definition of what is acceptable. She must constantly defend the value of what she does to her colleagues, who do not wish to see the prestige of their department "diluted by mediocrity."
Most faculty, especially the un-tenured ones, are constantly on the defensive. Their closest colleagues are in reality their closest rivals. Much more than in graduate school, the faculty peer group is highly competitive, and rarely disposed to mutual assistance. The reason it is so competitive is that there are virtually no collective benefits from academic activities.

Prestige from research and publication accrues to the individual scholar and the department at large, but not to other scholars in the department. Grant money may support students or research assistants, but rarely colleagues. Popularity with students simply makes your colleagues look worse. In contrast, nonprestige-gaining activities, such as involvement in committee work or acceptance of difficult courses or schedules imposes burdens, but gains no credit at tenure time. It does not take too long for new faculty to see that it is not in their self interest to take on additional responsibilities.

Consequently, what faculty compete for is not prestige, which can only be conveyed from the outside, but time -- time off from heavy teaching loads, onerous courses and other departmental responsibilities. It is this time that faculty need to produce the publications that gain prestige. It is to get this time that faculty engage in the internecine warfare for which academia is notorious.

In the competition for time, women are frequently at a disadvantage. First of all, as in any hierarchy, costs and burdens are generally passed on to the lowest level, and this is where women are to be found, if at all. Secondly, because women are usually "deviant" in the faculty environment, it is difficult for them to find other faculty with common backgrounds with whom they can ally. This is somewhat alleviated in those rare departments with more than one woman. Third, and most important, the traditional attitudes and expectations about women remain. Women's scholarly achievements are simply viewed as of lesser importance than those of men; they do not bring prestige.7 Concomitantly, woman are expected, much more than men, to render service to the campus community. Doing the departmental housekeeping chores is quite consistent with their traditional role. A woman may even be hired for that purpose and not find out until it is too late.

For these reasons, women faculty tend to receive their strongest and most immediate collegial rewards from committee or student work rather than professional and publishing activity. Yet it is still the traditional double bind: those women who stick to their books and their labs are labelled "incompatible" or "uncooperative" and those who don't are dismissed when tenure time comes for insufficient publications.

The Feminist Impact
The operation of the prestige motive can be easily seen if we examine the kind of impact the women's liberation movement has had on academia. There have been basically three different kinds of demands that the movement has made. The first is for more and better jobs -- affirmative action. The second is for curricular changes -- courses on women, and even degrees for those courses. The third demand has been for a variety of fringe benefits such as gynecological care, women's centers and child care.

Starting from the proposition that an institution gives in first in those areas which either cost the least or it values the least, what has been the success of the movement? The low cost fringe benefits -- such as women's centers and feminist speakers --have often been gained. The expensive ones like child care have not been. Curricular changes have come fairly readily. It is estimated that there are several thousand women's studies courses, at least two dozen majors and eleven graduate programs in women's studies.8

Needless to say, none of the majors are at the highest prestige schools. Gains in hiring have been virtually nonexistent. The employment of female academics has increased by only one percent since affirmative action programs were instituted, and the percentage with tenure has actually decreased. Since, I suspect, the percentage of Ph.Ds who are women has increased by more than that, the net result has probably been a minus one. While the declining academic job market creates difficulty for even the best-intentioned departments, it is clear that the curriculum has been more responsive to change than have the personnel committees.

Why is this so? I suggest it is because the curriculum is where the academic world has the least at stake: The buyers of curricula are students, and students do not control prestige. Instead, by permitting or even encouraging courses on women, the university can make some very real gains. 1) They remove some of the pressure on job demands as female faculty can be hired for women's studies courses -- in new programs or with new lines --which doesn't involve telling the regular departments they must hire women. 2) It allows the universities an opportunity to attract students -- who pay tuition -- by appearing to be "with it." Course offerings are really the only place the student view counts -- as long as it doesn't require eliminating any of the established courses but only adding new ones. In this era of decreasing enrollments, many women's studies programs maintain their precarious hold on the budget by touting their large student enrollments. 3) In most cases, the real costs are often borne by the women faculty. They are the ones who have to put the time and energy in to setting up the programs or preparing the new courses. Frequently women's studies courses are taught as "overloads" in addition to the regular course load and even when they are not, they only use up the free choice course options faculty have available to them. Those faculty who teach primarily women's studies courses pay for this privilege by becoming non-persons within their original discipline. As long as the creation of new departments with their own budgets is not demanded, the formation of women's studies programs involves a lot of faculty committee work and very little money. When such new departments are created, they effectively segregate the active feminists from the rest of the faculty, and from many students.

One can readily see the significance of faculty availability to set up these programs by looking at their pattern of diffusion. Women's colleges have had many such courses for years, and they were among the first to initiate new ones in response to the demands of the feminist movement. The other origin was in the high prestige universities where most Ph.D.s are incubated. Here they were largely initiated and taught by graduate students, occasionally without pay. Some of them were taught by junior faculty women. After a couple of years, the number of women's courses in the high-prestige schools decreased and they appeared in the state colleges. Why? The graduate students graduated. The junior faculty women weren't reappointed, and both followed the traditional path of academic women into the second echelon schools, taking their courses with them.

Appointments in the regular departments on the regular lines, on the other hand, present difficulties. The faculty prerogative that is most zealously guarded is the right to make personnel decisions. The administration usually has the right -- seldom exercised -- to veto departmental recommendations but not to force its own preference upon them. Faculty are most concerned about the right to decide who shall have the prestige of associating with them, not what those people will teach. The concomitant major concern is the right to make those decisions by whatever means they wish. It is the challenge to this right that makes affirmative action investigations so threatening. Male faculty members aren't opposed to having a woman or two around -- especially in the untenured slots. What they are opposed to is having to make their decision-making procedures public.9

The reality of the matter is, that "merit" is only one of the criteria used in selecting colleagues. Having the right qualifications and the right recommendations may get one through the first elimination round to the interview stage, but that's as far as it goes. Beyond that, many purely subjective factors, centering around how well one "fits in" to the department, are primary.10 The hiring process in academia is quite similar to, and serves the same functions as, sorority "rushing" in college.

However, since under the prestige system "merit" is the only legitimate rationale, the role of the other factors cannot be publicly justified.11 Thus the real threat of affirmative action requirements is that they will force departments to "objectify" their selection procedures or to admit that they are, in fact, not objective. Neither consequence is minor. If procedures are objectified, one of the main supports of the prestige system is lost. The academic community, like similar social structures, has its own economy. This economy is based on an exchange of favors, not money. Jobs, information about openings, publication in anthologies and even in journals, participation on panels, critical reviews, ideas, and other information are among the favors that can be exchanged. Like most primitive economies these exchanges are not quid pro quo, but given or received as needed with the understanding that eventually they will be returned. One could look at the academic community as nothing more than an overlapping series of exchange networks. Needless to say, some faculty are in a position to give more favors than they need to receive. They are compensated by being accorded higher prestige. To a certain extent one shows one's importance by the number of favors one can do. Objectification of selection procedures threatens this exchange economy by removing part of the "currency."

It is therefore unlikely that the academic hiring procedures will ever be basically altered. In industry the government can pressure for affirmative action through manipulation of the "profit-motive" -- by threatening to cost a recalcitrant company money. Higher education does not operate on the profit motive and is not responsive to such threats. Indeed, the prestige motive defies manipulation because to change the hiring process is to undermine the prestige system itself.

Notes
1 Charles Horton Cooley, Life and the Student: Roadside Notes on Human Nature, Society and Letters, (New York: A. S. Knopf, 1951) p. 184.

2 A year after I first gave this paper I discovered The Academic Marketplace by Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee (New
York: Basic Books, 1958). These authors also found that prestige was the "central variable" which interpreted most of the findings in their study of the vacancy and hiring process in all the liberal arts departments of ten "major universities." While my observations were made independently of their analysis, I will cite them where pertinent. They in turn are indebted to Logan Wilson's The Academic Man: Sociology of a Profession (London: Oxford University Press, 1942). It is worth noting that "prestige" has been seen as important by independent observers for a very long time. I would like to thank Leslie R. Wolfe for having provided me with a copy of Caplow and McGee, which has long been out of print.

3 Caplow and McGee, p. 83.

4 Ibid., p. 128. "There is very little point in trying to determine how good the man really is.... What is important is what others in the discipline think of him, since that is, in large part, how good he is. Prestige ... is not a direct measure of productivity but a composite of subjective opinion."

5 Ibid., p. 91-92, 145.

6 Arthur Friedman, "Publish or Perish," The University of Chicago Record 6 (October 31, 1972), p. 105.

7 Caplow and McGee, p. 111. Numerous studies asking "objective" judges to rate the quality of scholarly articles, artistic works, vita, and other forms of "productivity" have shown that those works with female names attached to them are consistently rated inferior to the same works with male names.

8 Women's Studies Newsletter, January, 1976, p. 8.

9 One of the best examples of this fear is Richard Lester's Antibias Regulation of Universities: Faculty Problems and Their Solutions; A Report Prepared for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974). Caplow and McGee analyze the internal political reasons academic Institutions want to maintain the secrecy of their hiring process on p. 187. Many of the quotations they give us as to why a particular person was hired show a high degree of capriciousness which would be reason enough to desire secrecy.

10 Caplow and McGee, p. 133-134.

11 Ibid., p. 16 1.

This article was published in QUEST: a feminist quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 1, Summer 1979, pp. 26-36, and later translated into German. An earlier version was given as the keynote address at the Feminist Scholar conference at Montclair State College, Upper Montclair, NJ, May 16, 1974.

Reproduced here with permission from the author.

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Dan
Were you a big reader as a youngster? Is there an incident from your youth that you recall that might have been the spark towards your becoming a writer?

Marshall
I wasn’t a big reader, compared to other writer friends I have. I always had deep attachments to certain books—that old, red-covered volume of Winnie-the-Pooh first, then The Lorax, then From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler—but I don’t think I read especially widely, for a kid. But yes, I also had a third grade teacher who gave us an assignment to write a story, and who then typed up and mimeographed the story I turned in, passed it out to the class, and read it aloud. I’ve always said I decided I’d be a writer at that moment, while her voice enunciated my sentences, and I think it’s really true, even though I went through long stretches of my youth neither writing nor reading much. It was as if I’d secured a future that didn’t require my present—as if I’d decided I would be a doctor when I grew up. But then I did only apply to undergraduate colleges that offered creative writing as a major, and not surprisingly, I arrived at mine (Carnegie Mellon) a truly awful writer. I still remember a couple of my teachers there having a good, long laugh together, one day when I was a senior on the verge of graduating, about just how bad I was when they first saw me—they could recall in detail my early poems and stories, and quoting them still brought tears to their eyes.

Dan
Besides reading and writing, what aspects of pop culture (if any) grab much of your attention? For instance, growing up in Harford, CT, were you by chance a Whalers fan?

Marshall
Ah, the Whalers—you couldn’t avoid them. And in my youth, coaches Calhoun and Auriemma hadn’t yet arrived so UCONN basketball was nothing, making the Whalers all we had to cling to. I was (and remain) a huge sports fan, though hockey wasn’t a favorite. Last summer a writer for The New York Times traveled around Connecticut, interviewing people and visiting sports bars, trying to trace out the border where Yankee territory gave way to Red Sox nation, and my town was right on that line. Because my family was full of Red Sox fans (well, mostly—my mom had a crush on Mickey Mantle), I became a dire Yankee fan. I had a poster of Thurman Munson in my bedroom (and his was my first experience of death). I remain one, too. Sorry. Though with how much better your Tigers have been lately I have nothing to be sorry about. I do love pop music, too—sometimes write while listening to it.

Dan
Your debut novel, The Cottagers, came out last year. How much reviewing attention did it receive? Was it about what you expected, or a surprising amount (in either direction)?

Marshall
It was really distressing at first, because there was virtually no attention at all for many weeks. It had gotten a decent PW review, and a not-great one from Kirkus, but when it was out, nothing. After about two months the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch reviewed it, and at about three months, within maybe a two week span, there were better reviews from Esquire, The LA Times, and then the Sunday NY Times. That all came as a huge relief, because I had already resigned myself to having put out one of those books (I’d had friends with them) that slip between the cracks and simply disappear. And frankly, in the end, that was as much review attention as I’d hoped for with a novel like mine. My son was born the same week the novel came out, and that really helped: all through those quiet months, I simply didn’t have the time or energy to bathetically obsess over my utter anonymity the way I surely would have without him.

Dan
I noticed that the NY Times listed it as an Editor’s Choice – did you (or your agent perhaps) notice any bump in sales after that announcement? Or for any reviews for that matter, be they print or online?

Marshall
You know, I just don’t know how to keep track of sales well enough to tell things like that. And I love my agent, but she’s not really the type to track a book that way either (which I don’t mind). But I do know that Norton called to say they would put out the paperback of the novel about two days after the NY Times review, and I hadn’t heard from them at all in many weeks at that point. It was a two-book deal, but before that little clutch of reviews I wonder if they might have canceled the second book (much less a paperback of the novel). Or maybe I’m just being a paranoid author.

Dan
What is your take on the reduction in newspaper book pages across the country these days?

Marshall
Sadness and dismay. The usual. They’re my favorite part of any paper (well, maybe the sports pages). And I’ve lived in places—Portland, for instance—where they contribute beautifully toward creating a thriving local book culture. The success of outlets like Amazon and Borders set against that trend seems so odd to me. And what about all these book clubs and reading groups? Where will they find their books, and why isn’t their proliferation keeping those sections popular? But of course I fear—like everyone—we may be seeing the final days of newspapers in general.

Dan
Even though the book flap and blurbs announce it as such, I was still surprised by the level of suspense felt while reading The Cottagers. Did you fully intend to write this particular novel when you started out, or did it develop into the suspense driven drama through the writing?

Marshall
No, I’ve never fully intended anything I’ve written. I’m definitely a driving-at-night sort of writer: can only see as far as the cast of the headlights. And I didn’t intend to write a suspenseful book, although I agree with everything others have said on the LBC site: I love suspense, though it’s never enough on its own for me, and its promise is never what will get me to a book. But you know, I’m glad to hear that mine is suspenseful, and I’m still a little surprised when people find it particularly so since of course there’s only brief (and limited) doubt about who killed poor Nicholas. Happily surprised, since suspense was never a high priority for me while writing.

Dan
You were out and about doing some readings, I know you were invited to read in the Zell Visiting Writers Series at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Do you like to give readings? Do you have any preference for their locations when you do give them? Bookstores, universities, libraries, or bars even?

Marshall
I sometimes like to have given a reading. There’s so much more adrenalin involved there than at the desk, and it’s great when you feel like you’ve actually spoken aloud what you heard in your head. I guess I do like giving readings, although I feel like it has so little to do with writing (I’m more an alone-under-lamplight than aloud-and-together lover of literature, as consumer as well as producer). And I’ve enjoyed the very different feel of reading in a bar as opposed to a university hall or a library—I like that range—but I don’t know that I have a preference. It was great being at Michigan, though—so many warm people there, among the faculty and students, both.

Dan
You’ve also published many short stories, including seeing them in such journals as Ploughshares, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Do you prefer writing novels to short stories, or vice versa? What, to you, are the biggest similarities and the biggest differences in sitting down to each?

Marshall
So far, I seem to like writing both equally well (or dislike them equally, more often). For me, the main technical difference is simply plot—you can get away with so little of it in a story, of course, and I’m not a writer who naturally thinks in well-plotted structures. It’s something I usually have to impose. But on a more impressionistic level, the big difference for me is simply that once I get past a certain number of pages and parallel promises waiting to be kept, I can’t hold a whole novel in my head at once. I can’t sit down at the desk and hold it at arm’s length and reconsider the entire weave before getting my fingers wrapped up in the two or three threads at hand that day—the way I work on a story. And I find that very difficult, especially since when I write novels, for some reason, I’ve always been drawn to material that involves the juxtaposition and association of fairly disparate elements—connections that feel as if they won’t be made outside of a novel version of the world—but my sense of composition, frankly, isn’t always up to pulling off such a collage. So The Cottagers was the fourth novel I started and got a good distance into, and all three of the others essentially died by falling into pieces that couldn’t be satisfactorily stitched together. The various points of view in The Cottagers allowed me to work that way still, to some extent, but at least this time all the people were in the same setting, encountering one another and the same events, etc.

Dan
Your work has also been included in Best American Short Stories, I believe the first time was in 1992 for the story JunHee. What extra bit of satisfaction do you feel as the author of a story that gets included in such an anthology?

Marshall
The only time. Oh, I was so young, Dan—25 when that happened (that was also the story that was in The New Yorker) and just a year out of an MFA program. You know, I thought: well here I am. Look at me. Move over, Cheever. I wasn’t stupid enough not to know I was lucky, and I was immensely satisfied, but truthfully, it wasn’t good for my writing. It was too much too soon, and I had just been lucky with that story. Lucky in two ways: it was a better story than anything else I’d written then, but also there is simply so much luck built into all the layers of the publishing world, in my experience—only a few years later I remember re-reading that story and being appalled. It wasn’t good at all, and certainly hadn’t deserved that level of validation. I’m including it in my collection, but I had to revise it a lot to do that, and even so, I’ll include it there not so much because I still think well of it as because I feel like that collection is, for better or worse, something of a record of my development as a writer. But for a good couple of years after that success (still the high point of “exposure” for me as a writer, as perhaps it always will be), I couldn’t write anything without comparing it to “Jun Hee” or thinking about whether my editor at The New Yorker (who has long since moved on) would like it, and so I didn’t write much. All the time I wasted thinking of that silly story as a benchmark of some kind. But I probably wouldn’t have written much good fiction in those years in any case (I really was still figuring too much out), and those credits still look kind of nice in an author’s note.

Dan
You have a collection, Tyrants, due to be published. Is there a timeline for that yet? I read 2006 online somewhere (maybe the WUSTL page) but do not see anything on Amazon about it coming out.

Marshall
Yes, it’s coming out in February (2008). Thanks for asking.

Dan
The Cottagers will be coming out in paperback next month – will you be going back out to support it doing readings and the like?

Marshall
Well, Norton won’t be sending me out or anything. I’ll happily go anywhere if I’m invited.

Dan
You teach at Washington University in St. Louis, making it quite possibly the first writing program with two teachers having been nominated for the LBC Read This! Program (though I’ve not truly researched this), along with Kellie Wells. How did you come to find yourself teaching in the middle of the country (having grown up in Connecticut)?

Marshall
You know, the job was available when I was on the market, first of all. It was a program I was familiar with—I knew they’d had a good MFA going here for years—and I love the work of Stanley Elkin and William Gass. It was exciting to get to teach in their wake. When I arrived, there was only one other fiction writer—Charles Newman—who just taught one semester a year. But I really liked (still like) everyone in the English Department, and I liked that they’d let me teach literature—craft classes—as well as workshops. So I felt very fortunate to land here. Since then, yeah, Kellie Wells and Kathryn Davis have joined the program, and they’re both terrific people and good friends in addition to being writers I really admire. I think we’re all proud that we’ve kept Wash U something of a home for the kind of non-traditional narrative that Elkin and Gass made it known for (though my work is probably the most traditional of the three). And it’s taken a while, but my wife and I feel ourselves settling into the city, and certain aspects of being Midwesterners, more every year. The fact that we still pine for places like Boston or Seattle sometimes seems to have less and less to do with any dissatisfaction with Saint Louis. We like it here.

Dan
Lastly, Marshall, if you were a character in “Fahrenheit 451,” what work(s) would you memorize for posterity?

Marshall
Oh—isn’t that nice to think about. Probably Melville—passages of Moby Dick. (Bradbury probably has a character in the book quoting Ishmael among the trees? I haven’t read it since high school.) And Henry Green. I think some of those dialogues—from Loving, or Nothing, or Doting—would be weirdly sustaining, with their mix of wit, longing, and existential emptiness (I’ve always found depressing literature the most uplifting). Aren’t Elizabeth Bowen’s sentences and paragraphs often gorgeous? I’d try to hold on to all of “In the Ravine” too.

Dan
Thanks again for taking the time to answer these questions.

Marshall
Thank you, Dan—very much.

Marshall N. Klimasewiski, author of The Cottagers (Norton, 2005). He currently is a Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis.

Reproduced here with permission

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The story, moreover, begins in a realistic register in which “hot water cascaded from shiny metal taps. . . [and] steam rose, swirled, made the air around him hot and moist” (9). It is true that his grooming paraphernalia includes a razor with which he intends to slit his wrists, but the arc of the story appears to rise from this low point. After all, we first meet Odysseus sobbing on the beach when he believes that he is trapped on Calypso’s island. After all, Welling’s lover Corelle does return, and he may be ready to deal with his attraction to under-age girls. Yet all is not what it seems or what the reader expects in this world, which makes “Suicide Note” an especially effective beginning to Music for the Off-Key.

Other stories are no less surprising, although they take place in settings where one expects violent turns of events. I could imagine an Americanized version of “Sound of the Drums” or “The Great White Hate” on one of the rapper Guru’s Jazzamatazz albums with their bluntly-cut slices of life in Brooklyn. The second story in the collection, “Double Room,” is set in a mysterious luxury hotel where the desk clerk, Serena, pursues a young man who appears to be a female CEO’s plaything. “Gold,” the third story, concerns the baffling dynamic between Laramie, a homeless Black man, and Blaine, a jewellery store clerk. She befriends him, even to the point of bringing him to her apartment, but then throws him out when she learns that he has stolen some rings, a crime for which she had lost her job. Laramie then returns to the streets where he and his dog, Styler, become the victims of random violence. Also intriguing is “The Child Who Wished,” a story about Ebi, an African child who, knowing little or no English, becomes the victim of bullies but then avenges himself. Even when Newland’s stories end in redemption or release, as in “Flight of Freedom” or “Healing Hands,” their endings shock and startle.

A second way of reading the stories is through the characters. They are simultaneously inscrutable yet sympathetic, inviting the reader’s scrutiny yet resisting simple categorization. Welling, of course, fascinated me. Similarly, I returned to “The Child Who Wished” in order to revisit the last image of Ebi “his brow furrowed, concentrating on Fox with all the might that he possessed” (93). Ebi is a sturdy, sympathetic child, and when he fights back against the bullies who attack him, I want him to fight them off. However, I wonder, when he glares at Fox after Lance’s sudden death whether he has become a bully himself. Indeed, he calls Fox, a mixed-race child, a “curiosity” more than once. This complexity also appears in stories that are more slice of life and less plot-driven. Even though “All Crew”’s Barray is unable to resist or even analyze his desire to avenge his best friend’s murder, he is still very much aware of the effect that he has had on his teenaged sister, Lauren, who bullies her younger siblings, denying them milk for their cereal. I would add that, for the most part, Newland’s female characters seem more mysterious than his male characters, perhaps with the exception of “Double Room”’s Serena or “All Crew”’s Lauren. Even after a rereading of these stories, I do wonder what Blaine sees in Larimer, and certainly Welling could be more suspicious of Corelle when she returns to him.

A third way of reading the stories is through their settings. These are very much British stories. A boy is killed on the High Street rather than on Main Street or a parkway. A young man isolates himself in his flat rather than in his apartment. Dialogue is also important to the stories and may be a barrier if you are not used to working-class British accents. I must admit that reading “All Crew” and Suzanne’s dialogue in “Suicide Note” became a little easier after I had listened to Lily Allen’s cockney-accented music a few times. Newland’s Britain is also part of the globalized world. Ebi has just arrived from Africa to live with his mother. Not improbably, his father is working in America, and just as he had in Nigeria, Ebi has eba and egusi soup for dinner. In another story, “Smile, Mannequin Smile,” the British protagonist lived in Japan after having left her hippie husband and graduated from art school. As a result, this country and its culture represents emotional and erotic freedom for her, in turn motivating her actions. Many of the characters belong to what is known as youth culture. This blend of local specificity and global inclusiveness has become more and more common, and now when it appears to be absent, one remarks on this as I realize every time my husband joins me at my parents’ in Maine. Music for the Off-Key, being a product of this blend of the local and the global, draws on it to create a world that is not limited to realism’s register and, for this reason, continues to be fresh and intriguing.

Music for the Off-Key: Twelve Macabre Short Stories
by Courttia Newland.
Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 2006. £8.99

Originally published on Potomac Review. Repoduced here with permission.

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Between 1998 and 2000, the labor force participation of women with babies under the age of 1 dropped for the first time in more than 30 years, falling from 59 percent to 55 percent. Then, between 2000 and 2004, the labor force participation of mothers with preschoolers also fell.

Ever since, feminists, anti-feminists and "post"-feminists have been debating the implications of this so-called "opt-out revolution." Some rejoice that career women are finally embracing their inner housewife and using their education in the service of full-time parenting. Others are dismayed, warning women they will jeopardize future earnings and independence by retreating to the home. And still others maintain that because only affluent women can afford to stay home full-time with their children, we need to help the wives of low-income husbands to stay home too.

Much of this debate is based upon false assumptions about who stays home and why, according to a study just released by researchers associated with the Council on Contemporary Families. The highest concentration of full-time homemakers in America is found among women married to low-earning men, while highly educated wives are increasingly likely to combine work and motherhood.

Long-range trends in the United States and the rest of the industrial world suggest that there has been a fundamental, irreversible revolution in the relationship between women and work. Countries that still organize their work life and social policies around the ideal of a male breadwinner providing for a stay-at-home wife will sooner or later have to face up to this reality.

Since 1970, the involvement of women in the paid labor force has increased dramatically throughout the industrial world. In some countries, the obstacles to combining motherhood with paid employment are still so daunting that mothers must withdraw from the labor force for several years. But far from encouraging a revival of male-breadwinner families, this situation accelerates other types of family change.

For example, in Japan and Italy, the age of marriage has reached new highs and birth rates have plummeted: Single women increasingly postpone marriage and childbirth because they cannot combine motherhood with the work they have come to see as an important part of their lives. One Italian demographer says that "women no longer give up work for the family; on the contrary, they give up having children in order to have a job." Americans may agonize about whether it's good for society to have so many working moms, but family researchers in Japan, Italy and Singapore worry much more about having so many working non-mothers.

France and the United States, where many more mothers hold down full-time jobs, have much higher birth rates than Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain, where it is harder for mothers to work outside the home. But because America, unlike France, does not provide universal and high-quality preschool, low-income mothers in the United States often cannot afford to work. Their participation in paid labor is much lower than that of middle- and high-income mothers, whose employment rates remain at world historic highs.

In the United States, the labor force participation of mothers with preschool-age children tripled between 1960 and 1990, rising from 20 percent to 60 percent. According to Stanford researcher Paula England, the workforce participation of mothers continued to rise during the 1990s, but at a much slower rate, so that by 2000, "only" 65 percent of mothers of preschoolers were working. So the slight dip in employment of moms with babies under 1could simply mean that some mothers were taking the timeouts that are legally guaranteed to all mothers in most other industrial countries, and then going back to work.

Between 2000 and 2004, the labor force participation of mothers with children under 5 did drop slightly, from 65 to 64 percent - possibly, says economist Heather Boushey, because of a recession that saw a drop in the labor force participation of non-mothers as well. But whatever the reason, the figure was back up to 65 percent by 2006. As England says, "This is hardly an opt-out revolution."

Some believe that the opt-out revolution would become a reality if more women could afford to stay home. But this hope is based on another misconception. The women most likely to become stay-at-home moms today are in fact the ones whose husbands can least afford to support a family. Women whose husbands' earnings are in the bottom 25 percent are the only sector of the population where full-time mothers outnumber those who combine paid work with parenting. Fifty-two percent of these wives are out of the paid labor force, compared with only 20 percent of wives whose husbands' earnings are in the middle range.

Many American women, then, are full-time homemakers because they cannot afford to work. They do not have the education or job experience to earn a salary that would cover the costs of child care or transportation, even though the family could really use a second income.

In families where men earn $60,000 to $120,000 a year, 72 percent of mothers work outside the home. When you get to husbands in the top 5 percent - men who earn more than $120,000 a year - 40 percent of moms stay home, presumably by choice. But even in this rarified income bracket, 60 percent of mothers work outside the home, although their families could clearly get by on their husbands' earnings. And those who stay home often do so because their husbands' high earnings require such long workweeks that no family functions would get done at all if the wife did not stay home to organize them.

Highly educated women are more likely to combine work with motherhood than less-educated women, and this is even more true today than in 1980, at the height of the feminist movement. As of 2006, England reports, 77 percent of mothers with college degrees were employed, compared to 71 percent of mothers with high school degrees, and just 52 percent of mothers without a high school degree. Given that women are now a majority of those who earn college degrees, it is unlikely that we will see a decrease in the labor force participation of mothers in the coming decades.

Women are in the workforce to stay. Where employers and policy-makers refuse to accommodate women's desire to combine work and family, we see one of two outcomes: Either women stop having babies, as in Italy or Japan, or, as in the United States, many women who need to work can't afford to (because of expensive and uneven-quality child care) and many women who want to work feel guilty about the choices they are forced to make.

Stephanie Coontz teaches history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and wrote "Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage." Copyright 2007, Hartford Courant.

Reproduced here with permission.

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Many of our choices are conscious. They are the simple choices such as; “I prefer a black car to a green car, so I am buying the black car.”

Many of our choices are unconscious. They represent those areas of our lives where we feel disenchanted, disappointed, empty, frustrated, and unfulfilled. Our heads may tell us one thing, such as: “I have to stay in this job to pay my bills” when in reality, we dread facing our workday each morning.

Other areas of unconscious choices lie in the area of unfulfilled relationships. The kind of people we share our time with. The type of romantic relationships we have. There is only one way to tell if it is your conscious mind, or unconscious beliefs, that created these choices for you: Ask yourself how deeply fulfilled you feel with those people.

Do you feel supported, nurtured, respected, valued, honored, cared for and loved? Or do you feel drained, taken for granted, hurt, depleted, disrespected and used?

Your greatest truth lies in your heart. You KNOW the answer. That answer creates the dawn of your opportunity to replace an unfulfilled life with a fulfilled one. It creates a tremendous growth opportunity. The growth opportunity of your life! Who you are, who surrounds you what you have, what you would prefer to have, and most importantly what you deserve, are all chosen by YOU.

It takes tremendous courage to face your deepest truth. For most people, myself included, it takes a paradigm shift. Your paradigm is your general view of something. If you think certain people who comprise a certain portion of the population are not good, your paradigm will shift when you meet someone of that exact group of people who shows you that they are not ALL that way. THAT is a paradigm shift.

What about how YOU are? What is your general view of you? For me, it took untold heartache, countless hours of therapy, and deep self questioning before I found the inner courage to align my conscious thoughts (I deserve the best) with my unconscious belief that I was not worth much at all. Guess which belief was running the show? It was the unconscious one. The belief that I was not worth that much brought me the circumstances that showed me what I was tolerating, relative to what I could have.

Once your unconscious beliefs are brought to light, or come up to the surface, they dissipate. When that happens, a deep and positive inner shift takes place.

You have grown. No longer will you live any area of your life where you feel you are treated like dirt. You will only work in the type of job you absolutely love. You will only be in a relationship where you are treated beautifully.

You will also feel worthy enough to extend yourself to others with an open heart, without having a fear that you will be hurt. You will feel strong, confident and much more of the REAL you.

The real you is relative to those parts of your life that do not feel like they truly belong. What kind of company do you keep? Do you hang out with criminals or people who help uplift humanity? Which do you really prefer deep within?

Do you have a spouse or lover who adores you, or one who treats you like garbage? Which do you prefer? This is the relativity of your life.

All of our choices, both conscious and unconscious, lie in our self worth. Look at your life and you will find the indicator of your self worth.

It is a deep, transformative process to uproot the unconscious beliefs that have created pain in our lives. As your beliefs about yourself change, so too will your life change.

It is all relative to what lies within. You will know when you have grown. Your outer life will mirror your inner life in a healthier, more positive and life enhancing way.

It may be scary, however, choosing the best will show you the real truth: that you ARE the best. Relative to the old you, the changes in your life will be profound. It will feel like a whole new life. The life you DESERVE to live.

Barbara Rose, Ph.D. is the bestselling author of thirteen books and a world leading expert in personal transformation, and spiritual awakening. She is a pioneering force in incorporating Higher Self Communication, the nondenominational study and integration of humanity’s God Nature into modern personal growth and spiritual evolution. Dr. Rose is known for providing life changing answers, quick practical coaching and deep spiritual wisdom to people worldwide as the Founder of Institute of Higher Self Communication. Visit her website here.

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I prefer an accommodating vice to an obstinate virtue.
—Moliere

Kill a man and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.
—Jean Rostand

The silence of the stars is silence of creation and re-creation.
—Chet Raymo

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