Friday's too-Forgotten Stories: Wilma Shore: further short fiction and more from STORY, THE NEW YORKER, and THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, et al.

On Wilma Shore on Sweet Freedom.

Wilma Shore: 

"The Butcher" Story, November/December 1940; 
can be read online in Women Working, edited by Nancy Hoffman and Florence Howe (The Feminist Press/McGraw-Hill 1979)

The following four short stories (and a very brief "casual") can be read online, but behind a paywall, at The New Yorker Online:

80 * The Curving Road (ss) The New Yorker, June 12, 1948

26 * Wilma Shore and E. J. Kahn, Jr.* The New Yorker, December 4, 1948: 

The Talk of the Town: "West Coast Intelligence: A nursery school has opened in Los Angeles, called the Tot-orium." * jk/cl

The Ostrich Farm, (ss) The New Yorker Mar 12 1949; Short Story Magazine (Australia) #71 1950

The Moon Belongs to Everyone, (ss) The New Yorker Aug 27 1949; Short Story Magazine (Australia) #70 1950

Lock, Stock, and Barrel, (ss) The New Yorker Jul 15 1950; Short Story Magazine (Australia) #78 1951

and...free of charge...

80 * Dress from Bergdorf’s (Shore's preferred title: "All Sales Final" --see the review of her collection Women Should Be Allowed here) (ss) Cosmopolitan Jun 1959, which can be read online here

May Your Days Be Merry and Bright, (ss) The Saturday Evening Post Dec 21/28 1963 (which can be read online here)

A Bulletin from the Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Research at Marmouth, Mass., (ss) The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Aug 1964 (which can be read online here)

Goodbye Amanda Jean, (ss) Galaxy Science Fiction Jul 1970 (which, as cited previously, can be read online here)

Is It the End of the World?, (ss) The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Mar 1972 (which can be read online here)

The Podiatrist’s Tale, (ss) The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Apr 1977 (which can be read online here)
...and some nonfiction, from The Writer's Handbook, 1974 edition (online here) "The Hand is Quicker Than the I" (Shore on the uses of first-person narrative form, among an appropriately star-studded cast in the how-to essay anthology.)

Encouraging the reading of Wilma Shore's frequently brilliant fiction (among other writing) is an ongoing concern of this blog, and in the pursuit of that goal, I finally purchased a discounted six week subscription trial to The New Yorker (50% discount code, courtesy of Jackie Kashian's podcast The Dork Forest, is "DORK") so as to allow me online access to the four TNY stories grouped above, while also refreshing my memory of the two latter-day The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction stories (I can only assume that Edward Ferman at F&SF was offered the viciously unnerving "Goodbye, Amanda Jean" but for whatever foolish reason didn't accept it, so that it appeared in Ejler Jakobsson's Galaxy instead). 

"The Butcher" (in Story magazine in 1940) was Shore's second published story, but the first one she liked, as did the editor of Best Stories annual (soon to become, and remain today, The Best American Short Stories series), which demonstrates the early and continuing concern Shore had with the constrictions of traditional roles on men and particularly women; her idealistic and very competent young office worker is as certain she's ready to be an ideal wife as she is an utterly competent and conscientious stenographer, for all practical purposes the only profession a woman can expect to have in New York City in 1940 aside from teaching school. But, somehow, even with an appreciative and reasonably sensitive husband...domestic work at home isn't quite what she hoped it might be. And she couldn't tell you why. As the daughter of an accomplished writer, who dropped out of a California high school to study painting in France and be praised as a budding genius in that field by Gertrude Stein's brother, and then putting aside painting to be the wife of a failing actor, and mother of their child while still very young...one can see where the story might have some autobiographical resonance. 

Eight years later, when the first of Shore's New Yorker stories is published, she has a firmer grip on her tools, can work in the disparities of class as well as the hemming in of sexual assignments in detailing a reunion between a young woman and her former family maid, once a friend as well as servant, now far enough removed from her former ward's life that the latter, also, can't quite put her finger on why their last encounter feels hollow in comparison to their easy interaction when the elder woman worked for the young woman's family...at least not at the time, but, as the former Miss looks back on it a few more years later, she understands better. 

"The Ostrich Farm" deals with family dynamics of a rather more heated sort, as a boundary-free mother and her overdependent daughter don't realize there's any other way to act in regard to each other and their respective husbands. This one, and the two later stories sold to Harold Ross's magazine, are notable compared to Shore's women's and little/radical magazine stories in the degree to which the men are far more in the foreground of the stories...for TNY is about Important Matters, the kind that feature Men, doncha know, in these early but still pretty influential issues of the magazine, where the at times apparently bumptious Ross could express utter confusion in most dealings with women (his successor in the chair would famously hide from everyone). 

But "The Moon Belongs to Everyone", while written from the viewpoint of a male protagonist, still manages to have a gentler if no less wrenching emotional underpinning, where it's less the assignment of roles by society that can be constricting so much as those driven by tragedy...as when a young family, with an infant and a boy on the cusp of adolescence, loses their wife and mother suddenly. And the sense of compromises acquiesced to in the face of tragedy and need, and difficulties in fully overcoming those challenges, taking their toll. 

And by "Lock, Stock and Barrel", the wry sense of humor Shore brings to her best work is in full flower, while no less deftly drawing the predicament of the man who can't quite understand how or why his marriage has failed, and how he tries to come to grips with that fact...or, perhaps more accurately, tries very hard not to. 

These are all good stories, if not quite up to those Shore would collect from her slightly later writing for Women Should Be Allowed, her only published collection...and presumably one delivered to her book publisher about the same time as she contributed to Avram Davidson's Fantasy & Science Fiction "A Bulletin from the Trustees...", her first overt sf story, or at very least her first story for the speculative fiction magazines, and discussed in the earlier posts. Following the savage satire of "Goodbye, Amanda Jean", "Is It the End of the World?" is only a bit less (obviously) apocalyptic, dealing as it does with environmental (mostly atmospheric) degradation so profound that it might well kill us all at any time during the events of the story, but that doesn't mean that the small power-struggles and mutual dependences of family life are any less distracting from that greater danger, and how people will tolerate and adapt to almost any threat in the face of the "need" to simply get to where they want to meet, for one small purpose or another, and on time.

And while "Amanda Jean" and "End" certainly could qualify this post for consideration as entries in the February is Women in Horror Fiction Month observations, "The Podiatrist's Tale", a grimly amusing ghost story, helps clinch the deal...this might not be the last short story Shore published, but I'm not yet aware of another after 1977, and it deals with how the vicissitudes of aging might not be relieved even after death...

Even as we lost another writer not too unlike Wilma Shore in her sensitivity, craft, insight and wit, and bubbling-under influence, Carol Emshwiller, this past Saturday at age 97, with her daughter Susan and son Peter/"Stoney" announcing the fact on Tuesday. Emshwiller, who also had a not to too dissimilar life from Shore's beyond their literary work in some ways, not least in terms of engagement with the community of the avant garde in several artforms, followed such other recently-lost peers as Ursula Le Guin, Kit Reed, Grania Davis and Kate Wilhelm...and inasmuch as I attempted to write up her brilliant first collection Joy in Our Cause a few years back while staying in a hotel in Barre, Vermont, with wonky computer access and there to attend the memorial service for one of the last of my aunts, my father's sister Shirley, it might be past time for a better try. For Emshwiller, too, is perhaps not fully appreciated enough for what she contributed, sometimes obliquely, to modern horror, as well...while writing primarily surreal or satirical or metafictional work, in the modes of contemporary/mimetic fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and even in two innovative western novels.

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's reviews.

• The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: 20th Series
• Editor: Edward L. Ferman
•  Cartoons • interior artwork by Gahan Wilson
• 1 • Shaffery Among the Immortals • (1972) • short story by Frederik Pohl
• 21 • A Different Drummer • (1971) • short story by Raylyn Moore
• 40 • The Deathbird • (1973) • novelette by Harlan Ellison
• 75 • Born to Exile • [Tales of Alaric the Minstrel] • (1971) • novelette by Phyllis Eisenstein
• 112 • Thus Love Betrays Us • (1972) • short story by Phyllis MacLennan
• 133 • The Animal Fair • (1972) • novelette by Alfred Bester
• 179 • Is It the End of the World? • (1972) • short story by Wilma Shore
• 191 • The Bear with the Knot on His Tail • [Stardust (Stephen Tall)] • (1971) • novelette by Stephen Tall
• 231 • Birdlime • (1971) • short story by B. L. Keller
• 241 • The Problem of Pain • [Avalon (Technic Civilization)] • (1973) • novelette by Poul Anderson
• 265 • Sooner or Later or Never Never • [Reverend Crispin Mobey] • (1972) • novelette by Gary Jennings

FFB: THE WOMEN WHO WALK THROUGH FIRE edited by Susanna J. Sturgis (Crossing Press 1990)

from liberation: a magazine for freedom issue 0/(in*sit) issue 4.5, Summer 1993 (review written in 1990)

An impressive anthology, a sequel to Memories and Visions, reviewed last issue, and like V. 1 mostly new fiction with a few reprints mixed in. At least four stories here are about as good as they can be: the brilliant Rachel Pollack's "The Girl Who Went to the Rich Neighborhood" (a fairy tale in a modern urban setting), J. L. Comeau's hard-edged, violent contemporary horror "Firebird", and two stories which draw on Polynesian and Native American mythology, Eleanor Arnason's "A Ceremony of Discontent" and Carol Severance's "Shark-Killer". Cathy Hinga Haustein's "Earth and Sky Woman" is also very good, but it's realistic, not fantastic, and apparently was included on the strength of being about a scientist. G. K. Sprinkle's "Road Runner", Deborah H. Fruin's "New Age Baby" and Ruth Shigezawa's "Hills of Blue, an Orange Moon" are all well-handled "small" stories, by which I mean they don't invest as much in their subplots or resonances as the best stories here. Good, flawed stories include "The Forbidden Words of Margaret A." by L. Timmel Duchamp (it posits a quarantine on an Angela Davis-analog; fortunately or not, the U.S. takes more subtle measures against most of its dissidents than do most of its puppet satellites, which Duchamp credits with inspiring this story; even as an allegory for the lack of access most U.S. citizens have to dissident views, the story comes off as heavy-handed); Elaine Bergstrom's "Net Songs" (yet another tyranny overthrown by one bold individual, but AIDS-angst well-channeled); Lucy Sussex's "My Lady Tongue" (which [seemed to me at the time] to be afraid to endorse lesbian separatism more out fear of offense than actual conviction); and Phyllis Ann Karr's "Night of the Short Knives", which strikes me as a minor Frostflower and Thorn story [Karr's sword & sorcery series]--likewise Ginger Simpson Curry's "Sahrel Short Swords" has several imaginative touches but is a too-familiar tale. Nonetheless, all of these repay the reader well; less satisfactory, if still readable, are Rosalind Warren's fannish joke "The Inkblot Test", Merrill Mushroom's "Mamugrandae--the Second Tale" (just as overly cute as the author's handle might suggest), and Cleo Kozol's "Picnic Days", which would've fit well into the back pages of the late 1950s Galaxy magazine as an example of heartfelt, playful, but ultimately bootless "comic inferno" satire. This book is definitely worth owning; the best work sings, and the least hums along well enough.

for more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

from the Locus index of sf:

The Women Who Walk Through Fire: Women’s Fantasy & Science Fiction Vol. 2 ed. Susanna J. Sturgis (The Crossing Press 0-89594-419-7, Sep ’90 [Oct ’90], $9.95, 275pp, tp, cover by Beth Avery) Anthology of 16 sf and fantasy stories by women, ten original, with an introduction by the editor. A hardcover edition (-420-0) was announced, but not seen.

• 1 · Introduction · Susanna J. Sturgis · in
• 12 · Earth and Sky Words · Cathy Hinga Haustein · ss *
• 23 · The Inkblot Test · Rosalind A. Warren · ss *
• 27 · New Age Baby · Deborah H. Fruin · ss *
• 34 · Night of the Short Knives · Phyllis Ann Karr · ss *
• 53 · The Forbidden Words of Margaret A. · L. Timmel Duchamp · nv Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine Issue 8, ed. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Pulphouse, 1990
• 76 · Road Runner · G. K. Sprinkle · ss *
• 85 · Picnic Days · Cleo Kocol · ss *
• 93 · Net Songs · Elaine Bergstrom · ss *
• 111 · Shark-Killer · Carol Severance · nv The Dragon Feb ’88
• 132 · Firebird · J. L. Comeau · nv *
• 162 · A Ceremony of Discontent · Eleanor Arnason · ss Room of One’s Own v6 #1&2 ’81
• 173 · Mamugrandae—The Second Tale · Merrill Mushroom · ss Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, 1982
• 182 · The Girl Who Went to the Rich Neighborhood · Rachel Pollack · ss Beyond Lands of Never, ed. Maxim Jakubowski, Allen & Unwin, 1984
• 194 · Sahrel Short Swords · Ginger Simpson Curry · ss *
• 208 · My Lady Tongue · Lucy Sussex · na Matilda at the Speed of Light, ed. Damien Broderick, Angus & Robertson: Australia, 1988
• 256 · Hills of Blue, an Orange Moon · Ruth Shigezawa · ss *
• 268 · Contributors’ Notes · Misc. · bg *

FFB: MEMORIES AND VISIONS: WOMEN'S FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION edited by Susanna J. Sturgis (Crossing Press 1989)

From (in•sit), Summer 1990: "'Other'nesses"

Fantastic fiction has an obvious appeal to those who dislike the current state of affairs; those who are oppressed can play with notions of other ways of living, while those who are savagely oppressed can have a wider range of metaphor to express their outrage and joy (when expressing same nakedly wouldn't be wise). Hence, this volume: an anthology of original fantasy, sf and surrealist fiction by women [I didn't know at the time, and I think it's not mentioned on the copyrights page, that one story apparently had a previous or perhaps nearly simultaneous publication; see index below]. 

Memories and Visions features few familiar bylines [in 1990]; only R. M. Meluch has had a novel published by a major commercial house, and only Lorraine Schein and Kiel Stuart have sold much to the magazines devoted to various sorts of fantastic fiction. This is a collection devoted mostly to newer writers, or writers just beginning to play with fantastic motifs. In her funny and informative introduction, Susanna Sturgis notes the difficulties she had, during her tenure as book-buyer for DC's feminist bookstore Lammas, in generating customer interest in speculative fiction: "Some were already converted, some were willing to try, but many more were not even tempted by the well-drawn women characters and feminist themes, even lesbian love stories, of [Elizabeth] Lynn, [Marion Zimmer] Bradley, [Ursula K.] Le Guin, [Suzy McKee] Charnas and [Joanna] Russ, among others, [in mass-market paperbacks] at cover prices roughly a third of the trade paperback alternatives. 'I don't read science fiction,' was the explanation. 'It's too unbelievable. I can't deal with spaceships and elves.' [Ah, the elves of sf...or was that the cattle-rustlers of sports novels?] They bought lesbian romances instead.

"I could recommend plenty of titles with neither spaceships nor elves, and as to 'unbelievable'...Well, did you hear the one about the beautiful, brilliant woman with no apparent income who runs off to a secluded resort with an equally beautiful but shy, recently divorced woman, has perfect sex on the first try, and lives happily ever after?"

The stories range from very straightforward sf through allegorical surfiction to humorous fantasy. Caro Clarke's "The Rational Ship" is a solidly traditional space opera with high-tech overtones in form, though definitely not so in incident: a spaceship captain pilots her ship over long distances with the help of a "writer", another woman, who devises a scenario for the entire crew to grapple with telepathically as they go about their tasks--particularly the captain herself, who engages sexually with the writer, as a matter of course, necessity and grudging pleasure during the subjectively brief trip. Charlotte Watson Sherman's "Killing Color" is a horror story about racial murder and related diversions in the Old South; "The Harmonic Conception" by Nona M. Caspers is probably the funniest story in the book, about a lesbian living in an all-woman household who finds herself the victim of immaculate conception. Schein's "The Chaos Diaries" is meta-cyberpunk. Not everything here is as adept as everything else, and some of the best work is toward the middle of the volume, not the typical anthologist's trick, but the fourteen-story (including a set of novel excerpts, and a free-verse poem as last contribution) collection swings.

To read this book online, see the Internet Archive "library" here. It's also easily available secondhand; only the Laurell Hamilton story seems to have been reprinted so far (she's certainly seen the most commercial success among the contributors)...I don't see evidence of the novel the Shirley Hartwell excerpts are taken from being published, either. 

The Locus Index to the volume (the ISFDB index linked on the title):

Memories and Visions: Women’s Fantasy & Science Fiction ed. Susanna J. Sturgis (The Crossing Press 0-89594-391-3, Sep ’89, $9.95, 201pp, tp) Anthology of 15 feminist sf and fantasy stories, with an introduction by the editor. Also announced in hardcover (-392-1) but not seen.

• 1 · Editorial Memories & Visions, or Why Does a Bright Feminist Like You Read That Stuff Anyway? · Susanna J. Sturgis · in
• 10 · The Chaos Diaries · Lorraine Schein · ss *
• 16 · Itu’s Sixth Winter Festival [excerpts from Daughters of Gelasia] · Shirley Hartwell · ex *
• 30 · Womankind · Rosaria Champagne · ss *
• 36 · The Rational Ship · Caro Clarke · ss *
• 45 · The Amazing Disappearing Girl · Judith Katz · ss *
• 58 · Killing Color · Charlotte Watson Sherman · ss Obsidian II Spr ’89
• 72 · O’s Story · L. Timmel Duchamp · ss *
• 92 · Conversation with a Legend · R. M. Meluch · ss *
• 102 · Signs of Life · Barbara Krasnoff · nv *
• 132 · A Token for Celandine [Nightseer] · Laurell K. Hamilton · ss *
• 152 · Harmonic Conception · Nona M. Caspers · ss *
• 161 · Children of Divers Kind · Mary Ellen Mathews · ss *
• 175 · Meaningful Dialog · Kiel Stuart · ss *
• 182 · Sign of Hope · Adrienne Lauby · ss *
• 197 · womanmansion/to my sister/mourning her mother/ · Hattie Gossett · pm *
• 203 · Contributors’ Notes · Misc. · bg

Sturgis would go on to edit two more anthologies, mixing new and reprinted fiction, for Crossing Press, which would fold not too long after publishing both The Women Who Walk Through Fire: Women’s Fantasy & Science Fiction Vol. 2 (1990) and Tales of Magic Realism By Women: Dreams in a Minor Key (1991), both also recommended. Sturgis has continued to work as an editor and to publish fiction and nonfiction of her own, but has not assembled any further anthologies. 

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog. (And buy her new book!)

FFB: THE SPITBOY RULE: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band by Michelle Cruz Gonzales (PM Press 2016)

Spitboy was a feminist, all-women hardcore punk rock band in the 1990s notable for being one of those bands, and perhaps the one most widely respected in the hardcore punk community within the punk subculture, who didn't consider themselves a part of Riot Grrl, which was developing in the same years Spitboy and its successor band Instant Girl flourished, largely focused at first around the bands with roots in Olympia, Washington, including Bikini Kill. As Michelle Gonzales notes several times in her memoir here, Spitboy's members felt they were women rather than girls or even grrls, and they didn't feel like recording the more pop-influenced music, or the lyrics exorcizing childhood/early adolescent demons, most of the RG bands favored...a rift that wasn't mended any when one of the more prominent Riot Grrls accused Spitboy of "cultural appropriation" for calling their third released record, an EP ("extended play" multi-song 7" vinyl disc), Mi cuerpo es mio ("My body is mine")...a not atypically white young RG woman, from an economically comfortable background, looking at Spitboy and not fully seeing Gonzales among them, a Mexican American from a small, mostly run-down and impoverished small town in Southern California. Perhaps "thrown" by Gonzales going by her punk-scene nickname "Todd"...

When I heard and saw Gonzales's reading and presentation of her memoir at an anarchist book fair, in the video above, it certainly augmented what I'd known about Todd the drummer, singer (usually backup, or co-lead on the songs she wrote) and general presence in the bands she was in when I was an appreciative fringer in the harDCore scene in Washington in the '80s and '90s, and a dj doing a show called Sweet Freedom, with my then womanfriend Donna Wilson and later solo, first at WGMU-AM, the college station at George Mason University, then at WCXS (later WEBR), the community cable access radio/web radio also in Fairfax County in the DC suburbs (and briefly after my relocation on WPPR-FM in Philadelphia). 

As a kid, Gonzales had loved Annie Ross's "Twisted", as performed by Joni Mitchell, and had been inspired to take up guitar, then drums, by the Go-Go's originally, after playing flute in school bands...I could certainly relate to that, though I played the trombone she was glad to have not picked up and lugged around. While I still lived in the DC burbs in Virginia, I met Adrienne Droogas, the lead singer of the band, a couple of times (though on both occasions Droogas seemed depressed and withdrawn, and I didn't seek to intrude...according to Gonzales, this was not the usual case with Adrienne, perhaps the most social of the band's members--and down possibly because she was leaving the band, leading to their name change to Instant Girl), but never met Todd/Michelle, though did see her with the band on a couple of occasions.  In her book, she mentions several times how insecure she usually felt about her looks, particularly in the largely white punk scene and in an otherwise all-white band, and would assume the only reason men she didn't know in the punk scene might be attracted to her was her playing in her bands, Bitch Fight and Kamala and the Karnivores before Spitboy and Instant Girl. She was incorrect, but it felt true at the time, apparently. 

The book is a collection of essays, rather than a continuous narrative, so Instant Girl is barely mentioned at all, as is just a passing note that Spitboy had relocated from the San Francisco Bay Area to DC, perhaps just before Droogas dropped out, and not for long, as far as I know (I should look into this)(amusingly, Bikini Kill also relocated to the DC area for several years...thanks to Dischord Records and other, often related factors, such as Positive Force DC, the dc space and 9:30 Club concert venues, and a thriving scene, DC was for a while comparable to the Bay Area as a punk Mecca). But the recurring themes run to Gonzales coming to grips with various sorts of chauvinism--sexism faced alone and with her bands, racism within and outside the punk community, sometimes subtler than others, ethnicitism even among the Hispanic members of the punk community and even just the occasional awkwardness of being the only Xicana in a band otherwise made up of white women--mixed in with the camaraderie she usually feels with her bandmates and others in punk community, how often they would startle those who knew them for their fierce sound and to some extent look, their willingness to call out bad behavior from the stage and their uncompromising lyrics, that they were friendly women who would prefer to play Travel Scrabble between sets to getting drunk and Fucking Shit Up. Also noted: the pitstop perils of menstrual synch-up while touring by van, adventures in screen-printing t-shirts, not worrying about Punk Points and listening to and singing along with Liz Phair on the cd player in the vans on those tours, and more individualized matters such as how much fellow-feeling she had with Linda Ronstadt, in a way Gonzales could relate to trying to recapture her own family cultural legacy performing songs in Spanish with lyrics Ronstadt could barely understand when younger. Not too much kiss and tell, and what there is is charming. And the last thing she expected from their Japan tour, toward the end of the band's run, was to find herself widely accepted and reasonably comfortable in the country...even when first disembarking at the airport, she was seen by a number of small children as being Disney's Pocahontas in the flesh.

It's a good book, and mostly won't leave the reader adrift even if unfamiliar with the punk scene in the '80s/'90s...I do wonder about a few matters, though. Mostly how the Instant Girl experience went...

Perhaps their most famous single song...


The first song, instigated primarily by Todd/Gonzales, written by Spitboy:


In concert:

FFB: PULLING OUR OWN STRINGS: FEMINIST HUMOR & SATIRE edited by Gloria Kaufman and Mary Kay Blakely (Indiana University Press 1980)

This 1980 volume somewhat unsurprisingly gathers materials from the 1970s and earlier...one might be surprised by the eclecticism of those materials, including short stories, essays, novel excerpts and others from longer works, one-panel cartoons, comic strips, poetry, quip quotations, letters to editors of various publications, transcripts of a couple of standup duo Pat Harrison and Robin Tyler's comedy routines, and songs, some with the actual sheet music included along with the lyrics. C0-editor Gloria Kaufman in her introduction draws a distinction between what she sees as "female humor" and feminist humor: the former is usually full of bitterness, as it is mostly about the impossibility of the improvement of women's plight in society, and if anything celebrates working around while accepting rather than working against traditional limitations, while feminist humor is predicated on the possibility of change for the better, for liberation and equality, and highlights the absurdity of misogyny as well as its not at all necessary evil; Mary Kay Blakely in her introduction notes that feminist humor is often tasked with being the only humor of an oppressed group that really shouldn't ever hurt anyone's feelings in any way, and the impossibility of that task. While some of what is collected here, being satire and other comedy from a disadvantaged group and the wits within that group and their sympathizers, is at times bitter or angry, that's justified, and not all of it is by any means...a fair amount of whimsey and gentle observation appear alongside, or even within the same works.

In large format, and with pages laid out in a manner more reminiscent of a magazine than more traditional books (but less busily than most slick magazines are today), the editors gather their selections under several chapter-headings, as transcribed from their table of contents in WorldCat thus:

192 pages : illustrations, music ; 29 cm

Contents: "Dear Gloria" / by Mary Kay Blakely -- Introduction / by Gloria Kaufman -- PERIODIC HYSTERIA -- Becoming a Tampax junkie / by Ivy Bottini -- Ragtime -- Periodical Bea / by E.M. Broner -- Splat / by Marilyn French -- A person who menstruates is unfit to be a mother / by Hadley V. Baxendale -- A crowd of commuters / by Mary Ellmann -- If men could menstruate / by Gloria Steinem -- Walking the knife's edge / by Lisa Alther -- Mosquitoes and menses -- New discoveries hailed as birth control breakthroughs / by Jane Field -- Superpower sought on the contraceptive front / by Carol Troy -- Jumbo, colossal and supercolossal -- To the editor / by Shirley L. Radl -- The natural masochism of women / by Hadley V. Baxendale -- Revolutionary contraceptive / by Roberta Gregory -- The perfect job for a pregnant woman -- A few words about breasts / by Nora Ephron -- Mammary glands / by Kristin Lems -- What do you say when a man tells you, You have the softest skin / by Mary Mackey -- Keeping abreast of what men want / by Mary Kay Blakely-- UNTYING THE MOTHER KNOT -- On sleeping with your kids / by Alta -- The day's work / by Barbara Holland -- The pee-in / by Sheila Ballantyne -- Fairyland Nursery School / by Sheila Ballantyne -- Molly's beginnings / by Rita Mae Brown -- The Christmas pageant / by Rita Mae Brown -- Needle-and-thread envy / by Sheila Ballantyne -- Raising sons / by Elizabeth Cady Stanton -- The pros and cons of motherhood / by Mary Kay Blakely -- CLICKING, CLUNKING, AND CLOWNING -- Clicking -- A bargain with the judge / by Florynce Kennedy -- Don't you wish you were liberated too / by Shirley Katz -- The man was right / by Ellen Goodman -- Clunks / by Jane O'Reilly -- Pandephobium / by Sue Held -- Clothes make the man / by Sally Sertin -- Untitled / by Alta -- On stage with Harrison and Tyler -- Clowning with Ivy Bottini -- Monumental prophylactic -- Men: beware the ATR -- WE MEASURED 56-480-47-277-30-19, AND NOW WE MEASURE MORE! -- Carrie Chapman Catt -- When taxes are taxing -- A consistent anti to her son / by Alice Duer Miller -- The woman question in 1872 / by Fanny Fern -- Predictions for 1979 / by Yenta -- A Flo Kennedy sampler -- The lifting power of woman / by Joan Honican -- Why we oppose votes for men / by Alice Duer Miller -- How the women sang their way out of jail / by Mary Harris Jones -- The human-not-quite-human / by Dorothy Sayers -- I laughed when I wrote it / by Nikki Giovanni -- Liberation of the Yale Divinity School library men's room / by Carol P. Christ -- We need a name for Bernadette Arnold / by Joan D. Uebelhoer -- On a different track / by Sharon McDonald -- RAPE AND OTHER BIG JOKES -- The Saturday night special / by Naomi Weinstein -- How to avoid rape -- LABORING UNDER FALSE ASSUMPTIONS -- A great satisfaction / by Dorothy Sayers -- The aroma of "Miss" / by Virginia Woolf -- Marginal workers / by Hadley V. Baxendale (David Frank Phillips II?) -- Letter to the editor / by Joan D. Uebelhoer -- A writer's interview with herself / by Mary Ellmann -- Crooked and straight in academia / by Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope -- The conference / by E.M. Broner -- MLA / by Mary Mackey -- HERE COMES THE BRIDLE -- Lady in red / by Ntozake Shange -- Sterner stuff / by Sue Held -- Marriage quickies -- Dishwashing & suicide / by Maxine Hong Kingston -- The politics of housework / by Pat Mainardi -- We don't need the men / by Malvina Reynolds -- Of bikers, brides & butches / by Sharon McDonald -- What Mother never told me / by Sharon McDonald -- FOR ALL THE "CRAZY LADIES" -- No one has a corner on depression but housewives are working on it / by Gabrielle Burton -- Multiple penis envy / by Hadley V. Baxendale  -- What God hath wroth / by Charlotte Painter -- Mother's Day poem / by Pauline B. Bart -- I'm sorry, you're sorry / by Mary Kay Blakely -- Don't wear your guitar, darling Mother / by Shirley Katz-- Football / by Crazy Hazel Houlihingle -- Aaaaaaaaaargh! / by Sheila Ballantyne -- ONCE UPON A MYTH -- Application for employment / by Rhoda Lerman -- The creation of man / by Rhoda Lerman -- To whom it may concern / by Rhoda Lerman -- Quips of a high priestess / by Zsuzsanna Budapest -- You are what is female / by Judy Grahn -- The House of Mirrors / by Mary Daly -- Norma Jean's theory / by Sheila Ballantyne -- Honk if you think she's Jesus / by Mugsy Peabody -- Why little girls are sugar & spice and when they grow up become cheesecake / by Una Stannard -- S/HE-IT -- A feminist alphabet / by Eve Merriam -- "Him" to the weather / by Judith K. Meuli -- Overcoming a man-nerism / by Naomi R. Goldenberg -- Talkin' gender neutral blues / by Kristin Lems -- An eight-letter word / by Mary Ellmann -- Letter to the editor / by Patricia Miller -- Dear Colleague: I am not an honorary male / by Joanna Russ -- Another name for "down there" / by Sue Held -- Pickups, puns, & putdowns -- Josie takes the stand / by Ruth Herschberger. As one can see, there's quite a mix of mostly fairly contemporary writing and other art, along with some classic examples, many from 19th Century feminists and some few from earlier yet (you can't leave out Mary Wollstonecraft), and the TOC doesn't cite the comics contributions, including multiple items by Jules Feiffer, Gary Trudeau and Johnny Hart as well as Nicole Hollander and Bulbul. And, given that Kaufman taught in South Bend and Blakely lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, at time of assembly, certain bits of locally-published material appear at various points in the book that editors elsewhere would likely not've seen, giving this somewhat unusual university press item a regional flavor that probably didn't hurt in getting through the approval process. Certainly the Nora Ephron essay has since become a bit of a classic itself, and others here should've; excerpts from now largely overlooked former bestsellers as Kinflicks and The Women's Room are useful to have at hand, as are the multiple excerpts from Sheila Ballantyne. Those who remember Joanna Russ's "Useful Phrases for the Tourist" fondly will find "Dear Colleague" cuts a similar path rather closer to home. Inexpensive copies of the 1980 and 1994 reprint editions (I hope the later printing had better binding than mine does) are to be had from the usual sources, and one can definitely do worse. This very late entry in Friday's Books hopes to join Patti Abbott's selection of same as detailed and linked here; next week, I will be gathering the list again.

FFB: POPCORN AND SEXUAL POLITICS: MOVIE REVIEWS by Kathi Maio (Crossing Press 1991); Maio in F&SF

I briefly reviewed Kathi Maio's first collection of film reviews, from the feminist magazine Sojourner (as distinct from the leftist Christian magazine of almost the same title, pluralized), Feminist in the Dark, in a survey of collections from the various film and other a/v critics who've published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction over the years (a cohort which has since been expanded to include David Skal and Tim Pratt). Having unboxed and reread some of her second collection of Sojourner essays, and (sadly) her last book so far (Crossing Press hit some bumpy road not long after the publication of this one, and no one else has picked up the slack in this regard), I thought I'd give this one at least a brief review as well, and cite (again) her online archive of contributions to F&SF (though incomplete, as it starts with her 1999 columns, when she began contributing to F&SF on previous primary columnist Harlan Ellison's recommendation in 1991).

What I learned after that initial review on the blog was that Maio had been a fellow member, with several regular and past contributors to the weekly Friday Books roundelay, of the amateur press association D[orothy Sayers-]APA-Em, thus an old correspondent and friend...and as also a librarian, her grounding in the literature of crime as well as her feminist sensibilities, wit, and lack of allegiance to any sort of overarching theory of film are all on display as thoroughly in this second collection as they were in the first.  Popcorn is organized slightly differently than Feminist in the Dark was, with thematic groupings of her reviews ("A Fine Romance", "The Lost Race of Hollywood", "The New 'Women's Film'", "Losing Out and Getting Even", "Motherhood in Patriarchy", "With Friends Like These..." [fake feminists] and "A Real Class Act") demonstrate some of the breadth of her concerns with both the esthetics and the conscious and unconscious (and usually too conscious) messages underlying the films under review, in terms (obviously) of race and class considerations as well as gender, and of the uncertainty of large commercial entities and would-be as well as actually profound artists in attempting to portray women's (and everyone's) lives, and reach women (and other) audiences. More of the films in this volume than the first are large-studio/distributor releases, but that doesn't limit how much Maio has to say about them, by any means, and she's not one to dismiss the demotic appeal of a blockbuster, nor to champion obscurity for its own sake. She touches on all sorts of films in the books, as opposed to the more limited focus of her F&SF column to solely films of a fantasticated nature, and the slight tentativeness that could sometimes come particularly with her early columns in the fiction magazine, a result I think of her not being a lifelong primary reader of fantastic fiction the way (I assume) she had been of crime fiction, is not in evidence, even when dealing with such work as Ghost or She-Devil (which of course have artistic roots further away from the core of fantastic drama than those of Arrival or even The Lobster, to cite the two most recently archived reviews). That she is the only columnist to hold the drama desk at the magazine without being in one way or another a central figure in speculative-fiction writing (even Baird Searles, the one non-prose-fiction writer to serve in this wise at F&SF, was a playwright and dabbled in prose fiction and poetry in the fields). 

Maio is plainspoken without being simplistic nor dogmatic, loves to connect her reactions to the item under discussion with its place in the traditions of earlier film and related art (as any good critic should do, of course). And she does find the sometimes incomplete virtues of the work before her, when possible, and is sure to mention them, while never willing to overlook their flaws...nor the disagreements she has with other critics, including such feminist peers as Molly Haskell.  You should check out her work online for F&SF or the one (1998) piece posted from The New Internationalist, and if encouraged, you can do much worse than to seek out both of her books (she has a sort of preliminary crowd-funding account up, for unspecified purposes, and we can certainly hope for more collected critiques).

Her LinkedIn freelancing citation:
Film, Book and Cultural Criticism, including a regular film column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Former regular columns at Sojourner: The Women's Forum, On the Issues Magazine, Visions Magazine and Wilson Library Bulletin. Other writings appeared in Ms., New Internationalist, Washington Post Book World, New York Newsday, Second Wave and other periodicals, anthologies and reference books. Author of the books: Feminist in the Dark and Popcorn & Sexual Politics.

For more of today's books, please see 
Patti Abbott's blog.