[it's 3.32]

Meg Wollitzer has a piece in the NYT about the rules of literary fiction for men and women.   I really don't pay enough attention to what's published to know whether she is generally on the right track, but I did think being a woman was a handicap in various ways when my first book was published. 

When my editor bought The Last Samurai he told me it was essentially a love affair between the mother and the little boy.  Well, I was strapped for cash, and it didn't seem to matter desperately if the editor misread the book in this way - but as it turned out this meant that neither he nor anyone on his staff took seriously the formal aspects of the text.  As I've said (this really is getting old, sorry), when there was a disagreement over punctuation I drew attention to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; my editor explained that "That was a very special book," and he said it in the presence of his production manager, who seems to have thought this gave her license to override the terms of my contract.  (It seems unlikely that Cormac McCarthy got this kind of response to The Road.) 

code like a girl

Mooching around online as one does (reculer pour mieux sauter) I find

a) a somewhat unfocused piece on the PEN website on a recent conference session, originally entitled Women, Sex, Fiction, renamed Gender, Translation, Diversity, contemplating the fact that women are 80% of readers of fiction but are underrepresented in the Library of America (3%) and win fewer literary prizes.

b) a piece in the Guardian by Kira Cochran on women and depression

and

c) a piece in the Guardian by Zoe Williams on a successful class action against Birmingham County Council for pay discrimination

The tribunal's finding is this: women employees have been systematically underpaid and discriminated against by this council, for as long as the Equal Pay Act has been in force. Female staff on the same pay grade as men (cleaners versus bin men, for instance) could expect to earn much less, to start with, and go on to be paid much less in bonuses. The starkest example given was one case of a refuse collector taking home £51,000 in one year, while women on his level received less than £12,000.

Paul Doran, of the firm Stefan Cross that successfully brought this case, told me: "The bonuses were a sham, there was no monitoring, they were paid simply for men turning up to work, doing their jobs properly."

I've always been partial to the theory that depression is suppressed rage.

With regard to literary honours, the question seems to me to be not merely whether the women nominated are unfairly treated; there is a larger question relating to obstacles confronting ambitious women writers. If we look at the last three women to win the Nobel Prize, Lessing, Jelinek and Müller are all strong, angry, aggressive - and it does seem to me that ambitious work calls for a certain ruthlessness. The culture of publishing, especially American publishing, selects for niceness - this applies to men as well as women, but behaviour that is perceived as hostile and confrontational in a woman would not necessarily count against a man, and polite requests from a woman get waved aside. Loyal readers will remember the great copy-editing saga, in which the hapless author made two trips to New York to try to avert possible problems, politely reminded everyone of the terms of her contract, and had the copy-edited version reinstated behind her back...

My impression, unfortunately, is that both men and women feel more comfortable asking women to make allowances when family life interferes with work -- agents, editors, producers, directors, lawyers tell me they will take care of something, don't, then explain that they couldn't get around to it because they were having a baby, or had just had a baby, or had to do something or other with their small children, or had to go out of town on long weekends to stay with a retired parent, or, you know, just had to leave the office to take their dog for a walk. It's one of the things one has to bear in mind when one thinks of publishing an ambitious book: the more demands it makes on other people involved, the more vulnerable it will be, and the higher the requirement for niceness reserves.

Pardon me, my name is Stimson

The dollar has gone into freefall. An editor has offered to publish Your Name Here, explaining that he loves Joyce, Beckett and Pynchon and finds in YNH the things he loves in JBP. He proposes a first print run which was that of Ulysses.

The freefalling dollar would be a matter of indifference if I had, for instance, sold the book about a boy trapped in an online poker fraud ring to 20th Century Fox. The Ulysses-level first print run would be a matter of indifference if the dollar were gaining ground. The two together raise the FAQ: What is to be done?

A: I buy an Idea sofabed on Craigslist, which must now be transported from A (Naunynstrasse) to B (my apartment). (Why not rent out one half of a handsome Berlin apartment while finishing the book about the boy trapped in an online poker fraud ring?)

So I've been shamelessly scrounging, asking Alex Frey, Johanna Thompson and TARARTRAT for help with the schlafsofa. While waiting for a reply I've been fecklessly surfing instead of getting on with the book about the boy etc. etc. And what to my wondering eyes should appear....

In the early 90s I worked for an NGO that supported women's projects in what our brochures referred to as the developing world. For a while I had a colleague, a 50-something-year-old woman who had once worked for NOW (the campaigning organisation for the ordination of women). X had had an old-fashioned marriage; she had met her husband-to-be briefly before he went overseas, they'd become engaged, she'd gone out to India to get married and had second thoughts, her mother-in-law-to-be had poured champagne down her throat till she was too drunk to back out. In retrospect X thought that the fact that she'd agreed to do it had not been a terribly good reason to go through with it.

At some point I was writing a letter to a population of possible supporters, young women we knew only by name. I said: What do you think, is it better to use Miss or Ms?

X: Oh, if you're writing to that generation you should certainly use Ms.

Well, a kiss is still a kiss, but a Ms is not as good as a Miss as time goes by...

Frittering away my time, as I say, trying to organise help with my schlafsofa, I check out Nathan Bransford's blog. Nathan has a post on formality in query letters. Down among the comments

[Update: TARARTRAT has agreed to get up at the crack of dawn to help with the verdammte Schlafsofa]

is one from a 20-something agent, who says, in Anno Domini 2008,

My pet peeve in being addressed is "MS."

My inner English major screams whenever I see this. It's always bothered me. I would prefer people just call me "Colleen".

"Miss" is not offensive in any way and I don't understand why cranky feminists decided to replace a perfectly good honorific with one that is not actually short for anything.

I was under the impression that both married and unmarried women were once addressed as Mistress; two abbreviations were later derived from this to mark marital status. (But to the best of my knowledge, I have no inner (or, indeed, outer) English major. ) I do think feminists made a serious mistake in introducing Ms in the hope of achieving an unmarked form; the sensible plan would have been to coopt Mrs.

As my friend X understood, anyway, it is very common to write business letters to people whose personal lives are irrelevant to the matter at hand. It is not offensive to address an unmarried woman as Miss; it would look careless and unprofessional to address either a man or a married woman as Miss. It is generally possible to identify the sex of an unknown correspondent by the first name; it is not possible to determine marital status, since we do not have the custom of changing first names upon marriage and selecting the new names from a pool restricted only to married persons. It is not easy to see why someone who wants to deal with a woman professionally should have to go to the trouble of finding out whether she is married or single.

[Update: Alex Frey has also agreed to help with the verdammte Schlafsofa.]

In any case. If anyone wants to correspond with me, none of the following is incorrect: Dr DeWitt; Ms DeWitt; Miss DeWitt; Mrs Levene; Helen. I would very much prefer people not just call me Colleen.