This week, the Speculative Literature Foundation's Fall Mentorship program wrapped up. It started just after Clarion ended and lasted for two months. (I applied while I was still at Clarion, after Leslie sent the announcement of the programs creation to the list.) It paired (well, quintupled) new/neopro writers with more established writer. We didn't do crits--too time-consuming, too tempting--but the mentor assigned to each group of five people (in my case, the always entertaining and insightful Ben Rosenbaum) answered nuts and bolts questions about both craft and professional stuff. Great fun, and lots of food for thought in every discussion, even--scratch that, *especially*--at the times when I utterly disagreed with the views of my fellow mentees or our mischeviously argumentative mentor.

I'd heartily recommend future installments they may do of it to anyone who's interested. Definitely worth the $15-30 sliding suggested donation, which in any case funds the SLF's other worthwhile projects.

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Most of the standard deductive arguments for the existence of God are pretty bad. I presented a paper in the Philosophy Department earlier this fall poking logical holes in one of the most popular ones.

Still, there's at least one argument for the existence of God which seems pretty persuasive: the existence of single malt Scotch.

I had some friends from the grad program over the other night, and broke out the bottle of Glen Garioch, which I hadn't had any of in a while.

Given the absolute choice, I'm more of an Islay person, but still....hot damn, now that I remember how good Glen Garioch tastes, that bottle might not be long for this world.

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On a note related to neither mentoring nor Scotch, Strange Horizons this week did several reviews of Tiptree-related stuff, which leads me to wonder about something.

With a very few exceptions, every single article about Tiptree, review of the (excellent) new biography of her or anything of the kind I've read *always* quotes Robert Silverburg's 1975 statement, in an introduction to one of her anthologies, that he didn't believe that silly rumor that Tiptree might be a woman, because "his" writing voice was so masculine.

Now, it's a silly statement, but if you want quotes from iconic people expressing the same certainty that Tiptree was a man, there's a *much* better one everyone could be quoting, from pioneering feminist SF author Joana Russ in the same year, who said that Tiptree had ideas "no woman could even think, or understand, let alone assent to" and that someone else's statement that Tiptree might be female proved that this person wouldn't "recognize a female point of view if it bites him."

Now, the Russ quote is *way* more smugly certain and strident than the Silverburg quote, and more surprising given its source, so why isn't *that* the standard one quoted in reviews of the biography (in which it appears on p.3), articles about Tiptree, etc.?

I'm not entirely sure, but I've got a thought.

The gender essentialism in the Silverburg quote is of a terribly old-fashioned kind, the unexamined and theoretically unsophisticated hunch that only a woman could have written a Virginia Woolf novel and only a man could have written a Hemingway novel. We can all have a good laugh about it now, and that laugh confirms us in our views, makes us smug and comfortable, in the same way that laughing at any slightly embarassing and archaic view makes us comfortable about how smart and progressive we all are now.

By contrast, the species of gender essentialism represented in the Russ quote was doubtless bound up in Russ' mind with the idea that the traits all women have and all men have are bound up in socialization rather than anything innate. *This* kind of essentialism is still popular in a certain kind of contemporary feminist theorizing (though certainly not the only strand of such), that says that because of the opression of women, women have a radically different experience of the world than men, that cultural expressions "construct reality" in accord with the experience of dominant groups, that art is always political and never neutral, that it is impossible or at least incredibly difficult for people in opressor-categories to fully understand the world from the p.o.v. of opressed-categories, etc., etc., etc.

To some extent, what I just said is probably a caricature, but it would be fair to say that at least some of these ideas, at least to one degree or another, are all still live issues for debate in the contemporary discourse of lefty-sf-types (e.g. me and my friends, people who write articles about Tiptree, etc.), in a way that Silverburg's more naive views circa 1975 are not.

As such, Russ' silly quote can't be safely laughed at. Laughing at it is as likely to make people uncomfortable as it is to make them comfortable.