Red Plenty Seminar

Spufford mentions lots of work by 50’s soviet economists, is there anywhere a non-Russian reader can read some of it? Did anyone ever translate it? Progress publishers where are you when we need you?

I can’t wait!

That gives me a reason to finish reading it. It’d be nice if he wrote a sequel about Stafford Beer and Allende.

Data is partially right. I think belief in socialism died during the Khrushchev regime and was replaced with concerns over material standards of living and social status. On an individual level the regime owed its legitimacy to an increasing standard of living. Given the poor state of affairs in the immediate post-war period this was pretty easy. But, the 1950s and 1960s did see some impressive growth, and despite much of it going to the military, living standards across the board did rise. Collectively Soviet patriotism relied upon the victory of WWII and things like Gagarin’s launch into space. But, socialist ideology basically no longer existed in content, but only form by this time. By 1963 nobody realistically believed they were going to reach utopia and very few people even in the government cared about world revolution. They did think that as individuals that they and their children would continue to have a better life than their parents. On an individual level the system worked under Khrushchev basically as an authoritarian welfare state with near full employment. If you were a natsman with a national territory you also benefited from a variety of affirmative action measures provided you actually lived in your assigned territory. This is one reason why there is a lot of opposition to Soviet policies by nationalities without national territories such as Jews, Germans, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks and almost none from larger Asian groups such as the Uzbeks.

@Katherine, its format is a series of more-or-less fictional stories that try to be close to events that actually happened or could have happened, interleaved with short non-fiction chapters on aspects of soviet history.

Some of the stories have female protagonists, most have female characters, though male protagonists and characters are the clear majority. That’s especially true for the almost-not-fiction stories, where most of the characters are historical or based-on-historical male soviet bureaucrats.

Katherine – it passes the Bechdel test with flying colours, and while the women characters are interested in their relationships with men, these relationships are rather less important than the day-to-day question of surviving in the Soviet system. The two academic enclave chapters are particularly good on what it’s like to be a woman academic in the system.

Thanks for the information folks.

And ajay, there’s really no need for the snark. I did say information for the purposes of filtration. I certainly didn’t say that I wouldn’t read it if it didn’t come up to certain standards because I am not, in fact, an idiot.

But is it so shockingly preposterous that a book that, say, purports to be semi-fictional history of a certain peroid of the USSR should give due notice to 50% of the population? It would be horribly incomplete if it didn’t, surely?

Okay, thanks, noted also.

On a side note, I bought it as an eBook from my local neighborhood bookseller’s site, which sells Google eBooks, which I can import into my Nook reader via the Adobe Digital Editions software (or read via reader software that hooks into Google Books). This makes me feel less guilty about buying an eBook.

I did say information for the purposes of filtration. I certainly didn’t say that I wouldn’t read it if it didn’t come up to certain standards because I am not, in fact, an idiot.

“Filtration” does imply a process of selecting out undesirable stuff, though. That’s what filters do.

And if your first question about a book is not “is it interesting? Well written? Does it explore new ground? Is it well researched? Is it about a topic I find interesting? What’s the author’s other stuff like? What have other people, especially people whose opinions I respect, said about it?” but “unless it passes my box-ticking exercise it will get filtered out” then that’s a fairly unfortunate view to take.

Threadjack over.

Ajay,

I would guess that Katherine is assuming, as I would, that a book that is recommended in a post on Crooked Timber would probably pass several filters about being interesting, well written, well researched, etc. (and the author of the post is likely to be included in what do “people I respect” think of it). Having passed those filters, it is pretty reasonable to ask if it passes the “female characters are people” filter.

And thanks also Henry, you have described my intent/approach perfectly.

Genuine question: if the effect of a Bechtel test fail is not ejection from the in-box, what is it? Care to operationalise?

btw, Spufford’s “Backroom Boys” didn’t have any female characters at all did it? So it’s only by the purest chance that this one has passed the test.

dsquared 05.09.12 at 9:19 pm

” I am currently wondering how to shoehorn a couple of token female characters into my novel about a Nazi life assurance company.”

Obviously you’re not well read in the appropriate literature :)

How hard can it be to insert a hot blond Nazi Sex Kitten in a tight leather uniform?

I am currently wondering how to shoehorn a couple of token female characters into my novel about a Nazi life assurance company.

Ilsa, She Actuary of Allianz Versicherungs-Gesellschaft.

It’s pedantic, but the American State of Play, I thought, was a spectacular example of failing the Bechdel test because it actually did have enough women in the cast, in appropriate roles, to be able to pass it, and still failed. Red Badge of Courage doesn’t have any women in it, okay. An episode of Sex and the City fails the Bechdel test, that’s really an accomplishment.

#35, 36, 39-
On the assumption that the novel about a Nazi life assurance company is a serious project (and a pretty interesting one, I would think – see, e.g., Allianz’s website,
https://www.allianz.com/static-resources/en/about_allianz/history/sp/en/themen/index.html

and this from an insurance industry site:

http://insurancenewsnet.com/article.aspx?id=335014&type=lifehealth

I don’t know why it’s difficult to create important female characters. Every office in that era had women secretaries, file clerks, typists. In that era of dictation and filing, secretaries in particular knew pretty much everything that their bosses were up to. Here’s a photo of a woman office worker from 1936:
http://www.ipernity.com/doc/57114/6511606/in/album/146759
http://www.ipernity.com/doc/57114/6511606/in/album/146759

I haven’t heard of the Bechdel test before – will look it up now. How would a Soviet book like The Master and Margarita go, or the movies Mirror or Burnt by the Sun?

To be fair, State of Play isn’t about politics, the real world, or working in journalism, so much as it’s about the emotional journey of Russell Crowe.

Most books on the USSR and Russian Empire only deal with the ethnic Russian population and thereby exclude the almost 50% of the population on the basis of ethnicity.

I wonder if this sort of problem could be swept up into some kind of Achebe rule or Achebe test? From a commentary on Heart of Darkness:

Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?

Can’t think of a way to make it pithy, though.

For this seminar, a serious suggestion – make the concluding round-up post open to comments, since if the Graeber one is anything to go by, there will be overlaps and interrelations between the main threads, and people will probably want to comment on those, or on the whole lot taken together, or on general topics relevant to the book but not covered elsewhere.

I was hoping you might have got Jo Walton.

Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?

I confess I can’t. This has always seemed to me possibly the dumbest thing one great novelist ever said about another.

Many of Lars von Trier’s films pass the Bechdel test.

Also many John Waters movies.

It’s on my wishlist: http://andreasmoser.wordpress.com/books-my-wishlist/ – I hope someone will send me a copy. Thanks!

What’s the Bechdel Plus Test?

Ah, of course. Thanks.

From Spufford’s earlier work The Child That Books Built, this quote might be pertinent and relates to the earlier girl child’s reading thread:

“Here you still see, as you do in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, the aboriginal American civility and idealism that belonged to Jefferson’s republic of farmers and merchants.
It shows in public rituals: when the cast of the pageant sing ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ on the darkening prairie, the audience spontaneously, unselfconsciously join in.” p 111

I quite like the idea that an author might have considered that women are fully formed people capable of being characters in their own right.

Me too, and the general situation in this regard is indeed lamentable. But the Bechdel Test is such a crude tool that it even disqualifies a lot of films in which women are fully formed people.

…
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Mädchen in Uniform

Picnic at Hanging Rock might be another one. Even though there are conversations between male protagonists in the movie, they are surely about the females, no?

I’m not sure Scott Pilgrim Versus the World passes in either direction if you define the terms fairly broadly. It isn’t clear what that proves.

#70

If you want to bring home the point that the film industry is very much a male dominant one, you might want to use the Bechdel Test as a rhetorical tool. If you want to judge individual films on how they deal with male/female perspective and portray women characters, it’s pretty useless.

There’s a movie/doco by Nikita Mikhalkov – director of Burnt by the Sun, Unfinished Piece for a Mechanical Piano, and Urga – about himself, Russia, and his daughter Anna which I remember fondly (tho as a girl I felt for Anna).

At one point she wore a scrunchie in her hair, which was the first time I realised fashions the world over were so similar.

There’s a scene, I remember, that resonated with me, when the young Anna cries over the death of a leader (not sure what the proper word is) – maybe Kruschev or Brehznev? – and her father becomes infuriated with her mourning for the passed away leader.

Spufford has Khruschev marveling at the traffic on the “washington beltway.”. Khruschev Isited the US I. 1959; the first stretch of the beltway to be opened to traffic was completed in 1961. It may be a trivial error but it’s the sort of thing that makes you doubt the depth of knowledge o. Bigger things.

Bloix – yes. And thank you. The helicopter ride over Washington and Khrushchev marvelling at the traffic are both attested, but the anachronistic appearance of the Beltway is just the result of my ignorance, as is my walking K through the wrong Penn Station. (He might well have defensively denigrated even the old station in all its Beaux-Arts magnificence, but that’s not the point.) In the same spirit, while we’re at it, I’ve got the date wrong for the introduction of the Moskvitch as the crappy Soviet small car of choice, and somehow turned the existing 3-ruble note into a phantasmal 2-ruble note, probably because of a cultural bias against the idea that odd-numbered denominations are allowed. I leave the question of whether I am likely to be able to get the book re-typeset to correct these ignorances as an exercise for the reader.