Reading the Poptimist

While not the most well-written entry on this Pitchfork blog, Tom Ewing has some interesting thoughts that seem related to my last post. He discusses what makes music "stand the test of time," while also introducing an idea I have never thought about: "standing the test of space."

I am very concerned about female authors' work standing the test of time, and even Ewing admits that male musical artists are much more likely to stand the test of time. The test of space, which Ewing's colleague defines as "simply asking us to consider how music fits into a life, or a society or a group of people-- what it's being used for, in other words, and how potently it fulfills that use. As opposed to one question implied by the phrase 'test of time,' which is 'how does this music fit into history?' That's not in itself a terrible question, but really it's best applied when there's a history to fit into."

You could ask the same thing of writing today. There are some authors, such as Stephen King, who many would not consider great literature but who will surely stand the test of time. (And, on a whole different subject for another day and another blog, I do hate that his writing is taken less seriously because it is genre-specific.) At the same time, I think there are several very strong male writers in literature who will be taught in university classes to my own children: Franzen, Chabon, Roth, Coelho, DeLillo, Ondaatje, Diaz...the list goes on and on.

My concern is that their female counterparts: Jennifer Egan, Barbara Kingsolver, Ruth Ozeki, Dara Horn, Nicole Krauss, Banana Yoshimoto, Alison Lurie, Marilynne Robinson and more are being pushed out by novels that stand the test of space (which happens to be the warped world where only shoes and sex matter to the twenty- and thirty-somethings who are trying to make it in the city) but are extremely unlikely to stand the test of time.

Does one have more value than the other? I would say probably no. Except that these novels that are being pushed back to make room for the highly publicized chick lit books are able to stand both tests.

My final thought on this was a comment on a little perusal of a book I bought on a whim called "The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books." While the book surveys several female authors, the top 20 picks from the lists created by literature-lovers only contain one female author. I have to wonder if this is because after the elementary school years we are exposed to a smaller number of female authors in education. If anything, it is frequently our education that informs our habits and reading tendencies. How do we bring value to female authorship without relegating it to its own class or genre?

Going back to the Pitchfork blog, Ewing makes an argument that forcing art to fit the test of time takes the idea of investing in art a little too far. But when it comes to the discrepancies in gender representation, I think it's important to analyze what we, as a culture, consider a good investment to be.