Abbeville vs. Chicago Part 4: Gender Bias

 

We couldn’t resist a little one-round bout with The Chicago Manual of Style after this passage caught our eye today:

Word Usage

5.204. Gender bias. Consider the use of gender-neutral language. On the one hand, it is unacceptable to a great many reasonable readers to use the generic masculine pronoun (he in reference to no one in particular). On the other hand, it is unacceptable to a great many readers either to resort to nontraditional gimmicks to avoid the generic masculine (by using he/she or s/he, for example) or use they as a kind of singular pronoun. Either way, credibility is lost with some readers. What is wanted, in short, is a kind of invisible gender neutrality. There are many ways to achieve such language, but it takes thought and often some hard work.

Oh please, Chicago Manual. “What is wanted” is a little backbone. When an editor wants to use language that’s both harmonious-sounding and appropriately gendered, she simply goes ahead and does so.

We Sell Seashells. Uh, In Book Form

If you’re looking for an absorbing beach read this summer, and aren’t afraid of seeming literal-minded by bringing a book about shells to the beach (which, we admit, is kind of like reading something called “A History of Subways” on the subway), Philippe Bouchet’s Shells is the volume for you. We always knew the French were passionate, but we didn’t know they could be so passionate about malacology until we read Mr. Bouchet’s love letter to the science of shells. That’s right, science: where other books on this subject might consist of a puffball text with pretty pictures, Abbeville gives you an edifying, engaging discourse on the history and study of malacology that covers such topics as shell classification, collection, and conservation. With pretty pictures.

Actually, the pictures are quite beautiful, and Bouchet’s enthusiasm for his discipline—as well as for science and exploration in general—can be felt on every page. You’ll come away from this book just as concerned as he is about the protection of sea life and the future of natural history museums, and just as excited as he is that untold numbers of shell species haven’t been discovered yet. You might even be impressed to learn that such new discoveries happen all the time, and that he’s discovered quite a few species himself over the years. Finally, if you hold this book up to your ear, you can hear the ocean roar.

Marginalia: Booksquare

Kassia Krozser is one of our true kindred spirits on the Web, and her trenchantly-written, marvelously-illustrated Booksquare arouses our sincere admiration—even, sometimes, our envy. Declaring that she “lavishes all her adoration on the publishing industry because, like a child who needs firm, corrective guidance, publishers and writers need Booksquare,” she makes tongue-in-cheek pontificating look like taking candy (firmly and correctively) from a baby. We want our superiority complex to be superior to her superiority complex, but if we’re being honest with ourselves, we have to admit it’s not. Well, maybe it’s at least equal.

Regardless, we’re linking you to Booksquare for the simple reason that its commentary on the publishing world is excellent. Topics recently covered by the site include the death of newspaper book review sections, the birth of e-reading devices, and “Why Publishers Should Blog” (a post we naturally commented on, suggesting that readers look no further than us for an answer). And of course, there are those great Molly Crabapple illustrations, which Kassia says “you wish were yours.” We do, Kassia, we do.

As far as we know, Kassia confines herself only to commentary on publishing, and has not yet ventured into Abbeville‘s other fields of expertise, such as the visual arts and the universe. If she ever did, we might be a little intimidated…but we’d still gladly read what she had to say, and recommend that you do, too.

Abbeville Gallery: Australia

One might expect Australian graffiti to consist largely of cheeky, offbeat swear words and cartoon drawings of wallabies, but apparently, the country’s urban artists have a taste for abstraction. Such has been the discovery of Arbiter of Style Lauren, who is visiting Melbourne (that’s “Melbin”) this month and who has provided us two new photographs for our Abbeville Gallery series:

We like how, especially in the second photo, Lauren’s turned the decorated buildings into abstract compositions of her own. But we’re really bowled over by the graffiti itself, which is better than anything we’ve seen here in the city lately. (Yes, even in Williamsburg.) Who knew that Australia, along with being a bestiary of crazy creatures, was such a haven of style?

Stylish Reader: Star St. Germain

As a final Friday side note, we wanted to point you toward the personal website of one Star St. Germain, an artist, designer, cartoonist, animator, and cellist of considerable panache. Star contacted us not long ago wondering if we might be interested in featuring her on our site, and you know what? We liked her style. Her site is a model of elegant Web design, her illustrations radiate casual cool, and her photographs demonstrate an eye for the vibrant and strange. Most importantly, she’s an Abbeville Manual of Style reader—proof positive of exceptional good taste. Star, we commend you, your artwork, and even your chic name. You, madame, are a Stylish Reader.

Think you’re just as stylish as Star, and have a website to prove it? Leave a note in the Comments section of this (or any) post and be sure to include a URL. We’ll peruse any entries we receive and profile our favorites in future Stylish Reader posts. As always, feedback, discussion, and debate about our choices will be welcome; here at Abbeville, we’re firm believers in de gustibus est disputandum. Until Monday!

Armin Brott Video on iParenting

This year, longtime Abbeville author Armin Brott—a.k.a. America’s “Mr. Dad”—was the proud recipient of not one but two iParenting Media Awards, both for his volume Fathering Your School-Age Child and for his Father Knows Best: The Expectant Father boxed set. Having heard the good news, he gladly agreed to do a video interview for the iParenting website, because, well, America’s Mr. Dad isn’t the type to grouchily turn down an interview. And now his gracious compliance is your good fortune, because you get to watch the video here!

As you listen to Brott discuss the genesis of his book series and dispense his fatherly advice, we defy you not to feel a warm filial glow. By the time the video was over, we had to restrain ourselves from calling him up and asking him to come out to the backyard to toss the old pigskin around for a while. That was silly; it’s a workday—but maybe he will later, when he’s not so busy? M-Mr. Dad?

Style Points

Infinitives

1.1. So we split one in the second sentence. Sue us. It’s an outdated rule anyway.

Like a Norman Rockwell Painting

The Abbeville blog has MOVED! You can now read this post here.

Interview: Edgar Allen Beem of Just Looking

Image courtesy www.yankeemagazine.com

Edgar Allen Beem is a freelance writer and erstwhile art critic for the Portland Independent and Maine Times. His blog Just Looking: A Critic’s Eye on New England Art is hosted by Yankee magazine. In keeping with our unofficial New England theme this week, we invited Mr. Beem to answer a few questions about the perennially beautiful art of that region, as well as his own life and writing.

AMoS: Are you an artist yourself? If so, in what medium or media do you work?

EAB: No, I am not an artist, though I do have a modest talent for caricature. Other than Fairfield Porter, I can’t think of an artist offhand who wrote significantly about art. Many artists have a hard time seeing the value and beauty of art that is not at all like their own. Porter was one of the representional painters who kept realism alive during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, but he was not blind to the genius of Willem De Kooning.

AMoS: How did you get started as an arts writer?

EAB: I began writing art reviews in 1978 for The Portland Independent, a short-lived alternative weekly. Peter Cox, the editor-publisher of Maine Times, saw my writings and offered me a job as the culutural reporter and art critic for Maine Times. Alas, neither Peter nor Maine Times is with us any longer.

AMoS: You’re the author of two books called Maine Art Now (1990) and Maine: The Spirit of America (2000). What qualities distinguish the art of Maine from other New England art, and what qualities distinguish New England art from other regional art?

EAB: For the most part, the most significant art in the world does not have regional identities. Art is a transcendent, international enterprise, a search for meaning through visual means. That said, Maine has attracted artists since the mid-19th century because of its natural beauty. There is still a strong, traditional painterly landscape tradition along the coast and up into the mountains. Of course, there have been and are fine artists working in all of the New England states, with significant art scenes on Cape Cod and Cape Ann, the White Mountains, Old Lyme, the Berkshires, etc, but the strongest contemporary landscape painting still comes out of Maine.

AMoS: Do you have a favorite artist or favorite work of art? Favorite New England artist in particular?

EAB: As a Maine native and chauvinist, I am most drawn to native Maine artists because, rather than imitate or describe the natural beauty of the state, they tend to internalize the realities of life in Maine and express them in abstract and conceptual ways. Among my favorite artists are Charlie Hewitt (a native of Lewiston-Auburn), Celeste Roberge (a native of Biddeford whose sculpture is on the cover of Maine Art Now), Alan Bray (a native of Dover-Foxcroft), Eric Hopkins (a native of North Haven), Dozier Bell (Lewiston), William Manning (Lewiston), and Michael Waterman (Portland). That said, I think sculptor John Bisbee, who grew up outside Boston and now teaches at Bowdoin, has created some of the most exciting and important sculpture in Maine since Louise Nevelson left Rockland for New York.

My single favorite Maine painting is Parson Jonathan Fisher’s 1824 “A Morning View of Blue Hill Village.” If it ever disappears from the Farnsworth Art Museum, you’ll know where to start looking for it.

AMoS: How has the art world (and the art market) changed since your career began? What trends do you foresee shaping it in the future?

EAB: Over the 30 years I have been writing about art in Maine and New England I have observed how the art scene and art markets seem to rise and fall with the economy. Maine Art Now probably should be re-titled Maine Art Then, as it chronicles the flourishing of the art scene during the go-go years of the 1980s. That scene died way back after 1988 and had begun to re-gain momentum with a lot of new players when war, energy prices, and the collapse of the credit market started to slow things down again in recent years.

AMoS: You recently called photography the “hottest art medium today.” Do you find that the comparative ease and availability of digital photography are “pushing aside” other, more traditional media, such as painting? That is, are young artists focusing on one at the expense of the other?

EAB: No, I don’t think photography is pushing aside painting or other media. I just think the question, “Is photography art?” was definitively answered in the affirmative in the 1980s. The art market is always looking for the new and the next and what it found was a lot of very talented visual artists working in photography—both film and digital. The question being asked now, as the traditional print markets for photojournalism dry up, is: “Is photojournalism art?” More and more photojournalists are looking to exhibit and sell their prints as newspaper and magazine art budgets decline.

AMoS: Your column in Yankee is focused on regional art, but which contemporary international artists excite you most?

EAB: I’m generally most excited by artists whose work is holistic, meaning not just about the object but taking the entire experience of perception into account. So I’m a big fan of artists such as Christo, Olafur Eliasson, and Robert Irwin who create or alter whole environments.

AMoS: Finally: when you hear the word “stylish,” whom or what do you think of?

EAB: Alex Katz. Style is his subject.

As it is ours, Mr. Beem. Thank you again for graciously lending your time, and we encourage all Abbeville readers (Yankee or otherwise) to make Just Looking one of their go-to weekly reads.

Bookstores of Style: Cape Cod Edition

Chatham, Massachusetts is a quintessential Cape Cod beach town, the kind that insists gently on protecting its quintessence from whatever forces of modernity might threaten it. The downtown has more gazebos than stores, the crosswalks are painted a cheerful solid green, and the bay teems with seals swimming just a few yards away from the humans. The cottages and beach houses have driveways of gravel instead of asphalt, or of crushed oyster shells instead of gravel, and are packed so closely together that actual neighborhood road signs read: “Thickly Settled.” (Is this a warning or a boast?) The seafood restaurants, taverns, and antique shops are all studiously quaint, right down to the lettering on their own signs—local ordinance seems to forbid the use of any font developed less than forty years ago. Presiding over it all is a church whose steeple, as my friend and host Dave pointed out, is a marvel of Yankee pragmatism: it doesn’t have a spire (too grandiose), but since it’s the tallest structure in town, does feature a clock.

Nested snugly into this bastion of Americana, which I was fortunate enough to visit this weekend, are two fine bookstores called Yellow Umbrella Books and Where the Sidewalk Ends. The former is the home of the first edition Paley I mentioned in the last post; this proved to be too pricey for a humble editor’s budget, but I did pick up a nice poetry anthology from the store’s “Small Press” rack. The latter, like so many of the shops in Chatham, is tucked unassumingly into a converted house; as its name suggests, it has an excellent children’s books section and a stellar Shel Silverstein section in particular. I thumbed through Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back (an old favorite) and The Giving Tree (you know when the boy carves his girlfriend’s initials—Y.L.—into the tree? I realized for the first time that this stands for “Young Love”), basking in the warmth of nostalgia and the cool of the store’s welcome air conditioning.

Both Yellow Umbrella and WTSE charmed me thoroughly. Their only flaw? Too few Abbeville books. If you find yourself headed up Chatham way, I would heartily recommend ducking into either shop for a while before grabbing a shake at the Kream ‘n’ Kone or a Sam Adams at the Squire. Or before frolicking with the seals.

(Many thanks again to both Dave and Mrs. B for hosting this weekend and making these bookstore excursions possible. – AA)

Travel Day

Today’s post is a short one, as this Arbiter of Style is traveling (and, more to the point, taking the day off). On my travels, however, I will soon be visiting a bookstore at which there is reputed to be a first edition of Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. If you’re in need of a quick recommendation on the subject of prose style, look no further than Paley, who died just last year: in addition to being a fixture in Greenwich Village for decades (she could often be seen there chewing bubblegum and handing out antiwar leaflets), she was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant short story writers. Do yourself a favor by picking up any one of her collections for a terrific summer read—as soon as you’ve finished savoring the joys of all your Abbeville books, that is.

We’ll be back next week with more interviews, Abbeville news, website recommendations, original photography, and fearless opinions—including, quite possibly, an opinion on the bookstore I’m about to visit. Have an exceptionally stylish weekend.