I got a funny email the other day. One, it was addressed to “Professor Ruttenberg,” which I think is hillarious, not because I might not ever be one (who knows? life is long) than because, you know, right now I’m sitting on my floor, listening to crappy music, decorating a belt buckle with paint pens and trying to cram as many Hebrew verbs as possible into my little brain. Right now I am not the picture of scholarly nuttin’.
Second, they asked for reprint rights for some of the stuff I wrote in my anthology for a forthcoming “scholarly book entitled [REMOVED TITLE, BUT IT HAS “ENCYCLOPEDIA” IN THE TITLE]“. Well, dat’s cool. Between that and the stuff I’m doing now for the EJ, I am a regular Encyclopedia Brown these days.
Third, both the original email and the permissions letter I got today say, “Publication is tentatively scheduled for January 2005.” I checked with the intern who wrote me, and yes, that’s what they meant. Did nobody tell them that a) January’s almost over and b) um, what would they have done if I (and presumably the other writers they’re soliciting) had said no? I know that it’s dang expensive to do major reworks on a mss once it’s in galley (pre-pub proofs) format, and if the original pub date is NOW they should have been done with the galley stage 6 months ago. So the request for permission now strikes me as more than a bit chutzpadik and presumptive, ‘specailly as none of us are in feminist publishing for the ca$h money.
What is wrong with me today? I (out of the loop, I guess) learned the word “wigga” today, and it’s like affecting my writing syntax in a bad bad way. Shiznit, gravy. Or maybe it’s just too much caffiene.
Speaking of galleys, I was asked in the comments a bit ago by AmEchad to talk about publishing, so I will–I haven’t forgotten the question and I’m not ignoring it, I’m just in the middle of finals now. More to come on that front soon.
In the meantime, forgive the radio silence to come, I’m working my tail off over here.
Aah, bad things about having 2 windows open at once (and I was once tech-savvy), I accidentally posted this in your EJ post from November:
Thanks. And totally understand about the finals. Just had my last one and now I have papers to write. Oh yay. I don’tthink I’ll be leaving my apartment besides on Shabbat for a while. But then again, what’s new?
Hi,
This is rather irrelevant to your blog entry, but I recently read your article in “Bitch” magazine’s Winter 2005 issue and I wanted to say I was really impressed. It was interesting to hear about your experiences and also to consider the ways in which dress, particularly religious dress, is understood so differently depending on where one goes. As you pointed out by saying that wearing pants in Jerusalem marked you as secular while wearing a skirt made people think you were Orthodox, we tend to have very strong cultural messages about who someone is based just on her outfit. As a non-religious person who dresses in modest clothes due to my upbringing by Muslim nannies and the like, I am often asked if I am either fundamentalist Christian or Muslim. Funny the way we attempt to categorise people, hmmm?
I found your point about feeling your heart “unfolds and opens” when you untuck your tzitzit to be especially interesting. I do think that how we dress is an expression of who we are and being asked to stifle that, in any situation, does not usually yield happy results.
As a side note, how did you come to be a contributor to the magazine? I notice that “Bitch” has a wide variety of people who write and articles they feature, which is one of the main reasons I buy the publication. Anyway, I appreciated your article and thought I ought to tell you so.
Ivy
ivy@tm.net
Hey, Ivy–
Thanks for your nice words! Yeah, getting dressed can be a complicated thing in this world. Lucky for some of us, it’s also a great form of entertainment. 😉
As for the contributor q, I’ll make sure to answer it in my post about getting one’s writing out there, as soon as I’m not being swallowed whole by finals…
RE: the Encyclopedia–
So I’m a contributor to volume 1, and what they’ve just told me is that they’re about to send it out to be turned into galleys. So I think they’re just being way unclear about what stage they’re in. As far as I know publication, like on-paper publication, is next Jan. Unless they’re planning on putting out vol 2 before vol 1, which would be wack.
I also started visiting b/c of the Bitch article–really excellent piece–
peace,
emily
Hey, Emily–
Congrats on the contributor thang. What did you write about?
They told me it was for the ca. 1/05 pub, so maybe it is going in the first volume? Or maybe I’m just confused? I don’t know.
Anyway, thanks for coming by this way, please keep commenting and such…
d
I wrote short encyclopedia entries for religious fundamentalisms, Islamic feminisms, and Irshad Manji…none of which I was fully happy with. (OK, the Manji one was pretty straightforward, although I didn’t get to argue with her, which was hard because her book made me argumentative.) The real problem was that dealing with any of these issues is way too complex for an encyclopedia article. How could I talk about Islamic feminisms in 500 words, and a) take apart the Western myths of Islam as the supreme woman-hating religion while still talking about the issues of gender discrimination both in sharia and in the many geographically/culturally diverse cultures influenced by Islam b) differentiate between secular and religious Islamic feminisms without reducing either of them to a meaningless parody c) deal with the sticky issue of *Islamist* feminisms, which don’t really fit on anyone’s map and d) use as few specialized terms as possible for an audience with no background in Islamic studies, postcolonialism, or even feminism? Oh, and I know almost nothing about Christian fundmanetalism, and considering this thing is being published in the US, that’s probably what people want to know about. (Totally punted that one and talked about the BJP and the Ikhwan instead.) Sigh.
In any case, people seem really excited about the encylopedia on gender studies listservs–although maybe this is just second-wave women trying to teach third-wave women and struggling with knowing what anyone is talking about, and glad for a codification of things. I’m glad to know they’re pulling things from Yentl’s Revenge, though, and if they asked for entries on Islamic feminism, etc, they’re probably pulling writings by Islamic feminists, and so are getting a broad grouping of things… so we can hope it’ll be good. Who knows.
ciao,
Emily