Penumbra

So yesterday I posted about some problems with Penumbra Ezine–namely, that although their guidelines say they pay five cents a word, until recently they published one “Rising Talent” story on their website a month–and those Rising Talent stories were unpaid. What’s more, there was no indication that those stories would be unpaid anywhere on their website. Writers “honored” with the Rising Talent designation discovered it when they opened their acceptance email.

This morning I had an email in my inbox from Celina Summers, editor of Penumbra. The email is kind of baffling–it says I’ve wrongly accused Penumbra of being a non-paying market when in fact they have paid at least five cents a word for every story they’ve published! Oh, and also the Rising Talent authors all totally knew they weren’t getting paid for their stories before they signed the contract.

Yeah. I don’t know either. You’d think the contradiction here would be obvious. And pretty much the whole email was like that, refuting things I hadn’t actually said, and then attempting to refute things I actually had said by basically confirming the facts I’d posted. The whole thing was either astonishingly disingenuous or astonishingly foolish.

It has also come to my attention, from a different source, that I am “an out and out lone wolf” with an “agenda at Penumbra.” And apparently just pointing out the plain fact that Rising Talent stories were not paid for, and that this fact was not apparent on the website but rather something writers discovered when they were granted this dubious honor, means I’m part of a “crusade to force [Penumbra and/or its parent company Musa] to close.”

First things first. I kinda like “out and out lone wolf.” Granted, it’s not as awesome as Gamma Rabbit, and doesn’t really even touch the gibbering incoherence of THE….Sodomite, but, you know, you take what you can get. And that “out and out” does add a pleasant touch of weirdness, so.

It’s also a trifle tin-eared. I mean, the image of the lone wolf is kind of romantic. I could totally see it being a superhero identity.

My only “agenda at Penumbra” (really?) is to inform writers. The best outcome of this, from my angle, would be for Ms Summers to begin to actually run Penumbra as the professional magazine she claims she wants it to be. This would include being completely honest and up front about pay rates, continuing to pay all authors (instead of, as with the extremely badly conceived “Rising Talent” business, paying most authors but not paying the one a month that should just be grateful to have their story posted on the website), and responding to all authors in a professional, non abusive way.

If Penumbra can’t be run on those terms, then yes, it should close. But note, Penumbra closing is not actually a goal of mine. Informing writers is my goal.

In her email Ms Summers claimed that my “accusation” could destroy Penumbra. I am flattered she thinks the Out and Out Lone Wolf holds so much power. I’ll say here what I told her– the only thing that could destroy Penumbra would be Penumbra itself. My pointing out a problem did not cause that problem, and my having said nothing, or retracting my (entirely factual) blog post would not solve that problem. Penumbra’s future is all on her.

I’d like to note, by the way, that Ms Summers offered to let me see Penumbra’s books and learn all about their finances and how they run things behind scenes. How this was supposed to prove to me that really the whole Rising Talent thing was fine and dandy, and the truly appalling emails I’d seen from her to at least one writer were totally and completely all right, I have no idea. I refused, because really that was irrelevant to the problems I was talking about, and to be honest the invitation just convinced me that either Ms Summers truly has no idea what the actual problem is, or else she thinks I’m stupid. Neither one speaks well of her.

I’m done blogging about this, because I’ve done what I wanted–gotten the information out there. Y’all can do what you want with it. I’d be more than happy to see Penumbra straighten up and fly right and go on to Ezine Greatness. If not, it’ll be because of their own actions, not one writer’s blog post.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an overpowering urge to go outside and out and out howl at the moon.

People Die of Exposure.

So, I’m speaking here as my personal self, and not as Secretary of SFWA.

First off. Writers. Any editor who tells you that they’re doing you a favor by giving you exposure? Not worth submitting to.

Because they’re not doing you any favors. If they’re just publishing your story for free on the web, you could get exactly the same “exposure” by publishing that story on your own blog.

Now, I’m not saying all non-paying venues are crap, or not worth subbing to. For one thing, your goals in submitting might not have much to do with being a professional writer–writing and submitting might be all about the fun for you, and that’s awesome and wonderful and have a great time! And there are, actually, or at least have been, a few places that pay nothing but have really good critical reputations. But those few non-paying venues that appearing in actually might do something for your career? Are edited by people with standing and reputation in the field such that yes, others pay attention to the stories they select. Those editors will never say they’re doing you a favor publishing you, because they know that in the end, you’re doing them just as much of a favor by giving them your story. Their reputation is based in part on their consistently publishing good work. That reputation doesn’t exist without you and writers like you. And they know that, and aren’t going to try to tell you that they’re somehow doing you a favor and trying to give you a leg-up.

Seriously, I’ve got no problem with non-paying venues, so long as they’re up front about not paying, and don’t try to act like they’re granting favors from on high by publishing you.

I do have a problem with zines that conceal the fact that they don’t pay. And I’ve got an even bigger problem with zines that pay some writers, but keep a slot for “promising” writers, you know, to give them a leg up. Without, you know, also giving them a check.

Now. A bit more than a year ago, the ezine Penumbra opened its doors. Their guidelines said they paid pro-rates–five cents a word. They also had a slot in each issue for “Rising Talent,” a story from an up and coming, new writer they felt deserved the spotlight.

What the guidelines, and the description of the Rising Talent thing, didn’t say was that the writers so-spotlighted would not be paid for their stories.

It appears this is no longer the case–the Rising Talent page on the website now only lists the existing Rising Talent stories and the description of it has been deleted.

So, this is where my personal desire to inform new writers intersects with my role as Secretary of SFWA. Because it’s become clear over the last year that some number of writers have been assuming that Penumbra was a SFWA-qualifying market, or at the very least would be in the fullness of time, that once their year was up, they’d be found to have met all qualifications and the writers who had sold to them in that last year would have a qualifying credit to their names.

Sadly, because they didn’t pay for the Rising Talent stories, and SFWA requires qualifying markets to pay SFWA minimum for all new fiction acquired, that isn’t going to happen. Not for this year, anyway. And when I say “sadly” I mean that–it’s to the advantage of writers to have lots of interesting, well-run, thriving venues for fiction around. The more there are, the better it is for us. When I see a zine obviously trying to get SFWA status–whether because they’ve announced they are, or whether it’s clear from their policies and guidelines–it gives me a warm, happy feeling. I wish them success. When I’m sitting in my Secretary Seat, it makes me happy to send an email telling someone that yes, they are a SFWA qualifying market!

So, I genuinely want Penumbra, and other zines trying to get that status, to succeed.

I want to say again, btw, that I am not at this moment sitting in my Secretary Seat. I won’t even be able to in a few weeks–on July 1, Susan Forrest pulls up with the SFWA Trailer and hauls that baby away. But it’s still here for now, and I am not sitting in it. I’m speaking only for myself at this point.

There’s been some back-channel chatter about the Penumbra situation, with some surprise and dismay at not only the lack of payment for Rising Talent stories, but also for the way Penumbra didn’t mention that lack of payment up front in its guidelines. From one angle, it looks pretty exploitative–let’s say you’re a new writer, hoping for a good home for your fiction and (oh please oh please) a SFWA qualifying sale. You get the dreamed-of acceptance–but wait, it’s for the Rising Talent slot! Isn’t that great!

Except you don’t get paid. You’re asked to write a nonfiction article to go along with the story, and you’ll get a free full page ad in the magazine! And they’ll pay for the nonfic!*

Now, if you’re a new writer who’s been paying attention, you know that there’s something off here. The guidelines said nothing about not getting paid for Rising Talent. You’ve been reading blogs and you know about the debates over whether it’s ever worth letting anyone publish your fiction for free. But damn it, you’ve been submitting and submitting and hardly getting any love, and this is almost the next thing to a SFWA pro market and if you pull out, will that leave you with a bad reputation? After all, SF&F is small. Everyone knows each other, what if you get blacklisted because you’ve acted like some kind of spoiled special snowflake over this?

These are very real feelings, and very real fears. And the way the Rising Talent thing was set up, it was almost custom-made to play on these feelings.

Now, in the various conversations I’ve heard about this, it’s been suggested that Penumbra just made an honest mistake. They didn’t mean any harm and didn’t know any better.

On the one hand, I really hope that was the case, because the alternative is something I’d prefer not to be true. On the other hand, if that is the case, it displays a pretty astonishing lack of knowledge of standard practices in SF&F. A complete ignorance of the conversations surrounding writing and selling science fiction and fantasy. And given that they’ve been aiming at SFWA qualification, it’s a bit puzzling how they could have failed to notice the mismatch between the “at least five cents a word for all new fiction” requirement and the whole “who needs money when we can give you valuable exposure” Rising Talent thing. Heck, once you know Rising Talent wasn’t Paid Talent, even the language of the Rising Talent description is dicey, given the common advice to new writers about the value (or more properly the lack thereof) of “exposure” as payment. That text is gone now, but this was the last sentence:

This is just our way of bringing a talented writer into the spotlight, in the hopes that exposure will lead them to bigger and better things.

And in fact, this isn’t their only problem. While I know a number of writers who have had a great experience selling their work to Penumbra, I also know of a number who have had decidedly negative experiences. I’ve seen emails, and let me tell you, I raised an eyebrow while reading them. And I admit I’m kind of raising an eyebrow over the response to “You shouldn’t be only paying for some stories and not others” being to delete the Rising Talent, not, you know, start paying for it.

Now, maybe the editor had a bad day. Or a bad week. Or has a bad week every couple of months or something. That happens–but it doesn’t excuse the sort of treatment of writers that I’ve seen. Let me say again, it’s not like someone told me what happened and they blew it out of proportion or twisted it around. I read the emails themselves. There is no excuse for what I read.

But let’s say it was a bad day, and most of the time they’re not like that, and all of it–the badly-written (and poorly understood) contract, the surprise non-payment for Rising Talent stories, the sporadically unprofessional emails–it’s all just them learning, just honest mistakes, and they’ll do better in the future.

I sincerely hope that’s the case, I really, truly hope they do better in the future. But as far as I’m concerned–me, personally, not anyone else–they’ve got a very, very long way to go before I’m going to tell a new writer that it’s a good place to submit. And I’m not happy to say that, I’d really much rather say, “Hooray for Penumbra, they’re a qualifying market now!” But I can’t say that, and it makes me sad.
___

*I’ve seen the correspondence and the contract of one of the Rising Talent authors. It was a whole ten bucks for the article. Or, actually, the contract appears to say the ten bucks was for the story–the only work named in the contract–while the correspondence insists that the article is also somehow covered in the contract that nowhere mentions it.

**Incidentally. There seem to be several widespread misapprehensions about SFWA qualifying status. One is that it’s some sort of mark of quality–that publishers that put out well-regarded work that wins awards but don’t pay minimum or meet circulation minimums ought still be able to be on the list. Sorry, no. There’s a list of requirements right here and they all need to be met. SFWA qualification makes no statement whatever about the quality of any market, or of the fiction it publishes.

There also seems to be a misapprehension that just paying five cents a word is sufficient. It is not. Please read that link above.

Please do not tell me about the requirements being outdated. I know they are. There’s a distinct possibility the Board will be looking at maybe changing those requirements in the nearish future. Please do email a Board member (any Board member! Seriously!) with your thoughts on the matter, if you’re having serious thinky thoughts or concerns you’d like them to know about. Be polite when you do, whoever you contact is a volunteer who’s working hard on any number of things right now.

***New writers, no one reputable is going to blacklist you for asking questions about a contract, asking to negotiate things that seem dicey to you, or just refusing to accept an acceptance that doesn’t seem right. An editor who tries to tell you that pros never question, negotiate, or pull out of bad deals, or who tells you that you’ll be blacklisted for doing those things, is not reputable and doesn’t actually have the ability to blacklist you that way. That editor might refuse to work with you again (no big loss!), but there’s no industry-wide blacklist they can put you on.

****Whether you’re a SFWA member or not, if you have an experience with a SFWA qualifying market that suggests that market might no longer qualify, please by all means email the Secretary of SFWA at secretary@sfwa.org and let whoever that is (it won’t be me after June 30!) know what went down.

June Fiction

I’ve gotten behind on announcing when stories go up at GNS. Sorry about that! Life, you know?

This month, A House, Drifting Sideways, by Rahul Kanakia.

On the morning of my fund day, our pilot landed the house with a particularly gentle touch. I was probably the only family-member who felt the house kiss our Philadelphia docking station. I abandoned my desk and went to the window. A crowd of grubby locals from the adjacent Suareztown had already gathered around the marble pediment of the docking station. It might be hours before we began recruiting, but they had no better use for their time than jostling for a place near the house’s entrance. Although Father refused to indulge their pretensions to serfdom by directly sharing our family’s arrival times with the Suareztowners, some groundskeeper had probably told them, days ago, that we were coming.

The leading edge of the crowd was just fifty feet below me. The mass of dirty limbs and garishly clothed torsos swayed, and arms were raised up. I waved, and the carpet of humanity rippled in time to my movements. I presumed they were cheering.

GigaNotoSaurus Announcement

I posted this announcement this morning at GigaNotoSaurus:

This summer, Anna Schwind (who is among other things one of the editors of Podcastle) will be taking over GigaNotoSaurus’ slushpile. She’ll be reading for the next three months.

This may or may not be related to the fact that I have a deadline coming up. But I’m also interested in the ways other people might curate stories, and I’m seriously considering future guest editing slots.

Writers who are familiar with Podcastle might already have some idea of the things that appeal to Anna–now’s the time to send those things if you have them! But don’t forget that sometimes the most wonderful discoveries are a surprise–something you never thought of, never expected. Keep sending the stories you believe in, not just the stories you think a particular editor might like. The submissions process will be unchanged–the regular guidelines still apply.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Anna brings us.

Pretty self-explanatory, really.

Haven’t been blogging much lately, mostly because I’ve been busy with, you know, stuff. And things. Nothing really exciting. The last couple days I’ve been making things out of Roman Cookery: Ancient Recipes for Modern Kitchens and so far the results have been interesting and quite good. Though this morning’s serving of puls punica was entirely too much cheese at the beginning of the day and I am loathe to move much now if I can help it. Apparently the recipe comes from Cato the Elder, who fed it to his slaves, and actually it tasted quite good and no doubt all that cheese was good for calories and protein if you were doing Cato’s farmwork, but urgh.

I do highly recommend the mixtura cum caseo with lagana (the lagana weren’t hard to make, but just for reference, a box of wheat thins would make an entirely acceptable substitution). Fabulous lunch. Also ginormous amounts of cheese.

Once I’ve managed to digest the puls punica–I expect that will be some time next week–I’ll be trying the moretum and maybe even trying to make some garum. The “if you don’t have the patience to leave a jar of fish and salt in the sun for six months” version, I’ll just say that right up front.
And there’s still quite a few breads, porridges, and soups, as well as one or two things with, like, meat or fish in them!

Anyway. A conversation on Twitter reminded me of a writing peeve of mine, and I thought I’d rant on that a bit, because.

The peeve is, complaints about “passive” characters, when those characters are not, in fact, passive–when in fact small choices in constrained situations do indeed lead to change, sometimes on a large scale, sometimes not. I most often see this when the characters in question are very hedged about by circumstances. The movements available to them can be small and subtle.

Now, it’s true that small and subtle movement often can rule out big, wide, adventury stories with exploding planets–though it doesn’t always–and it definitely rules out naked power fantasies where the MC is a Chosen One with all kinds of power–physical, political, economic–at their disposal.

But “very few choices, few of which involve much physical violence or action” is not the same as “passive” and I think assuming it is is particularly unfortunate. In fact, historically, in various times and places, women have lived in constrained circumstances, with options limited by custom, and yet quite a few women, historically, in various times and places, have done some amazing things within those limits, up to and including ruling empires. And there’s a great deal of drama available in those stories, in the ways people can, and did, manipulate the limited choices available to them with pretty astonishing results. Looking back on those and saying, “Well, but she didn’t really do anything, she was just passive” is….let me politely call it an error.

It’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it, that those stories and their real life analogues are so often about women or members of other marginalized groups, and when you look at that, the prohibition on writing passive characters suddenly looks very different.

Plus, while yes, it’s very fun to read about emperors and generals and whatnot, I have a problem with the unstated assumption that everyday people, just ordinary folks, must therefore have lives that are not interesting enough to tell stories about.

Not to mention the fact that thinking only the planet-exploding, power fantasy stories are worth telling is so extremely limiting. I mean, I like planet exploding power fantasies as much as the next girl, but I’d be so, so bored if that were all there was to read.

Stuff and Things

Been doing stuff! This weekend I went to the Missouri State Sacred Harp Convention. Which basically was like this: (If the embedding doesn’t work, try clicking here)

All day for two days, with occasional breaks for coffee and/or lunch. Or as it’s referred to in singing circles, Dinner on the Grounds. Which, translated, means “a ginormous potluck round about noon with so much delicious food that you can’t possibly try even a taste of every different thing, plus a zillion cakes and pies.”

I also attended Career Day at the nearby high school, where I talked to kids who were interested in writing. There were only a few students interested in SF&F, and several who were mainly interested in poetry, which I couldn’t really help them with. There were lots of good questions about quite a range of issues, including some technical ones (how to handle transitions, dealing with being stuck in a particular place in a project, etc) that really needed more complex answers–I mean, transitions? The choices are essentially limitless and without seeing the piece in question I could only give general advice (try just cutting to where you want to be, plus watch how the writers you love handle the same sort of thing and try imitating it to see if it works for you), but hopefully I was able to help a bit.

But my takeaway was, there are, locally, a good number of smart, eager kids interested in writing. They were a pretty wide-ranging group, too–I saw three sessions of about twenty kids each and they seemed to be from a pretty wide range of backgrounds from what I could tell just seeing them for a half hour or so. I really enjoyed talking with them.

Ten thousand thousand are their tongues, but all their joys are one

I need to run errands today like a super-efficient errand-running thing, but I can’t go anywhere just yet because all my jeans are in the dryer.

Meantime, I just thought I’d mention that Ancillary Justice has an amazon page, and it is, it seems, quite entirely possible to pre-order it.

At some point–no idea exactly when–I will have some ARCs to give away, too. I am trying to think of a fun way to do that, and haven’t come up with anything more exciting than “send me your name and I’ll pull some out of a hat.” There’s time, though!

Whether you pre-order, or wait for an ARC giveaway, either way, you can also apparently add the book on Goodreads.

No, I do not keep looking at those pages over and over again. I also did not set the mockup of the cover I saw a few weeks ago as the wallpaper on my computer and also my phone. Because that would be silly.

Omniscient

So, on a discussion forum elsewhere the topic of omniscient came up, and I got cranky and wrote a post, and this post here is a very edited version of that one.

One of the things that made me cranky was an assertion that omni was an advanced skill and only highly trained professionals with safety equipment firmly in place should attempt it. It was also suggested that because readers are mostly used to limited third, one should only deploy omni if one had a really good reason to.

I’ve said several times what I think about “don’t try this at home, kids” advice for writers, so I won’t repeat myself beyond saying I think that’s bullshit and you should absolutely try anything at all that you think might make your story as marvelous as you want it to be. Or even anything that sounds cool and fun. There’s honestly no real downside.

So, that disposed of. Is omni really all that advanced?

I don’t think it is. It’s just that limited third has become fashionable, everyone trying to learn to write is using models that used it, and in limited third headhopping is experienced as obtrusive so beginners are told to avoid it but not how to make it work or how it’s different from omni. So if you haven’t read much that uses omni, you won’t understand how it works, let alone how or why it’s different from limited third.

It’s true some number of readers just aren’t used to reading omni. But this is really not relevant. If writers only ever produced the kind of thing everyone was used to reading, sweet merciful Mithras, all of literature would be one gray, formless mass of uniform goo. It would be easy to read but why would anyone bother? And is that really what you want for your writing?

The question isn’t “is this what readers are used to?” The question is, “How do I make this work?”

You’ll be ill-equipped to make omni work if you haven’t read much of anything that uses it, or if you assume you can treat it like limited third. So the first thing anyone should do who wants to use it–and you don’t need any excuse to use it beyond the simple desire to do so, or the feeling that your story would be better for it–is to read work that uses it. In the conversation that triggered this post, Middlemarch was suggested, and I heartily endorse that suggestion. By all means, go read Middlemarch, it’s fabulous. But while you’re reading, pay attention to the POV. Notice that there’s a narrator. There’s a “someone” to be omniscient, to know all and tell us about it.

Limited third has no “narrator.” In limited third, somehow the impressions and thoughts of the POV character are arriving on the page. Omniscient, by contrast, only works if you assume Someone is telling the story. That someone needn’t be made explicit–you can do it by consistency of voice alone, if you want. But once you’ve established that narrative voice, by and large the reader will let you do whatever you like, because you’re never actually violating the main POV–that is, your (nearly always unnamed and often unmentioned) narrator.

That narrator can be a character in the story herself, named or not. Or they might be just an unnamed someone whose voice and comments make it clear they’re sitting there telling you this story, commenting on it, providing incidental information, their own judgments and opinions. Or they might be nearly invisible, barely detectable but for a few value-laden descriptions or one or two wry comments, or possibly just a certain distance in the narration–though of course it’s entirely possible to do an intimate omni and a very distant limited third, still, one quick and dirty way to establish omni from the very start is to open with a bit more distance than you’d expect in limited third. (It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…It is a truth universally acknowledged….Once upon a time…)

Now, if you don’t like omni, and have no desire to use it, then by all means, don’t. And if you don’t enjoy reading work that’s in omni, well, don’t, but of course I do think a writer ought to at least sample as broadly as she can.

But don’t avoid it because someone has told you it’s advanced, or hard to sell, or something readers won’t tolerate. Do whatever it is you think you need to do to make your story the most awesome thing you can manage to make it. Editors aren’t sitting around hoping for bland imitations of the last thing they published. And even if they were, is that what you’re really wanting from your writing, in your secret heart of hearts? Or do you want your work to be freaking awesome?

And you’ll never learn to do the awesome stuff if you don’t try.

(BTW, I also highly recommend Hal Duncan’s Rule 4 for New Writers: POV is not a communal steadicam. Hell, just read all the stuff he’s got for “new writers.”)

Debt

So a while ago I made a try at reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. But I have this thing about nonfiction–if I run across one or more glaring inaccuracies I find it impossible to trust the rest of what the author tells me, or the honesty of their arguments.

The sort of thing that puts me off is generally the sort of thing that five minutes with Wikipedia would clear up. In this case, I ran across this sentence:

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who ran twice for president on the Free Silver platform–vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold.

Okay, so. This is mostly only recognized by people who have their pareidolia turned up way too high, and also a fine disregard for Baum’s stated purpose (and what the actual point of a parable is to begin with). I read that sentence and said, out loud, “Are you shitting me, Graeber?” and closed the book and sent it back to the library.

But a friend of mine suggested maybe I’d been too hard on him and maybe I should give him another chance. So I got it out again and paged past the offending spot, and dove back in. And some of it is interesting and I find myself going “yes, that makes a great deal of sense.” But every couple pages I feel like he’s making logical leaps–small ones, but still. Not enough to make me put the book down.

Then I run across a sentence where he seems to conflate a commentary on a source with the source itself. I raise my eyebrow. And then I hit this.

To the contrary, insofar as prostitution did occur (and remember, it could not have been nearly so impersonal, cold-cash a relation in a credit economy), Sumerian religious texts identify it as among the fundamental features of human civilization, a gift given by the gods at the dawn of time. Procreative sex was considered natural (after all, animals did it). Non-procreative sex, sex for pleasure, was divine.

The footnote at the end of this passage just cites two books, it doesn’t give any explanation or amplification. Now, I’m not an expert in this area, I’m only a hobbyist. But I know what “religious texts” he’s talking about here, that describe the “fundamental features of human civilization.” He’s talking about the mes. Which are–oh, let’s let Wiki tell us:

In Sumerian mythology, a me (Sumerian, conventionally pronounced [mɛ]) or ñe [ŋɛ] or parşu (Akkadian, [parsˤu]) is one of the decrees of the gods foundational to those social institutions, religious practices, technologies, behaviors, mores, and human conditions that make civilization, as the Sumerians understood it, possible. They are fundamental to the Sumerian understanding of the relationship between humanity and the gods.

So, if the gods gave us these social institutions, religious practices, technologies, etc. they must all be good things, right? Divine gifts from the gods? It’s not necessarily a bad assumption, but go look at that list. Lots of good things and then you get things like the destruction of cities, lamentation, and falsehood.

So, “prostitution is on the list of mes” isn’t really a very good argument for the ancient Sumerians holding a positive view of prostitution. I don’t say they didn’t, understand, just that you couldn’t necessarily know that from its presence on this list. (Or for that matter, from its apparently religious nature, at least in some cases, which is his other support for his claims about Sumerian attitudes towards prostitution. But that’s a whole other discussion.)

But Graeber is basing part of his argument on the attitude of ancient Sumerians towards prostitution (vs later attitudes), and this is his evidence for the attitude he says they had. And so the question for me is, did he not actually look at the list of mes? There are plenty of Sumerian texts that are mentioned or summarized in books but hard to find in translation, but this one, as I mention above, is easily available. So if he didn’t read the actual list of mes, he did sloppy research and I’m bound to wonder where else he skipped research he ought to have done.

Or did he know what was on the list, and that things like destruction of cities and troubled heart and fear and terror were there (they are) but went ahead anyway because darnit he was sure he was right and how many of his readers would question it, or had ever actually seen that list? Cause it’s pretty obscure.

Either way I can’t really trust him anymore–if he’s ignoring or eliding things in areas I know something about, surely it’s happening elsewhere in the book and I just don’t see it because how could I? And now it’s increasingly difficult to go any farther without going , “No, really? Can I believe any of this?” Which is a shame, because I’m interested in understanding his arguments, and I think his takedown of the “myth of barter” is spot on–I’m just having trouble following him much farther because I keep seeing moments like this that speak of either ignorance (which means some arguments, no matter how logically composed, won’t stand because they’re based on inaccurate premises) or dishonesty (which means he knows some facts won’t support his thesis but he’s going to deal with that by eliding those things).

Ugh. I hate when that happens.