Bookaholic

When I started publishing in the mid-1970s, the issue of the sexism of the third person singular pronoun came up. With new authors, we would just advise them of our concern. But when our Mudborn Press broke up (she kept the name, I went with Bandanna Books for my FBN), and I became interested in publishing classic texts, I soon confronted the sexism issue directly.

Obviously, the older authors had no idea that there might be a concern about using “he” or “man” as applying equally to women as to men, and there are historic reasons for that. Until the 18th and 19th centuries, girls were not traditionally sent to school, so why bother with he-and-she when the only readers were male?

In Plato’s Athens, women were not part of the political process; his writings were on major themes of honor, justice, and such, so we moderns assume that he included all persons in his ideas. But when he writes The Republic, it’s clear that he didn’t. We tend to gloss over that, so that today we read his philosophy as universally applicable. Is it? That’s a question for an editor to be worth asking.

When I launched Bandanna Books, my very first book published was a version of the I Ching. Simple, straightforward, right? But the model in almost every entry was the Prince or the noble man, the good man. Again, were women explicitly to be excluded? In a number of instances, women’s roles are mentioned separately from those of men. Nowhere is there an instance of a woman held up as a model. Does that negate the ideas in the I Ching about right living and judgment? Again, we like to read it as if these were universal truths or guides. How should the text read then, if English has a gender split in the third person singular?

I gave it a lot of thought, tried and rejected several ideas before coming up with what I call “humanist pronouns.” I noticed that we already had a set of non-sexist-tagged third person pronouns, interrogative pronouns: “who,” “whose,” “whom.” These are ordinarily used when we don’t know the person or gender and are asking. But what if we started using, with the same pronunciation, “hu,” “hus,” and “hum”? The spelling is similar to what one would expect, the sound is familiar, and even the sense is close to what one expects to hear. “Someone is knocking. See hu’s at the the door.” “A customer left a package. I picked up hus package and put it away.”

This, I believe, works better than using the plural in place of the singular, or he/she, hir, s/he, him and her, or other constructions that I’ve seen.

Some authors are careful in their writing, so that little or no
“gender editing” is required. This is generally true of Shakespeare, Poe, and others. Yet a few books, starting with the I Ching, require major surgery.

What has been the response? I did a little survey, and got something like 8 positive, 2 negative responses from teachers who used the books in their classes. It hasn’t caught on with anyone else, as far as I know. College textbooks go out of their way to keep their texts from being sexist, sometimes going to extremes of rearranging sentences to avoid using any pronoun at all.

Will I continue using the humanist pronouns? That depends on the text at hand, the audience, the acceptance. It’s my best effort at regularizing English.

Actually, the concern has spread to other languages, most of which have explicit masculine and feminine nouns, pronouns, adjectives, sometimes even neuter pronouns. Their solutions, the ones I’ve seen, tend to tack on the second gender with a slash to the ends of words.

Why do I care? Why is this issue important to me? Because I have changed genders myself, and I am forced to ask other people to change their pronouns for me. Now, if we had a non-sexist third person pronoun, that would not be required.

I live in the United States, where equality is part of the law of the land, even when our Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.” The universal “he” has not disappeared; I don’t know if it ever will. I would like to see another option continue to be available.

I’ve been publishing humanities texts (many public domain) for college for years now, and it took a jog of the mind from Jason Epstein (chief at Random House) to make me recognize that I’m the editor of a star lineup of authors, and since they’re all dead, I can edit more or less as I see fit. Sappho, Edgar Allan Poe, Whitman, John Milton (whoa — edit Milton? yes, I’ve done it).

One might call what I do semi-scholarly; I don’t have to satisfy academic journals, but I do have to address the needs and concerns of the wider public. “Public” is the key word, that’s what a “publish”-er caters to. Which carries a responsibility to serve the past and the future well.

In one of my prefaces, I recall the image of the author looking over my shoulder as I tinker with the words or the translation. If she/he were alive today, how should the text read? This concern has led to modernization of some texts, praise for Jowett’s remarkable style that somehow escaped Victorianisms or, as we might say today, being cutsie with the language by prettying it up with quaint words.

I have to believe that people actually said “anon,” and “forsooth” in Shakespeare’s day, but in my life I have never heard them spoken outside a Shakespeare play. That was one reason I created the Deadword Dictionary.

The audience, too, is smaller than one might suspect; at least, this is my assumption: that the classics are read primarily in late high school and early college, if at all. That narrows it down significantly, which works for me. I aim to find models, if I can find them, of the “breakthrough” type, usually in one’s twenties or thirties, as Milton with Areopagitica (though he’s more famous for his much later works) or Walt Whitman.

But now that Google and the Gutenberg Project have made so much public domain material available, does that mean my niche is gone? I don’t think so. The trick, in my mind, has been to create the simplest approach to difficult or important ideas. And I’m taking my cue from beer, coffee, and food products, the proliferation of their brands and slight variations over the past few decades, but with an assist from coding, to allow a reader choices of customizing a text as they prefer it –say, with or without the original language, modernized or not, genderized or not, format, ability to add notes, or read notes or links, audio, graphics, so that each customer ends up with the product they helped create.

This should end up with a book with dimensions, different angles with which one might approach it. That would be more like a “tarbaby” (as in the Uncle Remus stories of Br’er Rabbit).

One of my hobby horses has been the third person singular pronoun, which I will reserve for another post.

I was digging through boxes of tapes that desperately need weeded out, sold, trashed, or… when I rediscovered my old radio tapes. I used to do a radio show on the local campus radio station — yes, at that time they invited community members to propose programs, and I did with a partner. The partner soon left, but I continued with a show called Sound Art, Sound Text, which combined whatever I chose to play from the record library (yes, LPs, remember those?) with some talk, some reading and eventually more.

On the basis of what little I knew about radio, I was also hired on as the graveyard shift person on an all-classical local station, in which my major duty was to change giant 2-3 hour reels and keep the canned music flowing, and occasionally read a story or two off the AP wire. In other words, I had a lot of time on my hands. The result of this is that I conceived of, and executed, a plan to create a radio serial (just like in the old days), in this case based on the Beecher family. I had run across two volumes of their round-robin letters, so the material for “dialogue” was set up. I wrote the narrator pieces to set the background, and created the scripts.

Then, since I spent time at the campus station, I would drag in anybody who was walking by in the hallway to read a role for me, which was recorded on reel tape. Actually I chose five friends to voice the major continuing characters: Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the father Lyman Beecher. In all, there were 57 parts, some of them tiny, and it stretched to 28 half-hour episodes. There was a lot of cutting and splicing of reel tape before I could convert it to cassette tapes (remember those?). This was in the Eighties, way before computers or the Internet were widespread.

OK, OK, I’m coming to it. I transferred all 28 episodes to mp3 files, uploaded them, each with the script (and you may notice some places of going off-script) scrolling down. I haven’t figured out how to regulate or coordinate the audio with the text (hint, hint).

And while I was doing that, I found four other radio scripts, but only one other did I find the audio (Margaret Fuller). These two are posted at www.bandannabooks.com/19th. I also included other pieces that bear on the 19th Century, which I have published or helped to create. The Izak Starfisher experimental radio group was three of us doing some interesting things, most of which never aired.

It surprised me that so much of my effort was focused on the Nineteenth Century, but it still fascinates me, and I hope that others might continue to be curious enough to see where we came from and how we got here. Anyhow, enjoy.