It's been a little quiet around here lately. Where have I been? you might well ask. And you might well keep asking, because an explanation is not going to be provided in this forum. But the hits just keep coming.

A minor literary kerfluffle has kicked up in the UK literary world as the editors of a new literay collection complain in their introduction that their contributions from women writers were disappointing. They take it one step further and say that indeed, the submissions from men are better:

On the whole the submissions from women were disappointingly domestic, the opposite of risk-taking - as if too many women writers have been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape, and melancholy at doing it, depressed as hell. ...What this book reveals, most interestingly, is a generation of, yes, young male writers who have gleefully ignored Short-Story-Land and all its dutifulness...

Breaking down the submissions by gender seems such an obvious and lazy distinction I wonder why they bothered to make it at all, unless this was a carefully considered ploy to create "controversy." At any rate, the inevitable feminist reaction and the response from the editors makes for interesting reading. Without reading all the submissions, we'll never be able to judge for ourselves whether the women writers did truly submit pieces of lesser quality, whatever that means in this context. But some commentators have taken a longer view about what this tempest in a teapot might suggest in a bigger cultural context.

In my experience it is not usually the writing that is domestic - more the response, a way of reading that is all too often a conditioned response, one that cannot see the sweeping universal in the minutiae of experience.

In other literary news, a hometown blogger is hitting the road with a book tour. Mark your calendars now!