Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

This article, which appeared in the NJ Star-Ledger under the headline “What a Girl Wants...to Read,” but was released via AP to nation-wide newspaper coverage, discusses the operation of Alloy Entertainment and how they have completely dominated the juvenile best sellers lists. Three of their books, according to the article, are in the NY Times best sellers list this week for children’s books, and their Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books are the number 1 series.

I found this interesting from a marketing and cultural perspective: clearly they have recognized that we as a culture (I’m speaking specifically of Americans here, but this does leak into other countries with American programs and newsfeeds) love celebrity and luxury. I recently read a book titled Living It Up: America’s Love Affair with Luxury in which a college professor tried to decode our obsession with luxury brand items. His conclusion was that the intersection of celebrity media attention, wherein we know what celebrities wear, do, eat, and carry better than we know the last names of our neighbors, crossed with high credit card balance limits, has created a luxury saturation on all market levels. Anyone with a credit card can afford high ticket items now, like Louis Vuitton or Kate Spade bags, Hermes scarves, or Prada backpacks. Should I wish, I can hook the Baby Bitchlette up with a Gucci-branded baby carrier, sort of an uber-Baby-Bjorn.

Alloy Entertainment identified this fixation, our lust for high ticket and celebrity-linked luxury, and spun it into several book series. Gossip Girl chronicles an uber-rich circle of girls in Manhattan; The Clique covers a similar group of girls, though younger in age. To quote the article, “the hook common in many of the novels is a gaggle of rich, bratty, powerful schoolgirls. It’s like an episodic reading of Paris Hilton and her friends....” We, the reader, get to peek in on and identify with young people living the ultra-luxe life.

Far be it from me to cry shock and awe at the idea of the publishing world following the celebrity-luxury fixation trend. I’m fully aware that there’s a reason why there are so many awful reality shows on tv. People like them, and they sell well. It’s not a hard equation.

But this particular section of the article made me see all shades of red:

Staff members are in charge of everything about the book, from creating ideas to finding writers for the books, crafting proposals for publishers and creating the sleek cover art. The company then sells the book, but keeps all the other rights. As many as 50 are published each year and are well distributed among the major publishing houses.

Alloy’s methods may seem a bit unorthodox, especially to budding authors peddling a carefully crafted labor of love. Write a book that isn’t your idea? That seems totally uncool.

But for many of Alloy’s authors, it is a chance to do something they’d never do.

Lisi Harrison, author of “The Clique” series, was working at MTV when she was approached by Alloy to create books about wealthy, junior-high queen bees.

“Always being a closeted wannabe author—I jumped at the opportunity,” she said.

So there you have it. You don’t even need to think up your ideas for a book anymore. Somewhere, a corporate task force is going to do it for you. No need for creativity, nor writing a book based on a moment of insightful brilliance about the relations between women and the world. Just find yourself a cool job and wait for the book-writing assignment to come to you.

The corporatization of creativity, where market research fuels plot development, reminds me of the dissolution of creativity in radio. Used to be that DJs were soulful-voiced individuals who could have some say in their playlists, who could mix up different song groups into a whole that kept people listening. Now DJ’s have a computer printout of what to play when that’s created depending on the format of the station. A top-40 station will mix up the top 40 songs, and then wedge in songs that were in certain chart positions 1, 2, 5, and perhaps 10 years ago, for example, depending on how far back in time the playlist of the station will allow. Sometimes the computer will spit out what one DJ I knew called a “Holy Shit” song, an old and semi-popular track that hasn’t been played in a long ass time. And that is the expanse of the creativity - the DJ has little to no say, and, in some formats, isn’t really allowed to do more than announce the station ID, the weather, the time and the next song. 

Now books are being written according to formula, too. I mean, I know that agents and publishers usually stick to established trend (hello, secret baby) when buying books in the first place, but to have the ideas and character groups thought up by the same people releasing the book, and farming out the actual writing to someone whose life experience may lend well to the development of acceptable plot ideas?

It boggles the mind. And whoo damn does it ever piss me off. Because you know if this formula works so well for Alloy (and it looks like it’s working just fine), other firms may pick up the trend, and soon instead of publishers releasing statements like, “We’re looking for paranormal romances with strong erotic elements” you’ll get advertisements from entertainment monoliths like Clear Channel: “We need a writer to bang out a few books in a series about a shopaholic vampire demon-hunter with three kids, a station wagon, and a serious penchant for shoes and handbags. No experience in writing needed, but must be familiar with all manner of couture, and the habits and lifestyle of the rich, famous, and undead.”

The book has an overarching storyline about a writer’s retreat gone horribly wrong. Interspersed with this main story are a host of short stories recounted by individual members of the retreat, all of them borderline (or outright) sociopaths and murderers.

The first short story, “Gut,” is really fun. As a teenager, the narrator for this story masturbated in his swimming pool while sitting on the inlet port of the circulation pump, which resulted in, erm, a rather visceral experience. That part of the story I had no problem with. It made me cringe and howl, but I bought it. One of the finest examples of making shit up I’d ever read.

Then at the end of the story, his young sister found out she’s pregnant, presumably with his child. How? Because of the sperm he blasted into the swimming pool while whacking off.

Now THAT gave me pause. First of all: the dilution factor would be immense. IMMENSE. Yes, there are billions of sperm in semen—but they’re contained in, what, a couple teaspoons of fluid? And it’s hard enough for a woman to get pregnant when the all those billions of spermatozoa are deposited DIRECTLY in the vagina. Disperse that sperm by many, many, many gallons of water and figure out the odds of somebody becoming pregnant because somebody jacked off in the pool. Answer: not bloody fucking likely.

Second of all: the chlorine in the pool would kill off a lot of those suckers. Not all, but a lot.

Third of all: The narrator noted that he removed much of the semen from the swimming pool after his aquatic jack-off sections, which means the vast majority of sperm would’ve been removed anyway, further decreasing the numbers of spermatozoa present in the swimming pool.

Fouth of all: Sperm can live outside the body for a maximum of 96 hours, but that’s assuming a friendly, stable, moist, pH-balanced environment like the Cowper’s gland of the penis, not a chlorinated swimming pool with water that’s constantly being circulated and filtered.

Fifth of all: Unless the sister liked to swim nude while douching herself with spermed-up swimming pool water, I find it difficult to believe that what few swimmers remained were hardy enough to penetrate her swimming suit and make it all the way to her uterus.

When ONE sentence in a short story makes a reader bust out a detailed five-point list on why she finds it highly implausible, I’d say that would be an example of making shit up that has failed, and failed rather spectacularly.

On to the “getting shit wrong” part of this rant: About 50 pages into the book, I started feeling bored, so I flipped way ahead and skimmed to see if the stories got any more interesting. I came across this sentence near the end of the book:

Among the dead celebrities roamed animals extinct on earth: passenger pigeons, duck-billed platypuses, giant dodos.

Wait a fucking second. What in the hell? The duck-billed platypus is extinct?

Such was my faith in Palahniuk that I actually looked this up. Hey, it’s not as if I’m a zoologist specializing in monotremes or Australian wildlife; maybe it had become extinct in recent years and I hadn’t heard about it.

No, the platypus is still alive and well and frolicking in the waters of the antipodes.

OK, fine. It’s an honest mistake, though one that a decent editor should’ve caught (a decent editor would’ve also caught and corrected Palahniuk’s tendency to switch from past to present tense for no discernible reason, or addressed why all these different stories narrated by extremely different people all sound as if they were being told by the exact same person, but those are other issues and beyond the scope of this particular rant). At any rate, shit happens, so while this mistake was startling, I didn’t hold it against the book too much.

I flipped back to where I was and continued reading. Ooooh, the people were being fed nothing but freeze-dried food at the writer’s retreat. A bit eccentric, but hey, the whole book’s eccentric. Then I came across another example of Getting Shit Wrong. The bags of freeze-dried food were filled with nitrogen to “keep the contents dead.”

Actually, that’s untrue. Nitrogen is often used in food packaging to keep oxygen out, certainly, but the lack of oxygen doesn’t necessarily retard microorganism growth. Freeze-drying does that much more effectively. Keeping out oxygen prevents spoilage by preventing the oxidation of nutrients, especially fat. Oxygen and light contribute to make fats rancid, which in turn affects fat-soluble vitamins such as A and D. Other vitamins are also notoriously sensitive to oxygen, such as vitamins C and E, which is why they’re such effective antioxidants.

Besides that, many, many pathogenic organisms can multiply and spoil food just fine in the absence of oxygen, thankyouverymuch—that’s why bacteria and other microorganisms can be classified as “aerobic” (requires oxygen), “anaerobic” (requires absence of oxygen), or “facultative” (able to function with or without oxygen). Clostridium botulinum is anaerobic, for example, while salmonella, listeria and staphylococcus are generally considered facultative species.

Mind you, I’m not and have never been a biology major; I took two years of biology classes in high school and one 100-level biology class in college, and I managed to pick up enough knowledge to de-bunk THIS bit of bullshit.

This wasn’t the dumbest bit about the freeze-dried food, though. The worst part came when some people decided to deliberately sabotage the food supply by cutting open the Mylar packaging. Within days, the food was rotten, stinking to heaven and leaking pools of noxious fluid.

Excuse me? I thought the food was freeze-dried.

1. How in the fuck did it get bad so fast? Dehydration is one of THE most effective protections against food spoilage. Forget oxygen; water is one of the biggest (and most consistent) requirements for microorganisms to flourish—mostly because cells consist primarily of water.

Want to know how effective dehydration is in retarding spoilage? Just look at your average bag of dog or cat kibble. The moisture content can vary a little bit, but generally speaking, they contain less than 10% water (from the figures I’ve seen, 4-5% seems the average). Think of how many months you can keep that bag of kibble after breaking the seal without it going bad.

Or if you want another demonstration: How many of you have gone on weekend trips and just dumped a bunch of kibble into bowl or a timed feeder and called it good? When you came back, was the kibble rancid, stinking and dripping?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

2. Where in the hell did the fluid come from? Oh sure, freeze-dried food will absorb some atmospheric water, but so much that the bags actually leak and drip stinking fluid? Bitch, please. Here’s an experiment: leave out a small amount of freeze-dried coffee in a saucer on your kitchen counter and see how long it takes for it to gather discernible amounts of water from the atmosphere. Don’t have any freeze-dried coffee? That’s OK, leave out a bowl of cornflakes, which is basically dehydrated corn. See how long it takes before ANYTHING happens, aside from the flakes losing some of their crispness.

But then having the freeze-dried food remaining good for the duration of the story would not have served, because the story required the writers to starve and do drastic, gruesome things to stay alive. Why the hell Palahniuk didn’t just go with canned or frozen food instead is beyond me, because canned food that had its seal broken or thawed-out frozen food WOULD spoil quite spectacularly in a short amount of time. Maybe because canned corn, Hot Pockets and TV dinners aren’t as weird and cool as Mylar bags of freeze-dried space-age kibble? Who the hell knows?

I guess the point is: I am so much easier to piss off when an author gets science shit wrong vs. history shit wrong because I know more about science than I do about history.

No, wait, that’s not it. The point is: if you want to make shit up, make sure you do it WELL. I can buy into a story about a dude who has multi-colored chimps flying out of his ass, as long as I’m given sufficient backstory to explain the simian presence in his rectum. A genetic experiment gone wrong, an ancient gypsy curse, hey, sure, whatever—make it convincing. Make it detailed. Make it consistent. In short: Make it GOOD.

Most important of all: don’t get shit wrong. Especially basic shit.

Hmmm. Maybe I should re-title this essay and call it “Chuck Palahniuk’s Literary Offences.”

I’d heard how racy and sex-obsessed the genre is, but it seems to me the race is entered and exited at exactly the same points each time. Chick-lit heroines talk about sex, and occasionally they have it, yet it’s never because they want it, never because they have to have it or they’ll die, even though it’s wrong and there will be hell to pay. Nor is there no hell at all to pay — the kind of sex you just wanted and took, then zipped up or fell unconscious. Nor is it married sex: predictable, satisfying and scheduled. No, chick-lit sex is some sort of subtext for societal temperature-taking. Brr!

Hey, everyone, let’s play a game! Let’s play… Spot the False Generalization! Chick lit is filled with nothing but girls who have sex even though they don’t want it? Well, hell, and here I thought Old Skool romances were bad when it came to rape.

And also: married sex is scheduled? Shiiiit. Nobody ever told ME.

[Chick lit is] not literature; nor is it pornography, which is unoriginal but at least it’s hard and wet, not safe lunchroom gossip lust.

Ooooh, another fun game! Let’s play… Spot the False Dichotomy!

Bitch, please. A book has to be either literary OR pornographic? The mind boggles at what this person would think about the vast majority of books printed, sold and read, which tend to be neither literary nor pornographic NOR chick-lit (which is worse than porn, according to this person’s assessment, and hey, she wrote for Hustler and Playboy, so I guess she’d know).

No literary movement before this one has ever made me angry. People’s taste is none of my business. But this shit is being marketed to young girls, who are already getting weak enough ideas from other media about what being a girl means — why should the few who read be plowed under, too?

OH NOS THINK OF OUR CHILDREN!!!!111 PH3AR TEH CH1CK L1T!!!!

Anyway, that bapping sound you hear? That’s me hitting my head on the desk. WHY do people so consistently underestimate the reasoning abilities of teenagers--especially teenagers who read a lot? I mean, these teens tend to be smarter than average and a bit more introspective than average, right?

Train that impressionable girl right, give her a rock-steady foundation in critical thinking, and I can just about guarantee you that she won’t be too easily swayed into thinking that she needs [insert stupid cultural message about what being a woman means] to be happy or a good human being.

I’d like to take all these books, pile them up and throw gasoline and a lit match onto them. And let my daughter, and all the other girls, see if they can walk into the fire barefoot. Maybe they can’t do it, and maybe they’ll cry and get hurt and go to the hospital. But some of them will succeed. Either way, they deserve to see what they are made of, before they lay down their fierceness and accept what the rest of the world tells them they are, and more debilitatingly, what they are not.

Right. Does this sound like a bunch of self-serving, pseudo-literary horseshit about how Girls Are Precious And Need A Trial By Fire? Or is it just me? Because she starts out like she has a point, then she goes straight into a truly godawful metaphorical conceit and I kinda lost her there. But then, I read romance novels, so I can’t be all that bright.

These are the books I want a young girl to find, all on her own — not clustered together on Barnes & Noble’s Young Girl section, shoved down her throat by a manager shitting out what was shoved down his throat by an army of publicists who know where their bread is buttered: Me by Brenda Ueland; Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier by Alexandra Fuller; and Dune Life by the National Audubon Society.

Newsflash: Young girls who like to read will, in general: a) read widely; b) find a lot of different things that they’ll enjoy; and c) enjoy them despite what you think is Good For Them.

And I have to tell you, in all my years of bookstore browsing, I have yet to experience a manager shoving a book down my throat--or any other orifice, for that matter. Bookstore managers are too busy, well, managing, and frankly, I’m lucky if I can catch the attention of a lowly clerk to help me rummage through the C shelves of the romance section to see if Mr. Impossible had been released yet.

Here’s a thought: raise your girls to be strong. Raise your girls to defy expectations. Raise your girls to think independently. And if she likes to read chick lit, it’s not the end of the fucking world.

People who impart fiction with this magical, all-encompassing ability to Educate and Edify--and in fact, expect fiction to do as much--annoy me. Not that allowing fiction to impart Social Messages of Significance is a bad thing (ref. The Jungle, 1984, Animal Farm), or an unworthy endeavor, but shouldn’t the primary instruction come from the home, the family? If your teenager is so weak-minded that she instantly buys into everything she reads, you need to sit her ass down and explain the difference between real life and fiction again, ‘cause I don’t think that first lesson stuck.

Fiction that has a pointed social message: OK, I can dig it, and mostly if the message it tries to provide jives closely with my personal worldview. But I don’t care if most my fiction doesn’t contain Big, Meaningful Messages. I mostly want my fiction to entertain me, and to not insult my intelligence while it’s doing so. Because at the end of the day, it’s not really a fictional novel’s job to teach me life lessons. It’s my job.