by SB Sarah • Wednesday, June 06, 2007 at 10:48 AM
In the romance world, there’s many an unspoken rule as pertains to authors and reviewers and whatall. Used to be you weren’t supposed to give incisive reviews of romance novels that said (*gasp*) critical or even mean things about a book.
Yeah, oops, we blew right by that rule, didn’t we?
Another unspoken rule: if thou art an author, thou shalt not speak unkindly to or about a review thou hast received.
So what happens when the reviewer, a reviewer in a Hugely Powerful Publication Of Much Circulation (HPPOMC), gives a review that is totally, completely, utterly, asshattedly wrong?
Note: Details obliquely masked for fun guess-who-ing.
A rather fruitful author has co-written a novel with a few other fruitful and popular authors. It’s not an anthology (a word that would strike fear in the hearts of those who order books, since anthologies do not sell well of late) or a series of interconnected novellas in one cover. It’s a novel with more than one protagonist pair.
Seems the HPPOMC reviewer labels it in the review as three novellas AND as a novel, then recommends the collaborating group write a novel next time.
“Huh?” says SB Sarah.
“Gross mislabeling and the kiss of death,” says the fruitful author. Said author questions with ire whether the HPPOMC reviewer read the book in the first place.
Now, we’ve talked about reviewers who give away the ending a la Harriet Klausner, and the negative backlash against those authors who snark back at reviews they don’t like. But what do you do when a reviewer in a Hugely Powerful Publication Of Much Circulation gets the type of book and details wrong, so wrong that you, the author, question whether the reviewer read it in the first place?
The authors are tempted to take pen to paper and dish out a helping of cannon fire at the HPPOMC, stating that the review as written makes it clear that the reviewer was phoning it in, never read the book, and needs a right smackdown. But of course, they don’t wish to look like whiny dweebs who grouse at the sign of a negative review, even though it’s not the negative review they’d be focusing on, but the part where the reviewer got it so wrong it’s questionable as to whether said reviewer ever cracked the spine.
What would you do?
Do you speak up? Do you write the publication and say, “WTFBBQ?” Do you let it be? Do you take to the internet? How far can an author push against the “Act like you don’t care and say nothing unkind about reviews” rule when that review gets the subgenre and format of the book itself oh, so very very wrong?
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by Candy • Wednesday, May 23, 2007 at 08:05 AM
Sarah forwarded on ”Not Everybody’s a Critic,” an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times by film critic Richard Schickel. I would’ve dismissed it as the choleric rantings of an old man who didn’t understand kids these days with their rock music and their colored chalk and their 23 Skidoos and their fanny packs and their rollerskates and their listening to the Becks and their pierced I-don’t-know-whats and their Internet tubes, except that in the process of his rant, he expressed some truly repulsive ideas.
So Sarah and I duly dived in and waxed lyrical. And by “lyrical,” I mean “Hot damn, why won’t these two women shut up?”
Candy: OK, here are some thoughts inspired by the article on reviewing, dismantled point-by-point:
“Some publishers and literary bloggers,” the article said, viewed this development contentedly, “as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books.”
Anyone? Did I read that right?
Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.
Oh, that is beautiful bit of condescension. Language even a busy blogger can understand. I beg your pardon, dear sir--I’m afraid your proliferation of syllables obfuscated the point for this busy blogger.
Oops, sorry, I didn’t mean “syllables.” I meant “bullshit.”
At any rate, did anybody else pick up on the fact that Schickel turned an observation about comments and on-line interactions into, well, Reviewing and Criticism? These are all related, but assuredly not at all the same thing.
Because I can certainly agree that raw opinion does not a review nor criticism make; on the other hand, I don’t think all those qualifications are necessary to write a perfectly serviceable review of a piece of art. He offers no compelling reasons why this might be so, either in this paragraph or in ANY part of the article. His standard cry is this:
Opinion — thumbs up, thumbs down — is the least important aspect of reviewing. Very often, in the best reviews, opinion is conveyed without a judgmental word being spoken, because the review’s highest business is to initiate intelligent dialogue about the work in question, beginning a discussion that, in some cases, will persist down the years, even down the centuries.
I honestly fail to see why having comprehensive knowledge of the critical traditions, the artist’s entire oeuvre, the socio-political context or how low Hemingway’s left nut hung vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s is required in order to write a cogent, entertaining, mentally stimulating and perfectly valid review. Having more information and expertise can certainly help inform the review and enrich it, but none of it is strictly necessary. This man has it ass-backwards. The best reviews and critiques are grounded in an opinion--an informed opinion, though not necessarily an expert opinion--and it is this opinion that forms the thesis of the piece. It is, in fact, the whole purpose of a review (though not a critique, which is an animal of a different stripe).
Schickel also utterly ignores the primary reason why reviews exist in the first place: to inform people if something is worth their time and money. Stimulating discussion is all well and good, and I occasionally read reviews for that reason, but for us unwashed plebs, what we ultimately want to know is: is this thing worth my time, money and attention? The best reviews tells us not only what the reviewer liked or loathed, but why she felt that way, and perhaps most importantly, whether YOU’D feel similarly about it, too.
Look, I get it. Internet reviews have suffered from Klausnerization. We feel your pain, we really do. But tarring us all with the same brush and then insisting on impossible elitist standards for something like an everlovin’ review is not doing anybody any favors.
And now, for the Howling Irony parts of the discussion:
For example, French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a name not much bruited in the blogosphere, I’ll warrant.
I’m as fond of a pretentious and archaic turn of phrase as anybody else, but if this man sounded any more self-satisfied, he’d explode like an overfed tick.
In the middle of the 19th century, his reviews appeared every Monday for 28 years. He was a humane, tolerant and relentlessly curious man who once summarized his method in two words: “Just characterization.”
That “just” did not mean “merely.” It meant doing justice to the work at hand and to the culture in which it appeared.
Given how concerned this clownboat is with just characterization, he isn’t doing an especially good job with blogs and bloggers, is he?
Finally, there was George Orwell, scrambling to make a living by writing reviews for London’s intellectual press for maybe $20 or $30 a piece. He was more pointedly political than Wilson, and more attuned, perhaps, to the vagaries of trash culture, but his defense of honest vernacular prose in the face of bureaucratic (and totalitarian) obfuscation remains a critical beacon.
For somebody who seems to be praising the virtues of “honest vernacular prose” and appears to seek, as Twain advises us, to eschew obfuscation, he certainly avoids doing both in one relatively short opinion piece, doesn’t he?
I do think, however, that a simple “love” of reading (or movie-going or whatever) is an insufficient qualification for the job. That way often leads to cultishness (see the currently inflated reputations of Philip K. Dick or Cornell Woolrich, both easy reads for lazy, word-addicted minds).
And we have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering. We need to see something other than flash, egotism and self-importance. We need to see their credentials. And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion.
True, a love of the arts is insufficient for somebody to write a review; if nothing else, decent writing ability and critical thinking capabilities are also necessary. But one needs to prove one’s right to an opinion?
What?
Did this man not, just a couple of paragraphs above, applaud Orwell for his opposition to totalitarian influences on literature?
He’s also wrong about Dick. Dick may not have written the most elegant prose in the world, but his stories and ideas are consistently thought-provoking and have been tremendously influential, especially in SF. Being able to overlook the occasional bit of clumsy writing does not mean we’re word-addicted or lazy-minded. In fact, if I were a (heh heh) dick, I’d ask Schickel what his qualifications are for that particular opinion, how well-versed he is in the SF canon in general and Dick’s body of work in particular, and whether he understood Dick’s inspirations, especially as rooted in his socio-political milieu.
Frankly, for somebody so intent on the importance of qualifications in order to have a valid opinion, he does precious little to prove to us his qualifications himself.
The act of writing for print, with its implication of permanence, concentrates the mind most wonderfully. It imposes on writer and reader a sense of responsibility that mere yammering does not. It is the difference between cocktail-party chat and logically reasoned discourse that sits still on a page, inviting serious engagement.
Maybe most reviewing, whatever its venue, fails that ideal. But a purely “democratic literary landscape” is truly a wasteland, without standards, without maps, without oases of intelligence or delight.
This is probably where we disagree most radically. He sees the lack of structure and hierarchy as a threat, as a destructive force. I see what we have as a beautiful thing. Yes, there’s a lot of chaff and chaos because of the low barriers of entry, but that just means the potential for something truly wonderful emerging is that much higher. People suddenly have these handy, convenient venues to talk about books. They’re getting excited, engaging with other readers and exchanging *gasp* opinions. This is most assuredly a good thing. The tone may not always be to my liking, but that’s the beauty of having such a multiplicity of venues: I can hare off and look for one more to my tastes, or (and hold on to your panties, sports fans, because here comes the shocker) attempt to create a community of my own. The cure to bad speech--or at least, speech that you don’t like--is more speech, not less.
Sarah: It’s like a whole new realm of dissection and dissery in the Bitchery.
I hear him on the idea that real (and worthwhile) criticism isn’t merely an opinion. It’s certainly true that not all opinion pieces are legit. Take, for example, all the “This book was bad and I didn’t like it” opinions that pass for a review on Amazon. Not at all a review, and in addition the opinion is useless without some kind of exposition or at the very least description of what the writer found to be flawed. I can’t make a buying decision based on HootchieMommaR657 (and that’s her Real Name™!) pronouncement of mass suckage without backup as to why the suckage was so rampant.
But how and where on the bus stop of pretentious crap do you get off saying that, and thank you for using simple terms that I can understand:
Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.
Sounds like the ranting assertions of someone who is afraid he is not so special anymore, hm? You have to have qualifications to review? You have to be familiar with the details of an artists oeuvre? What Ever. I’m a bitch; that’s plenty of credential. I’m familiar enough with the format and variations of romance to know what does and does not reek; I should have to read every book by every author and study up with flashcards to erect a foundation of scholarly authority beneath my every word?
Limiting the collective of who CAN review is as bass-ackwards as the limit of who IS reviewed. To address the specific genre to which we Bitches devote our attention, let me ask a pertinent question: How many romance authors are on the NY Times Best Seller list currently? As of today, May 23, 2007, there’s two on the hardcover fiction best seller list, and four on the paperback bestseller list.
And how many of them are reviewed in the book section? That’d be zero, there, Dick. So already the door of your privilege is half-shut to nearly 50% of a top-10 list of bestsellers. Better get behind the door and shove it closed before any bloggers (GASP) come through and try to review some of those books.
But in the Unintentional Irony department, there’s much to celebrate. The purpose of the review, according to this exclusive definition, well, sir, you totally shoot yourself in the foot there:
[T]he review’s highest business is to initiate intelligent dialogue about the work in question, beginning a discussion that, in some cases, will persist down the years, even down the centuries.
And you know where that dialogue takes place? Where the discussion happens? On blogs. In comments. In message boards and email threads and places where communities are constantly interacting. How is a discussion supposed to take place between a newspaper and a reader? You talk to yourself on a park bench reading the paper, and people don’t assume you’re erudite and educated. They assume you’re off your meds.
Of course, this could all be further support to the elitism effort in place already: only fellow readers of the New York Times or the LA Times or the Pretentious Buttnoid Times who’ve read the review in full can participate in the discussion, because it’s the elite review and it’s location that become part of the dialogue in addition to the book itself.
What really sets me off in response to this diatribe against the unwashed misspelled masses yearning to state their own opinions is that this guy and his ilk wouldn’t set foot near a romance if you paid him. Granted, the author is a film critic (and you must make “Film” a two-syllable word of course), but it’s not like he or any other reviewer in a major newspaper would “initiate dialogue” about a Roberts or a Gaffney novel, or “begin a discussion that...will persist” about the relative merits of Crusie or Kinsale’s works. So what’s with all the elitism that attempts to classify who is and is not a reviewer? We need MORE elitism? I mean, last I checked, sites like ours existed because there wasn’t enough legitimate critical review of romance anywhere, much less in major newspapers.
Maybe most reviewing, whatever its venue, fails that ideal. But a purely “democratic literary landscape” is truly a wasteland, without standards, without maps, without oases of intelligence or delight.
Yes, the Bitches once again have gone too far, we’re bottom feeding trashy bitches with no brains… in a wasteland. At least our wasteland has Fabio.
by Candy • Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 10:35 AM
Reader Joanne sent me an e-mail recently that thrilled me down to my bitchy little toes, because she hit on one of my biggest peeves in historical romance: the way many of the characters tend to sound like Americans in period drag. Americans with bad British accents in period drag.
To quote from her e-mail:
I have literally not read any historicals since I was a teenager (now mid-thirties so a big gap there). I immediately re-read a few Heyers, and then the two novels so far released by Elizabeth Hoyt and my first two Julia Quinns (Bridgerton ones).
They were all very enjoyable but every time I came across anachronisms in the dialogue (it’s not so bad if it happens in the narrative) it would suck me right out of my happy haze. They might as well have stuck in the words THIS IS NOT REAL; YOU ARE READING A WORK OF FICTION. It would have much the same effect.
Now, I am British, so it may be that there are very small things that sound glaringly American to me but perhaps sound so everyday to an American reader that they don’t particularly notice them.
My beefs:
1. Julia Quinn’s characters constantly say “Right” (as in “ok"). I just can’t see English people in the early 19th Century saying that. English people today don’t say that.
2. Again Quinn: she uses very English words like “bloke” and “sodding” as though to add to the authenticity but to me, these are contemporary words and stand out like a sore thumb.
Ohhhh, lordy lord yes. I have to interrupt here to emphasize this point, because honestly, adding contemporary British slang (bad British slang, at that) to a historical does nothing for the verisimilitude of the book. In fact, it makes the book sound more jarring. Look, kids, we’re aiming for characters who sound like Jane Austen, not Nick Hornby, mmmkay? Just remember: throwing in the occasional “sodding bloke” does not a convincing historical make.
(Insert Oscar Wilde jokes here.)
3. I have to say, Elizabeth Hoyt was pretty much spot on for my money on her dialogue - but for one thing. Her characters constantly said “I guess” when, to me, an English person would in fact say “I suppose”.
I suspect that 95% of the buyers of these books are American so, if those readers are not bothered by these (admittedly minor) anachronisms, I suppose the authors will not be particularly concerned. But damn it, this bothered me when I read these books and I wanted to bitch about it!
By the way, I am not just having a go at American writers. I am sure there are lots of British writers who are guilty of these faults - it’s just I’ve not really read much of this genre in the last fifteen years but in the last four weeks I’ve read 6 or 7 pitch-perfect Heyers and then read four novels by contemporary Americans with these very minor faults.
To get to the point - what interests me is this:
(1) is this type of anachronistic dialogue bothering to anyone else out there or am I being way too picky?
(2) what other anachronisms bother people and
(3) most importantly given that I am just getting into this genre again after about 15 years - who are the novelists who really get this right?
Here are my answers to Joanna:
1. You’re not alone. Oh God no. I believe I’ve bitched before about how it drives me bugfuck when authors slip in Regency-era slang like “make micefeet of things,” only to turn around and use terms like “OK” or “That’s fine,” or construct sentences that use “get” as an auxiliary verb, often resulting in sentences that are an unholy chimera of Regency Miss and Valley Girl (e.g., “I’ve got to run now, or I won’t get to go to the ball, and then Mama will surely be beside herself"). It throws me out of the story, and it’s one of the reasons why I have to be in the right mood to read Julia Quinn. Mary Jo Putney used to get a pass from me, but after a while I had to stop reading her, too, because I couldn’t get past her dialogue. And I gave up on Patricia Ryan’s medievals entirely (hey, what happened to her, anyway?) when one of her characters used the term “pariah” centuries before the English traveled to the Indian subcontinent.
2. It peeves me when scientifically-inclined types in historicals talk about science in modern terms--I’ve caught characters talking about bacteria, oxygen, genes, electromagnetic waves and morphine long before these things were discovered or isolated and given names. Look, if you want to create a mad scientist type who’s years ahead of his or her time, that’s all well and good, but have them talk about the science in the terms of their day.
Anachronistic behavior and attitudes often annoy me as well, but that’s another rant for another day.
3. Laura Kinsale, in my opinion, gets the dialogue right--but she gets most things right. For My Lady’s Heart has dialogue in Middle English--how sexy is that? You may not care for her plots or the way she writes in general, but she does a fantastic job with the dialogue. And earlier Loretta Chase novels, before she became enamored with very. short. sentences, are a joy to read because she gets the cadences right as well. The Lion’s Daughter, Captives of the Night and Lord of Scoundrels are all cracking good reads, as are pretty much all her Regencies. Judith Ivory, a.k.a. Judy Cuevas, does a decent job much of the time, though she occasionally slips. These are just the names that immediately came to mind; I’ll post more as they occur to me.
So now we turn the questions over to the Bitchery: Do you in any way care about anachronistic language? If you do, what are the examples that especially burned your biscuit? (Note to authors: if you’ve ever, ever, ever used the word “cookies” to refer to biscuits in British-set historicals, shame on you--that makes the sodding blokes weep tears of sadness over their crumpets and cucumber sandwiches.) And most importantly: any authors to recommend Joanna?
by SB Sarah • Wednesday, May 02, 2007 at 01:38 PM
Our schadenfreude-o-meters are pegged solidly in the red today, dear readers. Perhaps it’s spring fever, perhaps it’s the pollen in the air, but people sure are acting like they need big, heaping servings of clue cake, and perhaps some valium. For a stellar example, look no further than Karen Scott’s blog, where somebody alleging to be Kathryn Falk, CEO of Romantic Times magazine, posted a long (and we do mean looooong) diatribe against All Meanies in the Blogosphere (or whatever the hell those kids are calling it these days).
Some choice bits:
I have heard from several people on your post who are saddened by what they read today. One person mentioned has offered her resignation. Another is contemplating suicide. Is that what you intended for your blog? Do you want this on your conscience?
To most of us who devote our lives to publishing, romance is uplifting and increases joyfulness. These intensely negative and vituperative postings make our role so much harder and—most important, cause booksellers and others to doubt their own dedication.
Anyone who thinks this kind of dialogue on a blog is valuable is truly sick in the heart and the head.
And, even better:
The blog in question that you posted, bashing one or more publishers and authors, is detrimental to the principles of romance. If you have influence, please spend your time helping our romance community. People are sensitive and a string of suicides is not what is needed.
We here at Smart Bitches have a lot to say about this. Of COURSE we do.
Candy: So between a) Tony Catanzaro (or somebody pretending to be Catanzaro) telling us what he’s going to do with all that junk, all that junk inside his trunk and b) Kathryn Falk (or somebody pretending to be Falk) inundating us with smotheringly insipid New Age treacle meant to disguise vituperative shit that essentially boils down to “You mean girls are making sensitive types commit suicide, all because you’re JELUS H0RS who wish you had as much money as me,” a variation of Haldane’s maxim comes to mind: People are not only dumber than we suppose; they are dumber than we CAN suppose. (Well, one of our commenters is apparently convinced that Tony, like the universe, is definitely queerer than we can suppose, but we’ll leave that line of inquiry alone, eh?)
Aaaanyhoozenhauer, the part of Falk’s diatribe that makes me scratch my head hardest is the accusation that “a string of suicides” might very well be attributable to Karen Scott’s review of Ben’s Wildflower and, presumably, other reviews and commentary of romance novels along that vein. The sheer weight of the irony resulting from telling other people to play nice while pulling some seriously dubious crap with the passive-aggressive guilt-tripping and not-so-veiled threats could stop a charging rhinoceros cold.
WHY are people so vigorously denying that pure liquid crap sometimes flows out of the publishing houses? Crap sells! Carole Lynn is apparently selling like mofuckin’ gangbusters. Cassie Edwards is a bestseller. So’s Connie Mason. Own your love of crap! Embrace it like a lover.
As for the relevance of Romantic Times: you know, a couple years ago, when Smart Bitches was just starting out, I actually went to their website and tallied up the grades of the books they reviewed. (It’s quite easy to do: just search by rating and look at the numbers of results.) I no longer remember what they are exactly, but I remember that something like 70% were 4+ star reviews. [When I have a moment at work I’ll conduct another impromptu analysis and look at their grade curve.] The fact of the matter is, their grades are vastly inflated, and I tend to mentally adjust when I see a grade being quoted on a cover. Four and a half stars and gushy lovey hearts all over? It’ll probably merit a C--that is, if I can make myself finish it.
And the homophobic hijinx at the latest convention makes me madder than hell, but I’m also completely unsurprised. Fear of the gay cooties will make people do the damndest things.
Sarah: What I don’t get is (a) why will people never learn that smearing the pathos onto your argument does not make it more attractive and brilliant but instead makes you look like a complete tool? (b) Hasn’t RT proved itself irrelevant enough already? I know they just had their conference, but now there’s tales of homophobic chicanery that makes the RWA RITA presentation in Atlanta look like a sewing circle populated by all those nice old ladies you see in Hallmark cards.
Furthermore, on one hand I have an unverifiable denial from someone alleging to be Kathryn Falk in my inbox saying, “I don’t know nothing about ranting on blogs” and I read on Dear Author that an RT individual confirmed it was indeed Falk responding to Scott.
According to the email I received, a person alleging to be Kathryn Falk says she “don’t do much with the internet,” and that she’s “not familiar with rants on blogs.” The person writing goes on to say that she “did hear that someone named Betty posted a blog fessing up about one from me” but in light of the revelation on Dear Author that Falk is defending her rant makes this email seem like the left hand of RT and the right hand of RT might need a tushy to introduce the two of them.
My general reaction to the whole kerfluffle has been an unintelligible sound along the lines of, “Ghurk?”
I take it for granted that folks must know that RT is the romance equivalent of those movie reviewers who always give glowing reviews to movies that stink up the entire known universe, but why would Falk take exception to a review about an Ellora’s Cave publication and not any other book by any other publisher that has been given a poor review on a site such as ours?
Behold the anonymous (but impeccably reliable--we know this person) source who reveals a whole world of hurt going on behind the scenes. And by “hurt” I mean, “unfettered importance and financial power:”
“Here is all you need to know about Ellora’s Cave’s relationship with Kathryn Falk—when Kathryn says jump, EC asks how high. It has been this way for several years now, but especially so in the last year. EC spent phenomenal money on RT this year because Kathryn kept asking for more. A while ago, Kathryn came up with a brilliant idea. She wanted to start a new age line of books. But she had a problem. She didn’t want to invest any of her time or money into it. So what does she do? Give the people at EC the hard sell. And what do the EC folks do? Say yes as quickly as they possibly can. And so, The Lotus Circle was born.
Later, Kathryn gave The Lotus Circle her book, The Secret Explained, a book that purports to explain The Secret. Um, doesn’t The Secret already explain The Secret? Anyway, all that is to explain to you that Katherine is in bed with EC in a big way, and has a vested interest in defending it.
So, Kathryn finds out about the EC bashing and proceeds to write her own reply to it on Karen’s blog. And yes, that was her. She implies that someone threatened to quit over the mean comments written and someone else is near suicide. Not true, as far as I know.
(At this point, we’d like to clarify that by “Ellora’s Cave,” we’re referring to certain Higher-Up Mucky-Mucks, and not the organization as a whole, because our Impeccable Anonymous Source has indicated that many authors and editors are less than happy about the new directions the company has taken, and are probably watching the whole internet kerfluffle with a mixture of horror and awe.)
Candy:Yeah, I love how Falk talks about positive energy and hard work being all you need to do well in the business, and then we find out there’s some seriously shady dealings going on with her book and new publishing line.
Sarah: Perhaps we ought to consult the Magic 8 Ball:
1. Was it Kathryn Falk?
“Signs point to yes.”
2. Has RT finally revealed itself to be the irrelevant mess of hokey fluff Sarah & Candy always thought it was?
“It is in the stars.” (Or in the chocolate starfish, maybe).
3. Did the RT’s convention discrimination against gay romance rip the ugly festering scab off of the general discrimination against gays among some staid old-time-bastions of romance and send a clear message that gay romance has no place with mainstream romance any more than roosters have riding the shoulders of convention attendees?
“Without a doubt.”
3.5 Did said discrimination and chicanery reveal, again, how out-of-touch and irrelevant RT is?
“Ask Again Later.”
4. Will RT’s convention behavior and the fabulous lunacy of Falk lead to any changes? Or will people still read RT, and buy Cassie Edwards and Carol Lynne and other authors whose writing sucks a big wang?
“Sarah, come on now. I’m a Magic 8 Ball. Give me SOMETHING mysterious to work with here.”
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by Candy • Monday, February 12, 2007 at 03:29 PM
Ron at Galleycat has some marvellous linkage on the various reactions by chick lit authors. Go ye forth and click; marvel and chuckle with evil glee. Me? I’m behind on my writing and blog-hopping. So apologies for the stale air of this piece; I just managed to steal a few free moments to compose my thoughts and my bile.
So while reading Maureen Dowd’s incredibly silly piece on how OMG THE SHELVES THEY ARE PINK WITH CHICK LIT PLAGUE, I couldn’t help but compose this little mental letter to her:
Dear Maureen:
George Eliot called from beyond the grave, and she’d like her schtick back.
Love and lipstick-free kisses (I read the pink books, but I don’t wear make-up, which I hope is at least a point in my favor),
Candy
Though the comparison is quite unfair to Eliot, since a) she actually had a coherent point about technique and skill being important to storytelling, instead of just slagging off in a singularly sloppy fashion an entire genre of books, and b) Eliot actually knew what she was talking about, whereas Dowd’s attempt to assert her feminism by displaying a rather potent mixture of ignorance and misogyny was, to quote Sarah, shooting herself in the foot with her vagina. (Hey, new idea for a play: Reservoir Vaginae! No, wait, sorry, didn’t mean to offend: Reservoir Hoo-Hoos.)
My eyes did widen just the littlest bit when I read this part of her article:
Even Will Shakespeare is buffeted by rampaging 30-year-old heroines, each one frantically trying to get their guy or figure out if he’s the right guy, or if he meant what he said, or if he should be with them instead of their BFF or cousin, or if he’ll come back, or if she’ll end up stuck home alone eating Häagen-Dazs and watching “CSI” and “Sex and the City” reruns.
You know, she may have a point there. It’s not as if The Bard himself has ever written a story (or three) featuring cross-dressing protagonists and reams of comic miscommunication, or plays driven by romantic misunderstandings, or stories about tangled-up couples who wibble endlessly about their love and obsessively analyze what their lovers say and do. No no no. Not Shakespeare. It’s not as if he’d ever stoop to making dirty jokes and puns in his plays. Because dammit all, he’s litrachure.
Why? Being dead, white and formerly endowed with a penis helps, but most importantly, you have to remember that back when his plays were published, none of the covers were sullied by so much as a smidgen of pink ink. Or stiletto heels. Shakespeare’s heroines were always the most sober paragons of womanhood, and not horny, flighty teenagers.
I even found Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” with chick-lit pretty-in-pink lettering. (...) Trying to keep up with soap-opera modernity, “Romeo and Juliet” has been reissued with a perky pink cover.
Oh, the horrah, the horrah! What a sign of these degraded times! Publishers putting lurid covers on classics to catch the public’s eye?* Quelle idée! I have seen the horsemen of the cultural apocalypse, and they’re wearing Jimmy Choos.
This passage also amused me:
In the 19th century in America, people often linked the reading of novels with women. Women were creatures of sensibility, and men were creatures of action. But now, Leon suggested, American fiction seems to be undergoing a certain re-feminization.
Oh God forbid that girl cooties reappear in literature. We like our books to be potent and masculine, redolent of pipe smoke and Hemingway’s unwashed underwear. We’ve forgotten that the masculine experience, that prototypical manly isolato striking out to wrestle (in a non-homoerotic, not at all naked-and-rubbed-all-over-with-oil way) with fish or bulls or stallions or giant sperm whales called Dick, should be held as the ideal and the eternal; stories about women’s struggles with family, the cult of beauty, their careers and their lovers are fluff. Harlequins, as she called ‘em. Yes. Got it.
This choice tidbit from Leon ”I flap like an outraged matron when confronted with fictional hypotheticals distasteful to my delicate sensibilities” Wieseltier was also very amusing to me:
“These books do not seem particularly demanding in the manner of real novels,” Leon said. “And when we’re at war and the country is under threat, they seem a little insular. America’s reading women could do a lot worse than to put down ‘Will Francine Get Her Guy?’ and pick up ‘The Red Badge of Courage.’”
Dear heart, I don’t know how to break this to you, but...I’ve read The Red Badge of Courage three times. The first time was when I was twelve years old. I’ve read plenty of books about Man’s Inhumanity to Man In a Time of War; for a slightly more contemporary take, I highly recommend Pat Barker’s WWI trilogy, though some may want to approach that with caution because not only is it written by a woman, it contains *drops voice to a whisper* the gay. The thing is, it’s not a zero sum game. There are those of us who like our pink books and who are very, very well-versed in the Western literary canon. This may be difficult for you to wrap your mind around, Leon (can I call you Leon?), but do try. You’ll find it amazingly liberating.
* Yes, am quite aware that the slideshow on the Slate.com article showcases newly-designed pulp covers. Can’t find any links to the original pulp covers to, say, The Sheltering Sky. Dammit.
