The weekly “if it’s new to me, it’s news” post of links, commentary and inanity

1. Links of Interest

Post of the week: Kenda’s appreciation of one my favorite films, Starship Troopers, a movie that represents one of the best cinematic parodies of ultra right wing politics ever made.

The plagiarism case everyone is talking about. The New York Times reported on 17 year old German writer Helene Hegemann’s plagiarism, in her celebrated recent release, “Axolotl Roadkill,” of the book “Strobo” by a writer who goes by the name of Airen. Hegemann calls it “mixing and matching.” As the Times puts it:

Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. … “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” [she says.]

Der Spiegel online defends Hegemann. Laura Miller at Salon provides the rebuttal.

Accomplice Press gets the shout out from Katiebabs and Lusty Reader. Their new romance line, Curvalicious,

will be short novella length love stories with happy endings featuring beautiful, strong, intelligent plus-size heroines. They will showcase woman who know who they are and don’t feel the need to lose weight or change their bodies to get the man of their dreams. These enticing romances are designed to build self confidence in their readers while entertaining them with intriguing plots and well developed characters.

Note the last sentence and what it implies about whether fiction can have effects on readers. Also, Animejune’s question about whether heroes, too, would be curvy, was not answered.

You can hear Virginia Woolf using words like, “incarnadine” and explaining why “you cannot use a brand new word in an old language” if you hop over to Kate’s Book Blog and listen to the radio clip.

The gals at Risky Regencies are narrowing down their choices for the Georgette Heyer Readalong. Georgette Heyer’s Regency World will be reissued in August of this year.

The great Boosktore/Blogger Experiment of 2009 has officially ended as the last holdout, Michelle Buonfiglio/B&N announced they have parted ways.

I enjoyed this list of the 10 most unreliable narrators in fiction by Henry Sutton in the Guardian.

Also from the Guardian, an article, and 50 interesting comments, on writers crowdfunding their to be written books.

Book Blogger con has announced its keynote speaker. They also have a page listing all the bloggers who will be in attendance. I think that’s such a great idea. Anybody do that for cons like RT, RomCon or RWA? If not, I will host a page for bloggers attending RWA, when we get closer to the date.

Nominees for the 2010 Audies (Audiobooks of the year) were announced. I haven’t listened to any of the romance noms:

ROMANCE
For excellence in narration, direction, engineering, mix, and an abridgment when applicable of an audiobook of romance, including romantic suspense, historical romance, and other romance subgenres.

A Rogue of My Own, by Johanna Lindsey, narrated by Rosalyn Landor
(Brilliance Audio)

Dark Slayer, by Christine Feehan, narrated by Phil Gigante and Jane Brown
(Brilliance Audio)

The House on Tradd Street, by Karen White, narrated by Aimee Bruneau
(Listen & Live Audio)

The Untamed Bride, by Stephanie Laurens, narrated by Simon Prebble
(HarperAudio)

What I Did for Love, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, narrated by Julia Gibson
(HarperAudio)

The TLS Online is talking about romance, medieval style.

Medieval romance created and authorized the making of fictions in Western literature. Its preoccupations – the failure of idealism in social institutions, the self-realization of the individual, the tensions and anxieties within the family, the agency of women, and the pressures of masculinity – reappear throughout the centuries, in the successor to romance, the novel, as well as in a multitude of other media from primetime television to opera. Romance’s varied contexts, its long history and its development into new forms in the twenty-first century, whether drawing on the national myth of Arthur or on the popular plots of romances such as “Sir Gowther”, in which a devil sires a baby on a desperate mother, all provide, as these four books show, fertile ground for thinking about our past, our present and our future.

Obviously “romance” means something different here than we are used to (excluding medievalists from that “we”), but this essay reviewing four books that explore medieval romance is fascinating.

Writer Ann Somerville’s unhappiness with m/m romances deepens, as she explains in this post.

Mark Athitakis’s American Fiction Notes on Book Reviewers– Who Needs ‘Em?

Robin’s open letter to publishers from the point of view of a frustrated reader over at Readers Gab had me ruefully nodding my head:

Ironically, the more paraphernalia I have acquired to enable ever more diverse and numerous book purchases – dedicated digital reader, multi-function devices, multiple software downloads to read various DRM formats – the more difficult it has been for me to buy and read as many books as I would like. And seriously, I don’t think it’s supposed to work that way.

D.G. Meyers is talking about “Fiction’s Job” at A Commonplace Blog. As a gal with a Jesuit education, any post that quotes GK Chesterton is alright by me. Links to several other interesting takes on the question as well.

2. How To Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing, by Paul J. Silvia, is a terrific (but not cheap, at $9.48 for only 150 pages) little book I just downloaded to my Kindle and read in one short sitting. This is the book Nora “ass in chair” Roberts would have written about writing … if she were an academic in a psych department, that is. Silvia tells us right away that this is not the book for you if you are looking to improve your skills or engage in deep psychotherapy about your “psychic blocks”. As to the latter, he writes, “we won’t talk about unleashing your inner anything. Put your ‘inner writer’ back on its leash and muzzle it.”

Despite this, the author uses studies in psychology to explain how certain things keep us from writing. For example, the first chapter lists “specious barriers” to writing. “I can’t find time to write” is the first one. This is a false belief, but it persists because it is comforting. Instead of “finding” time to write, Silvia tells us we must “allot” time to write. He jokes,

When people endorse this specious barrier, I imagine them roaming through their schedules like naturalists in search of Time to Write, that most elusive and secretive of creatures. Do you need to “find time to teach”? Of course not — you have a teaching schedule and you never miss it.

Other chapters on “Motivational Tools”, “Starting Your Own Agraphia Group”, and “Writing Journal Articles” are also very good, but be warned that Silvia focus on psychology, so you have to make allowances if you are coming from elsewhere. Also, this is a book for academic writers of research articles and books, not fiction writers. One last gem:

Your first drafts should sound like they were hastily translated from Icelandic by a nonnative speaker. Writing is part creation and part criticism, part id and part superego: Let the id unleash a discursive screed, and then let the superego evaluate it for correctness and appropriateness. Rejoice in writing your gnarled and impenetrable first drafts, just as you rejoice in later stamping out your fuzzy phrases and unwanted words.

Such good advice for the perfectionist in all of us!

3. Personal

First, I am back on Twitter, as @RRRJes (bastards wouldn’t let me re-activate the late great @RRRJessica. But it’s ok. With the nickname, now it feels like everyone who replies to me is my best pal.)

A blogging conundrum. I’m chafing under two restraints on this blog. One is writing under a pseudonym. (The other I am not ready to talk about yet.) Maybe it’s the Aristotelian in me, but I like to be whole. I’ve wanted to point students and colleagues in the direction of posts, but I hesitate. And I’ve even thought about having students blog with me when I assign a romance novel next year in Ethics and Literature or Feminist Theory. And why not? I don’t write about work or family or personal life in a way that would compromise me or anyone I know. I also don’t feel ashamed about reading romance novels. I read them and enjoy them and I don’t care who knows it.

But there is one thing I occasionally do on this blog that I think could be awkward: read and review erotic romance. Now there is a difference between privacy and shame. Compare: I have a sexual relationship with my spouse, of which I am not ashamed, but I would hardly talk about it to anyone else. Similarly, it is one thing to say, abstractly, “I sometimes read erotic romance”, but another to talk about and review specific books, using explicit words. It’s just personal (I know, I know, how “personal” can something be if you post about it on the internet?).

Maybe it’s that erotic romance edges closer to pornography, (it’s not porn, but on the continuum, it is closer, because it shares with porn an intent to arouse), and that makes it feel closer to talking about my real sex life and less like talking about literature.

When many people review erotic romance they will say things like “it hit all my buttons” or “it was really hot” and they are not speaking metaphorically. Now, why does it feel ok to log all of my other emotional reactions to a book (“It made me sad,” “It made me laugh”. Etc) but not the sexual one? This is a legitimate part of a book review: if someone is writing the kind of sex scenes that make me giggle, that’s a literary failure, isn’t it? And conversely, writing good believable sex scenes is a literary success. So, I can’t defend my desire to keep that stuff off the table — it’s just a personal preference (I know others make different choices).

In short, one of the costs to me of connecting this blog up to my professional website and being more open about it, is that this would have to become a PG-13 rated blog. But the cost of blogging pseudonymously, is that the more I blog, the more serious I get about research in popular romance studies, and that has to be done under my own name.

Right now, I am leaning to cutting out the R-rated stuff and taking professional ownership of my work here, but I am on the fence. On the other hand, random people in RL probably don’t give a shit about what I do in my off time. The people in RL I have told about this blog do not ever actually read it (bastards). So it maybe doesn’t matter either way.

This is just what I am thinking about right now. Thought I’d share. Feel free to share back.

HAPPY WEEK!!

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