Archive for: August, 2011

Ethics and Fiction Syllabus Fall 2011

Aug 30 2011 Published by under Academia, Ethics

In case anyone is interested, here’s what I am teaching this term. I made a number of changes from last year’s syllabus. I can’t seem to help doing that, even though I know there are good reasons not to make frequent changes to a course. If you are interested in assignments, or have any questions about what I am trying to accomplish, just ask.

Ethics and Fiction (PHI 351/ENG 419)

Books:

Stephen K. George, Editor, Ethics, Literature, & Theory: An Introductory Reader

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Jennifer Crusie, Bet Me

 

8/30            Introduction to Course

9/1            John Gardner, “Premises on Art and Morality” (George); Abraham B. Yehoshua, “The Moral Connections of Literary Texts” (George)

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Three years of blogging: reflections, stats, and changes ahead

Aug 25 2011 Published by under Blogs and blogging, Navel gazing

Changing directions (Ireland 2011)

 

It’s time for my annual anniversary post. The big change this year was my new blog layout, introduced in September 2010. I’m still very happy with it. I recently realized how nice it is to have exactly what I want, when I tried to revitalize my work-related blog with a new Word Press theme and found absolutely nothing I liked.

I’m sorry to say that the other big changes were not additive, but, er, subtractive. I blogged less, 146 posts, compared to an average of 200 a year the first two years, with some fairly long stretches of radio silence. I also discontinued the Monday Morning Stepback, a weekly links and opinion post, because (1) preparing it took too much time (at one point I had over 300 feeds in my Google reader), (2) other bloggers often ended up posting the same links a day or so later anyway, and (3) I came to dread the potential for tension and upset it seemed to generate on occasion. I planned to attend both IASPR and RWA in New York, but family needs kept me away. I tried a couple of new things, neither of which I stuck with: (a) a Behind the Lines feature where I interviewed authors about a passage in a book (I actually really liked both of those posts), (b) and writing for Heroes and Heartbreakers (a site I think is a great addition to the blogsphere). So far in 2011, I have also commented on, and read less of, other blogs (I only have about a dozen romance blogs in my reader right now, and visit other blogs if the tweets look interesting), something about which I feel slightly guilty.

Noticing that comments were down, and seeing other bloggers note the same thing, in December I asked: Can Blogging Survive the Twitter and Tumblr Assault?, and funnily enough, got 49 comments. Commenting bounced back up (total of 9916), and I now realize the comment thing is cyclical. Comments are still my favorite part of blogging, and they continue to provide most of the value of this blog. The ongoing discussion of Loretta Chase’s The Last Hellion (where I am, as per usual, getting argued into submission) is just the latest example.

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Review: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach

Aug 23 2011 Published by under Reviews

 

Although I periodically pledge to use the word “No”, it rarely sticks, which is why I find myself writing a blog post on Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach (W. W. Norton, 2003). Later today I will lead a discussion of Stiff with a group of local high school honors students who are visiting my university for the day. We don’t have a medical school, so the campus bioethicist is going to have to suffice.  Luckily, a forensics expert has been booked after me, so I don’t have to say much about the science.

Stiff, an outgrowth of a Salon.com column, is Roach’s first book. She has since published three humorous popular science books, Spook (about the afterlife), Bonk (sex), and Packing for Mars (space travel). Stiff investiates what happens to human cadavers, whether they are donated to science, buried, cremated, or lost in airplane wreckage. It’s a gross, illuminating, and entertaining read, widely praised, and widely bought (it’s a New York Times bestseller).

Stiff is organized into chapters, each of which investigates a different cadaveric fate:

Table of Contents

  1. A Head Is a Terrible Thing to Waste:  Practicing surgery on the dead
  2. Crimes of Anatomy: Body snatching and other sordid tales from the dawn of human dissection
  3. Life After Death:  On human decay and what can be done about it
  4. Dead Man Driving:  Human crash test dummies and the ghastly, necessary science of impact tolerance
  5. Beyond the Black Box: When the bodies of the passengers must tell the story of a crash
  6. The Cadaver Who Joined the Army:  The sticky ethics of bullets and bombs
  7. Holy Cadaver:  The crucifixion experiments
  8. How to Know if You’re Dead:  Beating-heart cadavers, live burial, and the scientific search for the soul
  9. Just a Head: Decapitation, reanimation, and the human head transplant
  10. Eat Me:  Medicinal cannibalism and the case of the human dumplings
  11. Out of the Fire, into the Compost Bin:  And other new ways to end up
  12. Remains of the Author:  Will she or won’t she?

 

Some chapters were weaker than the rest, but if you find yourself getting bored you can skip ahead, since there is no thematic unity to the Stiff, beyond the subject matter. The chapter titles give away the book’s abundant humor, not all of it successful. Perhaps because the topic is so inherently unsettling, Roach tends to shoot for irreverence. Roach has a “bloggy” writing style, feeling free to insert herself into the proceedings at random, sometimes to great effect, sometimes distractingly. What also makes the book feel “webby” is her amassing of factoids culled from so many different sources: historical, present day news accounts, her own interviews or research. This makes for a snappy read, with bits of odd information coming at you with every new sentence.

This is an undeniably gross  book. I think I have a pretty sturdy stomach, but even mine turned at times, as when Roach describes a corpse lying in the grass outside a U Tennessee facility that studies decomposition:

Squirming grains of rice are crowded into the man’s belly button. It’s a rice grain mosh pit. But rice grains do not move. These cannot be grains of rice. They are not. Entomologists have a name for young flies, but it is an ugly name, an insult. Let’s not use the word “maggot.” Let’s use a pretty word. Let’s use “hacienda.”

Arpad explains that the flies lay their eggs on the body’s points of entry: the eyes, the mouth, open wounds, genitalia. Unlike older, larger haciendas, the little ones can’t eat through skin. I make the mistake of asking Arpad what the little haciendas are after.

Arpad walks around the corpse’s left foot. It is bluish and the skin is transparent. “See the [haciendas] under the skin? They’re eating the subcutaneous fat. they love fat.” I see them. they are spaced out, moving slowly. It’s kind of beautiful, this man’s skin with these tiny white slivers embedded just beneath its surface. It looks like expensive Japanese rice paper. You tell yourself these things.

Of course, Roach’s question is hardly a “mistake” — it’s the whole point of her book, and her frequent deflating references to her investigative skills will seem either cute or needlessly self-deprecating, depending on your point of view.

Why would a reader not deeply intrigued by biological science want to know all this? I’m not sure. While Roach is never disrespectful of her nonliving or living research subjects, I confess that the episodic nature of the book and the tongue-in-cheek approach made me feel as if the book appeals mostly to the morbidly curious.

Roach writes:

We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning, and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.

So, I suppose one effect of reading  Stiff – which is resolutely materialist — is to nudge us to remember that we don’t need our bodies when we’re dead, and to encourage us to make some decisions about what to do with our corpses to minimize harm and maximize benefit for society. But that can’t be right, since Roach herself says that while we can certainly let our loved ones know what we prefer, they are under no obligation to do what we ask, since it is they, and not us, who have to live with the consequences. Moreover, as Roach indicates with regard to obtaining consent for organ donation, sometimes more information (like, that if you donate your body to science, you might end up a head in a tray for a plastic surgeon to practice a facelift on, or you might end up full of maggots in a grassy field) makes consent harder to obtain, and I can honestly say that “giving my body to science” never seemed so dreadful as it now does. Am I less likely to make that choice? Maybe.

The other effect of reading Stiff might be lauding the unlauded: the people who donate their bodies, and the researchers who do the gruesome and difficult work of studying them so we can have better trained physicians, safer cars, and answers to important questions about what makes a plane crash or when a murder took place. After all, Roach refers to the cadavers are “our superheroes”:

 

They brave fire without flinching, withstand falls from tall buildings and head-on crashes into walls.You can fire a gun at them or run a speedboat over their legs, and it will not faze them. Their heads can be removed with no deleterious effect. They can be six places at once. I take the Superman point of view: What a shame to waste these powers, to not use them for the betterment of humankind.

 

But that can’t be it, either, for a couple of reasons: one, Roach comes very close to making fun of these people and corpses herself (of corpses: “Being dead is absurd. It’s the silliest situation you’ll find yourself in. Your limbs are floppy and uncooperative. Your mouth hangs open. Being dead is unsightly and stinky and embarrassing, and there’s not a damn thing to be done about it.”) and two, because the quacks, eccentrics, and sadistic researchers (the body snatchers, the creepy or greedy morticians, the guy who crucified bodies to determine whether the Shroud of Turin was a fake) get equal time with the good guys.

The word “dignity” appears fourteen times in the text (and in most reviews of the book, come to think of it). Preserving the dignity of the cadavers is major concern of many of the people Roach interviews. In Stiff’s first, very compelling chapter (one that would work well for pre-med undergrads), Roach marvels at the dignity with which medical students and professionals treat their cadavers (draping their faces, naming them, moving their limbs with gentleness, holding a memorial service for them). But, in a later chapter discussing the environmental benefits of composting dead human bodies, dignity seems less important:

To a certain extent, of course, dignity is in the packaging. When you get right down to it, there is no dignified way to go, be it decomposition, incineration, dissection, tissue digestion, or composting.

And, indeed, Roach has already said of cadavers at the start of the book, “Their fundamental feature is that they lack dignity.”

Not everyone who reads this book is going to approach it the way I would, but to me, this kind of tension cries out for exploration. Roach talks about “her first cadaver” — her mother. She says, emphatically,

My mom was never a cadaver. No Person is. You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place. My mother was gone. The cavader was her hull.

So, why bother with dignity? Whose dignity is at issue? Certainly not the “hull’s”. Is it the researchers’ dignity? The dignity of surviving loved ones? The dignity of the person who once “inhabited” the hull? Part of the sense of the absurd that comes from dealing with our dead is this very issue of the moral status of the corpse, and it would have added a deeper dimension to the book if Roach had at least raised the issue.

Roach seems very clear in the quote above — “you are a person and then you cease to be a person”, but in a later chapter (Eight, which  would work well for undergraduate bioethics students), this simple story gets complicated. I very much regret that Roach used the term  “beating heart cadavers” instead of the more widely used and appropriate “brain dead cadavers”, but her point is still well taken: brain death looks a lot like life, what with the breathing and the heart beating, and the warm skin, and the ability to gestate a fetus, and… you get the idea. What does it mean that we remove vital organs from brain dead bodies? What allows us to say the death occurred when the brain stopped functioning, instead of when the heart stopped? The determination of death by neurologic criteria is still relatively new and, in cycles, controversial. Exploring what makes it so would have been worthwhile*, but perhaps would have sacrificed the “coffee table” book feel of Stiff.

Since I am looking at ethical issues, I’ll just throw out one more: the treatment of non-human animals. For many researchers, animals are a poor second best to the use of human cadavers, but they can get away with things using animals that would never pass an IRB, such as the whole head (whole body? Another philosophical question!) transplants discussed in chapter nine. Without moral judgment or comment, Roach recounts a veritable catalog of horrors visited upon animals (live vivisection being perhaps the mildest) performed for the purpose of answering questions meant to benefit humans (sometimes the “benefit” is mere satisfaction of curiosity). To me, this cries out for at least a paragraph of comment. Why should we preserve the dignity of a dead human body, but feel free to execute animals in every fashion imaginable?

To sum up, Stiff is a quick read, with lots of interesting information about a subject few know well, but perhaps should. It’s not particularly deep or thoughtful, but it’s fun, and often funny, and it could certainly serve as a springboard for the kinds of questions a more analytical person might want to ask.

*Actually, exploring nonheartbeating organ donation (cases in which the patient is taken off life support, the heart is allowed to stop for a few minutes — a mere three in some places –  the patient is declared dead, and then everything is started up again so the organs can be maintained and removed) would have been worthwhile, too, as it raised many of the same questions about when life really ends, the balance between social good and individual life, etc.

 

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Review: The Last Hellion, by Loretta Chase

Aug 21 2011 Published by under Reviews

The Last Hellion (Avon, 1998) is the fourth book in Loretta Chase’s Scoundrels Series. It had the misfortune of being the novel immediately following Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels, considered by many to be one of the best romance novels ever written. The Last Hellion’s hero, Vere Mallory, the Duke of Ainswood, was introduced in all his dissolute obnoxiousness in LoS. He drinks, he whores (“the whores give me the only thing I want from a female”), he doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He speaks with a “mocking baritone”, acts with “rough obnoxiousness” and is “uncivilized” and “thickheaded”. Despite being a younger son of a younger son, deaths in the Mallory family have made Vere a Duke. Alas, he has no interest in taking seriously the dukedom’s responsibilities including two wards he has sent off to live with a relative. This exchange with his valet indicates his view of women:

“God save us from bluestockings. You know what their trouble is, don’t you, Jaynes? Due to not getting pumped regular, females take the oddest fancies, such as imagining they can think.”

Seasoned romance readers will identify that passage as communicating, “what Vere really needs is a ‘bluestocking.’” And who is our heroine but Lydia Grenville, a “cynically hardhearted reporter”  with a passion for social causes and no interest in marriage or men. I actually decided to read The Last Hellion because of Lydia’s sideline, writing (pseudonymously) The Rose of Thebes, a rollicking serialized adventure story on which all of London is hooked. Lydia is almost too outrageous, barreling through London in her cabriolet, wearing black bombazine, with her giant black mastiff by her side, but she’s funny and smart and determined and caring, so I was drawn to her anyway.

Vere and Lydia meet in an alley when Lydia is trying to save the life (and virtue) of a young runaway from a “procuress”, with her fists if necessary. Vere physically restrains her, kisses her impulsively, and she pretends to faint, only to make the Duke a laughingstock by flattening him with a punch to the jaw.  He pretty much falls in love on the spot. Of course, Vere is too thickheaded to realize it, but he is fascinated and attracted, and disapproving and disgusted, and he can’t keep away from her. For her part, Lydia is very attracted to Vere, but mostly sees him as a cretin, and an impediment to her various plans, both of which he is.

Their relationship is very amusing and over the top, reminding me a bit of classic Hollywood romances like Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday. Early on, for example, she performs a dead on parody of Vere in a smoky club where writers congregate, not realizing Vere is there. And, in my favorite scene, Vere accompanies Lydia (actually, he follows her, by hanging on to the back of her carriage) to an estate, where he helps her climb inside a second story window to retrieve her clothes without waking the occupants of the home. For an assignment, Lydia was costumed as a man, and Vere, in the pitch black darkness, has to help her undo the back buttons of her corset. It’s a very funny and sexy scene.

Overall, I enjoyed reading The Last Hellion, especially the zip and zing of Vere and Lydia’s encounters, but it really fell apart for me in the second half. Lydia’s character, despite being billed as sensible, turned out to be all impulse, no reason. Yes, she writes fiction, very popular fiction, but she refers to it as “sentimental claptrap” and it is never clear why she does it.* She saves a young woman, who becomes her companion, but instead of getting back to saving other young women from procuresses, she becomes inexplicably obsessed with finding the young woman’s missing jewelry. She turns out to be related to the hero of Lord of Scoundrels, Dain, which she knew, but what is never clear is why she never pursued the connection, especially when Dain and Jessica show up and embrace her as one of their own.** She doesn’t want marriage, and resists her attraction to Vere, but why?

The plot just kind of meandered after a great first third, and moved from finding the missing jewels, to resolving the will-she-won’t-she marriage issue with Vere (he tells Lydia she should marry him, not for her own happiness, but because she can use his wealth to save more young women.*** Instead of agreeing on the spot to marry a duke to whom she is deeply attracted and who clearly cares for her, she challenges him to a carriage race.), to discovering Lydia’s true ancestry, to … rather randomly … a manhunt for Vere’s missing nieces.

Vere, too, had some issues. Perhaps attempting to rehabilitate the character from his turn in LoS, Chase gives us a preface in which we see Vere lose one family member after another to various diseases and accidents, including, most poignantly, a beloved young cousin. In the genre, these kinds of early losses explain (and partially excuse) the development of rakish or dissolute heroes, so that was fine (and it was a really good prologue, actually). But Vere’s turnaround was a little too 180 for me. The woman-hater ends up declaring, “We’re of one mind, Grenville and I, and the mind is hers, on account of my being a man and not having one.”

There are other issues: Bertie, Jessica’s wayward brother from LoS, appears here as the love interest of the runaway whom Lydia saved. But somehow he has become a complete idiot between books. Is there an unpublished novella that explains his brain injury? And while the issue of historical accuracy is not one that interests me much, even I rolled my eyes when Jessica, after meeting Lydia exactly once, on the day of her wedding, presents her “enough lewd underwear to dress a dozen harlots.”

Still, Chase creates very likeable characters and this is a light, fun read. Vere’s bemused and reverential attitude towards Lydia — he calls her “Grenville” to the end — is one of its chief delights. My biggest problems with it really arose after I put it down and started to write this review, thinking about the plot as a whole and who these characters are.

But the main reason I read The Last Hellion was Lydia’s sideline of writing fiction. It’s really interesting how this is dealt with. It parallels very nicely the kinds of discussion had in Romanceland about the popularity of romance, its relationship to literature, and its critical reception.  Lydia refers to it disparagingly, but her editor says, “It isn’t the blasted critics, but your ‘dratted story’ that’s made our fortune”. I think Chase was trying to convey that the “wildly fanciful and convoluted” tale is really a part of Lydia which she would prefer to renounce, but shouldn’t, just as she shouldn’t renounce her messy and romantic feelings towards Vere. So it makes sense that Vere, once he learns who writes The Rose of Thebes, is delighted, and tries to convince her of its value.

On being told that an unfortunate plot turn has resulted in mobs of readers hanging a certain character in effigy, Lydia says “By gad, people do take their romantic fables seriously. Well. … Sentimental swill it may be, but it’s popular swill, it seems, and it’s mine.”

But Vere refers to Lydia as “a master storyteller”, and Dain concurs, “The gods must have given you the talent, cousin.” To which Vere replies:

“My wife holds that talent cheap,” Vere said. “She refers to The Rose of Thebes as ‘sentimental swill’ — and that’s the kindest epithet she bestows upon it. If Macgowan hadn’t let the cat out of the bag, she’d never have admitted she wrote it.”

“It serves no useful purpose,” Lydia said. “All it does it entertain. With simple morals. The good end happily, the bad unhappily. It has nothing to do with real life.”

“We have to live real life, like it or not,” Vere said. “And you know, better than most, the sort of lives the great mass of humanity lead. To give them a few hours’ respite is to bestow a great gift.”

“I think not,” Grenville said. “I begin to think it socially irresponsible. On account of that wretched story, girls take it into their heads to bolt in search of excitement they can’t find at home. They’ll imagine they can dispatch villains with sharpened spoons. They –”

“You’re telling me the members of your sex are imbeciles who can’t distinguish fact from fiction,” he said. “Anyone fool enough to try one of Miranda’s tricks is either restless by nature or doesn’t own a grain of sense. Such people will do something stupid with or without your suggestions. My wards offer a perfect example.”

…

[Vere continues] “You are a talented writer, with the knack of communcating with readers of both genders, of every age and background. I will not permit you to throw that gift away.”

…

[Vere continues] “I should be illiterate were it not for romantic clatrap and sentimental swill and improbably tales. I cut my teeth on The Arabian Nights and Tales of the Genii.

Here we have in a nutshell many of the common arguments for and against the genre. A reader could be forgiven for assuming that Chase had these things on her mind as a woman writer writing today. But in an interview at Word Wenches, Chase says:

Lydia is one of the many woman characters I’ve created in reaction to women in 19th C novels and to 19th C sexism and misogyny in general.  Specifically, what set me off was critics’ reaction to Lady Morgan’s two-volume ITALY.   You can read her response to some of the criticism here.
According to Paul Johnson’s THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN, “they hated Lady Morgan as a woman writer…and they were further incensed by the news that the publisher Colburn had paid her the immense sum of £2000 for the book.  Byron hailed the book as ‘fearless and excellent.’”  Everyone else went nuts.  Here’s a sampling from Johnson’s book:  “‘she spewed out of her filthy maw/A flood of poison, horrible and black.  “She was ‘an Irish she-wolf’ a ‘blustering virago,’ a ‘wholesale blunderer and reviler’; she wrote while ‘maudlin from an extra tumbler of negus in the forenoon.’”  This was typical “criticism” of the time–reviewers today are pussycats by comparison.  What fascinated me me was the how much they hated her simply because she was a successful woman writer.

I’ve just read about a half dozen Loretta Chase interviews, and although she talks a lot about how characters come to her, and what her inspirations are for characters, settings, and plots, I actually can’t find an interview where Chase talks about herself as a writer of popular books that are disparaged by critics and the moral majority. So one lesson is for me is to try not to be careful about assuming I can get inside an author’s brain that way.

Still, would it have lessened the quality of this book if Chase gave an interview where she said, “Well, I was being interviewed by a local journalist, and the guy was such a jerk about the romance genre, that when I was thinking of reasons for Lydia to be against her own muse, these came to me”? Unless it was just awkwardly thrust in as a kind of didactic moment, not for this reader.

*************

*True, she says she agreed to write it under two “conditions” (anonymity and editorial control), but conditions are not reasons.

**Or maybe I should say her reason — sparing her long dead mother from being the subject of gossip — is hardly convincing given the disdain this character feels for the nobility.

***In a spit in the face of journalists everywhere, he actually says “you could actually do something, instead of simply writing about what is wrong.”

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Some Blogs You Might Enjoy

Aug 19 2011 Published by under Genre musings, Uncategorized

I thought I’d give a shout out to a few blogs I enjoy reading. This is not an exhaustive list!


Limecello is a romance reader whose blog is a newer one (2011, I think), although she is a long time member of Romanceland, and has been blogging at various spots for almost ten years. Right now (through August 21, so hurry) she is running a comment drive for charity. Just make a comment, and contributors will give money to Save the Children, to benefit those suffering from the effects of drought in the Horn of Africa. Visit Limecello’s blog for reviews, author interviews, and giveaways.

Sunita is another long time member of Romanceland, who reviews at Dear Author. She’s an academic — a social scientist by trade — who mixes up blogging on issues of interest to romance and other readers with her takes on current events, like the U.K. Riots. Her specialties include debunking science reporting of recent “research”, especially as it bears on readers and reading, and historical accuracy — what it is and why it matters (or doesn’t).

LizMc, a Canadian English professor, is a frequent blog commenter and Tweeter, but she is new to blogging. Like Sunita, she often blogs a unique take on current Romanceland discussions, but she brings her own scholarly and other interests to posts including one on Uncomfortable Reading, and this one on Slow Reading.

Vassiliki and Infogenium are the team behind Shallow Reader. They don’t post much, but it’s like a little fun surprise every time they do. Most recently, we had Alphabet versus Genre, in which Vassiliki, a librarian, is “struggling to decide upon whether I like the genrification of libraries or if I would like fiction, to once again, be a roll call of authors on shelves.”


Heroes & Heartbreakers is hardly a “small” blog: sponsored by Macmillan, with paid administrators and writers, subscribing to H&H in your feed commits you to no fewer than 40 posts a week by dozens of bloggers and authors. I actually don’t subscribe, but I do regularly check in, because the H&H team gathered some of my favorite bloggers to write on a range of topics not usually covered by romance blogs, including not just other genres, like YA and SFF, but film and TV. I think H&H’s treatment of the romance genre as another form of popular culture is very fresh, and I especially enjoy their fun thematic posts, like Sometimes I Want to Slap Her: Anita Blake, Merit, Rachel Morgan, Kitty Norville, and Sookie Stackhouse , and If He’s Hot, He’s an Anti-Hero; If He’s Not, He’s a Villain. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have written a couple of posts for H&H since they launched 6 months ago. It was a great experience, and I would do more if I had the time.)

Lux Lucas is a very new (and infrequent) blogger who takes a literary approach to romance, in posts on Judith Ivory and Epilogues: the Cost of Sentiment. Like Liz and Sunita, this blogger likes to riff on others’ posts, extending the discussion in unusual ways.

 


From the About page:

Open Letters is dedicated to the proposition that no writing which reviews the arts should be boring, back-patting, soft-pedaling, or personally compromised. We’ve all had the experience of reading a review that sparkled—one that combined an informed, accessible examination of its quarry with gamesome, intelligent, and even funny commentary. These are the pieces we tell our friends about and then vigorously debate.

I really like Open Letters. It’s a monthly ‘zine, and also great for linkage and commentary. The writers succeed in avoiding the kind of pedantry that makes me run from most lit blogs, and they also review pretty widely across the spectrum. Recent posts like ‘What a Brain must Mine be!’: The Strange Historical Romances of William Harrison Ainsworth and On the Scent: Materialism, about perfumes, showcases the kind of quirky and diverse topics OLM covers.

What about you? Read any newer/smaller/off the beaten path blogs lately that deserve a mention?

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Self-published novels: the bad apple and the bunch

Aug 13 2011 Published by under Genre musings

My earliest experience in reading a self-published book was a memorable one: a book called Fuck Yes! by Wing F. Ling (1988), which appealed to me as a patchouli-wearing undergraduate philosophy major. Skip ahead twenty years, and I have read a tiny amount of self-published work in the romance genre: Shiloh Walker’s Beg Me and Courtney Milan’s Unlocked. In the latter two cases, I chose carefully: both were authors well established in their subgenres, whose other books were traditionally published, and which I already liked.

But I had a recent experience which brought home to me why self-published books by new authors are such a gamble for the reader. A local woman self-published her first book, a YA romance. I heard about it when she was interviewed on the radio, on local TV news, and in our local newspaper. I listened with half an ear, but the reports were glowing. I checked the book out on Amazon, and the reviews — 17 of them — were all 5 stars. So I bought it, read it, and … thought it was, well, much worse than I had been led to believe. How could this have happened?

I circled back to the reviews I had read. The TV news? Her spouse is the morning news anchor at the station. The interviewer said the book was great, and then admitted he had only read one chapter. I assume the local paper and radio came from her husband’s local media contacts. Why? Because the newspaper review was written by someone who has written no other book reviews, and the morning radio show, which I have listened to for 10 years, has never, in my memory, interviewed another writer. I decided to look again at those 5 star Amazon reviews. Hm. All local. All having written only one review.

I do understand the arguments in favor of self-publishing. Authors want to have control over content, timing, and other factors. And the “gatekeeper” function of traditional publishing often serves to calcify and over-commercialize the offerings. We also know that plenty of crap makes its way through the gates: badly edited books, poorly written books, you name it. The traditional model depends on a certain kind of trust, heavily weighted towards trust in experts. I believe because I see “Harper Collins” or “Samhain” that the book is going to be worth publishing (although not necessarily to my taste, but that is a different issue), because an agent and editors and a publishing house think it is.

The other option is that the customers are the “gatekeepers”. We are the ones who say if it is worth reading, via our wallets, our Facebook “Likes”, our Amazon and Goodreads reviews, our Blogs, Tumblrs, and Tweets, and other forms of word of mouth. If we don’t say it’s worth reading, the book drops off the radar, and may as well not have been published for all of its visibility. This model emphasizes a different feature of trust, trust in the taste and goodwill of peers.

The problem with this model is that, too often, trust in the reviews is totally misplaced. I don’t blame self-published authors, but the fact is, that their reviews are often totally unreliable. I became so annoyed at what I considered a skewed rating for the book mentioned above, that I wrote a one star review, for which I was sharply criticized and which received a dozen “unhelpful votes” — this despite the fact that of the 17 reviews, mine was the only one that bothered to defend my view.

As a blogger, I also have to add that the most annoying and constant spamming in my email box and on Twitter comes from self-published authors. In a way, who can blame them? They can’t benefit from the advertising muscle of a traditional publisher (and by traditional publisher, I mean not the “legacy” publishers, or “print first” publishers, but pretty much any publisher), so they have to do it themselves. They are paying for everything themselves, and they can’t afford to buy an add on a genre specific blog, never mind in the New York Times. But when I state on my About page that I do not accept solicitations, yet get a dozen emails a week from self-published authors, and maybe one from traditional publishers, an impression starts to form.

An old stat says 81% of Americans think they have a book in them. If even 5% of them actually write that book, well, we might pray the gate had stayed slightly more closed. I get it that the gatekeepers have been too zealous, too unwilling to take risks, too focused on the bottom line, too expensive, too greedy, too a lot of things. I applaud indie publishers who opened up new areas and took chances on unusual books. That said, as a reader, not an expert by any means, but just a reader sharing her experience, my money and my time is valuable. There are already too many traditionally published books — half of them seemingly on my Kindle — to read in my lifetime. I suppose I can become a more careful and savvy interpreter of reviews (God knows I have had to do enough of this when reading recommendations for job applicants over the years). But why should I take the risk that all of the self-pubber’s PR is BS and, worse, that their besties will come after me on Goodreads or Amazon?

Well, I won’t. I feel like this is a little un-hip in the book community (I guess I am not even supposed to be using the term “self-pub” because “indie” is what self-pubbers prefer), but it’s my money, my time, and my choice. I know someone is going to reply that I am taking taking a risk with any book, and that is true, but my perception is that I am minimizing risk when I avoid self-published books. So, unless a fellow reader whom I know and trust personally recommends a self-published book, I won’t bite again. I get into “comfortable” reading ruts, sure, but there are any number of ways I can expand my reading horizons without venturing to self-published titles, and I intend to do just that.

26 responses so far

Review: Too Hot to Touch, by Louisa Edwards

Aug 12 2011 Published by under Reviews

I read and enjoyed Edwards’ 2009 debut, Can’t Stand the Heat. When I saw AAR’s Desert Isle Keeper review of Too Hot to Touch, her fourth book, I decided it was time to revisit Edwards’ contemporary romances set in the culinary world. In THtT, the setting is an established family restaurant in New York City, Lunden & Sons Tavern. The book begins with a prologue. A 17 year old Jules Cavanaugh, crying and banged up, makes her way from her violent home to the only place she can turn for help: her friend Danny’s family’s restaurant. Danny’s dad, Gus, takes her in and, as six years pass with the flip of a page, Jules becomes a cook and a surrogate daughter and sister to the Lunden family. Unfortunately, both Gus’s health and the restaurant’s fortunes have deteriorated, so they plan to raise their profile in the city’s new culinary scene by entering the nationally televised Rising Star Chef competition, sponsored by cooking magazine Délicieux. The family needs elder son Max, who has experience in cooking competitions, and who was the subject of some of Jules’ adolescent fantasies, to come home and help. But Max left the family home on bad terms (he wanted to try new things in the kitchen, but Gus claimed tradition was more important), and has been happily globetrotting, living in Japan, Italy and anywhere he can get new life experiences while honing his cooking skills.

When his mother calls– omitting information about the restaurant’s declining fortunes and the patriarch’s declining health — Max agrees to help with the first round of the competition, but he’ll have to jet after that, thanks to an internship he has lined up in Italy.  When Max enters the Lunden kitchen, he sees the beautiful Jules, and comes on to her in such a strong and frankly slimy way that I disliked him intensely. I was also disappointed in Jules for allowing him to put the moves on her in no time flat. I predicted that the book was going to be a kind of reformed rake story, and when Jules agrees to “no strings attached” sex (*sigh*), thanks in part to bad luck dating a former coworker (She’ll never do that again! *double sigh*), I thought the novel’s terrain would be as flat and predictable as an 8 lane highway.

But something happened to turn Too Hot to Touch into a very satisfying, and even emotional and touching read. For one thing, Max falls hard and fast for Jules. For another, while it is true that Max is a typical contemporary romance hero in his desire to avoid commitment, he’s actually been searching — really! –  for knowledge and truth on his travels. The scenes in which Max tries, and usually fails, to use his newly learned Zen techniques to deal with his family rang very true – and funny –  to me. I thought it was interesting that Edwards wrote a hero who was shallow in his attitude towards relationships and family, but quite complex and even deep in other ways. He is just genuinely curious, restless, and enthusiastic about life. These things may not readily lend themselves to a stable career and home life, but they are not necessarily character flaws, something that becomes clear when we see their effect on the very controlled and tentative Jules. Here they are in the trivia portion of the competition, where Jules has completely frozen, à la Cindy Brady:

Fear turned Jules’s knees to gelatin. “But I know this one,” she whispered frantically. “What if I freeze up again?”

His hand was still covering hers on the buzzer, and he twined their fingers together, smiling warmly. “You won’t,” he said, confidence spilling from his pores. “You’ll know the answer to Slater’s question. You’re our last, best hope for winning this thing, Jules. There’s no way you’ll let us down.”

She stared straight into his calm gray eyes, her breath caught in her chest.

Is there anything on earth more seductive than a man who believes in you?

Jules closed her eyes and tried to be the woman he thought she was. “Go for it. I’ll get the next one, and we’ll win.”

The book blurb suggests that there will be a professional rivalry between Jules, who heads up the Lunden’s Tavern team, and Max, the prodigal son returned, but that’s misleading. Max doesn’t ever really challenge Jules, and, in fact, is incredibly supportive of her. Max needs to learn to forgive, he needs to learn to compromise, and he needs to learn that other people have something to offer him which he doesn’t know he needs, and Jules helps him with all of that. Max helps Jules confront her past (that prologue), to be satisfied with her own unadorned, tomboyish beauty, and to trust in her cooking and leadership abilities. Where they are rivals is for the affection of the Lunden family, and it’s the family dynamics that make the relationship especially interesting. How will Danny and Gus feel about Max and Jules’s relationship? Can they forgive Max? Is there even still a place for Max if he wanted one?

Layered over this is the competition itself. I’m no expert as to its authenticity, but as a reader, I felt Edwards’ portrayal of life in the restaurant and of the intensity of the cooking competition was a thrilling read. I was fascinated to learn the three classical variations of a basic brown sauce, what makes an apple smell like an apple, and the last meal eaten by the folks on the Titanic, course by tragic course. Edwards has a knack for quickly sketching memorable secondary characters, such as the judges and the other Lunden team members, that, with one exception, really enhance the story. I’m particularly looking forward to the next book, which is Danny’s, and the third, which features another member of the Lunden team, a burly, silent, and slightly terrifying cook named Beck, first name unknown.

The exception is the time devoted to the attraction between Délicieux editor (and contest judge), the elegant (read: uptight) Frenchwoman Claire Durand, and Kane Slater, California rock star (read: just what Claire needs) and food contest judge. I felt that the Lunden family “issues” (Gus’s health, Max’s estrangement, etc.) and the cooking competition took enough time away from the development of Max and Jules’ romance, and did not want to devote more pages to this other couple. Via Twitter, Edwards indicated that Claire and Kane’s relationship was not, in fact, sequel bait, but will develop over the course of the series. I am not sure if knowing that from the beginning would have helped me to accept its intrusion more. YMMV.

I really liked this one. If you are looking for a unique, touching, and satisfying contemporary romance, you should check out Too Hot to Touch.

4 responses so far

Seeking Historical Romances with Novelist Heroines

Aug 05 2011 Published by under Academia, Genre musings

I’m working on a project with a colleague, which involves looking at concepts of authorship as they relate to the women who wrote Minerva Press novels (late 18th century to early 19th) and those who write romances in the modern era (1970-today). We plan to present on this at the upcoming Popular Romance in the New Millennium conference at McDaniel College in November.

My colleague suggested that I look at historical romance novels (I am focusing on that subgenre) that feature a fiction-writer heroine. I can only think of one: Black Silk by Judith Ivory. (In the back of my head, I recall reading a recent historical romance in which the hero reads the heroine’s books without realizing it. But the title? Gah.)

I’m honestly not sure this is the way I want to go with this project. I’m really more interested in what the writers themselves think of authorship, and I doubt I can extrapolate that from their author heroines. But author heroines are worth taking a look at … if I can find any.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

30 responses so far

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