The (semi) weekly links and opinion post
Links of Interest:
Laura Vivanco at Teach Me Tonight on Representing Mothers and their Children. Thought provoking post and insightful comments.
Audible now has an Iphone/Ipod Touch/Blackberry App, making it a one step process to purchase and play your audiobooks. And the features in the Audible app — inclusive of cover art — are better than those in iTunes.
As reported by NPR, UVA has digitized and made available Faulkner’s talks given while he was in residence in the late 1950s.
“Because I’m the Batman!” — Batman sends an audio query to Janet Reid with hilarious results.
Mandi at Smexy Books has a great post and a wonderful thread on Urban Fantasy and the HEA.
An older post, but worth a look if you haven’t seen it: Women Writing Fantasy by Stella Matutine (hat tip to Kristin of Fantasy Cafe for the link).
Randy Cohen, “ethicist” (he’s actually a humorist) for the Sunday NYT Magazine wrote that trans people have an ethical obligation to expose themselves to their dates. This has not gone over well with several bloggers in the trans community. Lisa Harney has a particularly clear and incisive critique.
Tonight’s episode was definitely better, but I have had a very hard time watching True Blood this season on feminist grounds. Womanist Musings explains why.
The Book Smugglers have kicked off YA Appreciation event. Click the link for all the details and events.
RomCon
Two quick points about my experience there that I did not get to put in the blog post:
- Many of the authors and readers I met at RomCon do not read blogs, at all. Or even know they exist. The only website I heard mentioned by name by anyone was AAR. At the panel on “How to be a fairy godmother to your favorite authors” (or whatever the name was), a small sheet was distributed with a list of sites to talk about books online, and in addition to Amazon, and Goodreads, you had Coffee Time Reviews. That was pretty much it. It was a forceful reminder that we cannot take our experiences in Romland as representative of romance readership.
- I felt unexpectedly hesitant to pimp my blog at RomCon. I had fancy business cards (*giggle*) made up, but I only gave them to two people. I actually had the feeling – and I may have been totally off base here — that it would put a wedge between me and whomever I was chatting with to mention that I had a review blog. I’m not sure what to make of it. It felt like admitting I was on an opposing team in some strange way. Irrational, but there it is.
A few more post con reports have sprung up:
Kim from SOS Aloha has a great recap with a comprehensive list of all the bloggers in attendance.
Keynote speaker and author Lori Foster
Limecello, reviewer at TGTBTU
Author Nicole Peeler
Publisher’s Weekly, Beyond Her Book, Guest column by NYStacey
Author Carolyn Jewel, over at Risky Regencies
Covers:
Why are we interested in book covers? I can think of a few reasons. For one, aesthetics. Humans are interested in beauty and design. We like well designed things, even when the design is unrelated to the function. Some readers likely collect covers, the way someone might collect coins or ladles, and display them.
For another, as fans, we are interested in how the covers represent not just the book, but our genre, and therefore us. It’s interesting to think about what covers say about our culture, about what attracts buyers, etc. When we talk about covers, we are talking about how the industry sees us, and about how we are portrayed to those outside the genre.
Covers also provide an easy shorthand for us as buyers. Even a badly designed or ugly cover can communicate something about a book. To that extent they can help us with buying decisions, especially when we are in a rush.
Of course, covers can mislead us and often do. Few of the heroes in the books actually look like the cover models, and often the hero is posed in ways no human other than a cover model would consent to. The heroine also often does not resemble the female cover model, especially when the author has written her to be less than classically beautiful, or, as we have seen in the whitewashing cases, when she is of other than white Angle race or ethnicity. Covers can also show situations or scenes that do not occur in the book. Some covers are much more misleading than these examples, leading readers to mistake the subgenre or genre of the book in question.
But covers have no relation to the main purposes for which most buyers will pick up a book. Whether we read for fun or escape or mental exercise or any other typical reason, the cover is not predictive or causally connected in any but the most generic ways to whether we our reading experience will be a good one. Bad, ugly, misleading covers adorn great books, and lovely covers adorn awful books. Exciting, unique books get boring, unimaginative covers while dull and uninspired books get covers that are visually cutting edge.
The usual understanding of rationality (or at least instrumental rationality) is that your means match your ends. You have goals, and you do the thing that is most likely to help you meet them. Given that definition, using covers to make buying decisions is irrational.
The covers and content so rarely go together that I am actually grateful I now read mostly digital, because I feel like I have a better chance of meeting my reading goals –namely, a terrific, well written, enjoyable book — without them.
Personal:
We have decided to totally redo the kitchen. Those cabinets we had painted? Twice? Are getting ripped out. So is the floor. Hold me.
I got my instructor’s copy of True Blood and Philosophy. Expect a review in the next week or so.
I’m writing a talk for a conference on Saturday in Camden, so it’s a busy week.
We are also hosting a British soccer coach for my sons’ camp this week. Originally from London, he’s a university student at Leeds and an absolute delight. We are already learning a lot about English culture: I gave him a few cereals to choose from for breakfast and he poured a little of each into his bowl. It gives me an excellent excuse to fix a lobster dinner tonight.
“Re-Reading Authorial Intention and Imagination over Two Centuries
Apr 15 2011 Published by Jessica under Academia, Cover commentary, Feminist contentions, Genre musings
… : the Romantic-Era’s Minerva Press Novels and Today’s Popular Romances.”
Ok, that was not my title. Can you tell the English professor half of our team wrote that presentation title? Here’s how a philosopher would write it:
“What is an author?”
So you can see why I left the title to my partner in crime, Elizabeth.
We gave our talk as part of a campus luncheon series put on by the Women in the Curriculum/Women’s Studies program. We had very good attendance, especially from faculty in the English department.
Elizabeth is working on Minerva Press novels, which were not technically romances, but definitely have elements that make them comparable to romance. We’ve been exploring some of the commonalities between Minerva press novels themselves, their production, their authorship, and their readership, and contemporary romance novels.
Rather than try to summarize the entire 90 minute event, I’ll just bullet point a few things, and then stick a couple of my slides in. If you have never heard of Minerva Press, you might start with this wonderful piece by author Carolyn Jewel.
Knowing my audience mostly doesn’t read romances and would think many of the common assumptions (namely, that it is one book being written over and over) were true, I spent half the time educating them about the genre. I also spent some time on feminist critique, and on its similarities to nonfeminist critique. I discussed the import, from a feminist point of view, of not viewing romance novels as books. If they are not books, the 26 million women who read them regularly are not readers. This is not just constructing romance readers as passive. It is effacing them. Here are a few of my slides:
Owning my fandom -- first slide
Education. Folks loved this cover.
More education.
Discussed diversity in cover styles, looking like other genres
Covers that show strong heroines
Probably my favorite moment was during the Q&A when one of our creative writing professors said that while he was used to SFF and mystery being treated with contempt, he had never even thought about the silence around romance novels. They are beneath notice and beneath contempt.
Well, there was a lot more, but that’s the gist of some of it. Thanks for reading along!
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