Archive for the 'Monday Morning Stepback' category

Monday Stepback

Feb 28 2011 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

The weekly news, opinion and personal updates post

Links of Interest

Sunita, who occasionally writes book reviews for Dear Author and has been reading romance and following Romanceland for a long time, has taken the blog plunge. Check out her latest, Accuracy, Authenticity and World-building in Historical Romance:

[O]nce again hope has triumphed over experience, and I have come up with a spectrum of historical accuracy/authenticity/conviction. It draws on the various smart things people said on twitter yesterday.

Category 1: Wallpaper historicals. These are books where the characters are basically modern, but they wear period clothing, live in period houses, and refer to period events.There is no real pretense, by authors or readers who like the books, that these books represent serious attempts to depict a particular historical era. Think of it as going to a historical theme party: everyone dresses up in the theme, but they talk in their normal accents and use contemporary vocabulary and wear Spanx under their costumes.

Check out the post for the other three categories.

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The Nebula Awards finalists were announced, and book bloggers everywhere rejoiced to see so many women finalists. The Book Smugglers are hosting a Nebula Readathon. Click the link for the schedule.

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An open letter to Mills&Boon by Kat of Book Thingo, Waiter, There’s a Vampire in My Book.

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Author KT Grant/blogger Katiebabs is asking Does there come a time when the author who still reviews should be muzzled? prompted in part by Hush, Hush author Becca Fitzpatrick’s “be nice” advice post at Goodreads. On a related note, Teddypig posted on a Goodreads author responding to a bad review.

The Goodreads thing is turning out to be pretty interesting. Unlike a reader blog, where an author may show up only to comment on a review of her book, never to return, Goodreads is very much an author community as well as a reader community. The fact that it is shared space probably makes it harder to resist responding to a negative review.

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Beginning tomorrow, as described by Fiction Vixen, the 1st Annual March Madness Blog Party, hosted by author Ashley March. Prizes for readers and aspiring historical romance authors, author interviews, and more.

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Ever wondered why UF heroines have missing families? At Ex Libris, author Carolyn Crane explains it all for you.

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As reported by Library Journal and blogged about in many places elsewhere,

HarperCollins has announced that new titles licensed from library ebook vendors will be able to circulate only 26 times before the license expires.

For librarians—many of whom are already frustrated with ebooks lending policies and user interface issues—further license restrictions seem to come at a particularly bad time, given strained budgets nationwide. It may also disproportionately affect libraries that set shorter loan periods for ebook circulation.

While HarperCollins is the first major publisher to amend the terms of loan for its titles, two other members of the publishing “big six”—Macmillan and Simon & Schuster—still do not allow ebooks to be circulated in libraries, much to the consternation of librarians.

Two librarians are calling for a boycott of HarperCollins. Click the link for a form letter you can send to protest their library e-loan policy.
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Former owner of All About Romance Laurie Gold has announced on her blog that she is returning to the internets by taking a “part time paid” blogging position.

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Bad Publicity boosts Book Sales according to new research by a couple of business professors (via the Literary Saloon):

According to GSB professor Baba Shiv, familiarity with a product plays a crucial role when a consumer makes decision.

“The more familiar something is, the bigger a chance it will be incorporated into the [customer’s] decision,” Shiv said.

The familiarity has an impact on all brands and products. Bad publicity, while damaging to well-known products, provides lesser-known products with more consumer exposure.

Of course, their study looked at the effect of reviews in the New York Times. I wonder if it’s applicable at all to blog reviews?

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From the Awl, 10 Neflix Instant play British costume dramas for folks jonesing for the next season of Downton Abbey. Now that Amazon Prime members get free download play, perhaps they’ll post an Amazon list

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Although the site itself is a bit too busy for me, making it not always easy to figure out where to put my eyeballs for new content, I continue to be impressed with the quality of the blog posts at Heroes&Heartbreakers. They are now hosting a contest to win an ereader of your choice.

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The most amusing post I read last week: Sarkosi Admits French language a hoax after Wikileaks expose.
 (via Language Log):

During a speech given in received pronunciation, the French President came clean, stating that it all started off as a joke during William the Conquerer’s invasion to make the aggressors seem a bit more exotic.

Personal

My two week spring break begins today. I still have plenty of work to do, but it’s way less stressful without the actual teaching.

I know you have all been waiting with bated breath for this announcement, but I have finally decided what book to have my English professor friend read. You would think I was choosing my last meal! I veered completely away from Gothic romance (although I am grateful for that thread since I learned a lot of about the place of Gothic in the history of the romance genre, and got some great recs) and instead will lend her: Judith Ivory’s The Proposition. Also, When we chatted last week, I realized she had no idea what the difference is between single titles and category romance, nor that there are so many different category lines, so I think I will give her Sarah Mayberry’s Anything For You, just in case she has time to read two.

We are reading Janice Radway this week, so expect a post on that.

Otherwise, I have no idea what I will do on the blog this week.

HAPPY WEEK!

17 responses so far

Monday Stepback: Why Read?, Verbing, Straw Feminism, and Getting Yelled At

Feb 21 2011 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

The weekly links, opinion and personal updates post

Links of Interest

From the Guardian Books Blog, When Authors Met Book Bloggers for Lunch, interesting and balanced:

This is a great strength that literary bloggers have. They do not have to write for a mass audience, their excesses are not necessarily reined in by an editor, and so they are free to produce indecent, funny, inappropriate, uplifting, provocative, controversial or unconventional reviews, just as they are free to produce reviews that are vicious. I defend their right to be vicious and I don’t take it personally anymore, because I see literary viciousness as a dark art that sometimes needs writers as its canvas. I do worry about some of the writers who are just starting out, though. Some of the more casual meanness that happens online might be avoided if the reviewer imagined the author reading their piece, or if they envisaged a day where they had to meet face-to-face in a room.

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From today’s New York Times, Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites like Twitter:

The effect is seen on the companies providing the blogging platforms. Blogger, owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the United States in December than it had a year earlier — a 2 percent decline, to 58.6 million — although globally, Blogger’s unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million.

LiveJournal, another blogging service, has decided to emphasize communities. Connecting people who share an interest in celebrity gossip, for instance, provides the social interaction that “classic” blogging lacks, said Sue Rosenstock, a spokeswoman for LiveJournal, which is owned by SUP, a Russian online media company. “Blogging can be a very lonely occupation; you write out into the abyss,” she said.

But some blogging services like Tumblr and WordPress seem to have avoided any decline. Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that commercializes the WordPress blogging software, explains that WordPress is mostly for serious bloggers, not the younger novices who are defecting to social networking.

In any case, he said bloggers often use Facebook and Twitter to promote their blog posts to a wider audience. Rather than being competitors, he said, they are complementary.

“There is a lot of fragmentation,” Mr. Schneider said. “But at this point, anyone who is taking blogging seriously — they’re using several mediums to get a large amount of their traffic.”

I think this last point is very true.

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Rebecca at Dirty Sexy Books is celebrating her second anniversary with an interesting post full of lessons learned.

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At All About Romance, Dabney Grinnan is Flying the Romance Flag With Pride, an innocuous celebration of the genre … until something strange happens in the comments, now numbering 39. I may have made a snarky “contribution” myself.

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Once again my US Senator has a very bad idea. On the Kill Switch bill (via Books Inq).

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Monsters and Humans: Where to Draw the Line in Fiction, a guest post at Midnight Moon Cafe by Roxanne Rhoads.

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Is It Ok To Call Someone Else Nuts? at Udo Schuklenk’s Ethx Blog. I have purged words like “retarded” and, less successfully, “lame” from my vocabulary, but “nuts” is one I am on the fence about.

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Folks participating in a February 11 romance panel at a Sydney library have produced a transcript and a post from the moderator. Check them out for answers to questions like “How has romance changed since the 1980s?” and “Has the stigma against the romance genre diminished?”

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Let’s Say Goodbye to the Straw Feminist, by Cordelia Fine, in response to UVa psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s views on bias in science, as reported in the New York Times recently:

What about claims of sex differences in the brain, sometimes speculatively linked to aptitude in science and maths? Small sample sizes, noisy data, publication bias, and teething problems with statistical analysis techniques leave this literature littered with spurious findings of sex differences. So where does the disagreement lie between the neuroscientist or commentator who reports a sex difference in the brain, and the critic of that empirical claim? Does the former have a far more optimistic view of the study’s reliability? Or is she less concerned about the social fall-out should her claim about the difference between the male and the female brain turn out to be wrong?

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Is the Kindle increasing piracy, or is author Dave Carnoy thinking data is the plural of anecdote? (at CNET, vie @jafurtado)

A lot of people think moving away from paper is a good thing. Maybe it is. But what should also be alarming to publishers is that the number of people pirating books is growing along with the number of titles that are available for download. As I’ve written in the past, the rise of the iPad has spurred some of the pirating, but now the huge success of the Kindle is also leading to increased pirating. Yes some companies, such as Attributor, have done some studies about the issue, and seen increases. But for my evidence one only need glance at Pirate Bay and see what people are downloading and how many of them are doing it.

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Reading is Overrated by Rick Gekoski at the Guardian, a post probably more interesting for the way it rides the line between satire and seriousness (or is it the line between brilliant and bad writing?) and for the comments than for the words it contains:

And then we have this, from Somerset Maugham: “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life.” Well, almost all? I wonder which miseries reading is a refuge from, and which not? And if it is such an escape, are we not likely to doubt that what we were protected from was not a misery, but an inconvenience or an occasional source of bad temper? I suspect that a good definition of “misery” might well be “pain so acute that even reading will not assuage it”. I’d be surprised if reading provided a “refuge” from the pains of toothache, colic, or childbirth, the deaths of loved ones, the decline into dementia, the experience of war, famine, or grinding poverty, or the relegation of Coventry City FC.

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Do You Verb? by Stefanie at So Many Books:

the penchant in English to turn, usually nouns but sometimes other words too, into verbs. The grammatical term for it is “denominalisation” but I like “verbing” better, it is much more fitting, don’t you think?

Sometimes verbing make me nuts, but usually in my professional life. So, for example, when people say they “consented” a patient. What the hell does that mean?!

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If you were as disappointed as I was in the 20-years-late-to-the-party New Yorker Paul Haggis Scientology piece, read this excellent article at the Awl on The Early Heroes of Scientology Reporting.

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As a bioethicist, I am always interested in the lines between (often overlapping really) mental disorder and moral failings. This Time Magazine article on Sex Addiction is actually pretty interesting in that regard:

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is debating whether sex addiction should be added to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The addition of what the APA is calling “hypersexual disorder” would legitimize sex addiction in a way that was unthinkable just a few years ago, when Bill Clinton’s philandering was regarded as a moral failing or a joke — but not, in the main, as an illness.

APA recognition of sex addiction would create huge revenue streams in the mental-health business. Some wives who know their husbands are porn enthusiasts would force them into treatment. Some husbands who have serial affairs would start to think of themselves not as rakes but as patients.

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If you are interested in roundups of what happened at last week’s Tools of Change conference, check out these posts by Jane Litte, Sarah Wendell, and Ron Hogan. I was pretty wowed that Margaret Atwood commented — although not with super humility, unless I read it wrong — on the Smart Bitches post:

I was the Good Fairy who sprinkled you with snark dust, which you have to admit has served you well; and I have been following the fortunes of the Daughters of Pride and Prejudice (Harlequins) and the Daughters of Wuthering Heights (rippers with cloaks) and the Daughters of Aurora Leigh (a wounded man is more controllable) off and on ever since. In Lady Oracle, the secret life of the hapless protagonist is as a romance writer…
I will send you my shortie, “Women’s Novels,” if you like. (Inspired by my sister-in- law asking me why I didn’t write them, or at least something with white sharks in it.) Or you can find it in the (cough, ahem) book, Good Bones and Simple Murders… if, that is, you can find the book…

And have also been puzzling over this comment by Edward Champion:

The problem with conferences like Tools of Change is that they are often run by people who are socially clueless and extraordinarily rigid in their thinking. Real world pragmatism is going to be what separates the successful bookstores from the Black Books types that vanish in the next year.

… The collision of commerce-driven, socially clueless geeks with booksellers who comprehend social intricacies can often lead to regrettable results. And I suspect that the solution will probably involve a new panel called Humanity 1.0: Rediscovering Vital Social Values Practiced by 90% of the Human Population (Who Also Don’t Own E-Readers).

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Funny of the week: At Risky Regencies, author Janet Mullany on a Quick Writers Guide Through History. (via @keirasoleore)

Personal:

I gave a talk very early this morning at the hospital as per usual. This time, we were going over cases (rather than doing theory, for example, or policy). One fictional case had to do with a 4 year old who had to have surgery to remove baby teeth. Her parents gave her sugary drinks and failed to encourage good eating habits. After the surgery, when they saw how many teeth had been pulled, the parents were angry. In the PACU, the nurse anesthetist is confronted by them. How should s/he respond?

I’m not going to go into the details of how I would work through this case with the group, because I wanted to mention one physician in the room who was increasingly agitated as I went through the details of the (fictional, but all too common) scenario. He raised his hand right away and tried to derail the conversation in favor of a discussion of patient rights versus patient responsibilities. He was angry — very angry — that I failed to take into account that the whole problem began with bad parenting. He interrupted my talk several times, along the same lines. When I suggested that clinicians try to figure out why the parents were angry, he accused me of being “too touchy feely” and “ridiculous”, noting that his job was to bring the patient safely through the surgery, and that’s it. When I tried to find common ground (a usually foolproof mediation tactic, as in “we both agree clinicians should not get enmeshed in patient emotions”) he threw my handout on the floor, grabbed his bag and stormed from the room in the middle of the session.

This is the kind of exchange I have very frequently in my work at the hospital. I don’t get called in unless there is a “situation”, so emotions are always running high. People — nurses, doctors, social workers, patients and families — care very much about their work or their loved ones, and they also, being human, care about themselves. It matters a lot to me to be an agent of good, as far as I can (often, not very far), in this setting, and I will persevere even with people who don’t respect me, don’t like me, argue in bad faith, lie to themselves and to others, and are generally very difficult to deal with. I can’t let that exchange go by the wayside: I will work on it, through intermediaries if necessary, even if it is upsetting or frustrating.

But here, in Romanceland, I’m not going to do it. Here, for me, the bar is set much much lower for “not worth my time”. I’m sure in some cases, online meaningful discussions with people who seem “impossible” can yield important interpersonal breakthroughs, but in most cases, I doubt I can do it. More importantly — most importantly — I don’t have the energy. I just can’t. For me, in my life, disputes like the one this morning are much more important to face and resolve than disputes on a thread in Romanceland. I do not have loads of energy, so if I use up a lot of emotional energy in Romanceland, I know I won’t have enough for the other work that I have decided is more important for me, let alone for my family and friends, who are the most important of all. So — and I am responding to some emails here, which I’ll keep private — if I am not as involved in flamewars, or don’t get into it with commenters here, or just bow out of discussions or threads, or ignore some people on twitter, even though I may follow them, this is why.

The kids are off this week. And the spouse and I are … not. A lot of juggling. I hope to review Again the Magic by Lisa Kleypas later this week.

HAPPY WEEK!

27 responses so far

Monday Stepback: Big News! Links! And way too many Opinions!

Feb 14 2011 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

The weekly links, opinion, and personal updates post

Links of Interest

Macmillan’s new Romance site is up. It’s called Heroes and Heartbreakers, and yours truly will be blogging there on occasion, along with a bunch of other folks:

Heroes and Heartbreakers is a community website featuring daily content for serious fans of the romance genre in all of its forms.  Not everyone can understand the desire to argue for thirty minutes about Dain vs. Derek, to challenge the casting for the latest Jane Austen movie, or to debate whether the True Blood love triangle worked better on paper or on TV.

Heroes and Heartbreakers understands the woot! and the squee! of all of that.  Add in the original short stories and excerpts from upcoming romance novels, and it’s like a romance enthusiast’s paradise (the kind with extremely attractive men bringing you umbrella drinks).

Like our science fiction/fantasy sister site, Tor.com, we are publisher-neutral in our selection of books, authors and materials for coverage and discussion. We don’t play favorites because we think a real romance community site should be all-inclusive.  You don’t want to miss a thing, and neither do we.

Advertising Age has a story on Heroes and Heartbreakers, and similar sites such as eHarlequin. It’s 100% snark free! Apparently romance is “future proofed” (via @jafurtado):

It helps that romance was well prepared, in many ways without trying, for the challenges that would come. Its fans like to talk to one another, to the eventual advantage of the romance sites and social-media plays that have now emerged. And its books were typically priced pretty low. There’s more free content every day, but romance publishers are proving that cheap can be pretty persuasive, too.

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The program has been posted at Teach Me Tonight for the International Association of Popular Romance Studies conference this summer in NYC, and registration is now open. I’m so excited for this!

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Borders True Romance blog (Please don’t close your Bangor store. Please don’t close your Bangor store. Please please please.)  is giving away tickets for RomCon in Denver in August. I went last year and had an amazing time. Highly recommended.

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SFF author Carolyn Crane is offering tips to stay on track at her blog.

4. Social media like twitter has to be a decision, not a default mode. I can’t just go on twitter or whatever because I’m between things.

I think that one could be a life changer for me.

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At Things Mean a Lot, Ana/Nymeth has a Sunday Salon post, Not All Readings Are Created Equal, where she tries to balance respect for literary training and expertise with an acknowledgment that no degree or credential is required to say something important about a book:

The reason why I believe in democratising critical discourse is not because I think every single person in the world will make incredibly insightful, relevant and well-argued points about literature at all times (however you define those). It’s rather because I believe that we should recognise who does and does not make sense based on what they’re saying, not who they are or who they associate with. I’m not arguing against anyone’s right to take some viewpoints, readings or interpretations of a book more seriously than others; merely against following a pre-packaged formula to decide who you take seriously or not. It saddens me to see intelligence and insight be defined solely by the right sort of allegiance. This inevitably results in the dismissal of a lot of excellence points, and also in a lot of badly disguised idiocy being treated with subservience.

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At the Book Bench, Reviewers on Reviewing

I was at an event last week featuring an interview with Zadie Smith, co-sponsored by N.Y.U. and Harper’s, where Smith has just become the reviewer for the New Books column, at which she said many interesting things about book-reviewing. She insisted on being called a reviewer, in fact, and not a critic, a distinction I understood as being between an all-powerful and hoity-toity judge-type (the critic) and a sort of fellow-traveller (the reviewer), one who approaches a book in a spirit of camaraderie and aims to represent that book in a piece of writing as carefully crafted as the book itself (which is not to say “softly”). Smith cited Virginia Woolf, who reviewed whatever caught her fancy—trashy romances, if she wanted—and whose reviews were as much about her own perceptions of the world as they were about the book.

Do you know, did Woolf ever review a “trashy romance” (note the suggestion there is no other kind)? I would like to read that.

But a comment on that blog post caught my eye. It’s a call for authors to fight back:

My recent experience as an author of a book with a malignant review on Amazon was very instructive, and suggests that these reviews shouldn’t be taken lightly or ignored. Amazon is the largest single source of consumer information by review on the Internet. Like it or not, we authors of other than bestsellers have to understand an Amazon review as a sign of warning or encouragement right at the most important point of sale of our intellectual product. …  In the case of my bad review I responded to the review in a signed comment that diplomatically suggested another way of looking at the reviewer’s complaints. In return, the reviewer rewrote the review to make it worse, reduced it to one star and made it appear to be the original version of his review instead of a rewrite. I returned the serve by adding a sentence to my comment noting and dating the evidently angry rewrite to which he responded by revising it again and taking it, as I expected he would, off the deep end and far beyond an image of just an old man railing at clouds. After a long struggle, Amazon finally agreed that it had to be taken down. I can see great advantages to Amazon for authors and I’m trying to get better at using them. But I think that those of us who write books have got to start taking back the night, so to speak, from the wild west that Amazon book reviews have become. [emphasis added]

Is this author just a bit nutty, or is there an author backlash against negative reader reviews? I’m thinking both. Witness the kerfuffle of last week, when an author took to her blog to rail against “unprofessional”, i.e. “negative” review sites (too many people wrote their own blog posts on this dustup last week to even begin to list them. Just Google the author’s name and you’ve got a solid 6 hours of opinions to read. Or maybe 5 minutes, since all the opinions except one are pretty much the same.).

Then you have Carla Kelly taking to the AAR boards to complain about an Amazon review she had removed (I’m not questioning whether the Amazon review should have been removed, only the need to vent in a reader forum with a post entitled “If you don’t like a book…”). And an author, Victoria Howard, correcting a reviewer at the site The Romance Reviews (a site which is GIVEAWAY! after CONTEST! after GIVEAWAY! and therefore not of much interest to me in general. YMMV.).

I wonder if, in the push to get authors to get out there among the digital fandom and promote their own books, to be savvy and skillful — but authentic! and real! –  social networkers, it was not inevitable that authors would turn around and use the same tools — blog, forums, twitter –  to, in their view, protect their reputations against “deranged”, “unprofessional”,  or “angry” readers. If it is important to use social media to enhance one’s reputation, does it follow that one should use social media to protect it?

Luckily authors who aren’t sure what do in these challenging times can just read Meljean Brook’s Internet Survival Guide for Authors. Most of her points are great for anyone on the internets, really.

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Looking for a short list of great SFF for the romance reader? Janicu put one together over at starmetal oak book blog.

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In case you missed the news, Charlaine Harris has announced the end of the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Mysteries series … after 2 more books. I think this is a good thing, and I’m a huge fan of the series.

Apparently, working on a video game has been taking up a lot of her time. I’m not a gamer, so I haven’t played the games based on works by Nora Roberts, for example, or the Harlequin games. TV is one thing — at least it’s still long form narrative — but if video games are taking an author’s time away from writing books, I’m not sure I approve.

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After following the threads on men, porn, and sexual dysfunction, I don’t EVER want to hear another word about the dangers of the high expectations for men set by heroes in romance novels:

When you watch porn, “you’re bonding with it,” Kuszewski says. “And those chemicals make you want to keep coming back to have that feeling.” Which allows men not only to get off on porn but to potentially develop a neurological attachment to it. They can, in essence, date porn.

Two women discuss this issue at the Hairpin:

The thing that makes me GROAN SO HARD about this piece is that Rothbart and his group of pouty-faced masturbators feel put upon by porn! A kingdom of women putting all sorts of things in all kinds of holes, and they’re the ones with the sour puss.

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More press for the new book Academically Adrift at NPR:

According to the study, one possible reason for a decline in academic rigor and, consequentially, in writing and reasoning skills, is that the principal evaluation of faculty performance comes from student evaluations at the end of the semester. Those evaluations, Arum says, tend to coincide with the expected grade that the student thinks he or she will receive from the instructor.

“There’s a huge incentive set up in the system [for] asking students very little, grading them easily, entertaining them, and your course evaluations will be high,” Arum says.

I find it very hard to believe that “the principal evaluation of faculty performance” is based on an assessment of teaching, let alone student evaluations of such. It certainly is not true at my university.

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Neil Gaiman has changed his tune on piracy (video). Quoted from Comics Alliance:

“You’re not losing sales by getting stuff out there. When I do a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people ask “What about the sales you are losing by having stuff floating out there?” I started asking the audience to raise their hands for one question — Do you have a favorite author? And they say yes and I say good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book put up your hand. Then anybody who discovered their favorite author by walking into a book story and buying a book. And it’s probably about 5-10%, if that, of the people who discovered their favorite author who is the person they buy everything of and they buy the hardbacks. And they treasure the fact they’ve got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it. That’s how they found their favorite author. And that’s really all this is; it’s people lending books.”

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Lots and lots of press for romance novels due to the Valentine’s holiday. This one about a new documentary on romance readers at The Telegraph had the usual good/bad (30/70%) mix, but I was interested to learn about Mr. Sanderson:

I’ve always found the characters unrealistic in their stereotypical attractiveness and conduct. However, lots of women – 1.3 million a month – never tire of the tanned hunks and usually sappy females (however “sassy-mouthed’’ they might be). And this is why Roger Sanderson, who has written almost 50 M&B novels under the pen-name Gill Sanderson, says he would never try to introduce a less than perfect Alpha male as the hero. “He’s got to have a good body, and there’s no way he can be fat or badly dressed,” he says in a new documentary, Guilty Pleasures, which explores the enduring phenomenon of M&B. “And I never have – and never will have – a red-headed hero.”

(via @lizfielding)

USA Today has done a bunch of articles on romance. I tend not to be such a fan of press on romance novels when it suggests that writing — or reading — romance novels makes authors (or readers) experts in relationships, because I’d rather see the books being taken seriously as fiction, not as how to guides. But maybe the line is finer than I like to admit: while I don’t think Margaret Atwood is going to be interviewed for a serious science article on genetic engineering, I could see her being asked to say something about the topic in a “lifestyle” or “health” piece, I guess. Anyway, I found this comment interesting in terms of its contrast to the quote above (although it’s about heroines, not heroes):

And the depiction of heroines as impossibly perfect beauties is an outdated image that “was always unbelievable and has changed and changed quickly,” [author Sarah] Wendell says. “The standard has become much more sophisticated and diverse.”

I’m not sure I would go as far as Wendell on this issue, but this was my favorite article of the bunch, with good stuff also from Nalini Singh and Beverley Jenkins.

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I really liked this post at When Falls the Coliseum on sentimentality versus emotion in art, with a discussion of the copout at the end of Inception:

So, here’s the thing, modern artists: it isn’t emotion that’s the sin in your work; it is the phony conjuring of emotion that is not supported by logic and “circumstances.”

Sentimentality thrives in pop songs when the forlorn lover says he wants to die when she’s away. (What if she’s just in the bathroom?) It haunts movies when poorly-rendered outcasts weep about their exclusion from the world. It surfs on every brush stroke of a painting of a pink dog with eyes the size of pizzas. The problem is not the emotion, it is emotion without intellectual or circumstantial justification.

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Did you know feminists aren’t allowed to flirt? Ayup.

Male or female, if somebody subscribes to the tenets of feminism, they’re shit out of luck when it comes to flirting. Because flirting is inherently objectifying, right? And yet even feminists get lucky sometimes. How does this even happen? Well, I have some guesses…

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Laura Miller comes to Jane Eyre’s defense in Salon (from back in January, via @Infogenium):

For a great novel, “Jane Eyre” has endured more than its fair share of misguided, condescending misinterpretations, but none quite so extravagant as an essay published in the British newspaper the Telegraph last week by novelist Sebastian Faulks. “Jane Eyre is a heroine,” he announces in the opening sentence, while “Becky Sharp, the main character of Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’ (1847-48), is a hero.” Furthermore, “No one seems to question the distinction: it’s obvious.”

For Jane, the “fixed point and priority” of her life is not “her feelings for a man,” but the self-determination expressed in her ability to choose her own truth over those feelings and even, if necessary, over life itself. Her abandonment of Rochester is her coming of age. It’s hard to see how such a personality, and the drama of that personality reaching this apex of despair, clarity and fortitude, could be seen as un-heroic, especially compared to the adventures of a sociopath like Becky Sharp.

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Via Books on the Knob, now’s your chance to grab a free Kindle copy of Pride and Prejudice: Wild and Wanton Edition:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife . . . in bed. Unfortunately, you’ve never been able to see Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam indulging their every desire between the sheets–until now. In this deliciously naughty update of the beloved classic, you can peek behind the closed doors of Pemberley’s master bedroom–and revel in the sexual delights of your favorite couple.

Because really talented writers know that sex scenes have nothing to do with the text and everything to do with readers’ preferences. I’m looking forward to the time when, instead of different “lines” with different heat levels, we just have one book we can order however we want. ;)

Personal

We’re celebrating Valentine’s Day with a drive to Ellsworth and dinner with friends at a Mediterranean bistro we really like.

I am in grading purgatory this week.

I’ll have a review of Jo Beverley’s Forbidden Affections, a novella published … a long time ago (can’t find date. 1996?) … and just reissued by Zebra in the anthology An Invitation to Sin, which features a 16 year old heroine and a 30 year old hero. And a SECRET PASSAGE. (No, not that kind.)

HAPPY WEEK!

27 responses so far

Monday Stepback: The Glowing Review with the B- Grade

Feb 07 2011 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

The weekly links, opinion, and personal updates post

1. Links of Interest

I was feeling pretty spiffy a few months ago when I added the WP  Touch Pro plugin so that viewers of this blog could have access to a clean, scaled version for their mobile phones. But now I have to wonder, Is Your Website Ready for the Coming Tablet Revolution? (via @jafurtado).

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Novelist Emily St. John Mandel on Bad Reviews at the Millions.

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The kerfuffle of the week: Bitch Media posted a list of 100 Feminist YA Books, got some heat for a few titles, considered the complaints, and removed them. I think Bitch should not have put out a list they couldn’t defend, about a reading genre with such a passionate online community, and should have had a better plan in place for handling criticism and discussion. While creating a list of 100 is fine, because it doesn’t follow that all the books left off aren’t feminist, taking books off that list does imply that about the books removed. So removing books is much more fraught and needed to be handled a lot more deftly. I think authors have every right to chime in and ask that their books be removed from the list, but I think it’s Bitch’s list and they have the right to keep them on. I also think the reaction is overblown on all sides. The folks at Bitch made some mistakes, but nobody’s killing puppies. For a great response, see this terrific post by The Book Smugglers, who got dragged into it when one of their reviews was used as the basis for complaints about one of the offending books. Both posts have long long threads, which include comments that might well make you sad and/or angry.

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From reader Liz, Sexless Novels, in Esquire, which demonstrates clearly what happens when you exempt half the writing population based on gender:

Today, many writers have largely abandoned sex as an area of concern. There are exceptions. Predictably, the French are still capable of producing an enfant terrible, though in the case of Michel Houellebecq, he is no longer particularly enfant nor terrible. The best writing about sex I’ve read recently comes from England, where Geoff Dyer seems to have a right and healthy attitude about the way these things can work — a little cocaine, some free booze, a chance encounter over a few days in Venice — voilà … healthy, happy orgasms for all!

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Are eBooks heralding the End of Ownership? An interesting interview with Librarything’s founder:

Once you realise your Kindle book is not fully yours, you’ll accept it being mostly not yours. Google Ebooks are a further step away from ownership. Eventually you get to a faucet model, as music has done, either low-price (Netflix) or free (Pandora, YouTube).

“By itself, such changes might be culturally and economically neutral. Ownership of paper books wasn’t so much a consumer preference as a side effect of their physical nature, and law followed and solemnized that state of affairs. Maybe the faucet model will produce more readers, more reading, more good books, more paid authors, etc. Or maybe it will produce less. Who knows?”

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I’ve been thinking about doing a video blog (Be afraid. Be very afraid.), and have been interested in how others do it. There are some deadly boring ones out there. But author Nicole Peeler shows us how it’s done with this video review of Andrew Shaffer’s Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love (a book I will do a writeup on in the near future). I mentioned in my last post that I am writing an essay for a Hunger Games and Philosophy volume, and am pleased to say Andrew is making a contribution as well, on schadefreude!

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Can authentic social media engagement sell books? Well, Sonomalass bought Stephanie Dray’s Lily of the Nile based on a tweet about Dray’s post on the relationship between historical romance and historical fiction.

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Tweeter extraordinaire and former reviewer at TGTBTU, Limecello, has struck out on her own and has a blog, with reviews, contests, and more serious posts. Check it out.

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Not book related, but via The Awl, I found this great website that collects links to cover performances of various artists, from Lucinda Williams to Phil Ochs to Ani Difranco. Love it!

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From When Falls the Coliseum, a teenager faces an uphill battle when she tries to convince her persuasive writing teacher father to buy her a cell phone. Very cute.

2. When Reviews and Grades Don’t Add Up

I think we all know that sometimes the book review itself and the final grade (or number of stars, or number of wineglasses, books, roses, etc.) don’t match. Usually, this is because the grade seems high given the serious criticisms in the body of the review.

But lately, I have noticed the opposite trend. The grade might be a B- or C+, but the review contains nothing but positive or neutral comments. Can you imagine if I handed a paper back to my students, with a B- grade, that didn’t explain why it’s not an A? I feel the same way about reviews.

So this is a plea. If a book is not an “A” or “A-” read, please let us know why in your review. Thanks!

3. Personal

Nothing much to report. I did have a great time with 15 other people last night celebrating Chinese New Year with a 25 course meal. Too good of a time to take pictures, sorry to say. It turns out I am a Rooster, and thus will not have such a good year, according to our host, whom I subsequently did not tip.* ** ***

I’m teaching parts of Tod Chambers’ The Fiction of Bioethics this week in the seminar, and finishing up Kant and giving an exam in Ethics.

I’m reading His at Night by Sherry Thomas and No Souvenirs by K.A. Mitchell and enjoying both tremendously.

Have a great week!

*that’s a joke people.
** what I meant to say was that I would have withheld a tip, but it was included in the price.
***again, joking.

29 responses so far

Monday Stepback: Even More Random Than Usual

Jan 31 2011 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

The occasional links and opinion post, on the week that just was…

Links of Interest

In Slate, The Purpose of Science Fiction:

That said, our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it’s to suggest all the possible futures—so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go. George Orwell’s science-fiction classic Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future.

A response from The New Yorker’s Book Bench (Via @Book Bench)

Sawyer writes that it “raises profound questions about who should have the right to create living things and what responsibility the creators should have to their creations and to society.” This seems like a good prescription for writers of any sort, who are creators of “living” literature. Is Gary Shteyngart’s novel “Super Sad True Love Story” sci-fi or literary fiction? Who cares? In a reality increasingly permeated with science, as the lines between reality and manufactured reality, science and art, creator and created fade, it follows that genre lines should, too.

While I agree, I can’t help but find it interesting how literary types refuse to allow genre distinctions when they place anything good on the genre-only side of the divide.

*****

Robin @Tuphlos Bradford posting at Lauren Dane’s blog about libraries(via @Mike Cane):

The book culture is about sharing. The book culture is about falling in (and sometimes out of) love with books. Readers talk, extensively, about breaking up with series and authors. There is a stop, though, between “I love this series” and “I’m done with this series” and that stop is: the library. Long running series would be a lot shorter without the library. When readers are tired of reading the same book June after June, they stop buying. New authors have come along they would rather spend their money on. But if the library has the book, they may make an effort to keep up if they still have some interest left in the tank. Maybe the last two books were horrible, but this one looks promising, so they’ll check it out from the library. If it works, interest may be re-ignited. If it doesn’t work, the breakup may be final. But do you really think people will keep buying books they have no interest in reading? Really?

*****

I really enjoyed this Totally Hip Book Reviewer vid from WaPo book critic Ron Charles. My favorite bit is when Charles says: “Oh, I’ve just been handed a note by the 92nd Street Y asking me to speed things up” while a “Refunds available in the lobby” shows on screen. (via @mathitak)

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In the NYTRB, philosopher Ronald Dworkin’s essay on What is a Good Life? I thought readers of this blog might appreciate this bit:

If we want to make sense of a life having meaning, we must take up the Romantics’ analogy. We find it natural to say that an artist gives meaning to his raw materials and that a pianist gives fresh meaning to what he plays. We can think of living well as giving meaning—ethical meaning, if we want a name—to a life. That is the only kind of meaning in life that can stand up to the fact and fear of death. Does all that strike you as silly? Just sentimental? When you do something smaller well—play a tune or a part or a hand, throw a curve or a compliment, make a chair or a sonnet or love—your satisfaction is complete in itself. Those are achievements within life. Why can’t a life also be an achievement complete in itself, with its own value in the art in living it displays.

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Interesting: Author Pseudonyms: Helpful or Harmful, with lots of examples, at Don’t Talk Just Read.

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Read a Book for Ten Minutes Each Night and Save Publishing? Author Sean Cummings thinks so. So does my son’s third grade teacher.

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From the Online Education Database, the 50 Best Blogs for Humanities Scholars. Devoid of  the good feminist blogs, like Feministing or Feminist Philosophers, devoid of the good blogs devoted to race issues, like Racialicious, and a very heavy focus on blogs attached to print journalism. *sigh* (via Books Inq.)

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An amusing critique of the concept of author branding. What Color is Your Font, by Steve Weddle. Good discussion in the comments, too:

Think about what makes you buy a book. It’s the postcards, right? The bookmarks left behind at the signings? You know, that’s how most of the books on my shelves were bought. I saw a catchy postcard near the register at the bookstore and said, “Damn. Look at that postcard. That’s the same font I saw on a bookmark last week. That author must tell a damn good story.”

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Don’t ever interrupt me when I’m readin’ a book…

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A different look at piracy from an author in the Phillipines. (via @cjewel):

The problem with discussions of eBook piracy, or simply giving away your work for free, is that it doesn’t affect everyone equally. If you’re popular like J.K. Rowling or Stephen King, then it’s mostly a loss to you, since you’re not really after fame but income (to say nothing of the futility of stamping out each and every pirate). To obscure writers, like say a genre writer in the Philippines, it’s probably more of a gain, since we’re not popular enough in the first place to acquire a sufficient following to earn a significant amount from our writing. My friend Lavie Tidhar laments that his books aren’t being pirated and to a certain extent, piracy is a popularity metric; if no one is pirating you, then there’s little demand for your writing.

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A helpful video … How to Strip DRM from Your Kindle books (via @janel)

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A fun contest (closes some time on Tuesday I think) from Smart Bitches celebrating 6 years of blogging. Sarah Wendell asked entrants to post their 6 favorite things about romance. Over 300 entries provide an interesting — and fairly consistent — list of top attractions, especially “escape”, “HEA”, and “the men”. Wendell may or may not have promised to devise a contest post mortem pie chart.

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From Tricia of Literary Sluts, You’re Not a Traditionalist, You’re A Snob.

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Someone started a rumor that Ellora’s Cave doesn’t publish forced seduction stories and Kelli Collins sets them straight.

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Two authors make the case against writing reviews: Stacia Kane, demonstrating the fine art of digging a hole, here, here, here, and finally here. Also Jeanine Frost.

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I noticed a romance website that was formerly flash free has succumbed to the allure of the flash ad. Finding these ads a huge distraction from content, I decided to reintroduce Flash block. I soon became greedy and upgraded to Adblock Plus. Bliss!

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Personal

I spent the entire Sunday in bed, at first thinking I was hung over from my late night at the EURO LOUNGE (cue disco music and very bad martinis), and then, by 10:00am, realizing I was just sick. I read Michelle Reid’s The Italian’s Future Bride, at Tumperkin’s suggestion, which I found depressing, and we plan a post on it soon. I also hope to publish that post on Lover Awakened.

I also watched a few episodes of Spartacus: Blood and Sand. I can’t remember the last time the sheer power of good looking men kept me glued to the screen. But it sure happened yesterday:

Now that I am recovered, I am back to PBS of course.

HAPPY WEEK!

18 responses so far

Monday Morning Stepback: Better Late than Never edition

Jan 10 2011 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

The Weekly Links, Opinion and Personal Updates Post

Links of Interest

The funniest post I read last week: Tess Lynch on The World’s Worst Mommy Bloggers:

June 22, 2010

I love to look at Little Harrison while he’s sleeping. I just think…he’s so small, so perfect, and so innocent. His little tiny fingers swatting at his eyebrow tape, little precious digits smearing the mustache we drew on his upper lip, tiny lipsticked mouth making all sorts of different expressions like the most miniscule drag queen.

I really do not like mommy blogs, but I don’t want to get in a fight with anyone over it so I will stop there.

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This was the second funniest post I read last week: The Horrors of a 12-Day Internet Detox:

At breakfast one morning, I attempted to key in the status update: What have I done?!?! But when I looked down at my hands I was squeezing scrambled eggs between my fingers. My wife looked concerned. I laughed nervously, licking the eggs from my palm. “Everything will be fine,” I told her. “Why wouldn’t it?” she said, now scared.

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Nathan Bransford has advice on how to make good blog comments. Hmmm.

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Laura Vivanco profiles the new Mills & Boon Line, Riva, which does not sound enticing. A couple of authors show up in the comments to defend the line.

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An interview with Eloisa James at The Browser. I don’t think feminism means what she thinks it means, though:

They’re all pretty feminist – even historical heroines (who couldn’t hold a job) are forthright, strong women.

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At Get Yer Bodices Ripped Here, a fun post on Jan Cox Speas’ covers featuring the lovely artwork of Tom Hall.

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According to a study reported in the Daily Mail, you are more likely to remember your first kiss than losing your virginity. The best thing is actually this comment from a reader:

I can remember my first kiss, i can’t remember much of losing my virginity. But then i was sober when i had my first kiss. That claim cannot be said about my loss of virginity. I only remember saying ‘that’s a funny face’ at one point and being sternly glared at. I like to think i’ve improved since then.

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At Access Romance Readers Gab, Robin expressed skepticism about a $49 reader event with Susan Elizabeth Phillips in Selling the author: How Much is Too Much?. AAR has an interview and giveaway with SEP (contest ends Thursday).

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Robert McCrum in the Guardian books blog asks Do Creative Writing Courses Make Writing Too Literary?

Going in the other direction, Fiction Bitch has a series of posts from the Faber Academy folks, one of whom actually addresses the concern that these kinds of creative writing programs are taking people’s money for no very good reason at a time when the opportunities to make a living from writing are shrinking.

*****

A really good roundup of quotes, links and trackbacks on the Huckleberry Finn controversy at Racialicious.

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If you are interested in social justice issues, there is a new blog to read, Inequalities. Here’s good post on Michael Vick and the Politics of Second Chances.

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At Digiphile, Blogging Isn’t Dead, Influence Contests Should Be, and Hyperlinks Rule. (via @jafurtado).

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Downton Abbey

I watched Episode 1 (of 4) of Downton Abbey with my mom last night. We both really enjoyed it. If you missed it, you can click here to watch it online.

Here is a recap and review at Austenprose.

Check out this great Meet the Characters post at the descriptively named The Enchanted Serenity of Period Films.

Jane Austen’s World noticed several of the costumes for Downton Abbey were recycled from other period productions. Scroll down for links to individual posts on the “upstairs” Crawleys and the “downstairs” servants.

Personal

Classes start this week. I am teaching Ethics and the philosophy senior seminar, on Narrative Medicine. Looking forward to both of them. Blogging will return to its usual 3 or so times a week.

I am taking a break from Crusie, but will get back to her single titles later this month. I think it is time we figure out once and for all whether Bet Me or Welcome to Temptation is her best book, so I plan to host my first official Bookdown (I’m half joking there). I hope to review The Hunger Games . I have also been rereading J.R. Ward’s Lover Awakened. No review planned, but it has prompted me to draft a post, Top Ten Signs You are Reading Too Much Paranormal Romance.

I dropped my nearly two year old Kindle 2 at the gym, it broke, and Amazon is sending me a new K2 free of charge. Speaking of the gym, I started to worry that my trainer — who coaches a power lifting team — is trying to make me look like Starla from Napoleon Dynamite:

So I asked for a new program, and she put me on this “100 rep” thing, which I started today. Suffice to say, my fingertips hurt as I type this.

HAPPY WEEK!

21 responses so far

Monday Morning Stepback: What is Criticism, the Inner Critic, the Lost Art of Reading

Jan 03 2011 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

The Weekly Links, Opinion, and Personal Updates Post

Links of Interest

Stop the internets! Someone didn’t like love The Iron Duke. Which is cool, except for the comment that:

I just think it’s a crying shame that she declares on her website that she’ll never write something that’s not a romance–it’s selling her talents and her abilities short to limit herself to one genre.

…which had me scratching my head.

Edited to add the full comment below:

This book I want to talk about because I feel like it’s … travesty is not the right word, because I enjoyed it … but it’s not *right*. Ms. Brook is a fantastic worldbuilder, and more importantly, she can tell a damn fine science fiction story. Her characters are real, her world shines through the grime, and the plot worked, for the most part. I like her writing too, which I can’t always say of all authors. Where the book fell totally flat for me was the romance. I can understand a romance being there; I’m cool with romance; see all the books above that are romances, which is a genre that I love.

But in emphasizing the romance over everything else, as well as the sex scenes (which bordered on gratuitous), Ms. Brook did her book a great injustice. I know that this is the story she wanted to tell, and that this is the book she wanted to write; I totally get that. I just think it’s a crying shame that she declares on her website that she’ll never write something that’s not a romance–it’s selling her talents and her abilities short to limit herself to one genre.

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At History Hoydens, Heroines Who Overimbibed. Noting that drunk heroes are a dime a dozen in historicals, Kathrynn Dennis asks:

So I have to ask, can anyone recall a recent historical romance where the basically honorable and good heroine gets drunk (she’s the introspective, broody, but cavorting one), wakes up afterward and finds herself in “a situation” with the hero?

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Lynne Connelly on Why Writing Mills & Boon Modern (Harlequin Presents) is So Hard at TGTBTU:

Working to make these people special and specific, individuals instead of types, is hard, especially when there are no frills in the way, details of scene and setting, to distract.

*****

Edward Champion saw something steampunky (actually, the New Year’s Eve Steam Whistle Blow at Pratt Institute) on New Year’s Eve, but — scandalously – felt no need to digitally document it. Here’s what he says about that:

I’m essentially stating, “Photographs? Video? No, I don’t need any of that. You see, I’d rather believe in my admittedly imperfect and abstract recall for the remainder of my natural life.” It feels more dishonest and less human to match up my memory to meet the absolute data contained within a photograph. It is as if I’m filling out a form, never driving above the posted speed limit, or always coloring inside the lines.

I don’t think extramental images are much truer to “absolute data” than our own memories, but the essay is a fun read.

*****

SmokinHotBooks has a very helpful piece on Kindle’s new lending program.

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Huckleberry Finn is in the news again, for the use of the N-word. (via Books Inq)

This comment from professor Sam Gwynn on the first post is interesting:

Frankly, I just can’t teach it any longer. I know it’s great, and I can lecture for a day or so about how Twain is being faithful to the dialects and to the way that people spoke back then. But trying to lecture about its literary merits takes a back seat when I see how African American students (I’m talking about teenage sophomores, taking the class for core credit) are reacting to the iterations of THAT WORD. The problem is that Twain doesn’t distinguish between those who are using the word in a “kindly” manner (we could probably assume that this is the only word for black people that Huck has ever heard) and those who are using it an an epithet. Used indiscriminately in these ways, it just makes everyone in a classroom uncomfortable. Maybe if I were a better (or younger) teacher I could use this book to challenge all kinds of assumptions about language and art. I just don’t find myself up to the fight anymore, at least at the sophomore level. I think this is a pretty good 2/3 of a novel, but I really wonder why it has become canonized as the GAN.

I have to wonder about claims like this. I often look out at a sea of students, think I know what they are thinking, ask them to write a short response, and am astounded by how wrong I was.

That said, it’s a professor’s right to teach what he or she wants, but changing the text itself? I really could not believe my eyes when I read this:

Dr. Alan Gribben is publishing a new edition that, among other innovations, dispenses with the n-word altogether.

Gribben explains that Twain’s novels “can be enjoyed deeply and authentically without those continual encounters with hundreds of now-indefensible racial slurs.” It is the first volume to wash out Twain’s mouth with soap. Gribben believes that the presence of the n-word has gradually diminished the readership of Twain’s masterpiece.

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From The 99% a new take on the inner critic: Why Your Inner Critic is Your Best Friend.

So the Inner Critic isn’t the enemy, just an over-zealous friend who’s delivering the criticism too forcefully and without considering your feelings. We all have friends who do that from time to time.

The trick is to get the Critic back “onside,” delivering genuinely constructive criticism. Like the inspiring mentor who urged you to do your best and didn’t accept anything less – but with a supportive and encouraging tone of voice.

*****

At So Many Books, Stefanie reviews The Lost Art of Reading by David Ulin. Ulin ponders his own difficulty with sitting down to read without being interrupted by emails and texts and tweets, but it sounds like a balanced, thoughtful book, not a diatribe against, or apologia for, technology.

*****

Even novelist Jane Smiley has trouble, as she admits in this short interview with Fictionaut (via Author Scoop)

I am a serial email checker. I need to actually get into the hot tub or the bathtub to read a book.

I also liked this bit, in which she seems to channel the lessons of the inner critic mentioned above:

Write everyday, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

Opinion

Yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Book Review contained six essays on Why Criticism Matters.

Some choice quotes::

Stephen Burn:

The electronic footprint of earlier readers and their opinions exerts its tyranny on the solitary transaction between book and reader, and so in mainstream reviewing it’s time to hear less of critics talking about themselves, spinning reviews out of their charming memories or using the book under review as little more than a platform to promote themselves and their agendas. The critic ought to be an obscure, marginal figure, but I suspect that the tendency to overpersonalize a review stems from a sense among reviewers that part of their job has been usurped by the muddy aggregate of opinion that is everywhere available on a laptop somewhere near you.

Katie Roiphe, being awful as usual:

By this I mean that critics must strive to write stylishly, to concentrate on the excellent sentence. There is so much noise and screen clutter, there are so many Amazon reviewers and bloggers clamoring for attention, so many opinions and bitter misspelled rages, so much fawning ungrammatical love spewed into the ether, that the role of the true critic is actually quite simple: to write on a different level, to pay attention to the elements of style. Of course, it is not considered nice or polite or democratic to take the side of the paid critic (though, to be fair, she is paid very little) over the enterprising amateur who would like to shout anonymously on the Internet, but that’s precisely what is called for — unless, of course, the enterprising amateur writes better than the paid critic. The answer to the angry Amazon reviewer who mangles sentences in an effort to berate or praise an author is the perfectly constructed old-fashioned essay that holds within its well-formed sentences and graceful rhetoric the values it protects and projects. More than ever, critical authority comes from the power of the critic’s prose, the force and clarity of her language; it is in the art of writing itself that information and knowledge are carried, in the sentences themselves that literature is preserved. The secret function of the critic today is to write beautifully, and in so doing protect beautiful writing.

My favorite, by Pankaj Mishra:

“In our political as in our economic lives,” Tony Judt wrote in “Ill Fares the Land,” a lament for moral idealism and engaged citizenship, “we have become consumers.” A similar docility marks our cultural choices. Most writers as well as readers of literary fiction see it as a refined form of entertainment or instruction.

Deprived of a whole vocabulary of moral concern, which traditionally enlisted it into a humanistic culture, literary criticism was always destined to turn into a kind of competitive connoisseurship — a parlor game for the increasingly professional producers as well as the passive consumers of literature. It can have its intelligent pleasures; but, determinedly asocial, it is far from bringing, as Kazin wanted it to, a “historical sense of what has been, what is now, what must be” into “the immediate confrontation and analysis of works of art.”

I liked this bit from Adam Kirsch:

The critic participates in the world of literature not as a lawgiver or a team captain for this or that school of writing, but as a writer, a colleague of the poet and the novelist. Novelists interpret experience through the medium of plot and character, poets through the medium of rhythm and metaphor, and critics through the medium of other texts.

Of course, this is an ideal. Most of the time, depending on the kind of piece she is writing, the critic also has other responsibilities. She is a journalist: a review is, in part, a news story about a new book and why it matters. She is a consumer advocate, giving the reader enough information to decide whether to buy the book. At times — as we saw recently in the discussion of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” — she is a social commentator, trying to determine what the success (or failure) of a particular book says about America at large, how the nation lives or thinks or imagines.

An inspiring outing by Sam Anderson, if verging on the hyperbolic:

As book critics, our writing is a writing on writing. We respond to an author’s metaphors with countermetaphors; we criticize or praise a story by telling a story about it. My favorite work is always that which allows itself to imaginatively intermingle with its source text — to somehow match or channel or negate the energy of the text that inspired it. It can be imitative, competitive or collaborative; it can mimic or mock or scramble or counterbalance the tone of the source. It can be subtle or overt. But it will always have this doubled-over, creative quality: one memorable writer responding, in memorable writing, to another.

Here is a response from Mark Athitakis, who takes issue with the notion — present in several of the essays — that a function of criticism is to improve writing. And another one from Ron Hogan at Beatrice.

Personal:

We have another week off, but I have lots to do this week, getting my syllabi ready, etc. Kids are back to school today, and miraculously, I am not quite ready to part with them. We had a great “staycation”.

Look for more Jennie Crusie this week, and also some notes on a dissertation on romance that I have to read fast (it’s an interlibrary loan due back Friday!)

I leave you with a couple of shots from New Year’s Day:

Morning on the lake

41 degrees -- it's like June in January!!

HAPPY WEEK!!

28 responses so far

Monday Morning Stepback: Snowpocalypse edition!

Dec 26 2010 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

The weekly links, opinion, and personal updates post

Links

My sons, no longer content to share review space with their mother DESPITE THE FACT THAT THEY CAME FROM MY WOMB started their own book review blog, ReadReactReviewJr. We’ve noticed that while there are loads of YA blogs and loads of mommy blogs that review kids books, there are few book blogs written by kids for kids. We’ll see how long they stick with it.

*****

Also, I started a Facebook account for this blog (see right sidebar). So many people are on Facebook, pretty much all day long, that I think it may actually be easier for some to read this blog by clicking a FB link than to bookmark it or view it in their reader.

I notice that some people have a “do not attempt to friend this person unless you know her personally”, and I have no idea what that means. Does it mean, “if you are a spammer stay away”, or does it mean, “you had really better know her IRL?”. And if the latter, what does that even mean? If I met a romance author at a conference, do I count? I’ve just been sending out friend requests, figuring people won’t reply if they don’t want to friend me. But let me know what you think. I am a pretty amateur Facebooker.

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For your daily dose of sexual liberation, check out Hello Mom. Merry Christmas. I Write Erotica, at the Harlequin blog, by Tiffany Reisz.

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Net neutrality confuses me no longer, thanks to this truly idiot proof graphic (via @Techmeme)

*****

A Harvard Business Review blog post, You Can’t Multitask, So Stop Trying, is a decent read, but it’s actually more interesting for watching an academic try to engage with aggressive seasoned internet commentators. I am not sure why commenters got so mad at the post author, Paul Atchley, Ph.D., an associate professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Kansas, but one of them actually looked up and criticized his publication record. Ouch.

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In case you agree with Atchley, here’s the 99%’s 10 Online Tools for Better Attention and Focus.

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Not new, but new to me: Like A Virgin, by Emily Maguire, in Australia’s The Monthly, concluding with this (via @bookthingo):

The ways in which virginity matters in the long-past-virginal adult world is altogether different. The silly, superstitious, dehumanising, backwardness of the virginity obsession would be funny if it didn’t so often result in pain, shame, oppression and exploitation. We know – don’t we? – that the porn hymens are fake, that sex with a virgin doesn’t cure AIDS, that no mystical change occurs in either man or woman when a penis enters a previously unpenetrated vagina. We know – don’t we? – that teenage girls have erotic lives that are entirely unconnected and unconcerned with the fantasies of middle-aged men; that a woman’s identity, sense of self and value as a human being cannot be instantly and irrevocably altered by a single sexual encounter. And we know – don’t we? – that virginity is a human invention, that we are the ones who invest it with meaning, even as we’re unable to accurately or consistently define it.

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It’s fun to watch a smart and sympathetic semi-newbie to the genre try to make sense of it, and it’s also gratifying to see a leading lit blog discuss romance. See Ron Hogan do both here, in a post on Christmas romances.

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At FWD (Feminists with Disabilities), seriously one of the best blogs out there, Blindness in Greek Myth:

Greek myth is characterised by myriad meanings and functions of blindness. Whether blindness is representing establishment or exercise of power dynamics, whether it appears as a metaphor, whether it is performing a variety of functions all at once or something else entirely, blindness is everywhere in Greek myth.

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An interesting round up of discussions on whether to allow comments on blogs at Language Log. Perhaps my favorite point comes in the comments, and it is this:

When a narcissistic blowhard makes an ignorant comment on the Internet, there’s little or no cause to take note, so if a reaction ensues, it’s because there was a second fool willing to take the invitation.

Sometimes the best way to protect free speech is to shut up.

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Loads of best of the year lists to peruse. So many great ideas. I am actually thinking of starting a new feature, Top Ten Tuesdays, where I review a random book chosen from a best of 2010 list. I was especially interested in this one by Maria Lokken at the B&N blog, and KMont’s 2010 roundup at Lurv a la Mode.

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A pretty interesting video segment on book covers from CBS Sunday Morning, including some discussion of romance, chick lit, and the Twilight Saga, Larssen, and the impact of e-books (via Cover Cafe)

Opinion

I am fresh out of these. Any ideas?

Personal

We’re bracing for the blizzard. I am reading and rereading a lot of Jenny Cruise, so expect nothing but Crusie posts this week, and maybe into the next.

For the folks that asked for it, I added an “I like this” button to the bottom of each post. We’ll see if it sticks. (Sorry the font is so small. Working on it.)

HAPPY WEEK!

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