State of the Swan
CEM is here.
Deathmarch has commenced.
I will either be silent for the next week as I try to plow through this at top speed, or posty like a posty thing as I find myself in desperate need of breaks from the work.
It’s Pick a Fight Day on LJ!
(No, it isn’t. Just on my LJ.)
So, I’m mostly okay with this article in the Telegraph about how it’s okay not to have read John Updike, or for that matter other literary greats. It’s certainly true that it isn’t possible for even the most well-intentioned of book lovers to have read all of the Great Literature that’s been published in the last two hundred years, even if you aim only for the top tier.
But here’s where the writer and I part ways:
This is not an argument against the literary canon. I do believe there are certain key authors – most of them Dead, White, European and Male – who jolly well ought to be studied at school by virtue of the quality and intelligence and depth of their writing. And I certainly don’t believe in the modern anything-goes approach to teaching novels to children in school where they’re served up in gobbets of “text” (whole books being considered too challenging for the Xbox generation) and where literary merit is thought of less importance than “relevance” or “accessibility”.
All I mean is that once you’ve had a reasonable grounding in sufficient “proper” literature to form your taste, you should never again read a book out of duty.
Er.
Okay, middle first. I’m with him on the distressing notion that a whole book is too much for kids to read; God, I hope there aren’t many schools doing that. But. But.
Dead, White, European, and Male. The blithe assumption that they’ve got a majority share on “quality and intelligence and depth.” Gyah. I won’t even waste space on arguing that one; you all can do that for yourselves.
The end; the end is where I start talking back to my monitor. The idea that you should form your taste by reading “proper” literature. That literary merit (as judged by, I presume, highly-educated White European Males) should be our primary criterion for handing books to kids — because “relevance” and “accessibility” are silly little concerns, not something we should be wasting their time on.
How the hell does he expect anybody to learn to love reading, with that approach? How does an education in which you’re forced to read books out of duty incline anybody to go on reading them when the duty is removed?
A couple of months ago, I finally managed to articulate one of the things that bothered me about high school English lit classes: I think they force-feed students lots of things the students have no particular reason to understand or care about, and they do it because this is the last chance society has to make you read those books. So who cares if Death of a Salesman is about a guy decades ago having a mid-life crisis and you’re a sixteen-year-old barely aware that traveling salesmen once existed? Who cares if you have any reason to find Willy Loman’s pain sympathetic or even comprehensible? You’ll read it because we think you should do so before you die, and once you graduate our chance to enforce that is gone.
I don’t think any power in the ‘verse could have made me like that play, but I’ve got a tidy little list of authors I should give a second chance, because I might enjoy them now that I’m ready for them.
But I formed my taste by reading books I liked, books I cared about. It probably isn’t the taste Mr. Dellingpole thinks I should have; it’s okay for me not to read Updike, but probably less okay if the reason I’m not reading Updike is that I’m reading George R. R. Martin. But I submit that quality, intelligence, and depth exist as much in one’s interaction with a book as they do in the text itself: all the literary brilliance in the world doesn’t matter if my eyes are glazing over as I turn the pages. You want to know how I learned close reading? By obsessing over Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books and piecing together the fragments of prophecy and foreshadowing scattered through them. And it’s entirely possible I never would have become an alert enough reader to survive Dorothy Dunnett had I not gone through those baby steps first. But if somebody had convinced me I ought to be spending my time on Zadie Smith instead of Jordan, it’s also possible I would have never picked up Dunnett in the first place — or, y’know, other books in general.
If I were in charge of high school curricula, you know what? Literary merit would not be my overriding concern. I would set out to give kids books they might enjoy, and then once they’re engaged, teach them how to pay attention to what they’re reading. Everything else can follow from there, because once you’ve done that, the chances of there being an “everything else” get a lot higher.
It’s a fine irony when Mr. Dellingford decries readers who pick up literary books only out of a sense of obligation — while also telling us we should obligate kids to do just that.
for the psych folks
yhlee got me thinking about this one by linking to Harry Harlow — if I needed to read up on the social and emotional development of children, what names should I be looking for?
Specifically, the story situation I’m working with involves children raised from birth in what amounts to an orphanage: professional caretakers (well-meaning ones, not Dickensian sadists), but no parents as such, and the children have to depend on each other for affection. I’d like to know what effects that would generally have on their behavior, and also what kinds of practices the Powers That Be might institute to keep the kids from growing up too warped. (Would it help if they slept in dormitory arrangements, at least until a certain age? Etc.)
I’ll be asking my psych-major husband, too, but until he gets home from work, you guys are it. 🙂
Edited to add: I’ve read enough to come across Bowlby and Ainsworth, but I’m a) looking for more recent models and b) trying to work out the behavior of an adult character raised in such a situation; the specific behavior of toddlers is of less interest to me.
small favors
It isn’t actually a good thing that some confusion on my publisher’s end means my copy-edited manuscript isn’t here yet, but as it turns out, I’m just as glad; being dilated at the eye doctor’s renders me more or less useless for anything that involves reading. I’m managing this post, but it’s hard, and to read print I pretty much have to take off my glasses and hold the page two inches from my nose.
And my current Netflix haul is all subtitled, natch.
Today’s kind of shot, I’m afraid.
rereading myself
My copy-edited manuscript is expected to arrive tomorrow, and so I spent much of today re-reading In Ashes Lie.
I’m pleased to report that I like it, after all.
You’d think that would go without saying. But I spent so long head-down in this book, and so much of that time under a series of unpleasant stressors, that I truly lost my perspective on it. It’s the longest book I’ve ever written by a margin of nearly twenty thousand words, and approximately 87% more plotty than its closest competitors, which meant I had a difficult time holding the entire thing in my head at once; by the time I finished revisions, I was making changes half-blind, trusting to well-trained instinct that what I was doing would actually work. For all I knew, I was creating a Frankenstein monster of a book. But now, with the respite of having not looked at the thing for over two months, I find that — while there are some rough edges around those last-minute changes — on the whole, the thing works.
(Even the sentences, mostly. I can pay close attention to those in short stories, but in novels they tend to happen on autopilot, while my brain wrestles with plot and character and so on. Especially in a book like this. My autopilot, however, has gotten much better these last few years.)
Don’t get me wrong: I still don’t ever want to wrestle again with the fire-breathing hydra that is seventeenth-century English politics, and I still think this book deserves its moniker of “the Beast.” But that’s the voice of the months spent writing it, not the voice of the result. I don’t love it in the same way I love Midnight Never Come — no two books are ever the same — but I honestly believe Ashes has both Giant Spectacle and character moments that far surpass the best I was able to pull out for its predecessor. (The whole “burning down London” thing helped with the former.) It is a book I can be proud of.
And that two-month respite means I (hopefully) have the will to slog through the CEM, which is my last chance to catch any errors, polish those rough edges, and fix the sentences the autopilot did a less-than-spectacular job on. The production department appears to allot the same amount of time for copy-editing regardless of book length, so I’ll have to stick to a pretty rigorous schedule to get it done. But I’m actually looking forward to starting, at least.
(Ask me again in a week how much fun I’m having.)
What’s awesome?
Getting a new computer.
What’s not so awesome?
Suffering a hard drive failure after less than a week.
At least Vista alerted me to the disk error and got me to back up the files I had changed or moved since shifting everything over, so I didn’t lose any data. And I don’t have to ship anything anywhere; a technician’s supposed to be coming by within the week to install the new hard drive.
But GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Dept. of Hypotheticals I Don’t Have the Time to Write
Last night, in a discussion of Pluto’s demotion to dwarf planet, I brought up the fact that many astrologers have decided to disregard science’s classification and go on treating Pluto as a regular planet(1). And then I said it would be interesting if some pioneering astrologer retooled the system to account for all of the dwarf planets in a new and interesting way, and as a result astrology suddenly started being so laboratory-accurate that even the most defiant of skeptics had to admit that it only didn’t work before because the math wasn’t quite right yet.
IANAAstrologer, and I don’t feel like putting in the research necessary to write the story. But the idea amuses me.
(1) I am told the State of New Mexico has done the same, owing to how the guy who discovered Pluto was New Mexican — though he was in Arizona at the time of the discovery.
a star in the sky
Can anybody tell me what planet I’ve been seeing in the sky lately? I keep noticing it in the vicinity of the moon, in the western part of the sky, and it’s quite bright. Is that Venus, or something else?
a view from another world
I confess to having said a negative thing or three about MFAs in my time, so in the interests of fairness, I link to this defense.
What do I think? I think that Ms. Harding sounds believably correct . . . as far as it goes. I also think she’s writing from a foreign country, the one frequently called Literary Fiction. In the last few paras, where she talks about how writers are supposed to go about getting better, I think of the fairly vibrant network that exists over here in SF/F. It isn’t a perfect network by any stretch of the imagination; for everyone who can afford the time and money to go to Clarion (which we might as well label a short-term genre MFA program), there are a bunch of writers who can’t or have never even heard of it. But Clarion isn’t the only workshop. There are online critique networks. There are mentoring programs. There are conventions and other social gatherings, in person and online, in which you might find yourself becoming friends with a writer further along the path than you, who may very well pause on the trail to give you a helping hand upward. It’s usually not Ursula K. Le Guin descending from on high to help out a young woman who just finished her first novel, but the SF/F writing world is full of communal bootstrapping, a continuum stretching from established pros all the way down to newbies, and bit by bit we all haul each other and ourselves upwards.
I also think that the criticisms she’s responding to are not, for the most part, the ones I’ve leveled in the past. These days you can find a small number of MFA programs that are willing to let you write genre fiction, an even smaller number who employ professional SF/F writers who know something about your genre. Those programs? May well be great, for all the reasons Ms. Harding describes. But to quote two of the motifs she brings up — “Creative Writing Programs Foster Mediocrity” and “Real Writers Don’t Need No Skool” — I do think creative writing programs as a whole foster a particular kind of writing that is not what most SF/F folk are engaged in or would even benefit from, and while I wouldn’t say real writers don’t need no skool, I would say you don’t necessarily need school to become a real writer. Exhibits A through We Need A Bigger Alphabet: very nearly every professional SF/F writer I know. In fact, I stand by my conviction that if you can get your craft lessons by some other route — which in many cases you can — then you’re better off majoring in something that will feed your brain material, like biology or history or whatever suits the kinds of stories you’re telling.
Mind you, were a certain kind of literary type to wander by and read this (unlikely), they’d probably hit the second half of that paragraph and conclude that’s what’s wrong with genre fiction anyway.
But let me state for the record: I don’t think MFA programs are encouraging hordes of mediocre writers, for the reasons Ms. Harding describes. And it sounds like they serve a very necessary purpose in the corner of publishing she’s talking about. I do, however, stand by my belief that while they may do good for the occasional SF/F writer (especially the ones who make it into, say, James Patrick Kelly’s program), they’re not necessary — sometimes not even beneficial — for those of us over here in genre.
Yes, they really did all of these.
“The 10 Most Insane Medical Practices in History.”
Reading that reminded me of one of the unexpectedly difficult things about writing Ashes: dealing with Jack as a doctor. The character is an intelligent, inquisitive man absolutely dedicated to practicing the best medicine he possibly can — but let’s face it, the guy lives in the second half of the seventeenth century. His idea of cutting-edge medical science is using Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood to improve bloodletting techniques.
Jack is probably my favorite character in the whole book, but I wouldn’t let him within a hundred feet of me if I were sick. And yet I had to write lines describing how he’s trying to save somebody’s life by way of techniques that probably made things worse.
Note to time-travellers: if you ever get thrown back into European history prior to, say, the twentieth century, you’re better off refusing a physician entirely than letting one of them treat you. The body has this lovely thing called the immune system, and it stands a better chance of saving your life than any of them do.
now that “Chrysalis” is out of my way
I’m trying (again) for the one-story-a-month thing, which means I’m gearing up for February. This one is going to be a bigger project, and involves at least one piece of directed research. So:
Can anyone recommend to me a good biography of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham? I’m particularly interested in the last five years or so of his life; I could care less what he got up to in childhood.
(Oddly, this is completely unrelated to me reading The Three Musketeers. THAT book, I picked up because I’m trying to figure out what “The Three Hackbutters” should be about, other than its title.)
With it, not on it.
5063 words of crappy draft. Or rather, 5063 words of some admixture or good and bad; I know there are bits in it that work just fine. Unfortunately, they’re nowhere near a majority.
Doesn’t matter. 5063 words = done. I’ve finished “Chrysalis,” and before the end of the month, too.
Now it’s out of the way, and I can decide later what to do with it.
Much later.
with my draft or on it
Okay.
I have about three hours — a little less — until I need to be somewhere else.
I have a story that still lacks only one scene for completion . . . which is where it’s been for well over a week.
I have contacted my crit group to tell them not to expect this story any time soon, because it is a bad enough draft that there’s no point asking other people to tell me what’s wrong with it until after I’ve fixed the most glaring problems. I’ve also given myself permission to stash the bad draft on my hard drive and not come back to it until months or even years from now, because I’m pretty sure this really is a story that will work better once I’ve written (and published) more things in that setting.
I will finish this bloody story today or die trying. I don’t care if it sucks, I don’t care how long or short it ends up being, I don’t care about anything except finishing the stupid draft.
Because in Not Finishing this, I’ve been Not Working on a whole lot of other things, too. So it’s past time “Chrysalis” got out of my way and went somewhere it won’t bother me anymore.
holy colonial langauge, Batman!
From the cover copy of The Serpent and the Rainbow:
Drawn into a netherworld or rituals and celebrations, Davis penetrated the vodoun mystique deeply enough to place zombification in its proper context within vodoun culture.
In other words, the Rational Masculine West encountered the Mystical Feminine Other, and then had sex with it.
I haven’t tried to read the book itself, so I don’t know if this is the fault of the marketing department or Wade Davis. But jeebus. It’s like a whole game of Colonialism Bingo, all in one sentence.
‘puter! ‘puter! ‘puter!!!
New computer arrived today, replacing the 6-year-old box that could no longer maintain a wireless connection, and saving my laptop from the kind of continual usage it really isn’t built for.
It’s white. I don’t remember the last time I had a white computer.
Transferring files over from Puck now. Most of my programs are installed. Next I get the fun of re-setting various preferences and suchlike. Ah, the fun of a new computer. It’s blazingly fast, though, and I get to use all the pretty Vista features I disabled on Puck so as to maximize battery life. (Vista is pretty, though I’m still learning my way around its actual functioning.)
New ‘puter! <bounce>
faskinating
I adore things like this, little tidbits of cultural behavior that run directly counter to patterns ingrained so deeply in me they predate my memories of being taught them. It’s rude to say “please” and “excuse me” to family members? Like, they’ll be offended by it? That’s awesome! I had never thought about viewing familial intimacy through that kind of lens, and it’s kind of like trying to put something in a box by looking in a mirror. I can understand the rules that govern what I’m seeing, and they totally make sense — but man, if I stop thinking actively about it every second, my brain tries to revert to what it knows is “right.”
I usually talk about cultural relativism in the context of extreme things like human sacrifice. This is a nice, small-scale example that doesn’t jump up and down on top of the ethics and squick buttons. It may look like Opposite World from your perspective, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
for something completely different
O internets, I could also use someone who can spot-check me on matters of London vocabulary — specifically, the insults that would be used by a pre-adolescent girl who’s spent a fair bit of time on the streets. (E.g.: does “crackhead” sound too American?) Also derogatory terms for a police officer: what other than “copper” and “pig”?
I ask because “The Last Wendy” is being copyedited right now, and this is my last chance to catch any glaring regionalisms. I’m not looking for full-bore cockney rhyming slang here, but I don’t want the words to sound out of place.
graphical help needed
Sadly, while I can get around in Paint, there are a great many things that program can’t do. And I still have not figured out the first blessed thing about working in the GIMP, which may be a great open-source alternative to Photoshop, but is about the least user-friendly program I have ever seen, at least where new users are concerned. And I don’t own Photoshop.
So. I need assistance from someone who is good at placing text on an image. The aforementioned text needs to follow the contours of certain features on the image, which is what I can’t manage on my own. It shouldn’t be a huge amount of work — maybe thirteen words all told. And it needs to be done quickly. Any volunteers?
The Three Musketeers
I think I missed the ideal window in my life for reading The Three Musketeers.
The first time I tried it, I was too young; I was confused by Gascons and pistoles and lots of other things I’d never heard of, and the plot, it does not really get around to swashing bucklers and buckling swashes until a bit further in. So I quit. This month I picked it up again, but now I’m critical enough of a reader to be annoyed by things I would have zoomed right over when I was younger.
Like, for example, the way Dumas sings paeans to his characters, most especially Athos, who aside from drinking too much is in every way a paragon of blah blah blah. He’s my favorite of the three, but jeez, Dumas lays it on with a trowel. Or, to pick something more mundane: the sheer idiocy of the main characters’ spending habits. Assuming 1625 France was anything like 1625 England, I have every faith that Dumas’ portrayal is fair — but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to bash them over the head with a bench every time they piss away a fortune and end up penniless Yet Again. Then there’s the (equally period) over-eagerness to pick fights, which I find not charming but childish. And, of course, the treatment of women, most especially Constance Bonacieux, Madame dans Réfrigérateur.
And Milady, about whom I have a great deal to say.
I must become all things to all people . . . .
Many of you are probably tired of reading about the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate, at least for this round; you can only take it for so long before your brain gives up. But this post is less about the debate’s focus than its execution: namely, one possible source for the difficulty of communication that I think we can all agree plagues any attempt to move forward. Based on my peripheral encounters with theories of communication, I think tablesaw is right about the ways in which the conduit metaphor shuts down the possibility of effective progress, and Reddy’s alternate metaphor of the toolmakers with their blueprints and the evil magician coming along to mess with them sounds like a pretty apt description of the situation we find ourselves in. (Not just here, either; just poke your nose into politics and watch it play out.)
But I have one big question for the “Becoming Toolmakers” portion of the essay. To quote:
In the toolmakers paradigm, to become a better one-on-one communicator, I must learn more about the person with whom I wish to communicate and communicate to that person in mind. In the toolmakers paradigm, to become a better writer and address a universal audience, I must learn more about everyone by learning about multiple, intersecting cultural contexts different from my own, and I must write with all of them in mind.
On the one hand, this is more or less how I think about communication: that you must always bear your audience in mind, and try to craft your ideas into a shape that will work within that audience’s context. On the other hand — sweet Pentecost on a pita cracker, how am I supposed to speak mindfully to everyone at once? I don’t even know who all my readers ARE! Even if we agree to leave out everybody who isn’t moderately fluent in English, according to this “solution,” in order to communicate effectively, I must learn about inner-city Chicago blacks and Pakistani immigrants in London and American-born Israeli Jews and nisei Japanese college students at Stanford and affluent Hispanic teens in Dallas and everybody else I haven’t named and then write with ALL OF THEM IN MIND.
And that’s before we even get to the possibility that the communication strategy which is effective with one group may be actively detrimental with another, and vice versa.
Dude. There is little in the world I love more than learning about multiple, intersecting cultural contexts different from my own. I spent ten years in school majoring in just that, and I’ll keep doing it on my own from now until you pry my library out of my cold, dead fingers. But the “solution” as framed above is not a solution; it’s a godlike ideal no human will ever be able to live up to. Is it sufficient if I try? Or if I decide, okay, there’s a black character in this story, so I will focus my efforts on trying to speak to the myriad of possible black perspectives (because there is no single “black perspective”) and not worry about what the Hispanics or Asians or whoever think? How do I account for all the perspectives in the world that aren’t mine, and speak to all of them at once?
I don’t have an answer to that. I think tablesaw raised some great points in that post, but I hit that bit at the end and my eyes bugged out of my head. It’s kind of like the rule we kept returning to, during the panel discussions at VeriCon: how do you do [thing X]? Be a genius! It’s the solution to everything. Except that I can’t just wave a magic wand and turn myself into a genius. I can take little baby steps toward this utopia, but will they be enough?
