Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me

"Essay: The digital death of collecting: How platforms mess with our tastes" by Kyle Chayka

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It was a clubby world put into a panic by the success of “the lit’ry lady,” as a 1907 article termed her. Early issues of the Book Review were lively with alarm. Why Are Women Using Male Pseudonyms? How Dare Women Write From the Point of View of Male Characters? Why Are Women’s Books Selling So Well? “Is Woman Crowding Out Man From the Field of Fiction?”

(NB All these reviews are hyperlinked in the article.) 

 Y'all I loved the Bridgerton series SO MUCH and so I picked up the first book and it is SO BAD. I knew going in that the book was going to be whitey mcstraightspace but dear lord. Turns out all of the characters are in different books so if I want to check in on my favorite, Penelope, Imma have to skip to like the third or fourth book. I don't even know where the fuck Marina is. And on top of that, book 2/season 2 will be all about Anthony "Diet Vanilla Sprite" Bridgerton and dear lord.

Anyway, I usually read queer romances, both fic and published, and reading straight people always seems to involve "you're hot, I'm hot, let's insert that dick into the vag." On top of which a lot of reviews talked about the banter and it's like. What banter? It's all "Pip pip cheerio, no I shan't take the biscuits with tea today."

Straight people, who hurt you? I mean obviously it was The Patriarchy but good lord.

 Warning for unedited and unpolished word vomit.

Last week I started reading Janine Barchas's The Lost Books of Jane Austen, a study on popular editions of Austen that are largely "lost" because they were read to bits with few survivors. Eg. there was an edition in the late 1800s that was printed as a promotional by a soap company, and if you sent in x number of soap wrappers they would send you a book as a reward. Fascinating stuff, but early on Barchas describes her study as "bibliographical slumming" because she's studying popular works (never mind that Jane Austen is part of the canon; if this was a study of popular Shakespeare editions this same method of analysis would no longer be slumming and we all no way). A colleague scolded me for repeating the phrase, however, because "slumming" is such an ethnically and class-coded term, which is fair.

But I also contemplate the problematic ways that I as a human am read because of who I am now, which is as a tenured professor at a top university. It's assumed (and not just by this one person; it's happened with other people in other incidents too) that I don't know anything about working class life and so on, despite the fact that, you know, I grew up backwoods and blue-collar and so on. Frankly I know WAY the fuck more than a number of colleagues about problems of class and abuse in the US because I have fucking lived through it. And I have gotten to a point where I need to figure out how to much more openly address these issues in a useful way.

This weekend I picked up several books from the library. I got two volumes of Milosz's prose after talking to Todd last week; apparently the reaction of both of us in the wake of political goings-on was a desire to read/reread the work of a poet about how to intellectually survive in a totalitarian regime. I had also requested the new biography Becoming Beauvoir a while back and it finally came. It is very good and imminently readable, and it was very surprising to me to hear that most of the WW2 experiences of Beauvoir and Sartre are recounted as explicating varied love affairs (which honestly needs a chart to track) than anything else. So I suppose that survival is also about reading and fucking and loving, which I guess is helpful in its own peculiar way too. 

 

So has anyone been reading Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels? The literary world is nuts for them: See her coverage at The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Vanity Fair, among others.

I finished reading the first novel, My Brilliant Friend, last week, and am about halfway through the second, The Story of a New Name, right now. (I feel it says something about popularity that I waited like a month to get the first book from the library because of the wait-list, and I got the second in less than a week.) I'm enjoying them more than I expected, to be honest; despite starting in the mid-twentieth century, Ferrante's writing about an anxious, studious girl constantly grappling with poverty, class, and worst of all, adolescence, really resonates with me. I enjoy the writing, too, but I also have to wonder about how much, stylistically, is the author vs. the English translator. The book is published by Europa, a publisher that specializes in European translations, and I've read a number of their books (Muriel Barbery is probably the best-known because of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, but also Amelie Nothomb and Laurence Cosse) and they all sort of sound the same, and I'm not sure if this says something about a contemporary "European" style or if it's only the "house style" of the translators. (And I'm slightly tempted to try to get one of Ferrante's books in the original Italian just to see.)

The story is told memoir-style by an older woman, Lenu, whose friend Lila has disappeared, and then rewinds to tell the story from their childhood. I really like how it's as much about the darker aspects of female friendship as it is the glowy stuff; the girls envy one another: Lenu covets Lila's beauty and her take-no-shit attitude, Lila envies that Lenu gets to continue at school while she has to work (one thing I think is poorly done is they don't explain how the Italian lycee system is different than American schools, eg. elementary school is the basic school for everyone, middle school is functionally high school in that graduating it is pretty important, and high school is much more like an American college where you specialize in certain subjects with some general ed. requirements), even though Lila is the one who, as a girl, would check out books at the library and learn voraciously (like, for instance, Greek). There's a brutal bit where Lila has to leave school, and basically their teacher refuses to talk to her or acknowledge her again because she was smart and didn't continue her studies, never mind how her family made her go to work full-time so they could make ends meet. Lila ends up marrying an asshole she can't stand for money, Lenu basically has a breakdown partway through high school because of the pressures of balancing school, work, and taking care of her family. There's a beautiful, painful scene when one of Lenu's teachers starts giving her newspapers to read about the wider world (because the 1960s, because she can't afford them on her own) and she wants to cry because as far as she's concerned this is more homework she doesn't have time for. And in the meantime there are familial rivalries that flirt with gangland, there's pining for the cute and smart boy who barely knows you exist while dating the perfectly nice guy who can't talk books or writing with you, etc. And also, because of the language itself, there's anxiety about speaking: Lenu often talks about speaking in dialect with her family and friends, and proper Italian in school and with her teachers, and how if she slips and uses proper Italian with her friends and family they get angry and resentful, and worrying what the teachers will think if they ever heard her speak dialect, etc. (And this resonates with me too because I grew up in the rural South, and I never spoke with the local accents because, functionally, I was raised by the tv, and that was a source of bullying. Ugh.)

ANYWAY. So I'm enjoying the books, I get why people like them, but what I'm curious about is why these books in particular are being heralded as this amazing thing? Because you know who else writes about stuff like this. MAEVE BINCHY. Binchy, who writes (well, wrote; she died two years ago) about a changing Ireland and class issues and national issues (Ireland v. England) and religion, and domestic violence, and fucking divorce and abortion because those are/were huge issues there. Maeve Binchy with the bright paperbacks sold in grocery stores, sometimes on buy one, get one free tables, mass-market paperbacks that retail for like $7 vs. Ferrante's trade books that are like $18 a pop.

It should perhaps go without saying that Binchy's books were never reviewed by the prestigious journals above, nor was she interviewed by them, but I'm going to say it anyway because I just checked. I also looked at the NYT, who reviewed a couple of Binchy's books in the late 80s and early 90s (the last one reviewed was in 1995), and republished some of her Irish journalism in the late 60s and 70s, and a couple of book reviews by her in the late 80s and early 90s; there's also her obituary from 2012. I'm not sure what happened in the mid-90s for her to disappear so, though I suspect it was a couple of things: 1) The popularity of Circle of Friends which probably pigeon-holed that whole "women's fiction" thing (and probably also the dismal film of it, which surely didn't help with the change of ending); 2) the ever-widening prestige gap between popular genre and literary fiction, which was always there but I feel really hit new high (low?) points in the late 90s/2000s (Remember how people got so upset about Harry Potter being on the best-sellers lists that the NYT actually started a CHILDREN'S AND YA list so that grown-up reading wouldn't be sullied?); and possibly 3) shifting values in book review sections in the NYT generally, and more largely because in the late 90s/early 2000s a lot of papers eliminated them altogether or cut their pages so that space had to go towards "important" stuff.

(It now occurs to me that a study of linking at reviews and how they changed during these periods would be ~fascinating.~)

Anyway, so there are these shifting grounds of popular and literary reading, and women writers almost always get stuck in those bogs. Because Ferrante appears in translation she automatically has a higher prestige value, just because the translation market here is so tiny. Binchy wrote in English, albeit in Ireland, so the language/translation issue was never a thing, but she was always a best-seller in the Anglo-American market. She's even had a number of books come out posthumously, including In Her Own Words which was a collections of her journalism and nonfiction I quite enjoyed. Binchy was also profoundly prolific; some thirty books of fiction, several plays, her regular columns. In contrast, Ferrante has published nine books since 1992, although she has also landed on TIME's Most Influential People List. There's also the mystery of Ferrante; the name is a psuedonym, and there are theories about who she (if she) may be but no solid conclusions.

I don't have any conclusions; I'm just struck by how women writers, especially popular women writers, tend to get dismissed, and this isn't the case here. And I'm not sure why.

Goodreads Poll Finds that Readers Stick to Their Own Gender

Goodreads recently polled 40,000 British citizens on their reading habits and among the many trends that popped up, the one making the rounds today is all about sex. Namely, the surprising gender divide between male and female readers and the writers they prefer.

The survey found that men and women stick closely to their own camps with 90% of the 50 most-read books by men coming from male authors, and an identical 90% of the 50 most-read books by women coming from female authors. Female readers were also slightly more critical in their ratings of books penned by the opposite sex – giving them an average 3.8/5, compared to the 4/5 for works by female writers.

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But what’s really disheartening is that we still tend to view books written by women as less substantial and less “important,” which — given Goodreads’ findings — may just say more about who’s in charge at the top newspapers and publishing houses than anything else.

See also: Goodreads' message board discussion on Your Reading Experience > Male or female authors

Being a Better Online Reader

Of course, as Wolf is quick to point out, there’s still no longitudinal data about digital reading. As she put it, “We’re in a place of apprehension rather than comprehension.” And it’s quite possible that the apprehension is misplaced: perhaps digital reading isn’t worse so much as different than print reading. Julie Coiro, who studies digital reading comprehension in elementary- and middle-school students at the University of Rhode Island, has found that good reading in print doesn’t necessarily translate to good reading on-screen. The students do not only differ in their abilities and preferences; they also need different sorts of training to excel at each medium. The online world, she argues, may require students to exercise much greater self-control than a physical book. “In reading on paper, you may have to monitor yourself once, to actually pick up the book,” she says. “On the Internet, that monitoring and self-regulation cycle happens again and again. And if you’re the kind of person who’s naturally good at self-monitoring, you don’t have a problem. But if you’re a reader who hasn’t been trained to pay attention, each time you click a link, you’re constructing your own text. And when you’re asked comprehension questions, it’s like you picked up the wrong book.”

Maybe the decline of deep reading isn’t due to reading skill atrophy but to the need to develop a very different sort of skill, that of teaching yourself to focus your attention. (Interestingly, Cairo found that gamers were often better online readers: they were more comfortable in the medium and better able to stay on task.) In a study comparing digital and print comprehension of a short nonfiction text, Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith found that students fared equally well on a post-reading multiple-choice test when they were given a fixed amount of time to read, but that their digital performance plummeted when they had to regulate their time themselves. The digital deficit, they suggest, isn’t a result of the medium as such but rather of a failure of self-knowledge and self-control: we don’t realize that digital comprehension may take just as much time as reading a book.

An interesting article with interesting questions. However, I'd like to point out that some of the most in-depth and critical textual analyses I've ever seen? Have been on Tumblr. And Livejournal. And other e-forums where people discuss genre and popular texts. This could also of course point to a different type of reader; I've long maintained that genre fans can safely be likened to medieval scholars based on their predilections towards intensive readings. But I am struck by this notion of this ability to "construct your own text." In fandom, we call this head!canon--your personal "correct reading" of a text. I'm always struck by how we compare "digital reading" with "real" or "print reading" much in the way we differentiate genres--literary vs. popular and whatnot. I wonder what arguments might be made about different types of readers if we elided the print/digital divide with the literary/popular divide.