Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me

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.

...

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.

So earlier I had a conversation in comments with afearfulthing that got me thinking; the context was of reading only fic, blogrolls, and recs. In short, the selective reading of only trusted sources etc. There's nothing unusual in that, per se, except the reflection/self-consciousness of choosing to read from a body of free, communal, and public work versus industrial/pop culture production. I think that self-conscious choice is the key part, here, because it implies not only active choice in selection but also active selection.

A project I'd love to pick up one day is the history of women's private reading. Reading is of course both fascinating and difficult because it is in many ways invisible: How do you know who read what? And what she thought of it? There's a rabbit-hole of locating information from marginalia, from bookplates, from notes and diaries, from eyewitness discussions of women in line at bookstores, etc. etc. There's the story about Anne Boleyn's Bible: how she made marks in it with her fingernail: this visceral, bodily connection with a text that is still almost literally invisible.

A lot has been done on women's reactionary writing--especially in fandom, where fanworks are operators of critique and in some ways recovery: bids to "rescue" characters we love. But I'm not sure much has been done on reactionary reading--I'm writing this freeform without having done any research.

I'll use my own experience to talk about this a bit: I often find a lot more reading material of interest to me in fandom than in traditional publishing. Part of this is an access issue: what I want is a really good story with x, y, z. In a brick and mortar store or a library, you can ask clerks for recs, or see what they are promoting at the moment; but these depend on that individual person, and--sometimes--the necessity of building a relationship with them. In an online bookstore, you can run a search and sort by popularity, but this is limited by the interface's algorithms and the site's own audience. You go to a fansite, or AO3, search by tags and recs, and boom--you're done. Because you're automatically in a community of the likeminded. Going back further, you end up with similar situations in print zines, because the zines were community-based--if you were in that community, you would probably already like its content.

I imagine the closest analog to this community appeal in traditional publishing is how some companies--and I'm think specifically of Marvel and Harlequin here--build their lines for specific demographic audiences. Both companies literally have dozens of titles and each of them is for a specific audience: older readers, younger readers, African-American readers, queer readers, etc. I'm curious if anyone can think of other companies that do this?

I'm also thinking of the ongoing schisms in fandom right now, particularly on the topics of race. Check out N.K. Jemisen's GOH Wiscon Speech for more, but here's a key bit:

Maybe you think I’m using hyperbole here, when I describe the bigotry of the SFF genres as “violence”. Maybe I am using hyperbole — but I don’t know what else to call it. SFF are dedicated to the exploration of the future and myth and history. Dreams, if you want to frame it that way. Yet the enforced SWM dominance of these genres means that the dreams of whole groups of people have been obliterated from the Zeitgeist. And it’s not as if those dreams don’t exist. They’re out there, in spades; everyone who dreams is capable of participating in these genres. But many have been forcibly barred from entry, tormented and reeducated until they serve the status quo. Their interests have been confined within creative ghettos, allowed out only in proscribed circumstances and limited numbers. When they do appear, they are expected to show their pass and wear their badge: “Look, this is an anthology of NATIVE AMERICAN ANCIENT WISDOM from back when they existed! Put a kachina on the cover or it can’t be published. No, no, don’t put an actual Navajo on the cover, what, are you crazy? We want the book to sell. That person looks too white, anyway, are you sure they aren’t lying about being an Indian? What the hell is a Diné? What do you mean you’re Inuit?”

But the violence that has been done is more than metaphysical or thematic. Careers have been strangled at birth. Identities have been raped — and I use that word intentionally, not metaphorically. What else to call it when a fan’s real name is stripped of its pseudonym, her life probed for data and details until she gets phone calls at her home and workplace threatening her career, her body, and her family? (I don’t even need to name a specific example of this; it’s happened too often, to too many people.) Whole subgenres like magic realism and YA have been racially and sexually profiled, with discrimination based on that profiling so normalized as to be nearly invisible. How many of you have heard that epic fantasy or video games set in medieval Europe need not include people of color because there weren’t any? I love the Medieval PoC blog for introducing simple visual evidence of how people like me were systematically and literally excised from history. The result is a fantasy readership that will defend to the death the idea that dragons belong and Those People don’t.

An ugly truth in publishing is systematic erasure of choice--just check out what's going on with Amazon right now.

[Direct linking because the embedding code just isn't working: http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/t1nxwu/amazon-vs--hachette---sherman-alexie]

The commentary on first-time writers and publications is as fascinating as it saddening and disgusting.

As such, we as readers (and writers) are left to make our own alternatives where possible--and then we see this co-opted as well in terms of the major publishers that give mega-contracts to fanfic authors with proven track records (most recently, literally two days ago, a 1D fan bags a mid-six figure deal for her fan novel), and Amazon's own Kindle Worlds.

This cycle of production and consumption is fascinating--I have a whole 'nother piece I want to do on historical disruptions in terms of women's writing and reception--but what we see here is how publishers are taking advantage of alternative communities and trying to use them for more profit.

So I spent last week at the Popular Culture Association's National Meeting, which is always basically like nerdy braingasms. I gave a paper on Pacific Rim, spoke on a roundtable about Tolkien and derivative works, and ran a panel and roundtable on vampire literature. I also sat in on papers on comics, audience reception, adapting Sherlock, and a bunch of other things, and had some really great conversations, and then on the plane started sort of writing the following in my head:

Okay, so one of the ways to look at book history is how production and readership ties in with class: Today we refer to this (rather obliquely) as highbrow (Shakespeare), middlebrow (Tolkien), and lowbrow (comics? WWE?) culture. Now, what sort of came up in conversation at lunch one day, as happens, was the discussion of fandom as middle class activity. We like to think of the internet as freely available, but let's face it, it requires a computer and a connection, and any fanworks require software for images and wordprocessing. They also require time. This can also be tied into the assumption that fanworks are all by (middle class) teenage girls, because who has more leisure time for fan creation and media consumption, etc. etc.

Then you backtrack to the days of zines etc. You could obtain fic by either sending through the mail through ads in magazines (somewhere I have a 70s Star Trek mag that has one of those ads in the back for zines, with that old "- /" coding to denote whether it was gen or slash material) or by attending cons and acquiring them in the dealer's rooms (note: I know cons today often have a discounted charge if you want to go to the dealer's room and not the whole con--anyone know how far back that goes, or was it always the case?). So it would have been possible to have gone to buy zines but not shell out for actor photos and whatnot; not sure how many would have done that, but it would have been *possible*, I think.

But then in terms of actual zine production, back to the 1930s, there would still have been costs for paper, mimeo equipment, etc. etc. One of the fun things in my private collection is a short pamphlet by Don Wollheim from around ~39-40 where he is arguing against the US going to war because of the effect that will have on fan/SF culture: paper prices will go up and so will the cost of the magazines AND the fan pubs. (There's a paper in that, sometime.)

So backtracking even more, I'm thinking of Wilkie Collins's essay on the "Unknown Public" that was thousands of women buying books and serials back in the 1800s; his argument, as I recall, was about how they were buying all this lowbrow dreck (of course) and that someone (he) should *really* be teaching them to read properly. (Another note, there's been this preoccupation with "reading properly" back to the 16th and 17th c., and that too is tied in with class and also gender lines. Basically, men worrying about what women were reading goes way the hell back.)

Richard Altick in The English Common Reader actually did a fair bit with crunching numbers on publications and readers and such. I'm not sure if I'm relieved or not that he got kicked off my prelims list cos now I want to go back and look at it, though of course I need to focus on the books I already have. Altick was fairly seminal in shifting the discipline of book history from "how books were produced" to "who was reading them."

Anyway, fan histories/criticism tend to be written to focus on ethnography ("lookit what these people are doing! who are they?"), sociology ("look! it's women! *why* are they doing it??), and only now (like, literally, less than ten years) into literary critique ("this fan novel does x, y, and z."). I'm thinking if you apply book history practices to fandom, how we'll reveal things at a new slant: Not *why* women read and write slash, say, but what fans are really doing with their cultural preoccupations and so forth.

This can also be tied into romance studies, in a way. (Also, at PCA, I kind of wish I cared more about romances because what panels and scholars I have dipped into always seem to be consistently deep and well thought out. This year I attended a panel on gay romances and there were a couple of papers that were just really great histories of the emergence of those genres and how they were coded back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and it was *fascinating.*) Janice Radway's Reading the Romance basically focuses on the issues of women readers and writers, the patriarchy, and the middlebrow. Since a lot of fanworks are romances and erotica, a lot of this criticism and scholarship also applies. For instance, she has an essay about the supposition that romances are primarily lowbrow reading, except, of course, in terms of consumption and leisure time, a lot of romance readers are also middle class women.

Anyways, these are just so preliminary thoughts. So.

I meant to do it over the weekend but forgot. My bad.

Also I hear tell there's going to be a fan version of the poll/list, and anticipate many more fun books, and gods willing, less DWGs.

Now then. Meme!

NPR conducted a poll to determine the top 100 SF/Fantasy novels of all time according to participants.

Bold for read
Italics for intending to read
Underline for partial read series/books
Strikethrough for never ever reading


1. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien (Fuck yeah.)

( Read more... )

So I got an unexpected get out of jail free card and have been enjoying it.


Varamathras looks like I feel.

Scott called this morning from the Barnes and Nobles in Atlanta. We've been working our way through io9's 14 Best Speculative Fiction Books of 2010. He finished The Wind-Up Girl which I'm still stuck on--I like the chapters with Emiko but I loathe everyone else. Grr.

Anyway he was calling cos B&N had like none of the other books and he was about to give up and go to Amazon. He did pause to ask if I wanted to read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian with him.

Me (reading from web review): "If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power." Llama, this sounds horrible!!!
Scott: Yeaaaaaaah... that was a bad choice wasn't it?
Me (laughing): YES! This is a HORRIBLE choice!
Scott (sheepish): Yeaaaaaah. Okay I'll get this for me and then see if they have How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe.
Me: Yes please!!!

~

Saw this NYT article about some coffeehouses banning ereaders and found it deeply amusing. I know I'm really in the minority but I do LIKE ereaders: I like that I can carry a bunch of books with me very easily. I don't like that I can't mark them up, deface or improve the text, or a dozen or more years from now look on one fondly because it holds special memories (like the copy of A Moveable Feast I took to Paris, or the copy of Inglorious I read in Japan while contemplating marriage to Scott), but that's why it's possible to have BOTH things.

(And I've said this before and will say it again: I would totally have my iPad's babies if I could. So there.)

~

I crossed the 10k line in my novel. I know it's a drop in the bucket/average size of a Trek story, but it's still something all my own and I feel proud. I've created a file that's a sort of appendices as I work out additional things. Most recently I've been trying to figure out the religion of the people on the planet of Uir. (See, it has a name now. Well that's what the inhabitants call it, not sure what the Terrans call it yet...) Since I'm talking about a half dozen countries on the main continent, I'm thinking there's got to be at least three biggies. Now how do they all interact???

Working, working...

A couple of my friends suggested I try some soy milk to see how I handle it as I seem to be getting lactose-intolerant in my old age. So I bought some and drank a cup an hour or so ago and I feel pretty good actually. Although I gotta ask, is it supposed to look sort of tan? Cos that kinda freaks me out.

~

Spent most of today cleaning: the house looks kinda better. The movers are coming for Scott's stuff on Wednesday, and after that I'm going to re-do the guest room as a sort of study.

Anyhow, this is the first weekend I've had in ages to sort of decompress. I say 'sort of' because I've basically spent the past year in hyper-ahhhhhhhhhh! mode and now I'm actually sort of in a good place with a lot of things. But at the same time I'm also sort of counting to when I can go visit Scott. So it's all sort of odd and I'm way restless and even more ADD than usual.

~

Went to see Eclipse yesterday. Scott went at the same time so we can have sort of virtual dates. I enjoyed the film but not as much as the other two. But hella props to Melissa Rosenberg, the screenwriter, for continuing to infuse Bella with feminism and 5x the grrlpwr! of the series' Mary Sue-ish non-entity.

Scott and I are also going to start reading Lev Grossman's The Magicians together this week. Here we go with an attempt at respectable literature!