Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me

WARNING: This post contains lots of profanity.

Much handwringing at year's end from the Times Online which I have yet to learn to *not* read in order to protect my blood pressure.

It was a year in which a certain type of person died — Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Norman Mailer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jean Baudrillard. These were intellectually pungent, culturally potent individuals, angrily dismissed as often as they were called “great”, “seminal” or “genius”. And with Luciano Pavarotti dead, another type of greatness vanished from the planet.

No Kurt Vonnegut mention? Tsk.

Technology, hype and the sheer profligacy of the arts when confronted with a large, hungry and wealthy audience have created a climate of excess — just too many artists, too much money, too many works and too much noise. Who knows who, now, is great? Even if greatness existed, how would we find it? Do we want greatness, or would we simply prefer choice?

I'm sorry you're bitter about the rise of the blog. Do go on.

As a mass-market product, the novel is dominated by women. Women, overwhelmingly, buy novels; and, as a result, women write them. Chick lit and Aga sagas are now distinct and, seemingly, enduring fictional forms. The “great” novel, however, is dominated by men. Ask any collection of reasonably well-read people who are the great novelists of our time and the chances are they will reel off John Updike, Roth and, probably, DeLillo as if they were one gigantic genius of fiction. “They,” says Ian McEwan, “are the gods.”

Well fuck McEwan up the ass with a stick! He wouldn't know decent prose if it bit him! What the fuck about Neil Gaiman and Diana Gabaldon, who I wager both can say a hell of a lot more about humanity, beauty, and general fucking existence on one fucking page that all of those buggers combined!

D'you want to know why the "great novel" is dominated by men? Because fucking publishers are unable to publish a book by a woman that doesn't have a fucking shoe on the cover! Joanna Kavenna's Inglorious was one of the best new books I read this year, an exploration of depression, mortality, and emotional breakdown, and they have to sell it with a pair of FUCKING SANDALS on the cover!!!!!

The writer tries to back off here with a brief paragraph on two women writers who I've never heard of, and get this:

...in fact, everything she writes is suffused with extraordinary beauty and almost unbearable insight. She is the greatest of all writers on love.

The fuck? Women writers are limited to the fluffy bunny aspects of the emotional spectrum. The hell? Again, read Diana Gabaldon. She had two new books out this year, including Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade. I daresay if it had been written by a writer with a penis it would be popping up all over the literary year-end lists because of its explorations of homosexuality in the eighteenth century and its descriptions of life as a British officer, but guess what? No penis: no recognition.

Okay, there's quite a lot more of the article that I'm not breaking down because I'm just too fucking mad. My advice to you, dear readers, is if you choose to read the offending article, don't do so sober.

Research Report #47 from the National Endowment of the Arts.

The NYT reports more here.

Will report more fully myself once I'm done with the thing.