Although I don’t mind people leaving comments here, I think it’d be best to leave comments at her blog.

Beyond the possible attempt to bait fans of George R.R. Martin, I found this article to be very flawed.  One could argue that in the case of authors who write primarily multi-volume epic fantasies is that after a stage, it is increasingly difficult to balance creativity (after all, the main exposition occurs early in such tales) and continuity.  And when one goes outside that narrow field, the premise becomes even more ridiculous.  After all, I’m typing this with a copy of Umberto Eco’s Confessions of a Young Novelist, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and several of Jorge Luis Borges’ collections on shelves around me.

Worst part about articles such as this is that they show the provincialism that seems to infect so many bloggers who want to sound as though they are making a profound point.  Rather than even entertaining the possibility that it might be fossilized narratives and nearly-as-ancient “fan” expectations, simple, flawed arguments such as this piece are written.

Requires Only That You Hate takes on Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist

Nothing really to say but those quotes really are damning, aren’t they?

Just a few more items that I inherited (I have a few dozen of the various SF magazines she subscribed to over the 1960s-1980s that I’ll post in the coming days, once I remove the labels the best I can), but I have to say that this Asimov’s cover is very, very disturbing.  I wonder why…

It is a fair question and it has been on my mind lately, but when some inquisitive soul, who hails from the place named “abandoned fields” in the local Apalachee language, decided to mail me the response below, well I had to say something.

Dear near-the-sea fungi lover, I really don’t write most of the reviews that you see.  As I said two years ago, I leave most of the review writing (and all of the epic/heroic fantasy reviews) to my highly-trained Serbian reading squirrels.  They were a bit busy reading Eric Basso’s poetry to respond in full, but they did allow for representations of them to pose with a message for this reader:

Hope this clears up any confusion.  The squirrels, although not bear-friendly, do enjoy weirdness and they hope that others will go rabid and become one with the squirrels…even if it means not loving every single epic/heroic fantasy out there.

So it goes with the writing of book commentaries online, often for an honorarium or gratis.  Some, like myself, view this as a way of writing commentaries that are incisive and might mean something to readers besides those who choose to eschew Wikipedia and instead plagiarize my reviews for their papers (Yes, I’m certain this happens.  No, I won’t be calling out anyone).  Others seem to view book reviewing as a sort of online party where they can make BFFs or discover which authors are best to take to a bar and get shitfaced with them.  Not that there’s anything wrong with thi….fuck that.  There’s quite a bit wrong with that.

I don’t go out and search these things online (I prefer to read about dead people and dead languages like Sumerian than actively search for inanity), but I was linked today on Twitter to a post that was almost positively dripping treacle.  I am not going to be making any blanket statements about the presumed genre(s) that attract such coziness between authors and book bloggers (a term I use in the context of these people not aiming to write anything remotely analytical; they seek to promote works and not to dissect them if necessary).  What struck me about this post (and really, it’s not an unusual post, only the first such one linked to me today) is that it’s almost like a loveletter in the language used and the general tone of the piece.  Hey!  We <3 ya!  You rawk! 

Yeah, typing that made me feel ill.  I couldn’t help but think, “Why do these people keep shitting their beds?”  After all, too close of an identification between a book blogger and an author (or in some cases, their publicists as well) can lead to some rather odd behavior, especially on that wretched hive of scum and villainy known as Goodreads.  There are authors I converse with, including one with whom I’ve done some collaborations.  I also don’t review those authors anymore, because of conflict of interest.  If I wanted to just say, over and over again like a parrot, “I liked this and you may too!,” I’d start a Tumblr and post that same sentiment over and over again while alternating between showing images of a squirrel attacking a dog and a squirrel biting a snake.  Perhaps such is the easiest way to make a point, because if in some quarters, one writes a negative commentary, it seems that Kumbaya Hi-Pro Glow feeling of fuzziness fades rather quickly and the knives are drawn.

Such strong and virulent reactions to a negative commentary, whether they appear on Goodreads, a review forum, or even saintly humble abodes such as this one, in many cases speaks to the too-intimate bonds that sometimes form between readers and authors.  Oh, sure, I could lambast say a Robert Stanek and get at most a few sockpuppet responses.  But what if I were to say that I thought a popular author (fictitious for this example) was whoring him/herself out too much by promoting constantly on his/her site reader comments that could have been the work of a barely-literate third grader?  Beyond those that would (rightly) question if I should “be going there,” there would be those who would take immediate offense, make some meant-to-be-disparaging comment about my blog, my career, my looks, my age, my gender, my ethnicity, my religion, my dog, squirrels, etc.  While I might not be called “a cow,” as one such book blogger was by an author (or was it her publicist) in a spat that led to a massive one-starring of the offending post at Goodreads (again, must I reiterate my contempt for “five star reviews” and “one star reviews?”), I could imagine some heated commentary for criticizing an author’s writing and his/her blatant attempts to manipulate coverage.

But the worst thing about it?  Knowing that there are numerous “book bloggers” (again, used to denote those who view themselves as fans first and critics lastly, if at all) who will engage in verbal pleasuring of their favorite authors just so they can get more attention, more perks, more hits at Goodreads, etc.  Those are the ones who seem to be shitting the proverbial bed here, not those who guard against being too intimate with writers.  It wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t already know that in some quarters, even those who try to write from a critical distance are lumped in with these fans whose commentaries often serve to diminish the value of online reviews for readers who can’t get all yippy-skippy in their glee at reading an amateur blurb.

Others will have dissenting opinions, no doubt.

I saw this on a friend’s Facebook wall and I couldn’t resist snatching this image and posting it here.  Apparently there is news to be reported when cows are assaulted by burros and die from it.  The parts in red are the best, of course.  “the Municipality considers that the cow provoked the ass” and “it was around a young burro, with much strength, and of course the cow left itself completely nude with its teats to the air, well of course it [the donkey] left its mother and charged.”

There are some sad realities embedded in that, but oh how odd this story reads!

Fiction
Teju Cole, Open City (Random House)
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (Knopf)
* Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (Lookout Books)
* Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (Scribner)

Nonfiction
Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (Random)
James Gleick, The Information (Pantheon)
Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War (Knopf)
John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead: Essays (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)

Autobiography
Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing (W.W. Norton)
Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace (Free Press)
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (Little, Brown)
Luis J. Rodríguez, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing (Touchstone)
Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War (Henry Holt)

Biography
* Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of the Revolution (Little, Brown)
John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press)
Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 (Knopf)
* Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking)
Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Belknap Press: Harvard University Press)

Criticism
David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (Faber & Faber)
Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (Graywolf)
Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence (Doubleday)
Dubravka Ugresic, Karaoke Culture (Open Letter)
Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (University of Minnesota Press)

Poetry
Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World (New Directions)
Aracelis Girmay, Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions)
Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon Press)
* Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
* Bruce Smith, Devotions (University of Chicago Press)

Before the winners are announced March 8, I may review some, if not all, of the Fiction finalists and later tackle the winners in the other categories (provided that I haven’t already reviewed them).  These reviews will likely appear at Gogol’s Overcoat, with an overview post/review links here.

But despite the round-and-round nature of the often-derailed discussion, I think the core issue (or “core” to me at least, but then again, I was the one who initiated that discussion there) is the problematic issue of graphic violence in fiction.  I am not a pacifist; sometimes violence is a regrettably necessary last resort to aggressive violence.  But I have experienced enough over my professional career (which at times has involved me working directly with or teaching teens that have suffered emotional, physical, and mental traumas, including sexual abuse) to abhor graphic violence for the sake of “authenticity” in fiction (read “violence for violence’s sake).

It is strange to read comments arguing that violence has to be included in order for something to be “real;” especially odd when the works in question are epic fantasies.  Yes, yes, I can hear almost the thoughts of those who are thinking, “Hey!  But if the setting is a violent world, shouldn’t one reasonably expect there to be violence?”  This of course presumes that violence is somehow necessary in order for the story to be told, something that often is not the case (I doubt Patricia McKillip’s The Riddle-Master trilogy would be improved with gore, explicit swearing, and a rape or three thrown in to show how “dark,” “grim,” and “gritty” the setting is).

But let’s humor that train of thought that says in a violent world, violence must be shown.  How explicit should it be?  Should there be an unrelenting amount of violence described in detail, down to the downy ass hairs of those being raped in every possible orifice?  Most people would probably say no, that there are limits to the effectiveness of depicting such violent acts.  Yet “too much” is a blurred line. 

These are, of course, opinions I still hold over a month later.  Yet I thought it’d be interesting to look at what I’ve finished so far in January 2011 and what I am reading to see what acts of violence, if any, were depicted and the level of graphicness.  Here’s what I noticed so far:

1.  Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory.  There is an intensity to this tale set in southern Mexico in the 1930s during a period of anti-clerical repression that makes this tale seem more violent than what is depicted (there are very few deaths and none that are shown “on screen” here), yet the action seems to benefit from this not being spelled out.

2.  William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying.  Family chronicle that is a memorable read, yet no acts of violence occur here.

3.  Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine.  Tale of an African-American minister in the early 20th century sinking under the weight of parishioner expectations and his infidelity.  No violence outside of spousal abuse very early in the novel, which the boy stops his mother’s paramour from harming her.

4.  E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread.  Going to be writing about his works at length this month, so I’ll content myself with noting no violence in this novel.

5.  E.M. Forster, A Room With a View.  See above.

6.  Pietro Aretino, Sonetti lussuriosi.  Renaissance sonnets devoted to lust, particularly the poet’s preference to have anal sex with women.  No violence, however. (Italian)

7.  Anthero Tarquino de Quental, Os sonetos completos de Anthero de Quental.  More sonnets, but no anal sex depicted.  No violence, neither. (Portuguese)

8.  Graham Greene, The Quiet American.  Despite the backdrop of Vietnam in the mid-1950s as the French are pulling out and the Americans moving in, the tale has much more to do with intrigue, romantic and political alike, than anything truly violent.

9.  Augusto Monterroso, Cuentos.  His stories read more like fables.  Some acts of violence hinted at, but nothing described in detail. (Spanish)

10. Herta Müller, Tot el que tinc, ho duc al damunt.  Her 2009 novel about Romanian Germans being rounded up by the Soviets in the last year of the Soviet Union.  Devastating, with some acts of violence toward some of the characters, but nothing truly graphic. (read in Catalan translation, as it was the only one available in e-book form)

11.  Sohrab Sepehri, Water’s Footfall.  Bilingual (Persian and English) mystic poem.  Nothing violent.

12.  Sully Prudhomme, Les vaines tendresses.  Late 19th century poetry.  No violence. (French)

13.  Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.  A few depictions of marital abuse, but nothing that is portrayed in explicit detail.

14.  Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandra Quartet.  Intrigue, but no real violence depicted.

15.  William Faulkner, Sanctuary.  The most violent story I’ve read this month.  A “fade to black” rape scene and a couple of murders that take place, with brief descriptions of the shootings.  Mob lynching at the end.

16.  Maurice Maeterlinck, Death.  Essay on death.   Nothing violent.

17.  Forugh Farrokhzad, Remembering the Flight:  Twenty Poems by Forugh Farrokhzad.  Passionate 20th century Persian poetry, in a bilingual edition.  No violence.

18.  Adonis, A Time Between Ashes and Roses.  Mid-to-late 20th century Arabic poetry published in a bilingual edition.  No violence outside of allusions to protests and wars.

19.  E.M. Forster, Howards End.  See above.

20.  Various, The Upanishads.  Ancient Hindu scriptures.  Not violent.

21.  E.M. Forster, A Passage to India.  See above.

22.  (In Progress)  Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet.  Children’s words physically afflict parents, but nothing graphic about this.

23.  (In Progress) Tomas Tranströmer, The Great Enigma:  New Collected Poems.  It’s poetry.  No violence.

24.  (In Progress) Giosuè Carducci, Rime Nuove.  Late 19th-early 20th century poetry.  No violence. (Italian)

These are mostly reads (with the exception of Faulkner and Hurston) that I only decided to read shortly before I finished reading them; no real premeditation on what I would read.  Seems I’m more in the mood for reading poetry, even odd, amorous poetry about the poet’s love of anal sex, than I am about reading anything truly violent, at least in the sense of the action being described in detail.  Just thought that was an interesting sidenote to last month’s discussion, so make of it what you will, I suppose.