June 25, 2004

Incroyable!

[Click on photo to enlarge. Alain Pralon and Muriel Mayette as Argan and Toinette]

Just got back from seeing the Comédie-Français production of Le Malade imaginaire. It was remarkable; I haven't enjoyed an evening of theatre so much in ages.

As I mentioned in the previous post, not all critics have been kind: specifically, the company has been criticized for being too traditionalist; the performance, particularly the masque at the end, has been deemed in need of cutting; and the tone of the production has been described as too dark, a distortion of Molière's comedy. Ignore all this; these critics are wrong—wrong—wrong. The pacing was impeccable: tight, and lively. The masque at the end was dizzying; it broke from the representational mould and transformed the climax of the play into something hysterical, comic and yet savage. This last point is connected to another: perhaps indeed the play was not performed as lightly as is usual with Molière, but this is inevitable. We cannot now think of Le Malade imaginaire apart from the knowledge that the playwright was ill as he wrote it, that he himself played Argan, that he was so weak that he barely made it through the fourth night, and that he died shortly after. How can any actor playing Argan rail against the blindness of doctors and the pain inflicted by their treatments ... for laughs? It must be bleak, black comedy, earthy with its easy references to enemas and close-stools, full of slap-stick, but also steeped in bodily pain. This production got that exactly right. It was performed with a fuller knowledge of history than could have been possible those first four nights. And so perhaps this company is not as unwaveringly traditionalist as some would have it.

The performances were uniformly excellent, though they created more of an ensemble than I would have expected.

The set was atmospheric — a grand but faded room — and the costumes designed to blend rather than stand out.

The group of masquers who acted as the chorus were a treat: slightly malevolent clowns with the most beautiful voices.

It was a memorable production in which verbal wit and physical humour undercut, and were undercut by, harsh satire, which was in turn displaced by a vision of human existence with which we are more familiar from Beckett. The moral centre collapses: Argan's brother, up until the end the voice of reason, and his daughter, the moral centre of the play, both abandon their roles to collude in the ludicrous finale. And that is traditional.

June 10, 2004

Oryx and Crake II

Finished reading Oryx and Crake last night (first mentioned (here).

Atwood took a risk, writing in the voice of Jimmy/Snowman, the PR hack/last man on earth whose story it is. She can juggle voices with ease, as she did in Alias Grace, but since she is juggling in that novel there is space for the poetry of Grace's imagination, in contrast to her conscious voice which offers a stricter kind of beauty in its limitation. In Oryx and Crake there is the one voice, though it changes as the character's name and situation change, and Snowman's narrative offers its own hallucinatory poetry. (Was just talking to a colleague about Atwood; he said that he found her refusal to allow the reader to sympathize with her characters, offputting. That is something I like about her, I replied: her lack of sentiment.)

Picky caveats to get out of the way: Atwood's neologisms ("wolvog" for a wolf/dog hybrid, for example, or "AnooYoo" as the name of a company that offers rejuvenation products) are frequently jarring, even awkward. Atwood may hate Madison Ave. with the rest of us, but surely she can't deny that they are good at what they do.

More importantly, the resolution of the plot relies too much on the actions of individuals. This was no doubt Atwood's intent: to create characters who are impelled to disrupt the mass consensus under which they live. Nevertheless, that is not how things work, no matter what the Biography channel would have us believe. This needn't stop even the most resolute historical materialist from enjoying the novel, however, and not just because of its indictment of global capitalism. As Lorrie Moore wrote in The New Yorker:

a dystopian novel is not intended as a literal forecast, or even necessarily as a logical extension of our current world. It is simply, and not so simply, a bad dream of our present time, an exquisitely designed horror show in which things are changed from what we do know to a dream version of what we don’t.

Atwood presents such a (pick one) i) bleak ii) clear-sighted vision of the near future in order to ask some basic questions about humanity's right to continued existence. In my sf classes we often discuss dystopian novels that posit a clear argument for just what is wrong with us, as a species. Octavia Butler in the Xenogenesis series argues that it is the combination of intelligence and hierarchy that lead to our self-destruction; Sheri Tepper, in The Gate to Woman's Country and elsewhere, seems to argue it is — to be blunt — testosterone. And so on. This novel could be added to the list, though I don't know that Atwood's explanation for humanity's implosion could be summed up quite so succinctly. Hierarchy and sexual possessiveness, however, are on the list, not to mention a heavy dose of Victor Frankenstein-style hubris, updated with the theme of genetic modification.

The character of Oryx is puzzling. Sold by her parents when young, she worked in the sex trade for most of her life. A beautiful, enigmatic stereotype, or a critique of Jimmy's voyeurism and desire to control her? I would argue the latter — after all, while Oryx seems naive, she makes her own choices and is not dissuaded from them — though Atwood straddles the line.

I think that I will have to read this again, but upon first glance it doesn't seem as strong as her best work (I would include Alias Grace here). It falls down as science fiction — it is more a parable with science-fictional trappings, for, as John Clute points out, Atwood's vision of technological and cultural trends is both static and retro. In a strange twist Oryx and Crake is speculative fiction that is possibly less appealing to the usual readers of the genre, than to a more general audience. But still very much worth reading.

List 'o links:

Atwood on how she is not writing science fiction.
John Clute agrees that no, she's really not writing science fiction, at least not as it's been written since 1970.
Linda Richards loves it and compares Atwood's writing to cilantro.
Joan Smith of The Observer concludes, "In the end, Oryx and Crake is a parable, an imaginative text for the anti-globalisation movement that does not quite work as a novel."
Gazillion other reviews
Slashdot discussion.
Video of Atwood reading from Oryx and Crake.
Interview with Atwood (May 2003).
The Atwood Society's Bibliography of Margaret Atwood.
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Update (11/6/04): Since I posted this I have been trying to articulate just what I found unconvincing about the novel, and I think it is the disjunction between the breadth of the wider action (decimation of entire human population) and the limited scope of the characters: the only characters that are at all individuated are the title characters, the narrator, the narrator's parents, and Crake's stepfather. So not only do individual actions have irreversible global consequences, but individual actions in isolation.

Unless the whole narrative is some solipsistic hallucination.

(?)

May 20, 2004

Sexism in literary reviews

The Literary Saloon has been having an introspective look at gender bias in its review practices here, here, and here. I applaud their honesty, though they ruin the effect by commenting,

Looking at the piles of books around us most likely to get reviewed next it also doesn't look very promising — a few women's names peek out, but only a few. So it doesn't look like this will be chick-lit central anytime soon.

"Chick-lit central"?!?

( The NY Times Book Review, my bookish periodical of choice, had the best record of the journals they looked at, with 30% of their reviews treating books by women.)

May 16, 2004

Reading Miéville and Gibson

Finished China Miéville's The Scar some days ago. He is marvellous at world-construction; in a sense, the plot does not even matter, which is ironic given that his plots are very much his focus. No happy ending, but not tragic either, unlike Perdido Street Station (okay, okay, the problem was resolved but the fate of one of the characters was practically unbearable). Miéville's younger than I am, so I look forward to many years of reading his rich and convoluted novels and watching his writing mature. He's wonderful now, so what could lie ahead?

Before I had even finished The Scar I began William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, out not so long ago in paperback. A compulsive read. The protagonist, Cayce, is a "cool detector"; she is preternaturally attuned to logos, brands, and fashion, and works as a freelancer by evaluating marketing strategies for new products. The novel does a marvellous job eviscerating the mechanisms by which advertisers win hearts and minds. I enjoyed reading it, and I appreciate Gibson's particular talents. I recommend it. But all that being said, I am left — as I usually am with Gibson — with some nagging complaints.

Some years back a friend of mine said dismissively that he could easily tell which parts of The Difference Engine were written by Gibson, and which by Bruce Sterling, as Gibson was a far superior writer. Gibson is generally celebrated for his writing, but I have always felt that he frequently slides into overwriting, and this novel is no exception. Further, there is a certain clubbishness that is part of Gibson's popular appeal; his novels and stories give the impression of being closed texts that the reader cannot interpret without bringing some knowledge of [fill in cool subject here: the web; Prada; Tokyo department stores; post-Soviet Moscow, whatever]. Whether or not they are indeed closed is immaterial — though someone of my parents' generation would find them unreadable — but the impression they create, in readers, that they themselves are in the know about [fill in cool subject here], is gold for Gibson.

Another disconcerting element of this novel — this novel that I enjoyed immensely — is that it partakes of, hell it luxuriates in, what it criticizes: our heroine literally has phobic reactions to logos (Tommy Hilfiger is mentioned specifically as a simulacrum of a simulacrum of a simulacrum — heh heh, I own no Tommy our reader thinks, in self-congratulation), but throughout the entire narrative she lives the high life herself, at the expense of a creepy corporate Ubermensch so that she herself remains relatively untainted, and is as obsessed with material goods as the Donatella Versace-clone evil bitch she is up against. She removes all logos from her clothes with a little pair of nail scissors, but she does this with startling frequency. She shops, in other words, and her rarified criteria for acceptable material goods do not undercut consumer culture; rather, they set an even higher bar. Any nouveau riche cretin can buy Armani, but only someone with a honed aesthetic sense can transcend branding and aspire to the transhistorical chic of Cayce. Which, of course, is not transhistorical at all.

My final complaint about this novel — this novel that I enjoyed immensely, I reiterate — is the degeneration of the Ubercool heroine into a beleaguered damsel with the requisite probably–happy ending. And I don't think this reaction is just because I read it immediately after The Scar. It has "movie" written all over it. But, no part for Keanu Reeves.

May 8, 2004

The Scar by China Miéville

I have begun to luxuriate in The Scar, a treat I have been promising myself for some months (nine months, to be exact!). I try to avoid reviews if I know that I am going to read a book, but some always slip by. Rick Kleffel writes that

[Miéville]'s able to hand the reader just the right pieces of the puzzle, to ensure that the picture that's built up is bigger than the reader can quite contain, and bigger than the novel itself.

This is true for me. (And it's an accessible way of putting a larger point; so often my students are frustrated and turn off when they feel overwhelmed by a text. I think that I will try to address this head-on, next class.)

One reviewer called it a baroque and picaresque odyssey, and that seems apt. The aquatic city, Armada, is an exhilarating creation, combining elements of rum, sodomy and the lash and the library in Eco's Name of the Rose with various futuristic flourishes; I have included the cover from the UK edition here, because it is a more realistic evocation of the setting.

The heroine is a tough, competent babe. (All heroines written by men seem to be some version of this genus; do male writers ever write girly-girls? As protagonists, I mean. Can't think of many.)

Then there is the interesting question of which genre(s) Miéville writes.

Not too far in so will write more later.

SciFi Audio has clips from a reading, an interview, and good links.

The Complete Review gives it a B+.

BookSense interview.

Galactium.com reviews.

Official Pan Macmillan page.

April 16, 2004

Pulp

From "The New Republic Online":

What Is Pulps? The criticism of literature has always been one of the fundamental tasks of The New Republic, but there is a difference between the criticism of literature and the criticism of books. Not all books are literature. Yet it is a fundamental fact of American life that large numbers of Americans read books that are not literature. Even if some of those books do not warrant literary examination, they certainly warrant cultural examination. A nation's highest and lowest notions of itself may be found in its amusements. Thinking about America's popular books is a way of thinking about America. In the 1950s and 1960s, critics such as Robert Warshow and Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald taught by example how, and why, intellectual seriousness may be brought to bear upon things that are not intellectually serious; and, in recent decades, with mixed results, the discipline of cultural studies was established on this premise. The aim of this feature of TNR Online will be to toil in the same vineyards, though rather more snappily. Pulps will regularly visit the best-seller list and linger over thrillers, romances, fiction, non-fiction, and even (as The New York Times puts it) "advice, how-to, and miscellaneous" books, as documents of our time, for the purpose of a brief but undoubtedly penetrating exercise in cultural anthropology. After all, influential ideas have a way of turning up in the strangest places. A warning: Pulps will give away the books' plots. Critics have a way of spoiling all the fun.

Well I'm glad that someone is confident of their ability to separate the literary wheat from the chaff. Is anyone else envisioning reviewers typing with one hand while holding their noses with the other?

(From Maud Newton via Cup of Chica.)

Addendum (4:59pm): Check out Beatrice.com for a clear critique of the first Pulps review, posted yesterday. Doesn't sound good.

April 6, 2004

According to Bainbridge

Just finished According to Queeney (2001) by Beryl Bainbridge, a retelling of the relationship between Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale Piozzi. The novel is framed by a series of letters from Piozzi's daughter, Hester (Queeney) when adult, so her point of view dominates, but she is not alone: the bulk is told with a variety of shifting perspectives, though mainly Piozzi's and Johnson's. It is a cold, sad book. Piozzi is presented as selfish and violent with her children. Johnson's complicated relations with women and his physical decline are described in detail. One feels sympathy for the young Queeney, but the older Queeney of the framing letters is bitter and self-righteous. Bainbridge's writing is economical, and she rarely missteps, but I would agree with one (forgotten, sorry) reviewer who advised that only those already familiar with the Streatham circle should read the novel: in other words, that one should not judge Piozzi et al. by Bainbridge's portraits. A beautifully written but bleak, at times even macabre, set-piece, from the opening dissection to the final funeral. And remarkable for its reproduction of the turns of phrase, the modes of thought, of the period.

Addendum: Here is the Henry and Hester Thrale page of a comprehensive website about things Thrale, run by one David Thrale.

March 30, 2004

Rebus, continued

Just to conclude the crabby-assed — sorry, arsed — comments I made earlier about Ian Rankin's latest: I finished the book the next day, and while I (obviously) found it a page-turner, I was finally dissatisfied. Rankin's writing, this time around, lacks its usual subtlety. And all the pop-music references are getting tedious. Worse, he verges into sentiment with the heavy handed allustions to Rebus as a "knight in tarnished armour." And the ending is inexcusable. The ending of the average episode of Walker, Texas Ranger has more credibilty. If it turns out, as I suspect, that Rankin is leading up to some May-September grotesquerie between the frequently soused Rebus and the equally anti-social Siobhan — unless it ends almost as soon as it starts and ruins their working relationship forever — I may have to gouge my eyes out. So let's hope he has more sense.

The Little Professor commented on my earlier post, and mentioned that Rankin is winding up the series. I hadn't heard this, but Rebus must be nearing retirement age, surely.

If I haven't put you completely off, click the image for the amazon.ca link.

March 28, 2004

Ian Rankin, A Question of Blood

Half-way through; started last night as a treat to myself after three days of migraine hell. (Yes, I know I have to mark your papers, students from 3621. And I will.) I've read all the Rebus series, and they're the only detective/mystery novels that I still read. The story this time around is prosaically topical — ex-SAS soldier goes psycho and shoots up a school — and the writing seems off. I mean, "Now, on the M74 south of Glasgow, [the windshield wipers] were flying to and fro like Roadrunner's legs in the cartoon" (125). Or, "Her eyes were the same colour as the clouds which had obscured Arthur's Seat earlier that morning" (130). And, there is too much explication, too much awkward filler. The book is part of a successful franchise, moving along on the accumulated steam of its predecessors, but there is not much here that would draw in new readers. Rankin is not that old, yet with this novel he — and Rebus — have grown curmudgeonly.

Boy, there is no reviewer so cranky as a betrayed reviewer.

March 9, 2004

Adam Roberts' Salt

5/3/04/9:41pm

Awhile ago I posted about Adam Roberts' novel Stone. I have finally gotten around to reading another, Salt (2000), his first novel.

These would be wonderful texts to teach: subtle, yet with clear meaning that can be unpacked. The protagonist in Stone is a sociopath in a future where crime and mental illness are rare enough to be practically non-existent. In Salt, Roberts examines war. Several groups of colonists travel to a desert planet, one of which, the Alsists, is anarchic and another of which, the Senaarians, is a capitalist military patriarchy. These two groups are in conflict before they even reach their destination, and the aggression escalates in a way reminiscent of nothing so much as Swift's Big-endians and Little-endians, though there is no Gulliver to separate their warring fleets. The narrative is almost evenly split between two characters, Petja, a technician from among the anarchists who rotates into diplomatic duty at a crucial juncture, and Barlei, the Captain and later President of the Senaarians. Even when describing things as apparently uncontroversial as the differing technologies with which each group deals with the chlorine in the atmosphere, neither side can be civil:

[Barlei:] We would take a person, and sedate them, and under surgical conditions we would remove much of their sinuses and fill the space with a carefully grown filter .... [masks] were symbolic of our incapacity; they squashed against our faces ... Of course, the Alsists mocked our new technology .... Their propaganda satirized us: whenever the visuals were set in Senaar the people always had runny noses ... (41–42)

[Petja:] Our solution to the chlorine problem was a mini-mask. (43)

Initially, Petja seems infinitely more reasonable while Barlei is insufferable: a self-justifying, murderous prig. He unwittingly betrays himself and his beloved Senaar with every word, as when he disingenuously pretends not to understand economics while justifying Senaarian reliance on underpaid immigrant labour. He exemplifies, with his barely suppressed passion for his lieutenant, "the young, the beautiful, jean-Pierre" (221), the homoeroticism implicit in all–male institutions. Don't ask, don't tell even yourself. His description of aerial warfare is classic:

And so you press home the inevitability of the situation: that is one definition of war I suppose. You pull up toward the rear of one of the enemy, the acceleration weighing you against the back of your pilot's seat; and you fell the beautiful click as the weapons fix themselves, and the spiritual roar of them firing. Twin spires of light reaching through the darkness towards the blot of darkness, hidden in darkness, that is the enemy. Perhaps you close your eyes in prayer.

And there is light. And a tumbling of wreckage, falling to the endless levels of Salt below. (198)

The delicate balance between the elevated discourse of hysterical militarism, and sexual double-entendre, is masterful.

Barai would seem to be a straw man, but while he never becomes any more sympathetic (although he does become pathetic when jean-Pierre is killed in combat), Petja also looses the reader's sympathy, even before he discovers his enthusiasm for killing in the Alsist resistance. At one significant juncture he demonstrates an utter inability to empathize with others, and while this could be mistaken for a critique of solipsism in anarchists, his own people frequently disdain him for his "rigidist" tendencies. Anarchism, then, is not at fault, though it is, finally, unable to withstand the concerted onslaught of military capitalism. Petja is, however, more interesting, if less amusing than his counterpart: his language is concise yet poetic, and his descriptions of the stark salt landscape are sublime in an inhuman, disassociated way.

From the minimalist map at the front of the book, surely a comment on the rococo excesses of Tolkien and his imitators, to the actual numbers of combatants, scale is foregrounded. These are small communities, with small populations, and yet they waste themselves in war. It is a compact book, economically divided between the two narrators. It is about a bare desert world with only two significant bodies of water. Form follows function.

Both Petja and Barei discuss "purity," though for Petja it is, at least initially, a stern, political standard of self-sufficient behaviour, while for Barjei it is tied to jingoism, nationalism, and a military ideal as exemplified by the manly, blushing jean-Pierre. Petja, too, comes to regard his time fighting and killing as somehow pure, only to be "diminished" and "greyed" by social contact (218). Both sides also come to similar conclusions about war, despite their disparate ways of framing it: Barai says,

This war has been the savour in our meat. Without it, life would have been the dull round of planting and reaping, of giving in marriage and giving birth, of growing and dying." (220)

[Petja:] Textualising these memories has had one curious effect. I have recalled the time before we made war. It has made me realise how war becomes a simple way of living, how it seems to provide all that a human needs as material and spiritual membrane, wrapped tightly around them, It is the reason to go on living; it is what to do, how to do it; it is how to arrange the priorities; it is the end of the day and the beginning of wisdom; it is the left hand and the right hand.

So for one character, war is a way to be with other men, while to the other is becomes the centrepiece of an arid philosophy. Not that they would seem to disagree. Roberts gives the last words, significantly, to a female character. And then, he undercuts even that.

This might be an effective novel for my gender and sf course: there are two societies with two very different sets of roles and expectations for women; there is the whole jean-Pierre hagiography (I see him in a static shot by Leni Riefenstahl, with the camera below him looking up, the light behind him); there is sexual violence ... for a novel with few women characters, it would be remarkably useful in the course.

Roberts on Roberts:

It seems to me, then, that Salt is a novel about depression, about a psychological state that finds its correlative in the bleak landscape of the world, about a killing division of affective commitment. But I could be wrong about that.

I think I'm on safer ground when I mention the political and ideological issues that the book rehearses; questions of political affiliation, of the negotiations between cultural and personal difference, of the relationship to (patriarchal) authority and of the limits of control. That the book is also a self-conscious exercise in intertextuality is, I hope, equally clear: it draws on Herbert's Dune and on Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed as well as Vladimir Nabokov's Bend Sinister and the poetry of Robert Browning. I hope, in saying this, that I am only saying what is obvious from the novel itself. It remains the bleakest of my books, but I continue to find an austere and strangely uplifting beauty in certain aspects of bleakness, so I say this with no suggestion of apology.

No apology needed. A compelling book, and recognized as such by its nomination for the Arthur C. Clarke award.

February 17, 2004

Amazon.com update

Maud Newton links to an article in the Toronto Star which reports that Amazon.com is removing the offending anonymous reviews.

February 16, 2004

Anonymous reviewing

Following up on the Amazon.com scandal, Henry Farrell posts about the pros and cons of anonymous reviewing, and concludes "the system works reasonably well in the general."

February 15, 2004

Time keeps on slippin

A recent post from Chuck Tryon about the birthday of his elderly aunt really resonates for me. Both my grandmothers died in the 1990s, one at the age of 99 and one at 100. They both lived in the UK so I didn't see them very often, but I regret that I didn't find out more from them when I did have the chance. Most of what I know about them is filtered through my parents, which is only a fraction of the picture I'm sure. I don't want to make the same mistake with my parents, who are getting on themselves, but I often find that they don't want to talk about the past too much. Or at least, they only want to remember what they want to remember. And more than once I have asked about something significant that they themselves told me, and recently, and they have no recollection. Quicksand.

And then I think, isn't this some sort of Proustian hubris on my part? I have all-too-frequent proof that I can't even remember, or I misremember, events from my own life, so isn't it a fool's errand to run after my parents and grandparents? Don't we just have to accept that most of the sand falls outside the hourglass? One can try and keep journals or somesuch, but in my experience, one writes the least when things are most eventful. And blogging — the kind of blogging I am doing, anyway, as distinct from the more personal sort — is a way of capturing some types of things, but I don't know how helpful all my Barbie posts are going to be, if I ever look back here in an attempt to reconstruct my own past.

It's a Zeitgeist thing: Memento, that new comedy, 50 First Dates (with Adam Sandler! I can't even imagine one). I'm almost finished the 20th annual collection of the Year's Best Science Fiction edited by by Gardner Dozois (review forthcoming; watch this space), and it strikes me — and no doubt this says something about the demographics of successful sf writers — that a disproportionate number of the stories are about Alzheimer's. More on this soon.

February 14, 2004

Two thumbs down

From The Little Professor: link to a NYT article (free, but reg. req.) about a scandal at Amazon.com: apparently the reader reviews are sometimes written by authors puffing their own books, or by their antagonists, taking them down a notch. The article goes on to mention famous authors who have reviewed themselves or their friends. (I think we can all be proud that it was the Amazon.ca site that caused the ruckus).

Two thumbs down

From The Little Professor: link to a NYT article (free, but reg. req.) about a scandal at Amazon.com: apparently the reader reviews are sometimes written by authors puffing their own books, or by their antagonists, taking them down a notch. The article goes on to mention famous authors who have reviewed themselves or their friends. (I think we can all be proud that it was the Amazon.ca site that caused the ruckus).

February 9, 2004

Latest overdue reviews

Ellen Brinks, Gothic Masculinity: effeminacy and the supernatural in English and German Romanticism (Bucknell, 2003), and

Peter K. Garrett, Gothic Reflections: narrative force in nineteenth-century fiction (Cornell, 2003).

January 12, 2004

Review published

Mentioned some time ago, and then a little later, that I was working on a review of Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy, edited by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser (Greenwood Press, 2002), for the SFRA Review (#266, Oct–Dec. 2003). Received it in the mail today, and was so delighted with myself that I promptly posted it to my homepage (welcome > vitae > reviews).

It is a very useful book, albeit at times maddening.

Addendum: here is a direct link.

December 11, 2003

Read until you drop

Picking up on the previous entry about the nineteenth volume of Gardner's Dozois's series, The Year's Best Science Fiction (2001): finished it a few days back. It seemed to get stronger the further I got into it. Canadian Geoff Ryman — and if you haven�t read anything of his yet, you should — explores one of the last bastions of the pre�information age. Robert Reed's "Raven Dream" is sad and evocative; Carolyn Ives Gilman�s �The Real Thing� is one of the most disturbing in the collection, despite being light and comic, because it postulates a future that is already here, where useful information costs a prohibitive premium because

[t]rue memes are actually at a competitive disadvantage.... [b]ecause ... the world doesn�t work in a memorable or interesting way. That's why fiction is so much more satisfying than truth: it caters to our brains, and what they want. Reality needs to be productized in order to be convincing. (418)

The excellent Maureen McHugh's "Interview: On Any Give Day' is inventive — it reproduces a "National Public Internet" documentary about disaffected youth preyed upon by unnaturally youthful rejuvenated boomers. Jim Grimsley�s "Into the Greenwood" is a sad and creepy tale of inter-species abuse. Brenda W. Clough's "May Be Some Time" is really fun: scientists in the future retrieve and rejuvenate the gangrenous, dying body of Titus Oates, the member of Robert Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition who walked off into a blizzard in order to give the rest of the group a chance.

Lot's of "fish out of water" scenarios, but well done, with a deft feeling for an Edwardian of Oates's class and inclinations: "In all his wide travels, he had never heard such red-blooded invective from the lips of a female. A hard-bitten cavalry trooper could say no better. [Titus was t]orn between admiration and horror" (558). Apparently this is the beginning of a novel; something to watch for.

British writers are well-represented in the collection: eight out of twenty-six stories. Charles Stross's Sterlingesque future where the free flow of information is the worst threat to capitalism is only marred by a cheesy S&M subplot. Alastair Reynolds continues building the intriguing world of the Cojoiners in "Glacial." Ian MacLeod, whose "New Light on the Drake Equation" I mentioned previously, creates a fascinating world in "Isabel of the Fall," a far-future, high-tech, society with a strangely medieval culture, wasted on a story of two grotesquely tortured women (shades of Catherine of Alexandria, et al.).

Nevertheless, I don't know if he has written more of this world, but if so, I hope I come across it. At least, as long as it isn't full of yet more inventive ways for women to die. Simon Ings's "Russian Vine," Paul Mcauley's "The Two Dicks," Chris Beckett's "Marcher," and Ken MacLeod's "The Human Front" all share a characteristic bleak view and a refreshing take-no-prisoners approach to non-British readers.

December 5, 2003

Crash test dummy

Two weeks ago I had my sf class read J.G. Ballard's Crash. (For anyone unfamiliar with the novel, here is the blurb from the back cover:

In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a 'TV scientist' turned 'nightmare angel of the highways,' experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.

A little overblown, but you get the idea.)

This is the second class I have asked to read this novel, and while the previous one uniformly disliked it, they did so with none of the vehemence of the current group (see here, here and here [26/11/03:9am]). Of course they are two different groups of people, but I wonder if asking this year’s bunch to blog might have increased their comfort levels with me, and each other, and allowed them to be more forthright.

One aspect of the whole discussion has given me real pause: two students told me that the novel had made them extremely uncomfortable due to events in their own pasts. I had not considered this possibility with this particular text; certainly it’s full of graphic descriptions of sex and physical injuries, but the sex is consensual and the injuries are from car crashes: it lacks the sort of coercion, abuse of power, or interpersonal violence that would have automatically impelled me to issue a content warning. Actually, I have only once ever put something on a course that I thought warranted such a warning: I showed Boys Don’t Cry last year in my intro. to gender studies class, because the subject was important enough to override considerations of comfort (here is the official page from Fox, which manages not to mention that Brandon Teena was transgendered). I put Crash on this year’s course as part of a section on technology interfacing with sexuality (we also read William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” and Candas Jane Dorsey’s “(Learning About) Machine Sex”), but while it is an early example of the treatment of this theme, because of the reactions this year I doubt I will assign the whole novel again. Perhaps just an excerpt; there is one published in the RE/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition that I have, that would work.

Anyway, apart from anything else, I realized that I don’t want to read it again, so how can I teach it?

The whole discussion was an interesting exercise, however. The students questioned whether it is sf at all, and I have to agree that it is only in the broadest sense. It seems to be set at the time of the writing (pub. 1971), but it is strangely prophetic in its evocation of a world where individuals are disassociated from any sense of community by the impersonality of their surroundings; to whatever extent that was true thirty years ago, it must be even more so now. And even though that last may be arguable, the novel is prescient in terms of sf trends.

One of my students wrote a somewhat more appreciative blog entry than most of his classmates, and I think it’s worth quoting at length:

Seeing the reaction of the class towards James Ballard's Crash, I felt inclined to say a few things about it that I think I left unsaid. When we were on our break i was explaining to Krystal how i had felt about this novel. I told her about when I had visited England when i was about 13 and my parents and I were at the Piccadilly train station and somehow i got seperated from my parents and I ended up getting up close to the actual platform of the tracks, eventually the train had come and it whizzed by me and it just caught me offguard. It didn't scare me neither did it fascinate me, for me those 30 seconds of the train whizzing by me with all the lights, sounds and wind will always be a memory. This is how I felt about Crash. The whole novel seemed to me as just a plethora of sexual images. To the point where I had just become numb. And this is where I maybe understood where Ballard was coming from. Media in the contemporary world seems to forcefeed society with images of violence and sex and more imporatantly death, to the point where we take it for granted. In my opinion technology has amost numbed us to these aspects of society. We watch violence and death on the news and it does not seem to affect us anymore. The abundance of sex and our continued interactions in everything that we come in contact whether it's advertisements, movies, sitcoms whatever, we take sex and it's societal implications for granted. Maybe Ballard believes that we shouldn't.

To an extent, I had to justify choosing the novel, and that made me think about it beyond the obvious human/technological interface idea. It is, above all, a novel of ideas. A concept novel. I think that Ballard had this neato idea about people who got off on car crashes as emblems of what he saw as dangerous social and cultural trends, but instead of writing a story, as one of my students wished on his Crash webpage, he sat down and wrote a whole novel. I have to say it: that sort of unremitting focus in spite of all other considerations: it’s such a guy thing. But that being said, and as I remarked to my students, they may have hated it but I doubt that they will forget having read it. They may forget characters or incidents, but they won’t forget the queasy feeling they had as they read it, or the central linkage of sex, twisted metal, and wounds. And how long do they think they would have remembered, in comparison, an earnest editorial, say, on over-dependence on technology? And really, how else can we measure the success of a piece of writing but by the strength of its impact? One of my students wrote :

There's a saying I've heard once or thrice that every personal library should have one book that can offend anybody. Well, now my library has such a book, and it's name is Crash.... it's staying in my library as that book that can offend anyone. A trophy, if you will, to a literary war-wound received during my university days.

It is a fascinating novel; it must be practically unique in being so full of sex, from cover to cover, yet in utterly failing to titillate. It is the most unsexy dirty book that one can imagine, and that can hardly be unintentional in a writer of Ballard’s talent. (That is one reason why the Cronenberg film is so irritating: it could not, by virtue of being a visual medium, never mind the beautiful actors, achieve the almost ascetic quality that the novel has. Perversely ascetic—degradedly and begrimedly ascetic—or do I mean passionless? Or just enervated?). No-one in it to like, or sympathize with. Or, to even understand. Ballard makes us feel the same disassociation, the same anomie, as his characters. I suspect that that is the real reason for the strong reactions from many readers, myself included.

I can’t help thinking that Ballard must have had in mind the old comparison between being compelled by something, and not being able to look away from an accident. “You know. It was like a car crash; I couldn’t look away.”

November 7, 2003

Publish or perish

My review of L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s Archform: Beauty (see post of July 14/03) just came out in the SFRA (Science Fiction Research Association) Review (#265, July–Sept. 2003). I will post it to my website sometime in the next little while, in case anyone is still interested in reading a review of a novel that came out in paperback last year.

Just contacted the reviews editor to offer to do another review, and it seems that a second review that I had sent them, also back in July, has gone astray somewhere. It's difficult to find that balance between reasonably following up on something, and making a pest of oneself; a friend and I wrote an article some years back, on Star Trek novels (a thoughtful and serious article, thank you very much: we were tracing the slash–like elements in the earliest novels, before the franchise decided that it would ignore all other sectors of the market but adolescent boys). Anyway, we sent it to some people publishing a collection; they sent it back with some suggestions for revisions; we revised it and sent it back, and then sat back and pictured it wending its merry way to press. After long silence we contacted said people, who were much abashed and said that they had never received the revisions and so had thought that we were no longer interested.

Two grad students, no longer interested in a publication.

There's an Aesop's fable in there somewhere.

July 29, 2003

Four down

Just finished my review of the wonderful Birth: a literary companion. Not sure when it will come out; these academic journals, you know. (And these academic writers...). I will, again, post it to my site after a suitable interval. But in a nutshell, it was two thumbs up! A book I will pass on to others.

Now the only other thing I have hanging over my head—well, except for preparing for courses—is an encyclopedia entry about Eliza Haywood for the Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, originally to have been published by Fitzroy Dearborn but now a Routledge project.

I have already sent them one entry, on erotic science fiction (doing research for that was a real eye-opener). Haywood is such a fascinating writer: originally celebrated for her amatory fiction, she changed with the literary marketplace, over the course of her thirty–odd year career, and came to publish more circumspect novels of education like The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, one of the all–time best titles ever. Here is a useful article by Catherine Ingrassia: "Texts, Lies and the Marketplace: Eliza Haywood and the Literary Marketplace at Mid-Century" (1995) that was part of a Faculty Symposium at Virginia Commonwealth University.

For anyone interested in the genesis of the name of this blog: Pope attacked Haywood in The Dunciad and added a note alluding to "the profligate licentiousness of those shameless scribblers (for the most part of that sex which ought least to be capable of such malice or impudence) who in libellous Memoirs and Novels reveal the faults and misfortunes of both sexes, to the ruin of public fame, or disturbance of private happiness." Swift, in a letter to Lady Suffok, wrote of Haywood: "I have heard of [her] as a stupid, infamous scribbling woman, but have not seen any of her productions."

July 25, 2003

Adam Roberts's Stone

Just read Stone by Adam Roberts (Gollancz 2002), the first of his that I have read. [Spoiler alert]

A British sf writer and Senior Reader in English at Royal Holloway College, University of London , he wrote Science Fiction (Routledge New Critical Idiom, Routledge 2000), a really readable, useful text. I won't give much of a plot synopsis of Stone but you can find one here or here. On his website Roberts writes that in part the novel became a "detailed critique of Iain Banks's Culture novels": it is set in a far-future utopian society where crime is almost unheard of. The protagonist, Ae, is a rarity: a criminal sociopath. He is asked by an unknown person or persons to kill the entire population of a planet, but in an interesting take on the murder mystery genre, while he is cast as the criminal he also acts as the detective when he becomes obsessed with uncovering who wants him to commit this atrocity, and why.

Stone is interesting on gender issues, though it does not particularly highlight them. Like Banks (and John Varley), individuals can change their sex at will, though unlike Banks and Varley, it is not represented as insouciant costume-changing. For one thing, the t'T culture is not monolithic like Banks's Culture, and different societies have different approaches to sex and gender: on Ae's homeworld, for example, childhood is artificially drawn out and individuals do not sexually mature until their thirties or so, while on another world, mentioned in passing, very young children are sexually active. Ae is fascinating; born female and physiologically female during the narrative because the nanotechnology in his system has been removed as part of a criminal sentence, he nevertheless thinks of himself as male and his sex is ambiguous to observers (a lover has to take off Ae's shirt to discover it). Roberts's handling of the whole issue is evocative.

The novel begins with an excerpt from Kurt Soldan about quantum physics, a conceit which becomes central. I have never really got my head around Schrodinger's cat—more of a dog person, I guess—so there were elements of the narrative that I had to accept on faith. Roberts is touted as "the king of high-concept" in a cover blurb from The Guardian, and this is what must be meant. But an arts degree does not diminish the pleasure of reading this text, for the whole quantum/mechanical conundrum can be neatly translated into a metaphor for choice and free will. Indeed, the resolution of the mystery is perhaps more satisfying literarily than scientifically or logically. In an interview Roberts is quoted as saying

I have an arts/humanities training; I studied English and Classics, did a PhD in English, I teach literature. So I come at the business of writing primarily from the literary and aesthetic side, and I think through scientific premises or gadgets first from their thematic or metaphoric potential, and only afterwards from the point of view of consistency with the laws of physics and so on. This second part is important, or the books would be mere wish-fantasy, but it comes secondarily. A lot of hard sf is written by people trained in science, who think through the science side and then try to fictionalise it. That can work as well, but often is not as artistically well-handled, or so it seems to me.

I would certainly recommend Stone, and I intend to read Roberts's earlier novels, On and Salt. I was also fascinated to read on his website that he is engaged in an on-going project

to write a short story for every sub-genre and premise that SF has made famous; to assemble a collection in which I can try my hand at all the hackneyed old conventions. There seems less point in writing a time-travel novel, for example, given the huge number of such novels that have already been written, with severely diminishing returns, since H G Wells. But the short story form is ideally suited to playing around with these conventions without becoming dull.

This quality of engagement with genre is like a drug to an academic (well, to this academic, anyway), and I will bet that the resulting collection will be engaging to teach with as well as to read.

And to any publishers out there: readers often do judge books by their covers. Or, at least, they look at them: I hadn't read or heard about Roberts; I picked up his books in the local book chain because the designs caught my eye. I almost bought the lot on the basis of their sleek absence of lurid representational artwork, but I managed to quash the impulse. Of course, that was before I read one.

July 14, 2003

three down...

Yesterday I finished and emailed a review of Archform: Beauty by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. (Tor, 2002). There are already a lot of reviews of the novel out there, but mainly of the "it's a ripping good yarn!" variety. Again, the review was late, so I will have to wait and see whether it will still be published. If not, I will post it to my website. Here is a link to the rather disturbing graphic used for the cover: I can't decide if she is drugged or just hasn't eaten in a long time. Or perhaps her foot is caught in the metal thingy she's sitting in. At any rate, she is much more glamourous than the rather priggish heroine.

Birth: A Literary Companion

I am half way through a wonderful collection: Birth: A Literary Companion, edited by Kristin Kovacic and Lynne Barrett (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2002). I am reviewing it for the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering so I won't go on at length here, except to say

that it is intensely engaging, and it has reawakened the dormant desire I have had since the Jinker Boy was in utero to create art: to write, to paint: I came up with hundreds of plans, and even began to sketch out one of the writing pieces. I would like to finish it, and to write down everything I remember while I still can. That of course is the paradox, as now I have less time than ever. There is a piece by Margaret Atwood in the collection, and (I am going to misquote here) she writes that the reason that women forget is not the pain, but because the whole experience is outside language. No doubt it is true that we must be able to articulate something in order to remember it. What the editors write, in the introduction, that they wanted to do — and I think they have succeeded admirably — was to collect some articulations of the birthing and parenting experiences, as a sort of public service to expectant parents. Though I'm not sure that I would have appreciated it while I was still pregnant or in those early days when I felt like I'd fallen off a cliff; or, at least, I am appreciating it differently now that I can reflect back from a quiet distance. Though perhaps "quiet" is the wrong word...

July 11, 2003

two down...

Just sent off the second of four reviews that I have due, of Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy, edited by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser (Greenwood Press). I'll put it up on my web page after it's been out for awhile (if they still accept it, that is; it's pretty late.)

The summer is slipping through my fingers. I had hoped to clear up the small projects I had pending by the end of May, or mid-June at the latest. And here I am, still plugging away. And it's not as though I havn't been busy, because I have. The difference is the Jinker Boy (my 28 months old son). It is almost impossible to do any work when I'm not actually in my office; having him has certainly brought home to me — and to Joe (JB's father; my partner) — just how many hours a week we actually used to work B.A. (before JB). That's the thing about academic work: to a large extent it consists of things you would likely be doing anyway, in one form or another, and so you tend to lose track. Certainly reading and writing, though I suppose, in a perfect world, there would be fewer committees and less marking.

I can work myself up into a state of anxiety about all the tasks I need to do, but the fact is that having JB has changed my centre of gravity. Other things tend to shrink into the distance. Today he had a late nap and when he got up he was crying, inconsolable. He insisted that I hold him, but he wouldn't let me sit down; I had to stand and rock him. We offered him different foods and drinks, but he rejected them. We finally realised that he was so hungry that he couldn't eat; he had a very small lunch, and then played, and then had a long nap. Once we got some banana bread into him — his favourite — he calmed down and was able to snack on some different foods. I didn't think about my "To Do" list from the time he woke from his nap, to fifteen minutes ago, when he went to bed.

Then, of course, there are the times when I am dying to get away to my laptop. But then once I am here, I am often too tired to be productive.

My mother always said to have them young so you have more energy (she was 35 when she had me), but I think that the trade-off is patience. Joe and I are very patient with JB. Some might call it "lax," but that's just semantics.