This is a post about books.
Did you know there was wank going around fandom right now? Because I totally didn't. I keep thinking I'm still entrenched in it, but the truth is, I'm attached to the people in fandom. The actual fannish discussion stuff is, apparently, passing me by. People are arguing serious issues and I am rereading the Bruno and Boots books.
Personally, I think I have the better end of the deal.
Lots of people on my flist have been linking to some pretty awesome movie trailers lately. For example, Gunless stars PAUL GROSS AND HIS NEW HAIRSTYLE, and The Losers stars ZOE SALDANA AND JDM, and Kick Ass has CHILDREN AND CURSING AND VIOLENCE. But OTHER PEOPLE have linked to those, and I haven't seen any links for this.
Just so we're clear here, this is a movie starring DANIA RAMIREZ and EMILIE DE RAVIN and HAROLD PERRINEAU and NICK CANNON and fucking LUDACRIS, among others. And it's based on a YA novel by Matt de la Pena. If a movie has to do with YA lit, I am approximately 17 billion times more likely to pay to see it in theatres. Scientific fact.
OH AND SPEAKING OF YA LIT!
JD Salinger died yesterday, and lots of people are doing the "Oh god, now we're going to be talking about THAT book" thing. And... yeah, we are. I don't know how I feel about Catcher in the Rye. (I go back and forth on how much I do/don't like it, but generally, I find complaints about Catcher to be exponentially more irritating than Catcher itself.) I don't have any particularly interesting Catcher-related stories. (I read it for the first time at Disney World and I wrote a paper on it in grad school.) But I do have a field I love.
And, as David Levithan says, for better or worse, "The Catcher in the Rye" Helped Create Young Adult Literature.
Holden Caulfield is the embodiment of what we mean by the phrase “young adult” - too young to be a grown-up, but too wise to the world to be completely innocent. He’s caught in the in-between, and that in-between is what all young adult authors write about.
I don't care how you feel about Salinger in general, or Catcher in the Rye in particular, but this is what I've been thinking: it is crazy that the person who wrote what's commonly considered the first book in this field died in 2010. Yeah, he wasn't exactly in the prime of his youth, but dude, 2010. (If you're one of the people who feel Seventeenth Summer started YA- I'm not, for the record- then sub in "2006" whenever I say "2010" and it'll still be the same point.) When you step back and look at the chronology of basically anything else in the world (short of, like, the Internet), that's NOTHING.
I mean, was born in 1984. YA has always been there. It is crazy to me that, if I'd been born 50 years earlier, it wouldn't exist. I wouldn't even know what I was missing. And in those seventy-five years (give or take), it's become huge. There are awards and blogs and best-of lists and theory and professionals who do nothing but publish teen lit. They had to separate stuff off the NYT Bestseller list because ~srs bzns adult writers~ didn't want to be knocked off their pedestal by JK Rowling or Stephenie Meyer. And there's a lot of frustration, at least from me, that people don't take it seriously enough, because after a certain amount of reading and writing and TV-watching and conference-attending and theory-analyzing, it becomes your life, and all that you can see is how no one has a clue what they're talking about.
But that's the great part. YA is a baby. We're just starting to lose the first generation of writers in this field, and every day more sprout up like well-written, interestingly-conceived, controversy-drawing weeds. I think sometimes I forget that of course it's new, because it's been around me my entire life. It's like a med student learning that no one actually performed any surgery until the 1940s, and before that there were occasional guys with scalpels but mostly people just had to... okay, I can't figure out a way to work this metaphor that isn't gross, but seriously. There are something like four former Survivor castaways for every year that YA has been aroud, and it wasn't even formally called YA for lots of that.
So I'm sad that Salinger died, because death is sad in general and because I'd imagine it's much harder to be a recluse once you're dead and he won't be able to stop them from making Catcher into a movie now, but I'm glad that it made me stop for a minute to look at my field.
Because my field is fucking awesome, and I am glad it is mine.
Personally, I think I have the better end of the deal.
Lots of people on my flist have been linking to some pretty awesome movie trailers lately. For example, Gunless stars PAUL GROSS AND HIS NEW HAIRSTYLE, and The Losers stars ZOE SALDANA AND JDM, and Kick Ass has CHILDREN AND CURSING AND VIOLENCE. But OTHER PEOPLE have linked to those, and I haven't seen any links for this.
Click to viewJust so we're clear here, this is a movie starring DANIA RAMIREZ and EMILIE DE RAVIN and HAROLD PERRINEAU and NICK CANNON and fucking LUDACRIS, among others. And it's based on a YA novel by Matt de la Pena. If a movie has to do with YA lit, I am approximately 17 billion times more likely to pay to see it in theatres. Scientific fact.
OH AND SPEAKING OF YA LIT!
JD Salinger died yesterday, and lots of people are doing the "Oh god, now we're going to be talking about THAT book" thing. And... yeah, we are. I don't know how I feel about Catcher in the Rye. (I go back and forth on how much I do/don't like it, but generally, I find complaints about Catcher to be exponentially more irritating than Catcher itself.) I don't have any particularly interesting Catcher-related stories. (I read it for the first time at Disney World and I wrote a paper on it in grad school.) But I do have a field I love.
And, as David Levithan says, for better or worse, "The Catcher in the Rye" Helped Create Young Adult Literature.
Holden Caulfield is the embodiment of what we mean by the phrase “young adult” - too young to be a grown-up, but too wise to the world to be completely innocent. He’s caught in the in-between, and that in-between is what all young adult authors write about.
I don't care how you feel about Salinger in general, or Catcher in the Rye in particular, but this is what I've been thinking: it is crazy that the person who wrote what's commonly considered the first book in this field died in 2010. Yeah, he wasn't exactly in the prime of his youth, but dude, 2010. (If you're one of the people who feel Seventeenth Summer started YA- I'm not, for the record- then sub in "2006" whenever I say "2010" and it'll still be the same point.) When you step back and look at the chronology of basically anything else in the world (short of, like, the Internet), that's NOTHING.
I mean, was born in 1984. YA has always been there. It is crazy to me that, if I'd been born 50 years earlier, it wouldn't exist. I wouldn't even know what I was missing. And in those seventy-five years (give or take), it's become huge. There are awards and blogs and best-of lists and theory and professionals who do nothing but publish teen lit. They had to separate stuff off the NYT Bestseller list because ~srs bzns adult writers~ didn't want to be knocked off their pedestal by JK Rowling or Stephenie Meyer. And there's a lot of frustration, at least from me, that people don't take it seriously enough, because after a certain amount of reading and writing and TV-watching and conference-attending and theory-analyzing, it becomes your life, and all that you can see is how no one has a clue what they're talking about.
But that's the great part. YA is a baby. We're just starting to lose the first generation of writers in this field, and every day more sprout up like well-written, interestingly-conceived, controversy-drawing weeds. I think sometimes I forget that of course it's new, because it's been around me my entire life. It's like a med student learning that no one actually performed any surgery until the 1940s, and before that there were occasional guys with scalpels but mostly people just had to... okay, I can't figure out a way to work this metaphor that isn't gross, but seriously. There are something like four former Survivor castaways for every year that YA has been aroud, and it wasn't even formally called YA for lots of that.
So I'm sad that Salinger died, because death is sad in general and because I'd imagine it's much harder to be a recluse once you're dead and he won't be able to stop them from making Catcher into a movie now, but I'm glad that it made me stop for a minute to look at my field.
Because my field is fucking awesome, and I am glad it is mine.