(no subject)
My mother has the most amazing view from her computer desk--it makes me want to write about the ocean, which is good since I have that thing I need to send to my creative writing lecturer um, today. The desk itself is driving me mad, however. For one thing, it is a tiny tiny tiny little computer desk that came in a box, and is about a tenth the size of my desk at home (which was supposed to end up in some dubiously decorated board room somewhere as a conference table, but I got it first, so nyah). And it, this teeny tiny thing, was covered in enough layers of paper sediment to over-excite ten archaeologists.
This is what happens to flat surfaces in my mother's house. Sediment. To be fair, that's what happens to such surfaces in my house, but I can't start work on anything unless I spend a good hour procrastinating cleaning, so it's usually not that bad unless you turn up mid-way through my essay writing process, in which case it's usually the day before said essay is due, and the sediment is all highly relevant to the topic at hand and cannot be disturbed without ruining my momentum.
My mother, having grown up in my grandmother's immaculate, flat-surfaces-are-for-china house, has never, I firmly believe, felt the compulsive need to clean anything. I grew up in her house, so I do. I used to get thumped over the head with it at 11 o'clock at night, and would send the next three hours going at the paper piles in the kitchen, with the recycling bin pulled up just outside the door. (This then necessitated my mother going through the bin in the morning because at 2am things like bank statements, patient files and various other important documents that were slowly decomposing under the ten millionth take-out brochure, well, they didn't seem quite as important as they possibly should have.)
I refuse to clean while on holiday, however, so I just re-located the mess. You can no longer tell we have a scanner, but I can see the required 70% minimum of the surface before me. Which means I should be engaged in 'creative' writing, not a journal entry, but well...(I still hate that term, despite having agreed with Richard's Hugo's defence that it is at least accurate, if redundantly specific).
I think I'm refusing to start this thing because I just finished Robin McKinley's Sunshine last night, and I'm still trying to sort it out in my head. It was good, and exactly the sort of thing I wanted and was expecting when I bought it, but I realised this morning when I was reading an interview McKinley gave about it that it reads very much like the short-story-turned-novel that it is, with the rest of the book sort of spooling out from a tightly constructed beginning. It also reads, apart from that beginning, like the first novel in an intended series, like set-up, focusing on character development/interaction, and a perfunctory plot designed to manoeuvre those characters into position for the real shenanigans to be concluded later, and given that it's not...*makes Marge Simpson hrmmmm noises*.
I don't mind perfunctory plots as a rule, because I tend to divide my reading into 'sum of their parts' books or 'ooo, I will like that bit' books. LKH's Anita Blake series is the most obvious example of the latter. I hate how LKH writes. I really do. The first AB book I picked up was the third, which we had a work (the curse of the second-hand book-store! You will read trash you would never, ever buy! You will regret it, but you have the Friday night death shift, and you will do it time and time again!)...and despite nearly turning blue with all the gagging and eye-rolling I did over her prose, with those little fucking cutesy catch-phrases tacked onto end of each chapter or particularly significant paragraph, and the fact that I finished it, put it back, and had no urge to pick up any of the others... when the others turned up on my shelves, and it was 7:30pm on a Friday night, I read them. And I got hooked. I am a LKH junkie. If I fully applied my 'sum of their parts' criteria to these books, I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror anymore. You can't help yourself to a certain extent, it's true, and thus I realise that they are truly the worst books I have ever liked this much. They are worse than Robert Jordan, and that is saying so, so much.
At the top of my qualms about this series is that they come off, via the intense Mary-Sue reality that is Anita's world, as highly misogynist. The only competent female, who is not somehow compromised as a person or as a woman, is Anita*. Half the female characters in this series seem to need Anita, as the strong independent example of True Womanhood, to slap them upside the head with her fabulousness--evidence of their craven natures is given via their inexpertly applied makeup, that Anita always feels the need to comment on, even though she supposedly Does Not Care about girly-crap-like-that, their bigotry towards Anita’s various fuck-toys, their inability to deal calmly with gun-toting maniacs or their lack-lustre hand-shaking ability (the fact that Anita's idea of what constitutes weakness in women and how women should behave equates almost exactly to those of the men she spends so much time raging against for their inexcusable SEXISM...words fail). The other half are a suitably bad-ass 'liberated' women, but as such you will be a bitch who HATES Anita because you are EVIL, (y'know, vampire, vampire, voodoo goddess, vampire) or as in the case of poor Ronnie, JUST JEALOUS of Anita's unmatchable greatness. I could go on. I could write a fucking gender studies dissertation on the warped gender politics of these books. Anita Blake may indeed be the first twelve book long example of just what is wrong with modern ideas of feminism, i.e the assumption that if you're a woman, you are automatically one of the oppressed (or the kinda-sorta-used-to-be-oppressed as some people seem to see it), and thus any behaviour of yours, even the collusion with damaging societal norms, cannot be itself oppressive, because dammit, feminism (not that you like that term) is about your right to LIVE LIKE YOU WANT, thoughtfulness and responsibility towards this precious thing women have given their lives for be damned.
Or, in brief--if Anita Blake was a man, she would be the most reviled character since...I don't know. One of those stupid men in Tess of the D'ubervilles. (Who don't deserve half the reviling that Thomas Hardy does, imo. But that is another rant.) Also, LKH's plots: perfunctory.
And yet...shamefully, to my karmic detriment, et fucking cetera--I do not hate these books. I really do enjoy them. I squint at Anita doubtfully occasionally, but I'm good about maintaining my categories. I like LKH's characters. Sort of. I'm compelled to find out what will happen between them. I do not consider the books as a whole, or what they're "saying", because, again, I read them for the bits I like. LKH's recent descent into plots so non-existent Anita could quit her job and the books would lose about thirty pages...don't care. Terribly formulaic prose...don't care (uh, I don't really care. The phrase 'don't answer that' could be happily banned from usage, though). Would I like them better if about two-thirds of Anita's harem got taken out bloodily, and Anita was spurred into a psychotic whirlwind of revenge, and LKH's editor had to power to remove any and all rhetorical questions from the text with the click of a button? Uh… yes.* That would rock. But I successfully read around that stuff anyway, so I'm not going to start a letter-writing campaign. I read them for the bits I like, and since 'character interactions' and the subset 'vampire/human relations' are right up there on the 'bits I will like' list...I enjoy them. (Just to clarify, I don’t mean I skip bits of the book. I consider skipping something akin to a crime against humanity. It’s a crime against the book, anyway, even if it was written by Laurell K Hamilton. It’s just that I read it on the way to the stuff I like, and thus it fails to irritate like it would in something I was reading under my ‘sum of its parts’ category.)
Thus, Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book. I read about a thousand different recommendations for it, in various places on the net*, so I bought it off amazon. It is one of my favourite books, and definitely the best time-travel book I’ve ever read. But it’s something I love as a whole-I liked the characters well enough, but I wouldn’t rush out to buy a sequel if there was one, because I love how it works as a single unit. I don’t have a particular interest in finding out what happens to them in the future. It might ruin what already happened. (Which actually brings up interesting questions about individual books, ‘one-offs’ vs. series, because my ‘ooo, bits’ books tend heavily towards fantasy/SF, and thus series, while ‘one-offs’ are the standard literary fiction format, but this post is looong enough already and I really must shut up and go write my thing).
It seems to be a difficult thing to pull off, having both ‘ooo, bits’ like characters the author obviously loves as much as I do, characters who are walking around with the author’s bloody fingerprints all across them*, and a plot, a story that is never subservient to those beloved characters and has a certain degree of well-constructed, um, to be terribly unfashionable--relevance. I can’t think of anything I’ve read lately that really fit those requirements. Connie Willis only just missed. George RR Martin would qualify if I didn’t suspect him of a being reactionary, and that being why I like him so much. In all probability, now that I think about it, they may be incompatible requirements, in the sense that the characters I fall in love with are the antithesis of those required for a great novel. They’re usually far too special for their own good, too competent or too larger-than-life-they lack that last degree of verisimilitude on which the coherency of the entire novel depends. They’re the loose thread that I cannot resist pulling upon when thinking critically, and it gets depressing watching novels you enjoyed so much unravel like that.
Y'know, I suspect it is impossible to render yourself, your tastes, into a homogenous whole, and even if you could it would probably be to the detriment of your personality. But it would be nice and simple.
*From the perspective of the narrator, i.e ANITA, of course. Everyone else will undoubtedly make up their own minds about that one.
*Does it still count as a rhetorical question if you answer it? It does imply the answer supplied, doesn’t it? If so, does the use of a rhetorical question when bitching about rhetorical questions, and again in a footnote to that question mean this post will self-destruct under the weight of its own irony? Hmmm.
*I tend to decide before reading the book what category I think it is going to fit in. Categorisation depends on many factors including the whether cover is sepia toned, who recommended it to me and how, subject matter, whether I’m reading it for class, the font used. It is really shallow system, now that I lay it out like that, but it is something that I do automatically. It is probably outrageously unfair on certain books, I admit. I had to read The Eyre Affair for a course on Jane Eyre and super-textuality, and was rather unimpressed. If I’d just picked it up from the SF section of Dymocks by myself I would have probably enjoyed it more, and read its sequels.
*This is a major kink of mine, and why I’m fond of many a Mary-Sue-esque character, I think-the author is walking a fine line to give me what I want, and can be forgiven for tripping over it occasionally.
[Words I have taught my mother’s MS Word spell-checker for the purposes of this post:
fuck
fucking
textuality
girly
makeup
dammit
and Dymocks. ]
This is what happens to flat surfaces in my mother's house. Sediment. To be fair, that's what happens to such surfaces in my house, but I can't start work on anything unless I spend a good hour procrastinating cleaning, so it's usually not that bad unless you turn up mid-way through my essay writing process, in which case it's usually the day before said essay is due, and the sediment is all highly relevant to the topic at hand and cannot be disturbed without ruining my momentum.
My mother, having grown up in my grandmother's immaculate, flat-surfaces-are-for-china house, has never, I firmly believe, felt the compulsive need to clean anything. I grew up in her house, so I do. I used to get thumped over the head with it at 11 o'clock at night, and would send the next three hours going at the paper piles in the kitchen, with the recycling bin pulled up just outside the door. (This then necessitated my mother going through the bin in the morning because at 2am things like bank statements, patient files and various other important documents that were slowly decomposing under the ten millionth take-out brochure, well, they didn't seem quite as important as they possibly should have.)
I refuse to clean while on holiday, however, so I just re-located the mess. You can no longer tell we have a scanner, but I can see the required 70% minimum of the surface before me. Which means I should be engaged in 'creative' writing, not a journal entry, but well...(I still hate that term, despite having agreed with Richard's Hugo's defence that it is at least accurate, if redundantly specific).
I think I'm refusing to start this thing because I just finished Robin McKinley's Sunshine last night, and I'm still trying to sort it out in my head. It was good, and exactly the sort of thing I wanted and was expecting when I bought it, but I realised this morning when I was reading an interview McKinley gave about it that it reads very much like the short-story-turned-novel that it is, with the rest of the book sort of spooling out from a tightly constructed beginning. It also reads, apart from that beginning, like the first novel in an intended series, like set-up, focusing on character development/interaction, and a perfunctory plot designed to manoeuvre those characters into position for the real shenanigans to be concluded later, and given that it's not...*makes Marge Simpson hrmmmm noises*.
I don't mind perfunctory plots as a rule, because I tend to divide my reading into 'sum of their parts' books or 'ooo, I will like that bit' books. LKH's Anita Blake series is the most obvious example of the latter. I hate how LKH writes. I really do. The first AB book I picked up was the third, which we had a work (the curse of the second-hand book-store! You will read trash you would never, ever buy! You will regret it, but you have the Friday night death shift, and you will do it time and time again!)...and despite nearly turning blue with all the gagging and eye-rolling I did over her prose, with those little fucking cutesy catch-phrases tacked onto end of each chapter or particularly significant paragraph, and the fact that I finished it, put it back, and had no urge to pick up any of the others... when the others turned up on my shelves, and it was 7:30pm on a Friday night, I read them. And I got hooked. I am a LKH junkie. If I fully applied my 'sum of their parts' criteria to these books, I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror anymore. You can't help yourself to a certain extent, it's true, and thus I realise that they are truly the worst books I have ever liked this much. They are worse than Robert Jordan, and that is saying so, so much.
At the top of my qualms about this series is that they come off, via the intense Mary-Sue reality that is Anita's world, as highly misogynist. The only competent female, who is not somehow compromised as a person or as a woman, is Anita*. Half the female characters in this series seem to need Anita, as the strong independent example of True Womanhood, to slap them upside the head with her fabulousness--evidence of their craven natures is given via their inexpertly applied makeup, that Anita always feels the need to comment on, even though she supposedly Does Not Care about girly-crap-like-that, their bigotry towards Anita’s various fuck-toys, their inability to deal calmly with gun-toting maniacs or their lack-lustre hand-shaking ability (the fact that Anita's idea of what constitutes weakness in women and how women should behave equates almost exactly to those of the men she spends so much time raging against for their inexcusable SEXISM...words fail). The other half are a suitably bad-ass 'liberated' women, but as such you will be a bitch who HATES Anita because you are EVIL, (y'know, vampire, vampire, voodoo goddess, vampire) or as in the case of poor Ronnie, JUST JEALOUS of Anita's unmatchable greatness. I could go on. I could write a fucking gender studies dissertation on the warped gender politics of these books. Anita Blake may indeed be the first twelve book long example of just what is wrong with modern ideas of feminism, i.e the assumption that if you're a woman, you are automatically one of the oppressed (or the kinda-sorta-used-to-be-oppressed as some people seem to see it), and thus any behaviour of yours, even the collusion with damaging societal norms, cannot be itself oppressive, because dammit, feminism (not that you like that term) is about your right to LIVE LIKE YOU WANT, thoughtfulness and responsibility towards this precious thing women have given their lives for be damned.
Or, in brief--if Anita Blake was a man, she would be the most reviled character since...I don't know. One of those stupid men in Tess of the D'ubervilles. (Who don't deserve half the reviling that Thomas Hardy does, imo. But that is another rant.) Also, LKH's plots: perfunctory.
And yet...shamefully, to my karmic detriment, et fucking cetera--I do not hate these books. I really do enjoy them. I squint at Anita doubtfully occasionally, but I'm good about maintaining my categories. I like LKH's characters. Sort of. I'm compelled to find out what will happen between them. I do not consider the books as a whole, or what they're "saying", because, again, I read them for the bits I like. LKH's recent descent into plots so non-existent Anita could quit her job and the books would lose about thirty pages...don't care. Terribly formulaic prose...don't care (uh, I don't really care. The phrase 'don't answer that' could be happily banned from usage, though). Would I like them better if about two-thirds of Anita's harem got taken out bloodily, and Anita was spurred into a psychotic whirlwind of revenge, and LKH's editor had to power to remove any and all rhetorical questions from the text with the click of a button? Uh… yes.* That would rock. But I successfully read around that stuff anyway, so I'm not going to start a letter-writing campaign. I read them for the bits I like, and since 'character interactions' and the subset 'vampire/human relations' are right up there on the 'bits I will like' list...I enjoy them. (Just to clarify, I don’t mean I skip bits of the book. I consider skipping something akin to a crime against humanity. It’s a crime against the book, anyway, even if it was written by Laurell K Hamilton. It’s just that I read it on the way to the stuff I like, and thus it fails to irritate like it would in something I was reading under my ‘sum of its parts’ category.)
Thus, Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book. I read about a thousand different recommendations for it, in various places on the net*, so I bought it off amazon. It is one of my favourite books, and definitely the best time-travel book I’ve ever read. But it’s something I love as a whole-I liked the characters well enough, but I wouldn’t rush out to buy a sequel if there was one, because I love how it works as a single unit. I don’t have a particular interest in finding out what happens to them in the future. It might ruin what already happened. (Which actually brings up interesting questions about individual books, ‘one-offs’ vs. series, because my ‘ooo, bits’ books tend heavily towards fantasy/SF, and thus series, while ‘one-offs’ are the standard literary fiction format, but this post is looong enough already and I really must shut up and go write my thing).
It seems to be a difficult thing to pull off, having both ‘ooo, bits’ like characters the author obviously loves as much as I do, characters who are walking around with the author’s bloody fingerprints all across them*, and a plot, a story that is never subservient to those beloved characters and has a certain degree of well-constructed, um, to be terribly unfashionable--relevance. I can’t think of anything I’ve read lately that really fit those requirements. Connie Willis only just missed. George RR Martin would qualify if I didn’t suspect him of a being reactionary, and that being why I like him so much. In all probability, now that I think about it, they may be incompatible requirements, in the sense that the characters I fall in love with are the antithesis of those required for a great novel. They’re usually far too special for their own good, too competent or too larger-than-life-they lack that last degree of verisimilitude on which the coherency of the entire novel depends. They’re the loose thread that I cannot resist pulling upon when thinking critically, and it gets depressing watching novels you enjoyed so much unravel like that.
Y'know, I suspect it is impossible to render yourself, your tastes, into a homogenous whole, and even if you could it would probably be to the detriment of your personality. But it would be nice and simple.
*From the perspective of the narrator, i.e ANITA, of course. Everyone else will undoubtedly make up their own minds about that one.
*Does it still count as a rhetorical question if you answer it? It does imply the answer supplied, doesn’t it? If so, does the use of a rhetorical question when bitching about rhetorical questions, and again in a footnote to that question mean this post will self-destruct under the weight of its own irony? Hmmm.
*I tend to decide before reading the book what category I think it is going to fit in. Categorisation depends on many factors including the whether cover is sepia toned, who recommended it to me and how, subject matter, whether I’m reading it for class, the font used. It is really shallow system, now that I lay it out like that, but it is something that I do automatically. It is probably outrageously unfair on certain books, I admit. I had to read The Eyre Affair for a course on Jane Eyre and super-textuality, and was rather unimpressed. If I’d just picked it up from the SF section of Dymocks by myself I would have probably enjoyed it more, and read its sequels.
*This is a major kink of mine, and why I’m fond of many a Mary-Sue-esque character, I think-the author is walking a fine line to give me what I want, and can be forgiven for tripping over it occasionally.
[Words I have taught my mother’s MS Word spell-checker for the purposes of this post:
fuck
fucking
textuality
girly
makeup
dammit
and Dymocks. ]