Conversational buzzkill

The other day, just after watching news footage of the protests in Cairo, I thought I'd ask my dad what his take on the situation was.  His response?

"It's a sign of the end times."

And with that, I had to drop the conversation.  Wish I were surprised by it, but I was not.  My dad is much, much, much more conservative than I am both politically and socially (over the past few years, he's become a near-daily viewer of John Hagee's televangelist show, which ought to explain quite a few things to those who know of this person) and he has a huge blind spot when it comes to the Middle East.  If the exact same thing were happening in say Vietnam (where he served a tour), I would imagine that he would have been near ecstatic at the idea of the people protesting (mostly) peacefully against a corrupt and repressive regime.

Yet if it happens anywhere near Israel, he views it as a sign that malignant anti-Israeli forces are gathering power and that the Anti-Christ will soon emerge and the world will be engulfed in the seven years of Tribulation.  I've never bought that nonsense that Hal Lindsey and his ilk have been peddling these past couple of generations, but in the name of keeping family harmony (I do generally get along much better with my parents now that I'm in my 30s and don't need quite the separation that I needed in my late teens and twenties), I keep mum.

However, situations like this do make for conversational buzzkills.  Any similar topics that create a similar effect between you and friends/family?

Books traded out and in

Took a personal day today just so I could do a few things without feeling the need to cram everything into Saturday and Sunday.  One of the things I did was trade more books at my favorite used bookstore in Nashville, McKay's.  Here are some of the books I traded in (the majority were trashy romance novels of my mother's).  In this first picture, you can see three leatherette books issued by the Franklin Library.  Since I now own or have ordered full-leather editions of each, these were expendable.  Still a nice quality book to put up, likely for $10 or so.

These were some review copies that I either never was going to read or that I received by mistake multiple copies.

These were the National Book Award or Booker Prize winners and finalists whose stories did not impress me enough to consider re-reading them in the near future.  Oh, and two MMPBs of urban fantasies that do not interest me.

Here is part of what I bought in return (the majority of the purchases were books for my students to read in their spare time, based largely on requests from them).  Still continuing my French self-study, as you may see when looking at these titles.

Five books, five languages.  Have read samples of each of these authors before and wanted to read more in each case.

Any of these books particularly appealing to you?  If so, why?

Perceived fallacies

Ever heard someone speak and you thought they were full of shit, yet there were several people who seemed to be spooning that crap into their mouths?  It's a common occurrence in all walks of life; we do, like birds of a feather, stick together.  Yet it never hurts to challenge certain assumptions for what they are, personal prejudices trussed up and made to look almost respectable.  Thought I'd cover a few writing/reading related fallacies that I've seen rehashed several times over the years:

Fallacy #1:  Literary fiction/mainstream fiction writers hate genre fiction.  This is so commonly heard in certain parts that one begins to accept it as a matter of fact without thinking much about it.  Which writers?  A few here and there, no different in size and number than fantasy/SF writers who dismiss realist fiction?  Is it representative of thousands upon thousands of writers across the globe?  Of course not.  If you want to see how ridiculous this claim is, insert an ethnic/religious minority into the lit fic role and put the ethnic/religious minority into the second.  Or you could just flip them about as best suits you.  See how ridiculous that sort of generalization sounds?

Fallacy #2:  Genre fiction has produced more "literature" than has literary fiction.  Let me quote from a recent tweet sent by someone working for a major UK publisher:

Plenty of genre fic becomes Literature (Dickens) courtesy of posterity. Lit fic not old enough as a genre to have examples of the opposite?

 Sounds all nice and good for the audience (I almost responded at the time, but I knew I wanted to devote more than 140 characters to this.  I also am withholding more specific information, since I think this is not just the opinion of one person, but of several people who are active in genre discussions), but can it be disproved? 

Well, there's Saul Bellow for starters.  Likely Charles Bukowski.  Most of Norman Mailer's works.  Pat Barker appears to be well on her way.  Truman Capote and Harper Lee for certain.  That's just off the top of my head.  Still puzzled how Dickens is being claimed as "genre fiction," however, which I suppose leads to the next fallacy.


Fallacy #3:  Only the most narrow of prose styles can be classified as "literary fiction."  This fallacy is a natural conclusion to those who want to claim unto themselves virtually every single work of enjoyable fiction as being "genre fiction," until only a tiny remnant of works which they either do not understand nor care to like are excluded.  It really is a silly, silly argument.  For the life of me, I just cannot picture the vast majority of Dickens' works, concerned as they are with 19th century social problems or with the people of those times and backgrounds, having much in common, besides the English language, with the works of Terry Goodkind.    Methinks some are just overreaching in their desire to have their preferred reading be more desirable than other literary genres.

Fallacy #4:  Literary fiction is only concerned with bourgeois concerns.  Although there is some truth to this, only so far as there being several novels each year as being marketed to such audiences, there's a much wider range.  One only has to look at the past year's National Book Award and Booker Prize finalists to see that.

Fallacy #5:  Lit fiction writers do not care for genre fiction.  If that were the case, then I would imagine that the very warm reception I received from several lit journals when I queried for reading materials for Best American Fantasy 4 would have never happened.  It is rather telling that a sizable percentage of those who responded here or elsewhere to August's announcement regarding BAF's discontinuance were those most usually associated as "literary fiction" writers and editors.  I think a more pertinent question would be "Do core genre fiction writers/editors/publishers/fans care much for writers in other fields?"

Fallacy #6:  Fans know how to argue the dynamics commonly found in disparate styles of fiction.  We don't.  Even those of us who've had some training and experience in doing so ought to be very cautious in doing so.  The pressures put upon writers to change certain elements to suit better certain perceived market audiences differs from subgenre to subgenre and it would be wise not to pardon writers in one field for what they have to do and not consider what writers in another field have to do in order to have their works become successful.

Fallacy #7:  Everything I say is the gospel truth.  I could be very wrong, you know.  Are you certain you are not mistaken as well?

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

What a hero Tom was become, now!  He did not go skipping and prancing, but moved with a dignified swagger as became a pirate who felt that the public eye was on him.  And indeed it was; he tried not to seem to see the looks or hear the remarks as he passed along, but they were food and drink to him.  Smaller boys than himself flocked at his heels, as proud to be seen with him, and tolerated by him, as if he had been the drummer at the head of a procession or the elephant leading a menagerie into town.  Boys of his own size pretended not to know he had been away at all; but they were consuming with envy, nevertheless.  They would have given anything to have that swarthy, suntanned skin of his, and his glittering notoriety; and Tom would not have parted with either for a circus.

This scene, appearing roughly halfway into the novel,  captures much of the essence of Mark Twain's 1876 novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  When I first read this book in a 7th grade Reading class, I was around the same age as its main protagonist.  Although late 1980s America differed greatly from the 1840s Mississippi River societies that Twain explores here, there was a certain magic contained within its pages that appeal to me and others in my class.  Who hadn't ever wished that they were the hero in a romantic story, where fame and glory, especially the glory, rained down upon their heads?  For much of the novel, the humorous escapades that Tom Sawyer got into (often at the expense of his long-suffering Aunt Polly) dominate the action.  Yet it is when Twain attempts to introduce an actual plot to his novel that the power of the early scenes falters.

Re-reading it twenty-four years after my initial read, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer reads as a picturesque novel spot welded to a much darker, less fun read.  Although there is certainly adventure in the latter scenes involving Injun Joe and Tom and Huck Finn's quest to see where he had buried his treasure (the pursuit of justice being much further out of their imaginative juvenile minds), it pales in power and imagination to stories such as the famous fence white washing or the prank pulled upon the schoolmaster.  The novel reads more as a fix-up of humorous vignettes lashed together to a plot that does not begin until a third of the way into the novel and which is not dominant until the final quarter.  The Injun Joe plot arc feels out of sorts with the romps that the boys enjoys.  While there are a few signs of the imaginative, almost Quixotic Tom's speculations in several of those scenes, the entire affair feels different from the rest of the story, as if it were an intruder upon a very different sort of story.

Part of this issue might lie in the two main characters, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  Tom is one of those wild rogues whose spirit cannot be captured well in first person and while Twain was wise to avoid using Tom as a first-person narrator, his irrepressible character does not lend itself well to the more serious and frightening scenes in the novel.  Huck, on the other hand, feels more like a sidenote, like the unwanted village pariah he is at the story's beginning, until he is called upon to support Tom during the whole hunt for Injun Joe (and his treasure).  Perhaps it is merely me looking back upon the story while remembering his character in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but it seems that the final third of this novel might have been improved if the events had been described more directly by Huck Finn himself, as his character was always more practical and pragmatic than Tom's overly romantic idealism.

Despite the faltering of narrative power during the switch from youthful hijinks to two young boys trying to bring down a dangerous killer, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer still contains enough narrative force to make this an enjoyable read.  It is, as some critics have said, a sort of hymn to boyish youth and exuberance.  Tom and Huck are two of the most memorable fictional characters in American literature and although Tom never became quite the complex character that Huck later became, both are remembered for their shrewd commentaries on life at the edge of adolescence and how their dreams still spark sympathetic responses over a century later.  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is far from Twain's most polished and well-executed novel, but despite its flaws, it is its very rough-hewn quality that lends itself well to periodic re-readings, even when the initial youth has become a marginally more mature adult. 

So I pick up this ARC copy I recently received...

...and I open it randomly to a page, just to see what I might behold, and I read this:

Venjanj pointed to the land around them.  "Into this place they came, sodalist.  It was here they met the Quiet, here that the War of the First Promise was decided.  Baellor's army was outnumbered four to one.  Wave upon wave of the Quiet descended into the plain.  Baellor knew he could not fight a war on many fronts, so he commanded his line to form a great circle, leaving no flank.

"At first, only flesh and steel clashed on the plain.  But soon, Velle lifted their hands to the sky and called terrible fire and wind and lightning to smite Baellor's army.  They drew the great power of life from the world they sought to own, from the earth upon which their enemies stood.  Their drain upon the land was massive, stripping it of life and vitality, color and scent, the very marrow of the world, leaving the land an utter waste."

Let's see... constructed profession title?  Check.  Capitalized adjective serving in lieu of a regular noun?  Check.  Besieged, likely noble ruler whose name might be a near carbon copy from another epic fantasy?  Check again.  Dastardly enemy using some sort of magic to devastate the land?  Of course.  Does this have the feel like the author squatted over his narrative and took a massive (info)dump?  Certainly.

Sure, such impressions might be misleading, but I found myself having little interest in reading the story based on how much it appears to resemble those narratives that I've come to despise.  But one's tastes, as well as mileage, will vary, I suppose.

What I am reading now

Have fun guessing/looking these up:

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna's children died.

We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men's souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.

A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.  The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.  On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees - willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter's flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool.  On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them.  Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of 'coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.

There is no man who has less business talking about memory.  For I recognize almost no trace of it in me, and I do not think there is another one in the world so monstrously deficient.  All my other faculties are low and common; but in this one I think I am singular and very rare, and thereby worthy of gaining a name and reputation.

Besides the natural inconvenience that I suffer by this - for certainly, in view of its necessity, Plato is right to call memory a great and powerful goddess - if in my part of the country they want to say that a man has no sense, they say he has no memory.  And when I complain of the defectiveness of mine, they argue with me and do not believe me, as if I were accusing myself of witlessness.  They see no distinction between memory and understanding.  This makes me look a lot worse than I am.

After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people.

A quiet, good, sensible County Mouse once entertained an old playmate of his who had recently gone to the city to live.

Though his home was very modest and his life very ordinary, the Country Mouse had saved up in advance so that his dinner for his City Mouse friend would be a good one.  He had put away some very nice peas and bacon, a fine dish of oatmeal, a bit of cheese, and for dessert a tasty morsel of ripe apple.  When he and his friend sat down to nibble dinner, the Country Mouse  didn't eat any of this fine fare himself, but politely chewed away at an old wheat straw, so that the City friend would be sure to have enough.

Hope the pieces you did recognize (and those you didn't know or perhaps looked up to make sure) will encourage you to read or re-read the stories and poems from which these excerpts were taken.

Gerry Alanguilan, Elmer

This is the fourth in a series of reviews done by myself, Jeff VanderMeer, and Paul Smith.  Each of us (along with the occasional guest reviewer) reads and reviews the book selected independently of the others' opinions.  Jeff and Paul's reviews may be found at the respective links above, plus there is a round-up available on Omnivoracious.

Often, the most powerful and moving stories are told through the medium of comics or graphic novels.  Words which by themselves may contain the distant echo of thunder burst with raging intensity when paired with the right illustrations.  Sometimes, when words fail to convey the full range of emotions on display, a single well-drawn illustration may highlight the depth of feeling in a way that transforms both text and drawing, strengthening each as they are bound together to create a moving story.

Filipino illustrator and writer Gerry Alanguilan's most recent creation, Elmer, is a powerful story whose strength lies not with the illustrations (well-drawn and vivid as they are) nor with its prose (although several lines, particularly in the latter half of the novel, reverberate in the reader's mind long after the final page is read), but with how adroitly he combines the two to tell a story that is as profound as it is personal.  The reader might find herself reading the first couple of pages and then thinking, "What the hell?  Why is he casting a chicken in the role of the angry, discriminated against minority figure?  C'mon!  It's a freaking chicken!"

And then comes that "Oh, fuck!  What did I just think to myself now?" moment and it is there where Alanguilan's story takes flight.  Once the reader comes to terms with what that first casual dismissal might say about them, then that reader is open to consider just what Alanguilan is exploring in this daring, take-no-prisoners story.  Reminiscent in its basic structure (the relatively-privileged child trying and often failing to understand what the traumatized parents have been through) and choice of animals to underscore divisions based on creed, ethnicity, or behavior to Art Spiegelman's classic Maus, Elmer explores issues of identity, self-loathing, prejudice, discrimination, and violence in vivid, memorable scenes.

Elmer opens in an alt-Earth in the year 2003.  Chicken have been sentient since a sudden awakening in 1979 and have held full human rights since a UN declaration a few months afterward, following a brief yet bloody worldwide war between humans and poultry.  Yet despite the outward shows of acceptance of their newly-found fowl brethren, tensions still run high between the two sentient groups.  Jake Gallo, the son of the famous chicken writer Elmer, is introduced as being enraged at the unfair treatment he perceives he has received at the hands of humans.  Yet before we see his rage, we see his lurid fascination with a human former child star, Anna Rosie.  Alanguilan does not hit the reader over the head with these conflicts Jake is experiencing; he merely shows it in passing and leaves it to the reader to connect the dots.

As Jake struggles to deal with his frustration and to find a target for it, we are introduced to his family, each as complex and engaging as Jake himself.  We quickly learn that Jake's father, Elmer, has recently died from a stroke and it is his secret diary, willed to Jake, that serves as the entrepot to the fascinating, often tragic past of his father.  As Jake reads his father's diary, we see several flashbacks to Elmer's early sentient days, as he witnesses slaughter on a scale of the Holocaust in its devastating impact on its survivors.  Yet Alanguilan does not limit himself to just that.  He shows, via several chickens and humans alike in Elmer's live, just how complex life can be with each grudgingly holding on to a deleterious opinion of "the other."  It is a strange, brave world which we see unfold.  Yet through all the turmoil and destruction, there are tender moments of reconciliation, such as those between Elmer and his human neighbor or between Elmer's daughter May and her fiancé.  Sometimes, it's as simple as watching the sun rise and remembering that there is something special about living to see another day.

Alanguilan's artwork is more than up to the task of accentuating and further developing the complex themes explored in the narrative.  His sentient chickens contain a sense of individuality that might otherwise be nigh impossible to represent adequately with just prose another.  The stark black-and-white images complement the narrative action beautifully.  These images, when combined with the nuanced text, create an indelible afterimage that lingers in the reader's mind.  Elmer simply is a powerfully-written and drawn tale that utilizes the best storytelling elements of narrative and illustrative formats to create a deeply personal and moving story which explores a complex mindfield of emotions and prejudices in a fashion that could never be accomplished as adroitly if it were told as a traditional narrative.  Elmer is not a story to be read or viewed, however; it is to be felt within for its full effect to take place.  Highly recommended.