Would you want to read this book after encountering this passage?

Taken from Jean-Marie Blas de Robles' Where Tigers are at Home, p. 313 American hardcover:

THE VERY END OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY:  "In consideration of the criminal proceedings, charges and information, the interrogations, replies and confessions of the aforesaid prosecutor; of the replies and confessions of the accused made in the presence of his lawyer and everything that has been placed before us, we declare the aforesaid Legaigneux guilty in fact and in law of copulation with a female donkey belonging to the same.  As public atonement for this crime we condemn him to be hanged and strangled by the executioner, from a gallows that will be erected in such and such a place; and before this death sentence is carried out, the aforesaid female donkey will be stunned and killed by the aforesaid executioner at the aforesaid place, in the presence of the accused."

If the animal is punished it is because it shares responsibility for the act with the man:  the man guilty of sodomy has stooped to the level of brute beasts, but the donkey committed the unpardonable crime and raising itself to the level of thinking beings.  They are both "against nature."  By betraying the laws of the their species, they equally endanger the order of the world.

THE VERY END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY:  "Accused of attempted sodomy with a dolphin called Freddie, Alan Cooper, 38, justified the act by saying that he was only masturbating the animal to gain its friendship.  His lawyers based his defense on the fact that dolphins are notoriously licentious and are some of the rare animals who indulge in the sex act purely for pleasure.  Alan Cooper risks ten years in prison if the charge of clear intention of rectal or vaginal penetration is accepted and life if sodomy is proved beyond reasonable doubt." (Newcastle upon Tyne, England.)

Nearly halfway into this 817 page book and this is a fascinating look at 17th and current human attitudes toward life, sex, and existence (among a great many other things).  It contains Latin passages regarding the fucking of a woman and her pleasure in having not just her vagina but her anus penetrated, the etymology of "piranha," and a plethora of other things such as 17th century attempts to decipher hieroglyphics.  Certainly not for the prudish, but then again, I suspect there aren't too many regulars here who are prudes.  The squirrel erotica to the right doubtless weeds those out, no?

So people are arguing again about the validity of the Hugo Awards

I know I said my piece on the 2013 Best Novel shortlist the other day and had intended that to be my only real substantive comment on the issue, but I did see a comment on Twitter tonight wondering what my contribution might be to the rather large (over 180 comments when I just now checked) debate over at Justin Landon's Staffer's Book Review. 

To be honest, a few years ago, I might have been fired up about this issue (I probably was; too lazy to see what I blogged in 2007-2012 on the issue), but mostly I feel ennui over it now.  I've come to accept that WSFS/WorldCon/Hugo and I "just aren't that into each other."  I like more experimental fictions with diversity being more than just the color of one's skin, the gender and/or sex of the writer, or the locale from which they write; I want a wider range of narratives that challenge my senses as well as my thoughts.  Those type of fictions, even though many glide through the semi-permeable "walls" of various literary genres, just aren't going to be popular as an aggregate with mass audiences (or with 3-5K convention attendees).

So I've begun to feel as though I need to move away from it.  The Hugo Awards cater to a certain crowd.  Great.  Let them continue to please those who attend the convention circuits and who favor a particular style.  Doesn't mean I should endorse it as THE view on fictions that touch upon the science fictional and/or fantastical (or weird, horrific, etc.)  I don't, as I usually look forward to seeing what the World Fantasy Award or the Shirley Jackson Award jurists put out for their shortlists (oh, and the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, LA Times Book Prize, Orange/Women's Prize, Booker Prize, Asian Prize, and others that sometimes include works of the fantastical on their various lists).

The Hugos don't cut for me.  Neither do the Nebula lists, which I think are equally unappealing to me.  Notice how little I've said about the latter for the past couple of years; that's the level of disinterest I have.  I think I should start doing the same for the Hugos and not cover them at all here in the future, unless there is something that interests me in a positive way (for what it's worth, I'm about a quarter into Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 and I'm reminded positively of his Red Mars, which was my favorite of his Mars trilogy, but it'll be a while before I write a review, if I bother to do so).  Yesterday I read an excellent article by Matthew Cheney on "Most Everything is Terrible" that I think is very applicable to this situation with people taking stances on the Hugo/WSFS issue.  Too readily we proclaim judgment on issues without stopping to question whether or not we are at fault.  I'm weary of voicing my disapproval of selections from an award that does not cater to me.  There are other options, such as promoting those alternatives and leaving the undesirable ones to receive less e-ink from myself (and perhaps others).  To keep proclaiming one's opinion on this issue (or other related ones) is beyond beating a dead horse:  it is a willful refusal to move on and discover what you personally like without worrying overmuch about how certain others think it is a steaming pile of crap.

That being said, give some consideration to reading Kate Atikinson's just released Life After Life.  There are elements that should appeal to SF, alt-history, literary, and perhaps fantasy readers.  Or maybe Ron Currie, Jr.'s Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles might be more to your liking.  Better to find out than to fret over things you cannot change. 

Today is World Autism Awareness Day

April 2 is World Autism Awareness Day.  As a few of you know, I recently took a second job (my other job being a part-time middle school ESL teacher) working evenings with autistic teens.  This is an issue that strikes close to home for me, as I have likely one and maybe two young relatives who have some form of autism.  Recently, there have been studies that suggest that due to better diagnoses (and the reclassification of Asperger's Syndrome within the autism spectrum in the upcoming DSM-V) that 1 out of 88 children in the United States (and in some parts of the world, such as South Korea, it's even higher) will be diagnosed with autism.

Autism, especially in the severe/profound forms that I see at my second job, is a disorder that baffles those who are unaccustomed to being around those who have it.  Yet there are things that can be done to help these children and adults learn to function better in society.  That is why organizations such as Autism Speaks have made great efforts in recent years to educate the public about autism and what is being done to help treat it.  It can be as simple as replacing your lightbulbs with blue-tinged ones this month or wearing blue today, April 2, to show your support.

A few odds and ends seen on Twitter recently

I've been swamped with working two new jobs, buying a new car, and Holy Week observations, so some of these items may already be known by several.  But just in case, here's a few odds and ends over the past few weeks that have caught my attention.

Lost in the uproar over yet another underwhelming Hugo Award shortlist for Best Novel was the announcement that at the general meeting at the upcoming WorldCon there would be a motion to add Best Genre Poetry to the upcoming 2014 London WorldCon as a trial category.  UK-based critics such as Cheryl Morgan and Jonathan McCalmont had different reactions to this possible development, with McCalmont saying on Twitter that it was nigh hopeless to complain about the inevitability of this motion passing:

I guess complaining about Hugo poetry category is a bit like standing in the Amazon rainforest and complaining about the shitty begonias.
— Jonathan McCalmont (@RuthlessCult) March 31, 2013

Elsewhere, the ever-provocative blogger at Requires Only That You Hate announced Sunday that she would be changing the focus of her reviewing ire from self-published YA fantasies to the more sophisticated reviewing of My Little Pony episode and their deleterious effect on the so-called "bronies."  On Twitter, she gleefully said this after her announcement:

@esedia oh this will be fun
— Misandry Shrugs (@requireshate) March 31, 2013

As many of you know, Paul Smith and I have been posting substantive reviews over at Gogol's Overcoat.  Recently, Paul has decided that he cannot take my word for it and that he is going to sample the works of one of the greatest comedians/Continental philosophers of our generation.  On Twitter, he seems pretty sanguine about this potentially revolutionary writer:

I don't think the world is ready for a comedian with a routine consisting entirely of terrible Continental Philosophy jokes.
— Paul Smith (@Paul_C_Smith) March 25, 2013

And finally, Indian lit critic Aishwarya Subramanian announced on her blog this weekend that she was disappointed with Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou's recently-translated Black Bazaar (a shame, since I think it is one of the best translated books to come out in the past year or so) for its lack of development of the main character's "Buttologist" proclamation.  As she said sadly on Twitter:

"nothing to do with buttocks"
— Aisha(@ActuallyAisha) March 31, 2013

Hopefully Aisha will give Mabanckou another chance in the future despite the seeming misnomer.

Finally, a bit of non-Twitter-related news:  After three years of delays, Serbian illustrator Dunja Branovački (she designed the present blog header) and I will begin work this summer on a Kickstarter project for the previously-announced Squirrelpunk anthology of Squirrelist fictions.  We are uncertain what the goals or prizes will be, but we are thinking that perhaps the entry-level prize might be an autographed picture of a rabid squirrel leaping toward the camera as its picture was taken (sadly, the photographer succumbed to rabies a few days later) and perhaps there would be a rabid squirrel rave party for those who donate over $1000.  Feel free to suggest category prizes in the comments.

TBR? I do not think in such terms

Every now and then, I'll see a comment on another's blog or on Twitter expressing a faux-complaint (or at least I hope it is such!) about how they have "too many books to read" and that their pile of TBR (to-be-read) books continues to grow.  At times I think it's a mixture of humble-brag (after all, that emphasis on "too much" could be juxtaposed with "hey, I'm able to have lots of books in my possession," or at least it would have seemed like such to me when I was in college 20 years ago!) and a view of books as possessions and not necessarily as facilitators of learning.

I prefer to think of my books as being component parts of a personal library.  I'm uncertain how many I currently own in physical form (I'd guess somewhere between 1700 and 2200, depending on the contents of a dozen boxes or so; I know I have a little over 600 in e-book formats), but the books I do have I consider to be a library that I can consult, even though some I will likely never read front-to-back all of the way through.  Below are certain component parts of my library, including some comments on how I utilize them:

Here is a shelf of various translations of the Bible into 17 different languages.  Not pictured are the over two dozen commentaries, mostly on Catholic interpretations but also some from other faiths.  These books are used not just for spiritual reasons (I am a practicing Catholic, for those who did not know this), but also to provide points of comparison on issues of popular religious practice that have interested me since grad school.

I've posted this picture or one like it recently of my Library of America collections (bottom row includes 10 volumes from their American Poets Project), but I include it here to note that I consider these books (of which I've read only a little over a dozen all the way through) to be valuable resources in case I ever choose to return to the classroom as either a history professor/teacher or English instructor.  There is a wealth of primary sources here regarding certain authors that I would love to cover in a class (e.g. William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Henry James, et al.) and it is convenient to have them in these hardcover editions.

I'm currently in the process of rearranging my shelves (weekends-only project that's been underway for the past month) and most of my foreign-language books have been boxed up until two new large wooden bookcases arrive, so this picture of my Portuguese and Italian-language books will have to serve as a sample of the dozens of shelves I have in languages other than English.  I view these books not just as works of art, but also as tools that will allow me greater insight into the cultures that produced these authors.  For myself, reading "enjoyment" is something that occupies the senses long after the book is reshelved, and these books contain some excellent writing and stories.

Related to the paragraph above, I do love learning languages.  But regardless of whatever aptitude I might have, it takes years and lots of hard work to learn how to read a language (especially one that utilizes a different alphabet and has a radically different syntax from English).  So these books, some for languages that I can read fairly fluently and others for those I plan on studying in the future, are an invaluable resource (most are college textbooks, while others are bilingual dictionaries).  Not all are pictured here, but I have dictionaries and/or coursebooks for roughly two dozen languages, ranging from the Indo-European languages to Arabic to Swahili to even Quechua and Basque.  There's something about languages that is a combination of solving a mystery and music to me.  I want to improve my sleuthing as well as my listening comprehension, so these books are vital for me.

But these are just components of my library.  Not pictured are books that I read for other reasons, such as reviewing for this blog (or others like Gogol's Overcoat) or for more whimsical purposes, but whatever the reason, it is nice to have books that I have not yet read in full (or in part), as that leaves room for discovering new perspectives on issues that I might want to learn more about in the future.  TBR?  Pfft!  More like potential resources to me.

So the 2013 Hugo Awards shortlists have been released

Shortlisted nominees were just announced at the UK Eastercon convention, with virtually-real time Twitter updates.  I'm too out-of-the-loop these days to have comments on the short fiction categories, the various "fan" ones interest me as much as dining on mildewed food, and the multimedia ones I ignore as always.  But I do have a few things to say on the novel finalists:

1. Saladin Ahmed, The Throne of the Crescent Moon (reviewed it when it came out in 2012 and thought it was a good first novel)
2. Lois McMaster Bujold, Captain Vorpatil's Alliance (sampled one of her Hugo-nominated novels about a decade ago, thought it was dreck, so no interest in reading/reviewing this)
3. Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire), Blackout (third in a trilogy; the first I thumbed through, found it to be SOS-level story elements with writing that was rather underwhelming, so also no interest in reading/reviewing this)
4. John Scalzi, Redshirts (again, have thumbed through some Scalzi books sent to me over the years as review copies, found none of them to be interesting enough to read more than a few chapters, so also no reading/reviewing this)
5. Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312 (I've actually been meaning to buy this book for a while and I have enjoyed some of his writings – while finding others to be flawed conceptually as well as at a structural level – so this will be the other one that I'll be reading/reviewing).

So, the Hugo Best Novel list contains one novel I want to read, another that I enjoyed despite a few reservations (I like Ahmed's short fiction better, but that's a personal preference), and three that I probably will never read another work of theirs – even a sample – ever again.

When I think about genre fiction at the novel level (again, I leave aside commenting on other categories due to relative ignorance), I find this disconnect between what is "fresh" and "challenging" and with what garners award nominations.  It's been said by divers people over the past half-decade or more that awards like the Hugos and Nebulas in particular (and to a lesser extent, the BSFA and Clarke Awards) have engaged in a sort of "fan service" in that works that address certain fan preconceptions (and yes, this can also apply to some juried and author association awards) of what a "genre" novel should be.  There are the nudge-nudge-wink-wink-say-no-more! asides to kitschy pop culture (zombies, references to Star Trek, Star Wars, or anything "geek"-related) that do little more than just reaffirm certain tastes.  I cannot help but wonder if in a generation, these "geek"-centered stories will have gone the way of leisure suits, eight-tracks, and disco balls and are viewed as shorthand for an embarrassing pop cultural moment.  There certainly is very little to recommend most of these tales to any generation beyond a certain subset of the 40-65 year-old pale crowd.

Oh, doubtless some will counter this by noting the "diversity" of the nominations in other categories and to some extent this may be true.  Yet for those who want to equate some of the writers today with Joanna Russ or Samuel Delany (just to name two of several women and non-white writers from the 1960s and 1970s – and later), I'm going to ask this question:  which works challenge directly the social "conventions" of this day and age?  Is there a rougher, less concerned with "niceties" group of writers on these ballots that question the direction of SF/F and the values present within those stories?  Granted, one does not have to have a "political" message in order to be different, but if "diversity" is used to reference only the skin color or gender of the writer and not the stories that they write, then might there be an issue here beyond the typical mass fan votes tend to celebrate the "safe" and "conventional" at the expense of daring to say something different, something that might irritate people?

I do not know the answers to this question, but it is a question that I think should be asked whenever awards such as the Hugos announce their shortlists.  If there is an uniformity to the stories and the approaches toward telling them (leaving aside the "genre" tag), then there runs the risk of such awards becoming not the celebration of "the best" but rather of "the most conventional" and "safe to market."  That I fear has actually been the case for some time now and may continue to be so until the recent "geek" rage has receded in social consciousness and writers and fans alike feel the need to try something different.

Fiction or Non-Fiction?

Here are some quotes taken from certain volumes of the Library of America that I own.  Some will be fiction, others non-fiction.  Can you identify which is which? (bonus if you can pinpoint the author(s) as well):

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.  I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.  With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century.  This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

The guitars cried out "Polk Country," "Red River" and just instrumental hits with no name, that still are played by all good box pickers.  The dancing was hilarious to put it mildly.  Babe, Lucy, Big Sweet, East Coast Mary and many other of the well-known women were there.  The men swung them lustily, but nobody asked me to dance.  I was just crazy to get into the dance, too.  I had heard my mother speak of it and praise square dancing to the skies, but it looked as if I was doomed to be a wallflower and that was a new rôle for me.  Even Cliffert didn't ask me to dance.  It was so jolly, too.  At the end of every set Joe Willard would trick the men.  Instead of calling out the next figure as expected he'd bawl out, "Grab yo' partners and march up to de table and treat."  Some of the men did, but some would bolt for the door and stand about the fire and woof until the next set was called.

When John Burns, the great English labor leader and present member of the Cabinet, visited Chicago, he was asked by a reporter for his opinion of that city.  "Chicago," he answered, "is a pocket edition of hell."  Some time later, when Burns was going aboard his steamer to sail to England, he was approached by another reporter, who wanted to know if he had yet changed his opinion of Chicago.  "Yes, I have," was the prompt reply.  "My present opinion is that hell is a pocket edition of Chicago."

An army of cavalry and foot was passing.  It moved like a mob; its lines broken, as though fleeing from some terrible defeat.  The dolmans of the hussars, the heavy shakos of the guards, Hanoverian light horse, with their flat leather caps and flowing red plumes, were all jumbled together in bobbing disorder.  Behind the cavalry came the infantry, a wild sea of waving sabertaches, sloped muskets, crossed shoulder belts and swinging cartridge boxes.  Tod recognized the scarlet infantry of England with their white shoulder pads, the black infantry of the Duke of Brunswick, the French grenadiers with their enormous white gaiters, the Scotch with bare knees under plaid skirts.

As we travelled towards a land of liberty, my heart would at times leap for joy.  At other times, being, as I was, almost constantly on my feet, I felt as though I could travel no further.  But when I thought of slavery with its Democratic whips – its Republican chains – its evangelical blood-hounds, and its religious slave-holders – when I thought of all this paraphernalia of American Democracy and Religion behind me, and the prospect of liberty before me, I was encouraged to press forward, my heart was strengthened, and I forgot that I was tired or hungry. 

It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through.  There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a caster of state.  How they use the salt, precisely – who knows?  Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad.  Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery?  Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing.  In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere.  As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.