You now may be jealous of my book collection once again ;)

My copy of Zoran Živković's latest work, the 2011 The Five Wonders of the Danube, just arrived after I ordered it from Serbia a couple of weeks ago.  I've been a fan of his work for nearly eight years now, ever since the English translation of his The Fourth Circle was published in the United States.  If you'll do a search by his tagline here, you'll see a few reviews that I have written, along with some lovely books, some of which he sent me himself – pictured below – to help me with my Serbian (I still plan on eventually working my way through all of them and reviewing them; I've just been delayed by other demands on my time).  Maybe 2012 will be the year that I review more of Živković's excellent work, as he truly deserves greater attention, whether one associates him/herself as being a "literary" or "genre" reader.  Expect a review of The Five Wonders of the Danube sometime this month, if time permits.

Had to buy a new computer today

After nearly three years of service, my 13.3" MacBook Pro died today, victim to a fried motherboard.  I had pressed it into nearly around-the-clock service as an ersatz desktop and despite using a cooling pad, it probably overheated from being used so frequently.  I already had plans for buying a new Mac, but due to the timing of this, I decided that I would keep my 23" HP monitor and buy the 4 GB Mac Mini (2.5 Ghz i5 with 500 GB of storage, for the tech people; I only know this is middle-of-the-road) as a placeholder for a couple of years until I have again set aside the money for a high-end iMac that I want (yes, I am a mostly-satisfied Apple customer and no, I don't need to be told about Apple's policies or their tech specs, since I'm not a big gamer-type).

Anyway, here's a picture of the Mac Mini, the external DVD-RW drive, and an external hard drive that I use for Time Machine.  Speaking of the latter, it saved me a ton of headaches, as I was able to port over the vast majority of my files due to having done a backup a few months ago.  Wished I had done this more often, but there were performance issues issued (well, that and laziness).

The nosy among you can see a few UK edition fantasy books that I bought over the past decade, including a certain critical darling of the easily-outraged among the epic fantasy fandom ;)

Standing in the Pissstream: Comments Regarding "Mainstream," "Literary Fiction," and "Fantasy"

I promised Justin Landon on Twitter earlier that I would write a rebuttal of his post "Are We Trying Too Hard?", thus the post. 


I am a catholic reader.  I read histories, poetry, dramas, various comedies, historical fictions, contemporary fictions, the occasional romance (the 19th and early 20th century definition, however), weird fiction, cross-genre, crime, mystery, graphic novels and the odd manga, science fiction, fantasies of various stripes, and yes, I've even read yaoi on a dare.  There are, of course, gaps in my reading, as I am not a regular reader of erotica, nor have I enjoyed reading the latest iteration of "urban" fantasy (the term's meaning has shifted greatly over the past 10 years; the older forms of it I have enjoyed) or paranormal romance, because I am not the "ideal reader" for those works.  Oh, and thrillers, which I can barely stomach in cinema form and which I choose not to read after a few bad experiences.  I don't judge those who prefer these other forms; after all, my parents love reading thrillers and my mom romance novels on occasion, but both are well-rounded, intelligent people who have different reading preferences from mine.

Notice that I did not use the terms "literary fiction" or "mainstream" here.  I find neither label to be a good descriptor of what I like from certain styles of fictional narrative.  When I see people use these terms, whether it's pejorative or not, usually they are in reference to contemporary fictions, although sometimes the label is attached to historical fictions or even crime/mystery novels (which may baffle the well-read in the latter genres).  "Mainstream" is rather odd, almost as meaningless these days as talking about what "Main Street" wants.  There are a variety of styles for readers to choose from and several don't limit themselves to just a single form.

After reading Landon's article, I could not help but think that he does a poor job in defining the terms of his argument.  He treats terms like "mainstream," "literary fiction," "fantasy," and "literary fantasy" as if they are crystal-clear terms with sharp delineations.  He notes, for example, that Téa Obreht's excellent The Tiger's Wife was his favorite fiction for 2011 but that he did not include her in his year-end list because "in my mind, it isn't genre.  It's got some magic, or supernatural plot devices, but only by happenstance.  It is not a Fantasy novel, rather Obreht wrote a mainstream literary novel with a hint of fantasy."  It is a very odd distinction to be making, one that I do not think is supported by the text itself (which includes, among other elements, a supernatural being that is immortal and who promises to meet up with the narrator's grandfather when it is time for her grandfather to die) nor by Obreht's stated influences. 

What seems to be the point of his article is to narrow down the terms of what constitutes "fantasy" to something that is: 1) set in a fictional locale, 2) does not utilize certain narrative techniques that would make it "literary," whatever that might mean.  Although I likely am distorting Landon's argument somewhat, on the whole such a schematic for outlining what is and what isn't "fantasy" is flawed.  It is flawed because there are so many exceptions (where do you classify the likes of an M. John Harrison, China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, or Ursula Le Guin on occasion?) that can be made that it becomes difficult to justify trying to define anything outside of how it is marketed to readers.  Want something that is odd and tentacled?  There's some weirdness in Aisle 5.  Want shapeshifting female fighters who battle werewolves and other creatures?  Patricia Briggs can be found two aisles down.  Want a complex narrative about self-identity set in a mostly-deserted town with mysterious fog creeping about?  That's Samuel Delany and he's found...uh....well....fuck!  I don't know, but he's somewhere!

Another troublesome area in his article is his apparent defensiveness when it comes to perceived "attacks" on the particular brand of "fantasy" that he seems to prefer most, the multivolume epic fantasies.  I don't dispute matters of taste very often and I won't here, but a disproportionate amount of Landon's column revolves around his distaste for people either "pushing" for other forms of fantasy (if such are fantasies to him) or "attacking" the particular style he favors most.

To that, all I can do is shrug.  There are fans of epic fantasies who read this blog and enjoy what I review outside their particular "comfort zones"; others find the paucity of coverage here of their favorite subgenre of literature to be offputting and rarely visit or consider the books that I do read, because of perceived "negative reviews" of certain authors.  Tonight, I reviewed over at Gogol's Overcoat William Faulkner's 1932 novel, Light in August.  This weekend, I hope to write a column on Eric Basso's poetry for later publication at Weird Fiction Review and by Tuesday, I hope to have a review of Saladin Ahmed's debut S&S fantasy, The Throne of the Crescent Moon, up here at this blog.  Each of those differs wildly from one another.  I could make the argument that each of them could be considered "genre" and I would have some evidence to support that view.  I could just as well ignore such a label and focus on the works as being part and parcel of contemporary material culture (as a former cultural history grad major, it is still influential on how I view the world and its peoples).  Either one can "work," but both allow for a greater acceptance of works that might have some sort of literary kinship.  That openness I find lacking too often in these "literary/mainstream vs. genre" discussions and their off-shoot "what constitutes 'fantasy'" arguments.  I seem to be standing in the middle while so many are pissing off at these component fictional areas that I love that I sometimes wonder if I need to put on a raincoat and use an umbrella to avoid all of these piss streams that are flying past me.

So true

Saw this image linked to on Facebook.  It's from Cultura de Re-Evolucionaria and there are plenty more of applicable slogans there.  And yes, reading is like kissing and if you don't do it frequently, well, people do tend to notice.

These are recent print editions that I'm in the process of reading/reviewing

Since I did this earlier for the e-books I have, here are previously-non-photographed images of books that I recently received that I just finished reading, am in the process of reading, or will be reading in the near future.  Most, if not all, of these will feature in a review and/or feature in the coming months.

Gander's poetry collection, which I quoted in a post earlier tonight, is a finalist for this year's National Book Critic Circle Award for Poetry.  Just finished it and it is the perfect antidote for the nonsense I've been reading lately about commenting on other cultures.  Three Messages and a Warning is an anthology of Mexican fantastical fiction.  I may decide to write a feature or more on individual stories/authors, if their stories are weird enough, in a biweekly column on Weird Fiction Review that  Paul Smith and I will be running there later this month.

I've enjoyed two of Pelevin's earlier books in translation before, so I'm going to be reading this one in the near future.  The Catalan original of this pre-exile Mercè Rodoreda arrived too late for me to utilize it in a feature I turned in to WFR earlier this week, but I will read it and perhaps give my thoughts on it in the near future, as she is an excellent writer.

Ander Monson has written some brilliant stories in recent years (I had marked one of them for consideration for BAF 4), so I'm curious to see how he is as a poet.  Due to a recommendation from a reader a few days ago, I bought one of Polish writer Stefan Zeromski's books, The Faithful River.  Sometime in the next few months, I hope to have the time to read and possibly review it.

I am writing features in the next couple of months on Gogol's Overcoat for both the 1961 Nobel Literature-winning Bosnian writer Ivo Andrić and one of the nominees that year, Italian writer Alberto Moravia.  These two books will supplement other books of theirs that I already own.

Next week, I am due to turn in a feature piece on one of Ray's weird fictions, so to prep for that and a few other related matters in mind, I bought an expanded French-language edition of his earliest collection (this one contains some stories from his second collection), Les Contes du Whisky (Whisky Tales).  Some good, weird stuff here.

Which ones of these have you read?  Which would you like to read soon, if possible?  Which would you like to know more about?  And which would you not piss on if it were on fire?

Un forastero, sentado a la mesa, inquieto

At dinner, the Santiago poet averts her face from the gringo although no one else is sitting close enough for her to engage in conversation.  A synecdoche, he is taken for his government.  She lights up and blows sullen smoke down the table.  With suspicion at the threshold of dialogue, there is always a word blocking the first word.

And on the second day of the festival, after many papers, a consensus emerges that there are no longer regions of poetry; there are zones.  A distinction weakened, perhaps, in translation?

Final night, a local poet accuses the host of avoiding the issue of regionality altogether, of talking around it with clever language games when, in fact, some people's lives are at risk, even now, at this moment, because of what they write, because of where they live.

Another shouts from the audience that vanguard poetry doesn't speak to him, it is elitist, the tone of the whole conference is elitist.

And so the last evening dissolves into tensions,

A dinner table balanced

like a barbell, partisan drinkers

cluster at either end.

The foreigner can't control his situation; mastery eludes him.  After four days in another language, he who started out infinitely sensitive is completemente rendido, rent by the effort of constant attentiveness.

– Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World (p. 86)

Español no es mi lingua natal.  Antes de que tenga veinte y ocho años, hablé solamente inglés.  Cuando enseñaba la historia de los estados unidos y la geografía mundial in Florida en la programa Inglés para los habladores de otros idiomas, tuve que comunicar con mis estudiantes.  Ellos no pudieron hablar en inglés bien; yo no pude se hablar bien en español.  Nuestras culturas fueron bastane diferente que estaba facil a tener malentiendos.  A veces, nosotros estaban inquietos.  Tuvimos miedo que nos hacería tontos.  Cuando debimos estar comunicando, estabamos silencos.  Diez años más tarde, todavia me arrepento por causa de no traté bastante.

Chances are, many of you did not understand what I just wrote above.  Chances are also that some of you did and a few might even comment on my grammatical mistakes.  Yet buried within this issue of language communication is a larger issue of human relations and empathy.

I quote from Gander's book because this passage, taken from his time in Chile, contains a striking image that is so applicable to certain comments I've seen at divers site.  Pay close attention to the beginning scene, where he sits at a table with a Chilean woman who is distrustful of him.  "There is always a word blocking the first word."  In the intervening ten years since I had to learn how to communicate in a second language in order to teach students a subject in my native (and their second or third) language, there have been several times where I have been that forastero at the table, seated at unease.  

Recently, there was a post that took another blogger to task for his depiction of her native Thailand (and his views on Islam and near-slavering over this "Girls of Geek" calendar).  When reading Gander's prose-poem and the passage I quote above, I could not help but note the complete difference of approach between him and Pat.  Where Gander notes the discomfort and explicitly states how "the foreigner can't control his situation; mastery eludes him," Pat in his response to the Requires Hate posts does anything but acknowledge his obliviousness to how his words showed a callous disregard for a complex situation.  No, the narrative there is that he was just pointing out an uncomfortable "truth" about the sex tourism industry over there (while neglecting to point out or being very unaware that sex trafficking is a very serious problem in both the United States and his native Canada).  Of course, the way he put it was taken as very condescending at the very least, not just by acrackedmoon, but by several others who read it.  But what happened is that there was no communication to hint that hey, ya know, maybe a native's perspective might just be more valuable in this case than someone who, like the people in the Holiday Inn commercials, think that they "know" a culture or society just because they visited a few places over a period of days, weeks, or months.

Problem is that it takes several years at least for an outsider to become acutely aware of an insider's perspective.  Lord knows that in 2012 there are still all sorts of Mississippi Burning or Deliverance jokes told about my native American South region.  Oh, sometimes there'll be that bright, enlightened person who wants to sound all sympathetic and say "I am impressed by how much you've changed since the KKK days," in that grating tone that seems to accompany an elderly adult patting the head of a young child who is tempted to kick that oldster's shins but has to refrain from doing so because s/he'll be in big trouble.  It is understandable that after a while of being talked down to, as if an adult from another society/culture were a gifted child, you grow tired of being polite and being deferential to the irritating dumbfucks who can't bother themselves to learn more than the most superficial aspects of your culture/society.

Same thing applies to gender issues.  I know just enough to know that there's a helluva lot to learn and that it's best to sit at that table quietly, even if it makes you uncomfortable, and learn to listen to another person's narrative.  To tell someone who is fed up and who has to use elements of rant/rage discourse in order for that other to pay attention in the first place that "Masturbation might help you release some of that geek rage, you know. I could even supply my complimentary copy of the Girls of Geek 2012 calendar for you to focus on. . . It's not true it will make you deaf. . ."?  Really?  And there are people who aren't viewing this as sexist language, especially after it was made clear that the poster in question is female?  Add to that the comments made earlier over several posts about other cultures and religions and for some, including myself some time ago, it is very difficult not to conclude that Pat has said some very racist and sexist things.

Yet what's even more disconcerting than the spewings of those who use the sexist terms of "shrill," "harpy," and of course the ubiquitous "bitch," are those who feel that they should lecture her on her "tone" when it is precisely because of the trangression  against "polite talk" (read "the deference of 'inferior' races/women to their white male superiors) that women like them are heard at all.  I'm sorry, but if someone wanted to lecture me about my tone when I went HAM on someone "bein' ignert" about my native region, I would not be keen on listening to them because it's insulting and counterproductive to the extreme.  So what happens are those groups of people, segregated by race/gender, end up in clusters around the great table, not communicating to those in an opposing group.

What's also insulting about this recent turn of events are those who act all disturbed and troubled by my willingness to consider what acrackedmoon and others have to say.  Look at the comments elsewhere on this blog or elsewhere where my name keeps being brought up as if I were doing some horrible thing by being willing to hear her out.  It's not grade school where I have to participate in an ostracizing lest I be ostracized myself.  As I said in response to several of such bewildered comments of "how can you defend her?", there are certain review techniques that she uses that make her reviews stronger than the vast majority of what I read online (some of her critiques delve further into the workings of particular books than what I managed to do in my own reviews of these works).  Does not mean I agree with everything she's written (I don't), but I also found that by being willing to listen, that there is at least the potential for a good discourse (one day, for example, I'd like to know if she's read Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and if so, what she made of Twain's treatment of Jim).  My personal narrative allows for other perspectives, including dissenting ones.

It all boils down to getting past "that word blocking the first word."  I don't need to sit here and proclaim that I am good, noble, empathetic, decent, swell, etc.; it would mean the focus would be on my personal self-narrative and that in turn would drown out other narrative voices.  I know perfectly well that I'm a flawed person and that there's a lot to learn by just being quiet for a spell and listening.  Perhaps that would be a better course for those worried about "tone" or another's "reverse racism" (which I presume they mean prejudice, since racism is an institutionalized discrimination of peoples based on group prejudices), as lecturing someone yet again about their perceived need to be outspoken is as bad as speaking to a foreigner and acting like they are a child when they cannot replicate your language better than you do (as if most would do any better in a non-native language; I certainly realize my limitations despite my continued exposure to Latin American dialects of Spanish).  Sit at that table and realize that you don't have to have control at all times.  Maybe you'll learn something.  I know I hope to do so.

Remember when I went HAM in December 2011 on perceived pressure from publishers?

In case you don't, read this link first.  Let the irritation settle in for a little bit, then ready yourself for something that is even stupider than that, likely by a magnitude of 10 or more.  Now read this post from a few days ago that I saw linked on Twitter by Reading in a Single Setting. 

Are Some People That Ignert?

I'm going to post one of the images from the original blog post here just to make it easier for me to let the bile rise up and the spew all over the paragraphs to come.

Oh, where to start?  It's pretty obvious that this "Aziza Publishing" has no clue at all (wouldn't surprise me if it's a vanity press for this Uzuri Wilkerson author) about that piece of writing called a review.  Reviews are never the property of publishers/authors and if a reviewer is stupid enough to sign over "rights" to use a review, then one might wonder if what that reviewer had written even constitutes a review instead of a promotional piece.

But then it gets worse.  Oh, does it ever!  Granting database, CD-ROM, and DVD transmission rights (What?  There are people who buy CDs these days?) in perpetuity?  Over a piece that's probably going to be a fluff piece designed not to be analytical but to be sycophantic?  I knew some "book bloggers" were getting a bit too close to authors/publishers for there to be any real critical distance, but this would surely be beyond even their ability to put aside any self-decency in order to grovel, right?

Then there is the clause about the "unbiased rating system" and the scale of 1-5, with 5 being the highest.  What in the name of the recently-departed Don Cornelius?!?!?  That I have to bust out a multiple interrobang to reveal how I feel about this asinine demand ought to show just how dumb this entire "contract" is.  I would never sign such a stupid thing, but to think that there are people out there that think a review has to be on a Gamepro-style 1-5 ranking (and maybe subcategories for how the characters sigh lovely into each other's ears the trite platitudes of treacly love or domineering quasi-BDSM that have graced us since the days of Harlequin or Gor, if not longer) boggles the mind.

With the fourth part, we progress further into the fine art of the dumbass leading the potentially dumberass.  I am tempted to say, "It should go without saying that...," only to admit that for some, if that were to occur, that they'd have no clue at all (well, that is if they want to genuflect properly and not write a true review) on how to do this according to publisher/author desires.  If I were to describe this purported "contract" in five words for less, it would be "Epitome of incestuous sychophantic suckitude."

The final part speaks for itself.  Now if I could, in 400 words or more, be allowed to ream and eviscerate the sub-moron who thought this was a good idea and that even happy-go-lucky book bloggers/reviewers would agree to such dreck, I might be tempted to agree to a one-time anti-contract arrangement, but alas, I have bigger fish to fry (catfish, in this particular case).  However, if it is not clear by now, these sorts of missives seem to emerge from the gooey, murky depths of online relationships between book commentators (excluding for the most part those who try to emulate older, more independent reviewing models, although they too have their moments, as I'll readily concede), publishing houses (including this growing plague of self-published/vanity presses, print and e-book alike), and authors forced to do most, if not all, of the actual book publicity.  Although I doubt many would sign such a stupidass thing as the "contract" reproduced above, the temerity that some smaller publishing entities have is appalling.  Sometimes, I really think more people should go HAM on those engaging in such questionable practices, as it might make things a bit more bearable for the rest of us who want to read commentaries on books that aren't laced with the razors of publicist/author-approved platitudes.