I believe I started making list of books I wished to read when I was in high school. To illustrate the ginormity of my inner geekiness, I suspect I was the only 16 year old who skipped school to go to the library in order to look up books about books. From these tomes, I accumulated volumes of paper, all of which are lined with my elegant-yet-totally-unreadable handwriting, all of which list books I wished to read. Most of these earlier lists are in a file, in a box, in my parents' garage. I shall probably take them with me when I move out of state again because God Forbid I should give up my lists.
In any case, what do these lists consist of? Well, they are books, sometimes songs, with title and author. Why I wrote them down and from where, I do not know. Only past Lazaraspaste can answer that question. But here are some of them in a folder I found when cleaning out my paperwork during the holiday break. My goal is to consolidate them, but I don't know how I will do this. I think I need an iPhone because I would like one centrally located, ever accessible list so that when I am standing in the airport bookstore or the Barnes and Noble or the used bookstore, I will be able to call up my grand and teetering list and figure out what to buy. Not, if my 500+ books listed on LibraryThing is any indication, that I don't have enough books already but clearly I have a problem.
I know many of you have Kindles or Sonys and while I would like an ereader, I'm not a fan of the fact that the formats are so rigid. I would like to have the option of buying ebooks from anywhere and having the format be easily transferred to my ereader. Also, I can't afford it. If I get an iPhone, I can't get an ereader and I think I would use the iPhone more. If any of you out there have any opinion on this, please share with me.
I enjoy list making. Although, as a consummate and perpetual list-maker, I find certain kinds of lists disgraceful. For example, The Top 100 Books of the Century or the Year's Best. Well, not really. I mean, its very arbitrary, list-making is and any you make is going to have problems, even for you. You'll invariably forget something important. This is how To Do lists and grocery lists work as well. The best lists are ones that admit to their randomness and then explain what the book is about and why they've included it. My personal favorite of this sort is anything by Michael Dirda. Michael Dirda works for the Washington Post and has very broad tastes. I have discerned this from reading Classics for Pleasure, a book that jumps around genres quite liberally. Something I appreciate as a romance reader.
One of the chief reasons I became a librarian was my love of list making (I also like indices but let's not go there). What is a library catalog if not a gigantic list? What are the shelves if not the physical manifestation of that list? Libraries, in recent years, have become less about books and more about other shit. Like community education and technology, and while that's all fine and good, we still need books. I'm not one of those people who thinks that books will disappear because the thing about a book is that aside from the ability to read, you only need sunlight to operate one. This is very handy. I do not trust technology because technology breaks. It does. It does all the time. Things don't download. You lose everything if you don't back up. Things are scattered and hither and yon and you have to recollect them whenever you transfer to a new device. I've lost songs going from one computer to another, even with Geek Squad shifting everything over. I do not like the idea of losing my collections. I realize I'm a rarity but then while I think they're are many readers out there, there are even less people who are literate and even fewer book lovers. Yes, I am a terrible snob, thank you. I think a book is a piece of art. Its like owning a painting. I also have this theory that literacy, not just the ability to read but the ability to read for more than one meaning, works out to about the same percentage that its always been. I know people who don't read the same book more than once. This I find very shocking. I mean, how are you to know the book if you don't read it more than once? How can you possibly pick up nuance, say?
In any case, I'm looking for better ways to make lists. If I can incorporate technology into my listmaking, that would be great. We'll see.
Friday, December 4, 2009
The Message of a Book: A Short Rant
This post was inspired by a discussion over at All About Romance a few months ago.
Can we just never talk about the message the book is giving to children ever again? Please. Pretty please. Or, you know what? Hey, let's at least have like a two month moratorium on this discussion every year. We'll call it "Let's NOT Think About the Children Month". It'll be great. We can discuss books without talking about how they affect readers. No, the word is "effect" because apparently there's this belief still circulating around that somehow art will cause you to do things. For instance, if you watch "The Last Temptation of Christ" one too many times you will become an atheist. Or if you read about romance novel alpha, bad boys somehow you will then go out and find yourself an abusive relationship. Can we just please admit that this is just not true? That art does not cause things? Except boredom on occasion.
Or maybe that it's the opposite parallel. Maybe girls read books with bad boys in them because that's who they are attracted to already. Ever thought of that? And I've said this before but "bad boy" is a loose and ambiguous term. I have a love for literary bad boys at the very least and yet, I find myself in stark disagreement with certain people about who they refer to as a "bad boy." Not only does the term change definition from person to person but one can also be attracted to some bad boys but not all bad boys. Just because I fancied Lestat doesn't mean I'm going to date Ted Bundy. This whole conversation and line of thinking is so chock full of bad reasoning that I can barely keep from running around and smacking people upside the head. Do you know what is a stronger factor in determining whether or not a young girl ends up in an abusive relationship or destructive sexual patterns? Shockingly (and Freudianly?) it is her relationship with her father, especially during her teen years when she feels like crap all the time and the other teens around her are basically no different from a pack of feral dogs.
Don't you think that perhaps Bella's attraction to the paternalistic, controlling Edward in Twilight was more a product of the distant and cold relationship she had with her father? He never talked to her. He barely checked in with her on how she was doing or why she would make the sudden decision not live with her mother and stepfather (I heard somewhere that Stephanie Meyer's early version had her running to Forks because her stepdad had made an inappropriate pass at her)? Oh no, it could never be the dysfunctional family relationship. No, no. Bella's questionable attraction to Edward is clearly a direct result of her love of Wuthering Heights.
It just doesn't scan. Moreover, plenty of people fall in love with the wrong people, especially when they are young. Rarely does it happen that one meets a life partner in the hormone addled days of their youth. It happens, but not often. Why? Because when you are a teenager you are technically a sociopath. And everyone knows sociopaths have difficulty make good life choices.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Spinsters, Bluestockings, and Other Aging Virgins
I think I might be a spinster. Is there a checklist or something I can look at to make sure? Let's see: over-educated, check. Glasses, check. Governess, oh no but teacher and librarian sort of equals that, terrible fashion sense, nope. Phew, this close to being a spinster.
But if I am a spinster and my life was a romance novel, then any day now Mr. Wonderful Pants should be coming along to sweep me off my feet. Which would be good because my love of beautiful shoes has completely ruined my feet. The bone below my big toe actually aches. However, I think that my shoes are the major fashion item preventing me from being a spinster.
In any case, I prefer romances featuring spinsters and bluestockings the most. It has to do with Disney's Sleeping Beauty.
When I was between three and five I was obsessed with several things: Mr. Darcy, The Nutcracker, The Magic Flute and being a Sleeping Beauty princess. My love of Mr. Darcy was born of having viewed the old Masterpiece Theater version of Pride and Prejudice. I thought Mr. Darcy was a dreamboat. According to my mother, I used to pretend to kiss Mr. Darcy. I also wanted to be a ballet dancing, opera singer. Unfortunately, I was unable to carry either a tune or a rhythm. Such is life. I was also the oldest child of a family of girls.
By the time I was five I was very aware of the fact that eldest sisters rarely, if ever, get a happy ending. In order to get a happy ending one must the youngest or the only child. I was neither. I was convinced that somehow this dream of being a ballet dancing, opera singing princess in a story would some day come to pass. After all, if sudden transformations into great beauties have taught us anything then they have taught us that sudden transformations into great beauties are possible.
Imagine my bitter disappointment when none of this actually occurred. Ah well, what can you do. The other aspect of myself that characterized my childhood was deep sensitivity to anything that stank remotely of injustice or unfairness. That being said, it always seemed to me to be extremely unjust that ugly step-sisters and eldest children got the shit end of the deal in fairy tales. I mean, why should birth order rule you out of having a happy ending?
Which brings me back to spinsters, bluestockings and other aging virgins. Here then is coterie of ugly step-sisters and eldest daughters, albeit not in those terms, who are finally getting their happy endings. This coterie also includes any girls with glasses.
Favorites of this genre include, but are not limited to:
Mary Challoner in The Devil's Cub
Annelise Kempton in The Devil's Waltz
Beth Armitage in An Unwilling Bride
Penelope Featherington in Romancing Mr. Bridgerton
And most especially, Sophie Hatter in Howl's Moving Castle which is not a romance but amazing, amazing, amazing.
What I think I like most about these stories is that these heroines are not the object of initial desire, but somehow by being their own self, they become beloved. While standards of beauty have changed, the one that has remained the same is that if a woman is to be successful in love then she must never be herself. This is the central thesis of the infamous The Rules but it is not a new thesis.
Yet, these stories reject the notion that in order to be loved or sexually desired that a woman must hid her intelligence, push her beauty like a drug or crumble in the face of danger. In short, to exhibit masculine qualities rather than feminine virtues. It's rather heartening, but is it true? This I do not know.
But if I am a spinster and my life was a romance novel, then any day now Mr. Wonderful Pants should be coming along to sweep me off my feet. Which would be good because my love of beautiful shoes has completely ruined my feet. The bone below my big toe actually aches. However, I think that my shoes are the major fashion item preventing me from being a spinster.
In any case, I prefer romances featuring spinsters and bluestockings the most. It has to do with Disney's Sleeping Beauty.
When I was between three and five I was obsessed with several things: Mr. Darcy, The Nutcracker, The Magic Flute and being a Sleeping Beauty princess. My love of Mr. Darcy was born of having viewed the old Masterpiece Theater version of Pride and Prejudice. I thought Mr. Darcy was a dreamboat. According to my mother, I used to pretend to kiss Mr. Darcy. I also wanted to be a ballet dancing, opera singer. Unfortunately, I was unable to carry either a tune or a rhythm. Such is life. I was also the oldest child of a family of girls.
By the time I was five I was very aware of the fact that eldest sisters rarely, if ever, get a happy ending. In order to get a happy ending one must the youngest or the only child. I was neither. I was convinced that somehow this dream of being a ballet dancing, opera singing princess in a story would some day come to pass. After all, if sudden transformations into great beauties have taught us anything then they have taught us that sudden transformations into great beauties are possible.
Imagine my bitter disappointment when none of this actually occurred. Ah well, what can you do. The other aspect of myself that characterized my childhood was deep sensitivity to anything that stank remotely of injustice or unfairness. That being said, it always seemed to me to be extremely unjust that ugly step-sisters and eldest children got the shit end of the deal in fairy tales. I mean, why should birth order rule you out of having a happy ending?
Which brings me back to spinsters, bluestockings and other aging virgins. Here then is coterie of ugly step-sisters and eldest daughters, albeit not in those terms, who are finally getting their happy endings. This coterie also includes any girls with glasses.
Favorites of this genre include, but are not limited to:
Mary Challoner in The Devil's Cub
Annelise Kempton in The Devil's Waltz
Beth Armitage in An Unwilling Bride
Penelope Featherington in Romancing Mr. Bridgerton
And most especially, Sophie Hatter in Howl's Moving Castle which is not a romance but amazing, amazing, amazing.
What I think I like most about these stories is that these heroines are not the object of initial desire, but somehow by being their own self, they become beloved. While standards of beauty have changed, the one that has remained the same is that if a woman is to be successful in love then she must never be herself. This is the central thesis of the infamous The Rules but it is not a new thesis.
Yet, these stories reject the notion that in order to be loved or sexually desired that a woman must hid her intelligence, push her beauty like a drug or crumble in the face of danger. In short, to exhibit masculine qualities rather than feminine virtues. It's rather heartening, but is it true? This I do not know.
Epilogues or Babies + Schmoop = Puke
Personally, I like children and someday I hope to have one or two. However, children are not romantic. They are very opposite of romantic. As my father is wont to say, children are the enemy of gracious dining. I think this could be extended to most activities.
And yet, children populate the epilogues and indeed, the logues of romance novels. Why is this? The heteronormative imperative to procreate? Mmmmmm, maybe but I think not so much. I think it may be a genre standard which is to say that the romance genre is in a certain respect the opposite of tragedy in two ways:
1. It postulates a worldview in which the ultimate reality is happiness not grief and
2. It reifies the domestic. Epic and tragedy deal with Great Matters, matters of state, matters of God, and while romance does this, too, it does it on a more mundane level.
Thus the proliferation of babies is a symbolic measure of both of these standards. First, babies represent the continuity of generations as birth is the opposite of death. Second, babies represent the joy of the domestic. I say joy and not pleasure or happiness because children bring all of these things but when they are throwing a tantrum in the shoe department of the Nordstroms one rarely feels pleasure. Joy connotes a certain spike of pain along with the happiness, at least in my mind.
Despite this symbolic measure of babies, they aren't romantic. Babies cry and shit and throw tantrums. They do not care if you are tired or hungry or horny. They rarely if ever negotiate. Oh sure, the baby is funny and adorable and says awesome things that you only wish you could still say, but that doesn't take away the fact that the baby got some sort of sticky goop all over the couch . . . which you sat in. Not romantic.
So when novels end with the hero and heroine smooching over the sleeping head of a toddler all I can think to myself is, yeah right! One party would be off trying to do the following: laundry, the dishes, take a shower, sleep or watch something other than Caillou or Handy Manny.
"Quick Henry!" the heroine ought to say in low panicked tones. "While Charles is asleep, I'm going to take a shower."
"I'll move him to the crib."
"No, don't do that. You'll wake him up. Just let him sleep right there."
"I need to vacuum up these cheerios. If I leave him here, he'll wake up at the sound."
"So don't vacuum."
"But I can't vacuum when he's awake, because he yanks the cord."
"Ssshhhhhh, you're gonna wake him up."
"Can't I do anything in this house?"
Well, at least that's the way it goes in my family. My point is that children don't necessarily strengthen a relationship or offer convenient moments for making out. I would like to see less babies and births in epilogues. I like the concept of an epilogue but maybe authors could just jog it down the road a few years to the vow renewal or a toast a child's wedding. That would be better than babies.
And yet, children populate the epilogues and indeed, the logues of romance novels. Why is this? The heteronormative imperative to procreate? Mmmmmm, maybe but I think not so much. I think it may be a genre standard which is to say that the romance genre is in a certain respect the opposite of tragedy in two ways:
1. It postulates a worldview in which the ultimate reality is happiness not grief and
2. It reifies the domestic. Epic and tragedy deal with Great Matters, matters of state, matters of God, and while romance does this, too, it does it on a more mundane level.
Thus the proliferation of babies is a symbolic measure of both of these standards. First, babies represent the continuity of generations as birth is the opposite of death. Second, babies represent the joy of the domestic. I say joy and not pleasure or happiness because children bring all of these things but when they are throwing a tantrum in the shoe department of the Nordstroms one rarely feels pleasure. Joy connotes a certain spike of pain along with the happiness, at least in my mind.
Despite this symbolic measure of babies, they aren't romantic. Babies cry and shit and throw tantrums. They do not care if you are tired or hungry or horny. They rarely if ever negotiate. Oh sure, the baby is funny and adorable and says awesome things that you only wish you could still say, but that doesn't take away the fact that the baby got some sort of sticky goop all over the couch . . . which you sat in. Not romantic.
So when novels end with the hero and heroine smooching over the sleeping head of a toddler all I can think to myself is, yeah right! One party would be off trying to do the following: laundry, the dishes, take a shower, sleep or watch something other than Caillou or Handy Manny.
"Quick Henry!" the heroine ought to say in low panicked tones. "While Charles is asleep, I'm going to take a shower."
"I'll move him to the crib."
"No, don't do that. You'll wake him up. Just let him sleep right there."
"I need to vacuum up these cheerios. If I leave him here, he'll wake up at the sound."
"So don't vacuum."
"But I can't vacuum when he's awake, because he yanks the cord."
"Ssshhhhhh, you're gonna wake him up."
"Can't I do anything in this house?"
Well, at least that's the way it goes in my family. My point is that children don't necessarily strengthen a relationship or offer convenient moments for making out. I would like to see less babies and births in epilogues. I like the concept of an epilogue but maybe authors could just jog it down the road a few years to the vow renewal or a toast a child's wedding. That would be better than babies.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Books I've Bought: A Photo Essay
I love library book sales. I love used bookstores. I love thrift stores. Why? Cheap paperback books. I used to scour the thrift shops of the East Village for hidden romance treasures, certain in the knowledge that they knew not what they had. And indeed, they didn't. The following proves it.
I bought this in a bookshop located in the upstairs of an old 18th century building in St.Ives, Cornwall, UK. I can't remember how much I bought it for but I was stoked by the fact that at that time none of Heyer's books were in print in the United States.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Fatty Fat Fat Fat
Over at All About Romance Abi Bishop has written a post on fat heroes and heroines in romance.
Fat and love. Love and fat. The question, as far as fat in romance is concerned is this: Will the reader find a fat hero/heroine believable as a romantic lead? Or does being fat preclude having an erotic experience because fat is somehow a signifier for that total lack of sexual attractiveness? A recent survey (conducted by me, just minutes ago) of internet porn has concluded that there are a lot of fat, ugly, and fat n' ugly people fucking a lot, in various positions all for the titallating enjoyment of viewers across the world. That said, if fat people can fuck in amateur porn and get a lot of viewers, why is it so unbelieve that fat people can fall in love and fuck both other fat people and thin people. Another survey, also conducted by me via observation of couples over the years and repeated viewings of the old TLC show A Wedding Story, has suggested that people pair off in the strangest manner. I postulate three kinds of pairngs off:
Fat and love. Love and fat. The question, as far as fat in romance is concerned is this: Will the reader find a fat hero/heroine believable as a romantic lead? Or does being fat preclude having an erotic experience because fat is somehow a signifier for that total lack of sexual attractiveness? A recent survey (conducted by me, just minutes ago) of internet porn has concluded that there are a lot of fat, ugly, and fat n' ugly people fucking a lot, in various positions all for the titallating enjoyment of viewers across the world. That said, if fat people can fuck in amateur porn and get a lot of viewers, why is it so unbelieve that fat people can fall in love and fuck both other fat people and thin people. Another survey, also conducted by me via observation of couples over the years and repeated viewings of the old TLC show A Wedding Story, has suggested that people pair off in the strangest manner. I postulate three kinds of pairngs off:
Monday, August 3, 2009
Today's Music Is . . .
Here is a sampling of several songs I find particularly delicious. Enjoy!
"The Rake's Song" by The Decemberists
"True Romance" by She Wants Revenge
And last but not least:
"Wicked Game" by HIM
"The Rake's Song" by The Decemberists
"True Romance" by She Wants Revenge
And last but not least:
"Wicked Game" by HIM
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Sacrifice & Love
Over at All About Books, Rike has posted a blog about inequality in romances and marriages. Comments, right off the bat, became very defensive about posters own marriages and what-not . . .
However, I do think that Rike has a point and as I was thinking about it, I realized that this is actually the main reason I hate the ingenue as a heroine. To me, the naive but beautiful ingenue encapsulates everything that is wrong with male/female relationships: that in order to be in relationship not only do women have to sacrifice themselves totally and without the man having to do anything either but aslo that in order to be in a relationship a woman has to start out on an unequal footing or else she cannot expect to incite desire in men. Anyone who knows me, knows that I have had a long standing disgust, nay antagonism towards relationships between younger women and older men. Invariably the man has money, perhaps not wealth but definitely is comfortably set. The woman is, if not strictly speaking beautiful, then at least very good at approximating it with the use of plastic surgery and yoga (see Bravo's The Millionaire Matchmaker for references). She is also invariably neither as accomplished as the man nor as innately intelligent/smart. When I see this in real life it makes me want to light people on fire. The only reason I don't is because I never seem have a convenient Molotov Cocktail on hand.
This is not love, people. This is prostituition in its most insidious form. It is an exchange, not of souls or even of bodies, not of minds or of hearts but of economic factors between the wealth of money and the wealth of beauty. I do not believe any of the men on Millionaire Matchmaker really want to find love. What they want is to buy love. This is why they are going to a matchmaker. And she's not an old school yenta of the Fiddler on the Roof variety. Oh no, she is a pimp, bringing these men only the best products, the most appetizing of merchandise. Every woman on that show adheres to current standards of "beauty" with no deviations at all, not in dress, not in hair, not even in face. There is nothing remotely individual about these women. I suspect it must be something in the water in L.A. making them all into Stepford Ho's. Not that I, personally, would want to have my body anywhere near these "millionaires" as most of them are so phenomenonly unattractive both in body and mind that one is literally gobsmacked with the idea that sexual desire could ever be possible. Can a vagina dry heave?
However, I do think that Rike has a point and as I was thinking about it, I realized that this is actually the main reason I hate the ingenue as a heroine. To me, the naive but beautiful ingenue encapsulates everything that is wrong with male/female relationships: that in order to be in relationship not only do women have to sacrifice themselves totally and without the man having to do anything either but aslo that in order to be in a relationship a woman has to start out on an unequal footing or else she cannot expect to incite desire in men. Anyone who knows me, knows that I have had a long standing disgust, nay antagonism towards relationships between younger women and older men. Invariably the man has money, perhaps not wealth but definitely is comfortably set. The woman is, if not strictly speaking beautiful, then at least very good at approximating it with the use of plastic surgery and yoga (see Bravo's The Millionaire Matchmaker for references). She is also invariably neither as accomplished as the man nor as innately intelligent/smart. When I see this in real life it makes me want to light people on fire. The only reason I don't is because I never seem have a convenient Molotov Cocktail on hand.
This is not love, people. This is prostituition in its most insidious form. It is an exchange, not of souls or even of bodies, not of minds or of hearts but of economic factors between the wealth of money and the wealth of beauty. I do not believe any of the men on Millionaire Matchmaker really want to find love. What they want is to buy love. This is why they are going to a matchmaker. And she's not an old school yenta of the Fiddler on the Roof variety. Oh no, she is a pimp, bringing these men only the best products, the most appetizing of merchandise. Every woman on that show adheres to current standards of "beauty" with no deviations at all, not in dress, not in hair, not even in face. There is nothing remotely individual about these women. I suspect it must be something in the water in L.A. making them all into Stepford Ho's. Not that I, personally, would want to have my body anywhere near these "millionaires" as most of them are so phenomenonly unattractive both in body and mind that one is literally gobsmacked with the idea that sexual desire could ever be possible. Can a vagina dry heave?
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Two Weeks Notice
The romantic comedy genre is full of really, really bad movies featuring douchie male leads and women who can be politely described as harpies. Think Made of Honor in which Michelle Monaghan berates Patrick Dempsey for his sex-toy bridal shower (an accident on his part) like a prudish little schoolmarm instead of a sophisticated 30-something woman living in New York City. No woman I know . . . and let's be honest I know a lot of freaks and perverts, you know people who vote Democrat so my point of view is clearly skewed. . . would ever have a hissy over something that silly, especially something that was so clearly a mistake. They'd probably love it. But then, I don't know very many harpies.
It isn't very often you get a rom com these days with lots of witty banter and the sort of classic sexual chemistry of opposites at odds that you find in older films. In fact, the romantic comedies of the 1930's and 1940's (It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby) tend to have strong female leads and charming heroes whereas in modern romantic comedies, as I stated above, the tendency is adhere to gender stereotypes like something out of a Parade magazine or Andy Capp comic strip; misogynistic gender roles in which the man is a semi-retarded, ugly little doofus and the woman is mega-hot but total naggin, manipulative bitch. The fact that these sorts of comedies out number the witty-banter ones 10 to 1 is rather disturbing.
Two Weeks Notice, however, is an exception to this rather depressing rule. It features Hugh Grant playing my favorite of his roles, the lovable cad and Sandra Bullock as a type-A lawyer with a social conscience. However, Hugh Grant always comes across as intelligent and never dumb and Sandra Bullock is sweet, if neurotic. There's a great deal of back and forth but it is never cruel or mean-spirited. Moreover, nobody's fiance gets dumped at the end (number one rule of modern romantic comedies is that anyone who is engaged/married at the beginning of the movie will not be so at the end unless they are the quirky side-characters), nobody tries to date three different people at once, nobody interrupts a wedding at the last minute to make a declaration of love, and nobody learns a very important lesson about the true meaning of Christmas or whatever.
Instead you have Hugh Grant doing his best to channel Cary Grant at his goofiest and a plot based on the coming together of opposites. I think, though, that it is Sandra Bullock's character that really makes the movie. She plays Lucy, an intense, politically liberal, do-gooder. She's honorable and kind and a little manic but never really a bitch. She wants the world to be a better place and she's determined to make it that way. When she gets stressed out she over-eats (one of the few heroines, movie or otherwise who does. Who the hell stops eating when they are stressed? Answer: No one, that's why Americans are fat, because they are stressed out and poor. I hate heroines who don't eat. It is a lie!) until she makes herself sick. She's an overachiever but she doesn't nag or manipulate. She's just blunt. I find this very refreshing. I like her. I know her. She's a character who is more like the women I actually meet than the majority of female characters in romantic comedies who are caricatures of certain aspects of female traits. Take for example the excerable He's Just Not That Into You. Now I have three sisters, the majority of my friends have been and are women (I went to a small liberal arts college. The straight male population was minute), I have worked in female dominated fields most of my life and I have rarely come across a woman as desperate as the character Gigi or a little ho like Scarlett Johannsen's character or a nagging, frigid bitch like Jennifer Connelly's character. Nor do I encounter very many women who define themselves totally around their relationships with no outside interests or concerns. These are not the women I meet. Sometimes the women I know occasionally act like one of these stereotypes but these behaviors are not their defining characteristics nor the a representation of how they are the majority of the time. The fact that women are depicted in such a consistently awful light in romantic comedies is just disheartening. Therefore, I love the fact that Sandra Bullock's character is nothing like any of these. She may be intense and dutiful and a workaholic but she's not a bitch, at least not in the bad sense of that word. She's flawed but likable and realistic nor does she spend the entire film punishing Hugh Grant for some absurd mistake. It is more a film about them coming to the realization that they love each other. One of my favorite scenes is one in which they go to a lunch, order the same salad and proceed to switch, whilst carrying on an entirely separate conversation, various pieces of food from their plates. George takes all of Lucy's beets and then dumps all his ice cubes into her water. She stills all his croutons. Its very charming and the sort of thing very close friends, family or married people do.
I would like to see romantic movies go back to the old-fashioned sexual tension of something like a Katherine Hepburn and a Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib, a Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, or even a Woody Allen and a Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery. It is curious that as gender and sex roles have changed and become much more loose and malleable, as women have gained power socially and politically that the heroines of romantic comedy films have become less charismatic, less powerful and more and more bitchy and weak. Seriously, what's up with that?
I leave you with a clip montage from Two Weeks Notice brought to you by some person on YouTube
It isn't very often you get a rom com these days with lots of witty banter and the sort of classic sexual chemistry of opposites at odds that you find in older films. In fact, the romantic comedies of the 1930's and 1940's (It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby) tend to have strong female leads and charming heroes whereas in modern romantic comedies, as I stated above, the tendency is adhere to gender stereotypes like something out of a Parade magazine or Andy Capp comic strip; misogynistic gender roles in which the man is a semi-retarded, ugly little doofus and the woman is mega-hot but total naggin, manipulative bitch. The fact that these sorts of comedies out number the witty-banter ones 10 to 1 is rather disturbing.
Two Weeks Notice, however, is an exception to this rather depressing rule. It features Hugh Grant playing my favorite of his roles, the lovable cad and Sandra Bullock as a type-A lawyer with a social conscience. However, Hugh Grant always comes across as intelligent and never dumb and Sandra Bullock is sweet, if neurotic. There's a great deal of back and forth but it is never cruel or mean-spirited. Moreover, nobody's fiance gets dumped at the end (number one rule of modern romantic comedies is that anyone who is engaged/married at the beginning of the movie will not be so at the end unless they are the quirky side-characters), nobody tries to date three different people at once, nobody interrupts a wedding at the last minute to make a declaration of love, and nobody learns a very important lesson about the true meaning of Christmas or whatever.
Instead you have Hugh Grant doing his best to channel Cary Grant at his goofiest and a plot based on the coming together of opposites. I think, though, that it is Sandra Bullock's character that really makes the movie. She plays Lucy, an intense, politically liberal, do-gooder. She's honorable and kind and a little manic but never really a bitch. She wants the world to be a better place and she's determined to make it that way. When she gets stressed out she over-eats (one of the few heroines, movie or otherwise who does. Who the hell stops eating when they are stressed? Answer: No one, that's why Americans are fat, because they are stressed out and poor. I hate heroines who don't eat. It is a lie!) until she makes herself sick. She's an overachiever but she doesn't nag or manipulate. She's just blunt. I find this very refreshing. I like her. I know her. She's a character who is more like the women I actually meet than the majority of female characters in romantic comedies who are caricatures of certain aspects of female traits. Take for example the excerable He's Just Not That Into You. Now I have three sisters, the majority of my friends have been and are women (I went to a small liberal arts college. The straight male population was minute), I have worked in female dominated fields most of my life and I have rarely come across a woman as desperate as the character Gigi or a little ho like Scarlett Johannsen's character or a nagging, frigid bitch like Jennifer Connelly's character. Nor do I encounter very many women who define themselves totally around their relationships with no outside interests or concerns. These are not the women I meet. Sometimes the women I know occasionally act like one of these stereotypes but these behaviors are not their defining characteristics nor the a representation of how they are the majority of the time. The fact that women are depicted in such a consistently awful light in romantic comedies is just disheartening. Therefore, I love the fact that Sandra Bullock's character is nothing like any of these. She may be intense and dutiful and a workaholic but she's not a bitch, at least not in the bad sense of that word. She's flawed but likable and realistic nor does she spend the entire film punishing Hugh Grant for some absurd mistake. It is more a film about them coming to the realization that they love each other. One of my favorite scenes is one in which they go to a lunch, order the same salad and proceed to switch, whilst carrying on an entirely separate conversation, various pieces of food from their plates. George takes all of Lucy's beets and then dumps all his ice cubes into her water. She stills all his croutons. Its very charming and the sort of thing very close friends, family or married people do.
I would like to see romantic movies go back to the old-fashioned sexual tension of something like a Katherine Hepburn and a Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib, a Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, or even a Woody Allen and a Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery. It is curious that as gender and sex roles have changed and become much more loose and malleable, as women have gained power socially and politically that the heroines of romantic comedy films have become less charismatic, less powerful and more and more bitchy and weak. Seriously, what's up with that?
I leave you with a clip montage from Two Weeks Notice brought to you by some person on YouTube
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Jarvis Cocker is a God
This is Jarvis Cocker, minor deity and rock god. 
Jarvis and I have had a long relationship, a relationship that goes back to 1995.
Picture it: Utah in late February of 1996. Grunge is dead. Eddie Vedder is spending most of his time in Washington D.C. doing god only knows what, Kurt Cobain has been in his grave two years, and most of the new music coming out are the bands that are the copies of the copycats. Sad. What's a newly minted rebellious 15 year old girl to do?
Right now, everyone firmly believes that the next big thing is going to be Ska and with the Big Band revival a la the Brian Setzer Orchestra there's a lot of horns playing on the radio. My parents are in Europe with my two youngest sisters. Neither I nor Elizabeth can drive at this point so my cousin Ammon (Whatup, homey?) is "babysitting" us. This entails hanging out and driving us around. We all have tickets to Ska Patty's Day, a series of rock concerts over a week featuring different Ska bands. We drive between Salt Lake Valley and Utah Valley attending events, skipping school and generally slacking. Ammon is delighted to be driving my father's delicious little sports car and all of us stay up way too late.
That's when I met Jarvis.
Jarvis and I have had a long relationship, a relationship that goes back to 1995.
Picture it: Utah in late February of 1996. Grunge is dead. Eddie Vedder is spending most of his time in Washington D.C. doing god only knows what, Kurt Cobain has been in his grave two years, and most of the new music coming out are the bands that are the copies of the copycats. Sad. What's a newly minted rebellious 15 year old girl to do?
Right now, everyone firmly believes that the next big thing is going to be Ska and with the Big Band revival a la the Brian Setzer Orchestra there's a lot of horns playing on the radio. My parents are in Europe with my two youngest sisters. Neither I nor Elizabeth can drive at this point so my cousin Ammon (Whatup, homey?) is "babysitting" us. This entails hanging out and driving us around. We all have tickets to Ska Patty's Day, a series of rock concerts over a week featuring different Ska bands. We drive between Salt Lake Valley and Utah Valley attending events, skipping school and generally slacking. Ammon is delighted to be driving my father's delicious little sports car and all of us stay up way too late.
That's when I met Jarvis.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Rake-Tastic
The trouble with rakes in romances is that the author is constantly telling us that they are ever so bad and ever so nototrious and oh so dangerous but then they don't actually do anything rakish except throw out a few sexual innuendoes and maybe get the heroine to try oral sex.
The topic for this post has been brewing for some time but I realized I really needed to write about it yesterday. What happened yesterday? Well, I was on a plane. The romance selection in the JFK Hudson News is crap . . . . although not as crap as the selectionin the Phoenix airport. So there I was, waiting for a flight and I needed something to read. I had read all the books I brought ith me so I was lacking distraction. The book I wanted The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie was not there. So I got Always A Scoundrel by Suzanne Enoch. Now I had heard good things and I really enjoyed London's Perfect Scoundrel. So yeah!
Now I finished the book on the plane which either tells you how fast I read or how long the plane ride was. I liked it. It wasn't a stand out in my brain but that's not the point. The point is that the hero, Lord Bramwell Johns, is not a rake. Oh it says he is, everyone says he is but he really doesn't do anything particularly rakish. I mean, the villain, the Marquis of Cosgrove was definitely a rake of the debauched variety. Now there was an interesting fellow! Clearly a sociopath and yet I found myself wanting him to be the hero because he was actually a rake so there was something to reform.
This is not a lone problem, isolated to Ms. Enoch's lastest book. Most of the time in romances we are told that so and so is The Most Vile Rake In Christendom and yet he doesn't do anything particular vile. I have decided that this is a threefold problem because I like things that come in threes.
First off, it is a problem of world view. The author relies too much on her audience knowing about Romanceland, the Regency period etc. She does not establish, separtately within the confines of her book the social mores and taboos of that world. This is not easy to do. One has to show how people view class, race, gender, and morality. This is hard because there is not one view on any of these things. Let's take JK Rowling for example. There are many weaknesses in the Harry Potter books but the one thing that Rowling did brilliantly was to establish how the world functioned not just on a practical level (with Quidditch and brooms) but on a moral level with the way that different wizards and witches related to and regarded Muggles, Voldemort, the non-human personages like golbins and so on and so forth. Rowling consistantly displayed what the standard, status quo approach was and what the violation of those standards were whether they were the Klu Klux Klan like activities of the Death Eaters or Hermione's SPEW (The House Elf Liberation Front).
The thing is you can do this with a few sentences or with a character's throwaway comments. Not every activity or dialogue needs to go back to the plot. World views need to be presented. Part of this is an historical issue because people tend to think of history as static rather than dynamic. Of course, there were certain standards by which the London ton operated but not everyone held to these standards. The standards that we read about are a middle ground, a mainstream status quo. The ideal of behavior and social interaction, not the actuality. An aristoicratic Tory family is going to have a very different view from even an aristocratic Whig family of how the world should be. A Lord interested in science is not going to have the same regard for manners as a Lord obsessed with fashion. Therefore there has to be some establishment either by a description or dialogue, secondary or passing characters that defines how the world is and whether the main characters are violating that is.
The second problem is that I don't believe that anyone actually knows what a rake is, because we don't have them anymore. They are extinct.
The topic for this post has been brewing for some time but I realized I really needed to write about it yesterday. What happened yesterday? Well, I was on a plane. The romance selection in the JFK Hudson News is crap . . . . although not as crap as the selectionin the Phoenix airport. So there I was, waiting for a flight and I needed something to read. I had read all the books I brought ith me so I was lacking distraction. The book I wanted The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie was not there. So I got Always A Scoundrel by Suzanne Enoch. Now I had heard good things and I really enjoyed London's Perfect Scoundrel. So yeah!
Now I finished the book on the plane which either tells you how fast I read or how long the plane ride was. I liked it. It wasn't a stand out in my brain but that's not the point. The point is that the hero, Lord Bramwell Johns, is not a rake. Oh it says he is, everyone says he is but he really doesn't do anything particularly rakish. I mean, the villain, the Marquis of Cosgrove was definitely a rake of the debauched variety. Now there was an interesting fellow! Clearly a sociopath and yet I found myself wanting him to be the hero because he was actually a rake so there was something to reform.
This is not a lone problem, isolated to Ms. Enoch's lastest book. Most of the time in romances we are told that so and so is The Most Vile Rake In Christendom and yet he doesn't do anything particular vile. I have decided that this is a threefold problem because I like things that come in threes.
First off, it is a problem of world view. The author relies too much on her audience knowing about Romanceland, the Regency period etc. She does not establish, separtately within the confines of her book the social mores and taboos of that world. This is not easy to do. One has to show how people view class, race, gender, and morality. This is hard because there is not one view on any of these things. Let's take JK Rowling for example. There are many weaknesses in the Harry Potter books but the one thing that Rowling did brilliantly was to establish how the world functioned not just on a practical level (with Quidditch and brooms) but on a moral level with the way that different wizards and witches related to and regarded Muggles, Voldemort, the non-human personages like golbins and so on and so forth. Rowling consistantly displayed what the standard, status quo approach was and what the violation of those standards were whether they were the Klu Klux Klan like activities of the Death Eaters or Hermione's SPEW (The House Elf Liberation Front).
The thing is you can do this with a few sentences or with a character's throwaway comments. Not every activity or dialogue needs to go back to the plot. World views need to be presented. Part of this is an historical issue because people tend to think of history as static rather than dynamic. Of course, there were certain standards by which the London ton operated but not everyone held to these standards. The standards that we read about are a middle ground, a mainstream status quo. The ideal of behavior and social interaction, not the actuality. An aristoicratic Tory family is going to have a very different view from even an aristocratic Whig family of how the world should be. A Lord interested in science is not going to have the same regard for manners as a Lord obsessed with fashion. Therefore there has to be some establishment either by a description or dialogue, secondary or passing characters that defines how the world is and whether the main characters are violating that is.
The second problem is that I don't believe that anyone actually knows what a rake is, because we don't have them anymore. They are extinct.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
An Open Letter to A Romance Novel Hero: Resurrecting the Idea
Grey aka Robert Fordham
c/o Joanna Bourne
The Spymaster's Lady
Dear Robert,
Thanks for not being a dillweed. I apprecitate that. I don't know if you've noticed (you probably have. You are very observant.) but romance novel spies tend to be intensely retarded. By intensely retarded I mean, if they were actually spies they would be dead by now on account of failing to 1) comprehend human behavior 2) not noticing the holy fucking obvious and 3) generally acting like a 14 year old boy having a hissyfit, although that is probably quite insulting to 14 year old boys.
My point, Robert, is that you behaved like a spy. Early on you had some wacky ideas about Annique but you didn't let these notions override what your senses observed, as a good spy ought. You noted the behavior of this woman and then concluded (correctly) that she was not the sort to do the kind of killing you had initially thought she had. Moreover, you realized that as a French operative she was duty bound to try to escape and you didn't hold that against her. In fact, you admired her for that. I appreciate you Robert Grey Fordham. I appreciate the fact that you aren't an asshat. Well done, sir, well done!
c/o Joanna Bourne
The Spymaster's Lady
Dear Robert,
Thanks for not being a dillweed. I apprecitate that. I don't know if you've noticed (you probably have. You are very observant.) but romance novel spies tend to be intensely retarded. By intensely retarded I mean, if they were actually spies they would be dead by now on account of failing to 1) comprehend human behavior 2) not noticing the holy fucking obvious and 3) generally acting like a 14 year old boy having a hissyfit, although that is probably quite insulting to 14 year old boys.
My point, Robert, is that you behaved like a spy. Early on you had some wacky ideas about Annique but you didn't let these notions override what your senses observed, as a good spy ought. You noted the behavior of this woman and then concluded (correctly) that she was not the sort to do the kind of killing you had initially thought she had. Moreover, you realized that as a French operative she was duty bound to try to escape and you didn't hold that against her. In fact, you admired her for that. I appreciate you Robert Grey Fordham. I appreciate the fact that you aren't an asshat. Well done, sir, well done!
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
This Is Not A Love Song
This is not a love song.
This is not a love song.
This is not a love song.
This is not a love song.
--- Public Image Limited
Vice Avenged: A Moral Tale by Lolah Burford is not a romance. But it is also not not a romance. It is a curious little book somewhere between fable and fairy tale, romance and picaresque novel. Quite frankly, I am not entirely sure what to make of it.
Monday, April 20, 2009
At the Library Book Sale
The library book sale is a treasure trove of romance novels. I went to the library on Saturday and discovered several classic Catherine Coulters with their glorious be-Fabio-ed clinch covers, several Rebecca Brandewynes, an African-American contemporary category title from 1984 and like 400 Jennifer Blakes some in hard-back. The best part is that paperbacks are only 25 Cents and hardbacks are $1.00. I had to resist the temptation to purchase all of the above.
I'm going back next week to see what new stuff they have. Maybe I'll even start making a circuit of the all the local branches every weekend. I'll take my camera with me and record what I see for romance posterity.
I'm going back next week to see what new stuff they have. Maybe I'll even start making a circuit of the all the local branches every weekend. I'll take my camera with me and record what I see for romance posterity.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Are We There Yet?
This series is exhausting me. What series you may ask? Does it matter? I don't read series anymore. I can't. I can't bear it. They make me feel like a nine year old on a cross-country car trip in which the car is a 1958 Edsel with no air conditioning and a 60 year old man at the wheel who refuses to stop for bathroom breaks or go over 40 miles an hour. In other words, all I want is out.
Let me clarify what I mean by a series. Here's what I don't mean: anything with an end, a destination, if you will, a clear narrative arc leading to a conclusion despite the number of volumes. Or anything in which each book is loosely connected to the last one, where the old characters appear or are related to new ones but aren't the main focus of the new story. Let's take a little quiz, shall we?
Harry Potter? Not a series because, and this is very important, it ENDS. That, my friends is the key difference. There is a finale, a closure, a cut off point for the story arc.
What about Jo Beverley's Company of Rogue books? Not a series because each book stands alone and you can read them out of order, some not at all, and never be left out of pertinent plot points. Characters from one book appear in other books, but it is like visiting old friends and you don't feel like you are being jerked around on a never-ending merry-a-go-round of drama, like an episode of "Days of Our Lives" in which ten years in real time only equals about 48 hours in soap opera time.
Let me clarify what I mean by a series. Here's what I don't mean: anything with an end, a destination, if you will, a clear narrative arc leading to a conclusion despite the number of volumes. Or anything in which each book is loosely connected to the last one, where the old characters appear or are related to new ones but aren't the main focus of the new story. Let's take a little quiz, shall we?
Harry Potter? Not a series because, and this is very important, it ENDS. That, my friends is the key difference. There is a finale, a closure, a cut off point for the story arc.
What about Jo Beverley's Company of Rogue books? Not a series because each book stands alone and you can read them out of order, some not at all, and never be left out of pertinent plot points. Characters from one book appear in other books, but it is like visiting old friends and you don't feel like you are being jerked around on a never-ending merry-a-go-round of drama, like an episode of "Days of Our Lives" in which ten years in real time only equals about 48 hours in soap opera time.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
A Cheap Trick
While researching my PCA/ACA paper I came across a most interesting book entitled Endless Rapture by Helen Hazen. Now for those of you who don't know, romance scholarship has now been listed in waves (Thank you, Eric Selinger for confirming this at dinnerlast week) and this book falls into the first wave which also includes Radway and Modelski. Most of these, as everyone knows, tend to be more pejorative than not. Hazen, however, seems to be taking the opposite tack. The following is going to be my attempt to summarize her argument.
What is at issue is how rape is constructed in 1970's bodice rippers. These rapes vary but they are events that mainly transpire between the hero and the heroine. Hazen is attempting to answer the question "If rape is bad then why does it show up in romances?" Hazen believes that the two general responses to this matter of rape are misguided and wrong. The first response to the contradictory nature and problematic portrayl of rape in romance solves the matter by positing that the rape fantasy indicates women really do want to be dominated and raped. The other response is that of first wave feminism (although in the book she only refers to it as feminism) which simply denies the fantasy. Hazen theorizes that feminism and romance are coming at the same problem albeit from different ends and wants to identify the connection between the "pleasure" women get from reading about rape in romance and the anger that suffuses the women's movement when it comes to rape and sexual exploitation.
What is at issue is how rape is constructed in 1970's bodice rippers. These rapes vary but they are events that mainly transpire between the hero and the heroine. Hazen is attempting to answer the question "If rape is bad then why does it show up in romances?" Hazen believes that the two general responses to this matter of rape are misguided and wrong. The first response to the contradictory nature and problematic portrayl of rape in romance solves the matter by positing that the rape fantasy indicates women really do want to be dominated and raped. The other response is that of first wave feminism (although in the book she only refers to it as feminism) which simply denies the fantasy. Hazen theorizes that feminism and romance are coming at the same problem albeit from different ends and wants to identify the connection between the "pleasure" women get from reading about rape in romance and the anger that suffuses the women's movement when it comes to rape and sexual exploitation.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Haute Goth
I had a dream last night . . . of course, I'm sketchy on the details . . . but it seemed to be one in which I was a romance novel heroine in the Victorian period and some fella was proposing to me. And, of course, though I can't remember the details I remember the overall atmosphere of the dream: disturbing and anxious are the two adjectives that come to mind.
It is very clear why I dreamt this: not only have I been mostly reading romance novels I have also been working on my paper for the upcoming PCA conference. My paper this year is on the Gothic so I've been reading a lot of literary theory about it. It's turned my mind to mush. This is not the first vaguely Gothic dream I've had since beginning this paper. I will not bore you, gentle readers, with tales of my dreams. There's nothing so dull as hearing someone else describe what their brain fired at them during the night. Rather what I'd like to discuss today has to do with a small observation I have been coming to all these weeks of reading about the Gothic.
It is very clear why I dreamt this: not only have I been mostly reading romance novels I have also been working on my paper for the upcoming PCA conference. My paper this year is on the Gothic so I've been reading a lot of literary theory about it. It's turned my mind to mush. This is not the first vaguely Gothic dream I've had since beginning this paper. I will not bore you, gentle readers, with tales of my dreams. There's nothing so dull as hearing someone else describe what their brain fired at them during the night. Rather what I'd like to discuss today has to do with a small observation I have been coming to all these weeks of reading about the Gothic.
Monday, March 9, 2009
An Open Letter to a Romance Novel Hero
Bastian Toussaintc/oAnne StuartBlack Ice
March 4, 2009
Dear Bastien,
But for the whole spy thing, you totally remind me of my ex-boyfriend. I am not exaggerating. You are him, down to the refusal to actually give a straight answer to even the most innocuous of questions. In fact, I have a deeply held suspcion that Anne Stuart may have actually based you on my ex-boyfriend. I have no proof of this because such evidence couldn't possibly exist. Yet, there you are . . . or he is . . . or whatever, on the pages of a book. Dude, you even fuck like him. It's kind of scary, I'm not going to lie. Maybe Anne Stuart dated my ex-boyfriend or knew somebody who did. This is actually plausible since the ex is the living embodiement of the Duke of Slut. How he hasn't contracted syphillis is a wonder. Perhaps he, and you, too, has some sort of deviant immunity to sexually transmitted diseases. That would make sense as I'm pretty sure you are both Scorpios and as everyone knows, Scorpios are in league with Satan. It isn't a very good league. The Scorpios just exchanged their immortal souls for the superhuman ability to whore-it-up without any consequences and to succeed in their revenge plots against all would be detractors.
Monday, March 2, 2009
You're Kind Of A Douchebag, Devon.
This post is all about the ever popular and extremely beloved novel The Windflower by Laura London aka Sharon & Tom Curtis. Currently, this book is out of print, gosh darnit.
I've been thinking about Devon Crandall, erstwhile pirate and Duke of Earl. I've decided Devon's kind of a douchebag.
Before I go any further I would like to take this opportunity to discuss the word "douchebag" which I feel is one of the most useful words in the English lanaguage when describing personages of adverse character. A douchebag has many definitions being a slang term. The way in which I define it is as follows: a person, usually a man, who is arrogant, entitled, and smug. These qualities are inspite of the fact that they regularly behave with a moronic stupidity usually only associated with the mildly mentally retarded or people who have consumed too much beer. A person can act like a douchebag (such as when they have too many of said beers) and yet not be a douchebag. Douchebags are often victims of fashions, victims of fads, and members of fraternal organizations. Often they can be spotted by the smirk on their face (see George W. Bush) and their inability to understand irony or sarcasm.
I've been thinking about Devon Crandall, erstwhile pirate and Duke of Earl. I've decided Devon's kind of a douchebag.
Before I go any further I would like to take this opportunity to discuss the word "douchebag" which I feel is one of the most useful words in the English lanaguage when describing personages of adverse character. A douchebag has many definitions being a slang term. The way in which I define it is as follows: a person, usually a man, who is arrogant, entitled, and smug. These qualities are inspite of the fact that they regularly behave with a moronic stupidity usually only associated with the mildly mentally retarded or people who have consumed too much beer. A person can act like a douchebag (such as when they have too many of said beers) and yet not be a douchebag. Douchebags are often victims of fashions, victims of fads, and members of fraternal organizations. Often they can be spotted by the smirk on their face (see George W. Bush) and their inability to understand irony or sarcasm.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
A Reflection On My Favorite Hero
I have just finished viewing the section in the BBC 4 documentary Reader I Married Him on heroes. The documentary discussed in depth four heroes of romantic literature: Mr. Darcy, Mr. Rochester, Heathcliffe, and Rhett Butler. Watching this I found myself at a loss because with the exception of my brief crush on Mr. Darcy at the age of 3 (I had seen the Masterpiece Theater version of "Pride & Prejudice" ) I cannot honestly say that as a teenage girl any of these literary gentleman managed to capture my heart. There was one, however, and the rest of this post is about to take on the flavor of a shameful confession because the fictional character I have been in love with all these years is the Vampire Lestat.
I know. I know. Don't say anything. And before you ask, I was never a goth kid (too much effort), I've never been to New Orleans, and I find most vampire novel excreble. So how did this happen?
I know. I know. Don't say anything. And before you ask, I was never a goth kid (too much effort), I've never been to New Orleans, and I find most vampire novel excreble. So how did this happen?
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Teresa Mederios' Heroines
This Saturday, which as everyone knows was Valentine's day, I went to my favorite bookstore accompanied by my mother. For paperback loves, it is used-book heaven and chiefly among its qualities is the very excellent romance section. I can never walk out of there without at least three books. This time I picked up Teresa Mederios' Thief of Hearts, one of hers I had not read yet. I have always loved Mederios ever since I first read The Beast and the Bride. Not only is she funny, but her heroines are outstanding.
I think one of the chief problems I have with many romance novels is that there is a discrepancy between the heroes and heroines as far as characterization is concerned. More often than I would wish very compelling heroes are paired with heroines who are . . . flat. I wouldn't go as far as saying that they are TSTL or TGTBT (Too Good To Be True) but merely lacking in dimension. I suppose that this is because the heroine in many romances is merely acting as a place-holder for the reader. I know that there are those who enjoy or at the very least, over look this but I have no patience with place-holders, zeroes if you will. I enjoy falling in love with and rooting for the heroine as much as for the hero. Perhaps this is because I have always been a reader (I read early, frequently and everything) and therefore gender, looks, time, place, etc. I have no bearing on whether or not I identify with and want to travel along on the hero's journey. What does have a bearing on my desire to root for the protagonist is whether or not the author lets me see something about their character that is interesting, that develops them into a real flesh and blood person. It doesn't have anything to do with nobility or the classical definition of hero. It has more to do with me wanting to see their humanity. In this respect, I think many romance novel heroines are lacking. They have this tendency to be paperdolls rather than actual women neither in what they say or what they do.
I have never found this to be so with Teresa Mederios' heroines. I think this is because of the way that she introduces them to the reader. For example in Thief of Hearts we are introduced to Lucinda Snow not by her looks but by her reactions to the events going on around her, we are privy to her thoughts as she overhears a conversation aboard a ship and in a few lines become aware of how she thinks, how she behaves, how she views herself and how she believes other people see her. This is very typical of Mederios. She shows us who her characters are by their behavior and interior perspective rather than as an object viewed by others. Her heroines are very much subjects. Regardless of whether or not they are fat or thin, beautiful or plain, rich or poor, you always know what sort of person she is in those first few moments.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I have a very low tolerance for heroines defined mainly by their beauty. It isn't that I automatically dislike a story if the heroine is beautiful, it is just that I think that often the author gets lazy and infuses the heroine with beauty alone and no other quality. Georgette Heyer's Venetia is very beautiful but this is not her defining characteristic in the story. Her defining characteristic is her acute sense of the absurd and the ironic. Even before you know she is beautiful, Heyer gives her an initial dialogue that on the surface seems so very domestic but is, beneath, mocking. Mederios utilizes a similar technique, fixing into the words her heroines speak, their responses to those around them and the way they see the world a unique something that makes them more like real women and less like puppets in side-show. And because they are so very real and likable from the beginning even when they do things that are silly or foolish, I as the reader never feel they are TSTL because the behavior is based on the limitations of their character and perceptions not on the writing. It is very hard to forgive a heroine who you have been told repeatedly, if not explicitly, is perfect when she does something retarded or asinine. It becomes charming or at the very least, understandable, in a heroine who has from the first been as flawed and as real as an actual person.
I think one of the chief problems I have with many romance novels is that there is a discrepancy between the heroes and heroines as far as characterization is concerned. More often than I would wish very compelling heroes are paired with heroines who are . . . flat. I wouldn't go as far as saying that they are TSTL or TGTBT (Too Good To Be True) but merely lacking in dimension. I suppose that this is because the heroine in many romances is merely acting as a place-holder for the reader. I know that there are those who enjoy or at the very least, over look this but I have no patience with place-holders, zeroes if you will. I enjoy falling in love with and rooting for the heroine as much as for the hero. Perhaps this is because I have always been a reader (I read early, frequently and everything) and therefore gender, looks, time, place, etc. I have no bearing on whether or not I identify with and want to travel along on the hero's journey. What does have a bearing on my desire to root for the protagonist is whether or not the author lets me see something about their character that is interesting, that develops them into a real flesh and blood person. It doesn't have anything to do with nobility or the classical definition of hero. It has more to do with me wanting to see their humanity. In this respect, I think many romance novel heroines are lacking. They have this tendency to be paperdolls rather than actual women neither in what they say or what they do.
I have never found this to be so with Teresa Mederios' heroines. I think this is because of the way that she introduces them to the reader. For example in Thief of Hearts we are introduced to Lucinda Snow not by her looks but by her reactions to the events going on around her, we are privy to her thoughts as she overhears a conversation aboard a ship and in a few lines become aware of how she thinks, how she behaves, how she views herself and how she believes other people see her. This is very typical of Mederios. She shows us who her characters are by their behavior and interior perspective rather than as an object viewed by others. Her heroines are very much subjects. Regardless of whether or not they are fat or thin, beautiful or plain, rich or poor, you always know what sort of person she is in those first few moments.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I have a very low tolerance for heroines defined mainly by their beauty. It isn't that I automatically dislike a story if the heroine is beautiful, it is just that I think that often the author gets lazy and infuses the heroine with beauty alone and no other quality. Georgette Heyer's Venetia is very beautiful but this is not her defining characteristic in the story. Her defining characteristic is her acute sense of the absurd and the ironic. Even before you know she is beautiful, Heyer gives her an initial dialogue that on the surface seems so very domestic but is, beneath, mocking. Mederios utilizes a similar technique, fixing into the words her heroines speak, their responses to those around them and the way they see the world a unique something that makes them more like real women and less like puppets in side-show. And because they are so very real and likable from the beginning even when they do things that are silly or foolish, I as the reader never feel they are TSTL because the behavior is based on the limitations of their character and perceptions not on the writing. It is very hard to forgive a heroine who you have been told repeatedly, if not explicitly, is perfect when she does something retarded or asinine. It becomes charming or at the very least, understandable, in a heroine who has from the first been as flawed and as real as an actual person.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Review-ish
It is rare for me to have a visceral reaction to books these days even though I read as many as I ever did. And I read often. No, I read a lot. I probably read 4 books a week. When I was young I would fall into the book to such an extent that I would have physical reactions to the words: increased heartbeat, anxiety over the fate of the characters, tears, etc. experiencing in my own body what the characters were experiencing on the page. This is probably one of the reasons I have become and always will be a reader. It isn't simply the escape of reading, it is the ability to live another's life. Wherever you go there you are except sometimes with the right book.
I picked up Carolyn Jewel's Scandal based on a review I read over at AAR. They only gave it a B+ but I would give it an A. Not only did it create that rare visceral reaction in me but it had the equally rare quality of making me brood over it afterwards. In part this was because the characters were so well drawn that they had become flesh and blood people. It is much more common for me to experience characters as creations on a stage rather than as real people. Most of the time there is a veil between me and the stage, that invisible fourth wall that they speak of in drama classes, is something I always sense.
I don't always want to fall into the story so completely as I did with Scandal. It can be emotionally difficult. I admit to being one of those people that tend to absorb other people's emotions and vibrations, taking them into myself as if they were my emotions. It can be draining.
I have been trying to think why the Earl of Banallt and Sophie Evans' story had such an effect on me but I have a great amount of difficulty trying to pinpoint exactly why this story, of the stories I've read in the past while, was different. I have come to the conclusion that it was the prose itself. There is something in the way that Jewel writes that is very dissimilar to most other romances. With many romances, I think that there is a tendency to follow if not a formula, a pattern of language and story arc as a sort of form. I liken it to reading sonnet after sonnet and then suddenly finding yourself thrown into the immediacy of a pop song as you drive home. There's something in the three chords, verse, chorus, verse equation that hits you in the guts. Not that a sonnet cannot do the same thing but I believe it is the defamiliarization of the emotion, the lack of sameness to the way the moment is presented that makes that shift from one form to another so powerful.
Without the book in front of me I am unable to give any kind of close reading of Jewel's book in order to illustrate my point (I'm at work and the book is at home); however let me briefly discuss what I found specifically so compelling. Jewel takes a cliche idea (the plain, country mouse and the rake) and twists it. The book opens in the middle of things. Our hero and heroine have already met. They were friends of sort having met through her wastrel of a husband. Sophie is still wounded from that marriage, from the falling out she had with Banallt just prior to her husband's death. She's on the defensive. Banallt, on the other hand, has come to realization that he loves Sophie deeply and wants to marry her. The reader gets all this in the first chapter. What I mean by twisting the old story, is that usually we find that it is the hero who is guarding his heart because of a failed first marriage, that it is the hero that has to come to the slow realization of his true feeling towards the heroine whereas here, we have the opposite.
Banallt as a character is very interesting. It is stated repeatedly throughout the text that he is beautiful, yet what comes across more than his outward appearance is his character. Jewel gives us a very clear idea of the man he is and the man he was and how one could become the other and why. There are no dramatic villains here. Neither Banallt's deceased wife nor Sophie's dead husband act as the dark gloating ghosts of something like Rebecca. In fact, Banallt's wife has had less of an effect on his character than other incidents in his past. Tommy Evans, Sophie's late husband, is more of a villain but of the shallow, fortune hunting type. More importantly than his character is Sophie's feelings toward him which can be summed up as complex. She loved him, she hated him, she was disappointed by him, she learned not to trust him and yet she still wanted his love and admiration. This emotional ambiguity is not something I see a lot in romance. Or rather, to put it more accurately, many authors tell us how the characters feel towards each other but I, as a reader, do not see how they feel about each other. It never breaks through that fourth wall to become a living, breathing aspect of the person.
I've been attempting to write a story for a long time. This is not something new to me that I've just now decided to try my hand at. Rather, I have always been a writer (I wrote a play when I was 10, for example). But I have this disturbing feeling that my characters are flat, that they don't have that emotional zing to their personalities that makes them live on after the story is finished. It is a kind of magic and I'm just not sure how one acquires the knack for it or if it just happens to an author, unexpectedly and out of the blue much the same way it happens to a reader.
I picked up Carolyn Jewel's Scandal based on a review I read over at AAR. They only gave it a B+ but I would give it an A. Not only did it create that rare visceral reaction in me but it had the equally rare quality of making me brood over it afterwards. In part this was because the characters were so well drawn that they had become flesh and blood people. It is much more common for me to experience characters as creations on a stage rather than as real people. Most of the time there is a veil between me and the stage, that invisible fourth wall that they speak of in drama classes, is something I always sense.
I don't always want to fall into the story so completely as I did with Scandal. It can be emotionally difficult. I admit to being one of those people that tend to absorb other people's emotions and vibrations, taking them into myself as if they were my emotions. It can be draining.
I have been trying to think why the Earl of Banallt and Sophie Evans' story had such an effect on me but I have a great amount of difficulty trying to pinpoint exactly why this story, of the stories I've read in the past while, was different. I have come to the conclusion that it was the prose itself. There is something in the way that Jewel writes that is very dissimilar to most other romances. With many romances, I think that there is a tendency to follow if not a formula, a pattern of language and story arc as a sort of form. I liken it to reading sonnet after sonnet and then suddenly finding yourself thrown into the immediacy of a pop song as you drive home. There's something in the three chords, verse, chorus, verse equation that hits you in the guts. Not that a sonnet cannot do the same thing but I believe it is the defamiliarization of the emotion, the lack of sameness to the way the moment is presented that makes that shift from one form to another so powerful.
Without the book in front of me I am unable to give any kind of close reading of Jewel's book in order to illustrate my point (I'm at work and the book is at home); however let me briefly discuss what I found specifically so compelling. Jewel takes a cliche idea (the plain, country mouse and the rake) and twists it. The book opens in the middle of things. Our hero and heroine have already met. They were friends of sort having met through her wastrel of a husband. Sophie is still wounded from that marriage, from the falling out she had with Banallt just prior to her husband's death. She's on the defensive. Banallt, on the other hand, has come to realization that he loves Sophie deeply and wants to marry her. The reader gets all this in the first chapter. What I mean by twisting the old story, is that usually we find that it is the hero who is guarding his heart because of a failed first marriage, that it is the hero that has to come to the slow realization of his true feeling towards the heroine whereas here, we have the opposite.
Banallt as a character is very interesting. It is stated repeatedly throughout the text that he is beautiful, yet what comes across more than his outward appearance is his character. Jewel gives us a very clear idea of the man he is and the man he was and how one could become the other and why. There are no dramatic villains here. Neither Banallt's deceased wife nor Sophie's dead husband act as the dark gloating ghosts of something like Rebecca. In fact, Banallt's wife has had less of an effect on his character than other incidents in his past. Tommy Evans, Sophie's late husband, is more of a villain but of the shallow, fortune hunting type. More importantly than his character is Sophie's feelings toward him which can be summed up as complex. She loved him, she hated him, she was disappointed by him, she learned not to trust him and yet she still wanted his love and admiration. This emotional ambiguity is not something I see a lot in romance. Or rather, to put it more accurately, many authors tell us how the characters feel towards each other but I, as a reader, do not see how they feel about each other. It never breaks through that fourth wall to become a living, breathing aspect of the person.
I've been attempting to write a story for a long time. This is not something new to me that I've just now decided to try my hand at. Rather, I have always been a writer (I wrote a play when I was 10, for example). But I have this disturbing feeling that my characters are flat, that they don't have that emotional zing to their personalities that makes them live on after the story is finished. It is a kind of magic and I'm just not sure how one acquires the knack for it or if it just happens to an author, unexpectedly and out of the blue much the same way it happens to a reader.
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